Fermi Question of the Day: "How many horses are there in the US?"

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fermiquestions.org#/2025-08-20

Invites like these are my raison d'être

Tis the season 🎶🎸

a man in a suit and tie is speaking into a microphone and says " will you shut up man " ALT: a man in a suit and tie is speaking into a microphone and says " will you shut up man "

* Trump victory and increased polarisation could be related to ego protection against humiliation from contemptuous libs

(obvs not the full story - economics blablabla, tough year for incumbents blablabla)

Basic pattern I thought I saw from Envy:

* Contempt is another taboo emotion that seemed increasingly prevalent among Libs ie. Basket of Deplorables etc
* It was identified by Gottman as one of the "Four Horseman" of marriage failure and people are v sensitive to signs of contempt

CONSPIRACY | contrapoints YouTube video by ContraPoints

Yup I was wrong here - hope I'm right in the long run🤞🏻

Review: It wasn't my favourite video of hers. The videos are too damn long now 😵 I probably got too much of the content via the Tangents on her Patreon - can recommend those.

youtu.be/teqkK0RLNkI?...

In Pursuit of an Extraordinary Life YouTube video by Jeffrey Sun

the grass is greener where you water it 👩🏻‍🌾🌷

✨ timeline cleansing video recommendation ✨

youtu.be/F8Zs8xMTDzo?...

The Loud, Cruel End of America’s Fight Against Tuberculosis On March 24, the world will mark World Tuberculosis Day — though in much of the world, the alarm bells are already ringing. In Harare, Zimbabwe, Nurse Chiedza Makura starts her day with the same…

On World TB Day "The fight against TB isn’t over — unless we decide to let it be"

medium.com/@abeauneu/th...

Premier Inns are great - usually great customer service when it isn't too

epistemic anti-motivation

Thank you! 🙏🏻

Hmmm so my family are mostly still on android.

Do you think it's still worth it?

oh no

💯

I think there's also something about improving over time too.

Makes the initial effort worth it

🥹 so relatable

But if you judge someone's intelligence based on their ability to speak your language then I don't think you have an accurate picture of the world 🤷🏻‍♀️

IMO it's somewhat rude to force a person to use your preferred method of communicating without a reasonable attempt to use theirs.

Even if you're bad at languages, attempting some local phrases when you're abroad on holiday goes a long way in building rapport.

IMO forcing someone in the moment to put a fake number on something (especially when they aren't numerically confident) distorts what they were trying to communicate.

It's helpful to become more calibrated with numerical estimates but you can lie with numbers just as easily as lying with words.

Awwww 🥹

💯

Love to see stuff like this

As a non-researcher, I really value getting an understanding of how mistakes are corrected. Honestly it makes me trust institutions more than if they never admit to being wrong.

I still think its useful to write up non-generalisable productivity advice. Especially if the general advice (ie. use a planner 🙄) didn't work for you

Economics, sociology and psychology are the descriptive sciences.

Management and marketing are the practice.

The problem is probably that the descriptive sciences don't act like they have anything to learn from practice

But if there's knowledge value that isn't being distributed that's bad.

It's a pretty big problem if the means of knowledge production and the means of mass distribution don't understand each other.

Business people gonna distribute any value they can

I'll be honest - I don't understand what this means

🫣 dumb business person

To be clear here, I mean that neither side loses face when it is a transaction.

Business person doesn't feel dumb and is comfortable exchanging money for knowledge.

Academic gets the status from money.

Obviously there is a integrity risk here but honestly that was the beauty of professions

I agree - I think this is honestly what the "consulting" industry should be

Agree but I think the solution is more academic relationships with the private sector.

There's distrust on both sides.

In general, my guess is business people feel like academics hold them in contempt because of the lack of rigour.

Private sector responds by creating its own knowledge

"good intentions start to rot if you don't act them out"

It's called personal branding 💅🏻