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Essays tagged “Bryan Caplan”. Follow an idea across the archive.
A parent details their year-long experience with Alpha School in Austin, examining how this innovative program achieves accelerated learning through a combination of technology, personalized instruction, and incentive systems.
Scott reviews Bryan Caplan's book arguing that modern parents can relax their intensive parenting, while wrestling with whether this advice still applies in the age of smartphones and social media.
Scott Alexander rebuts Bryan Caplan's arguments about mental illness, criticizing the preference/constraint dichotomy and providing counterarguments to Caplan's claims.
Scott Alexander argues that public outrage over specific misdeeds is not arbitrary, but a strategic way to enforce important social norms with limited resources.
Scott Alexander distinguishes between 'universal culture' and 'Western culture', exploring how the former outcompetes all traditional cultures and the ethical implications of this process.
Scott Alexander critiques Bryan Caplan's argument that psychiatric diseases are unusual preferences rather than real illnesses, providing counterarguments and evidence to show this view is untenable.
Scott argues that the 'Cynic's Theory of Akrasia' (which says people's actions reveal their true preferences, contradicting their stated preferences) is functionally equivalent to the naive theory, just valuing unconscious over conscious preferences, and defends prioritizing conscious preferences because they're rational and morally informed.