- World poverty is shrinking rapidly, says the latest Oxford Multidimensional Poverty Index. (Thanks Andy.)
- What gives rise to moral outrage? Inside Indonesia investigates, with Lady Gaga as a case study.
- Kids from around the world photographed with their favourite possessions.
- How should we treat arguments made by people much smarter than us? The key lies in 'meta-rationality'.
- Tocqueville is big in China. (H/t Sullivan.)
- What has the nine-year effort to rebuild Iraq yielded?
- Bruce Schneier says our model of 'security' is not keeping up with technology:
Because sooner or later, the technology will exist for a hobbyist to explode a nuclear weapon, print a lethal virus from a bio-printer, or turn our electronic infrastructure into a vehicle for large-scale murder. We’ll have the technology eventually to annihilate ourselves in great numbers, and sometime after, that technology will become cheap enough to be easy.
As it gets easier for one member of a group to destroy the entire group, and the group size gets larger, the odds of someone in the group doing it approaches certainty. Our global interconnectedness means that our group size encompasses everyone on the planet, and since government hasn’t kept up, we have to worry about the weakest-controlled member of the weakest-controlled country.