Seven of the greatest academic works of satire of all time

May 26, 2023

1) What do you do when a predatory journal keeps spam emailing you to get you to make a submission? Submit this paper to their journal: 2) To succeed in academia, you need lots of publications. But the order of authors' names on a paper impacts who gets the credit. Thankfully, there's a technological solution to make every author the first author: 3) As much an insightful look at academic practice as it is a work of satire, this paper&nbsp...

Twelve Recursive Explanations

March 21, 2021

Photo by Fred Romero (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)

If the Overton Window were not inside of itself, you'd think I was crazy for writing this.Is it just me, or has the Baader-Meinhof effect been popping up all over the place ever since I learned about it?It's hard to justify learning about opportunity costs when there are so many other things you could be doing with that time.I don't think the idea of being Pareto Optimal has made anyone better off without making at least one person worse off.What can we infer from the fact that we find ourselve...

What In The Hell Is Humor?

July 6, 2019

Comedy and laughter are remarkably tricky to explain. As evidence of this, I'll point to the fact that there are more than 13 different theories of humor (each described at the bottom of this post). If you examine them, I think you’ll agree that while each captures relevant aspects of humor, none satisfactorily describes humor in all its forms. Part of what makes comedy so hard to describe is that it has such variety. While the boundaries between different types of humor are fuzzy, I think y...