Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • The Drinkers’ Bonus: Alcohol Intake and Increased Earnings

    Drinking alcohol — and the increased social capital that it leads to — may not just be responsible for a possible increase in life span; it may increase your earnings, too. In an analysis of both the General Social Survey and the published literature, researchers for the Reason Foundation show that alcohol drinkers earn, on…

  • Drinking Levels and Mortality Rates

    Despite the various and severe health risks that come with drinking, abstaining from alcohol appears to increase your risk of dying prematurely. The reasons for this are not clearly known, but it is thought to be because drinkers are more likely to belong to a community (albeit one that drinks), and a feeling of community is…

  • Writing Tools, Not Rules, for Better Writing

    “Tools not rules” are what’s needed to teach good writing, says The Poynter Institute’s vice president Roy Peter Clark in Writing Tools — his acclaimed book compiling fifty of his favourites. To accompany this book, Clark released his fifty writing tools to improve your writing on his blog, and here are some of my favourites:…

  • Writing Tips from Annual Reports

    Proving that good writing can be found anywhere, writer Nancy Friedman points to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s annual reports as examples of excellent copywriting. I cannot but agree. Friedman submits that we can learn to write better copy by studying Warren Buffett’s annual reports, offering these six tips, highlighted after studying his annuals: Tell…

  • Our Self-Centered ‘Default’ Worldview: DFW’s Commencement Address

    Recent talk of the correspondence bias (here) reminded me of possibly the best commencement speech that I’ve not yet written about (and I’ve written about quite a few): David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. The speech, often cited as Wallace’s only public talk concerning his worldview, was adapted following…

  • Vonnegut: Narrative Arcs and Why We Love Drama

    For millennia we have told and absorbed fantastic stories with simple yet strong narrative structures, and the structure of these stories is in contrast to the much less erratic “plots” of our own lives. This discrepancy between the dramas present in our stories and our real lives causes many of us to create unnecessary and…

  • First We Believe, Then We Evaluate

    When presented with a piece of information for the first time, do we first understand the message before carefully evaluating its truthfulness and deciding whether to believe it, or do we instead immediately and automatically believe everything we read? In an article that traces the history of this question (Descartes argued that “understanding and believing are…

  • Congruent Conflations in a Thumbnail

    I’ve been going ape-wild for congruent conflations lately and for good reason: they’re the most fun I’ve had with wordplay for a long time and I find they ring off the tongue nicely. Hopefully you’ll cut me a bone if I indulge a little more, as with just a couple more examples you will no-doubt be able to…

  • What’s Wrong With ‘Neurobabble’?

    We know that irrelevant neuroscience jargon increases the persuasiveness of arguments, but why is the current trend of finding a neural explanation for much of human behaviour a dangerous thing? In his warning against reductionism and trusting in neural explanations for largely psychological phenomena, Tyler Burge, Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, describes the three things wrong…

  • In Evolution, Adaptability Beats Fitness

    The longest continuous evolution experiment was started in 1988 and is still ongoing. The study, examining the “evolvability” of Escherichia coli (E. coli), has recently surpassed 52,000 generations and has had a sample of the population frozen and saved every 75 days (every 500 generations). The wealth of data obtained is fantastic and these frozen ancestors have been the…