> I increasingly find myself in disagreement with Scott’s essays on social issues and public policy, despite broadly sharing his small-L liberal outlook.
Well, there's your problem. Scott isn't a "small-L liberal." He does a decent job at masquerading as one, but ask a fan to recount his "greatest hits" and they're all boring old orthodox conservatism: race realism [1], IQ [2], anti-identity politics [3], etc.
(No, I'm in the mood to debate his positions on any of this, it's all been done to death and further debate isn't going to change anyone's mind, let alone his. The citations are there to establish that he is aligned with these views, whether or not it's warranted.)
One fringe benefit of belonging to "The Church of Graphs" that I don't think the author really touches on is that believers can do motivated reasoning _very_ easily. Scott is an expert at laundering his motivated reasoning through well-researched citations and data that supports his points, but he's not so great at giving the other side a fair hearing.
Nevanlinna theory isn’t that obscure (in the sense of mathematics, I suppose) but it is very difficult (for me, probably less so for Tao) when working to have the whole of 21st century analysis in your head at once and see what could be applied where. I can see how an LLM would be quicker than a human at recognizing a context where a theorem from an apparently unrelated subfield could be applied.
I doubt that 5 billion people could watch the Olympics at all.
Where I am from, there is so little interest in the Olympics that I doubt even half my countries' population would be interested. I have never watched the Olympics ever, and amongst my family and friends, there is little to no mention of it. It is a minor cultural phenomena. This seems to me like there were large extrapolations made.
During the last few decades, for various reasons the interest in several kinds of sports events, including the Olympics, has become much lower than before. Other forms of entertainment that were popular in the past have been similarly affected.
However, when I was a child, a half of century ago, the Olympics was not a minor cultural phenomena, but a really major event in which the majority of the people all over the world would be interested.
How do you even measure that at that scale? I'm sure I would be counted among that 5 billion, yet my "following" was searching medal counts every couple days to see how poorly my country was doing, yet I would never describe it as "important" to me in any way.
I sincerely doubt more than half the population of the entire planet showed more than a passing interest in them, and I'm still curious how it'd be possible to measure that.
This kind of argument was not persuasive when Alito deployed it for his pedantic dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County [0, specifically p. 17], and it remains not persuasive now.
> I don't know if this is part of the "healthy at any size" thing or what.
It’s not, that’s silly.
It turns out that it’s kind of hard to establish uniform physical fitness standards at scale! They have to be cheap to implement and easy to execute in a wide range of environments.
No one can agree on how much fitness a soldier needs to be minimally effective, but you know for sure every stakeholder has a strong and incorrect opinion on it. Oh, and if you raise the bar too high, you won’t meet your enlistment goals, and readiness suffers.
The US military is in the process of changing fitness standards, mostly for ideological reasons [0]. Most enlisted I’ve spoken to consider the new tests harder, especially for women, but it isn’t clear cut and implementation across services has been weird.
Rumor is they’re also cracking down on (specifically medical, not religious) shaving waviers again, probably because some minorities have a skin condition that makes regular shaving painful.
So it’s a bit of a conundrum! They obviously want more enlisted so they can do more wars in more places, but they also are adding disincentives for female or nonwhite enlisted.
> It is estimated that 45–94 percent of all Black men will experience PFB at some point during their lifetime. Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern men also are often affected, as are some women. A 2021 study found an association between shaving waivers and delayed promotions. Since most of the waiver group (65 percent) was Black, the new policy could have a discriminatory effect. In our conversations with Black sailors, including some in senior leadership positions, many shared that they feel the new policy is racially insensitive at best—or may be designed to target them.
Even if they are abused, their abuse doesn't have any downsides. These people are not growing beards.
Also, I don't even think they are necessarily abused. A lot of men are very sensitive to shaving, with degrees of sensitivity. I think there's probably plenty of guys who have perpetual razor burn and ingrown hairs and nobody cares.
Today’s article by Peter Baker ( https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/us/politics/artemis-ii-la... ) was yet more political drivel and very light on scientific goals, just a token mention of follow-on missions.
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