Here is something that should bother you. After every mass shooting in America, both sides of the gun debate rush to present facts. One side offers statistics on gun deaths per capita. The other side offers statistics on defensive gun uses. Both sides are armed with data, graphs, and peer reviewed studies. And absolutely nothing […]
On Gun Control: It’s Not About Facts, It’s About the Web Read More »
You probably believe that when you speak, you are transmitting your thoughts to another person. That words are little vehicles carrying meaning from your mind to theirs. That language is, at its core, a window into what you are thinking. Willard Van Orman Quine spent most of the twentieth century explaining why that belief is
There is a philosopher most people have never heard of who might explain the modern economy better than any economist alive. His name is Willard Van Orman Quine, and he never wrote a single word about oil prices, inflation, or supply chains. He wrote about language, logic, and the strange architecture of human belief. Yet
The Web of Value: How Changing the Price of Oil Changes the Meaning of Everything Else Read More »
You can hold gold in your hand. It has weight, it reflects light in that unmistakable yellow glow, and if you drop it on your toe, you’ll know about it. Bitcoin, on the other hand, exists as entries in a distributed ledger, mathematical relationships between computers, pure information. So which one is more real? The
The Ontology of Money: Is a Bitcoin More ‘Real’ Than Gold? A Quinean Investigation Read More »