Eliminate cafeteria trays to reduce waste. It's a little bit of a hassle, I suppose, but it beats eating dirt.

Walter Kirn on multitasking:

“Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”? Did anyone boldly ask, “What business is it of yours?” Was anyone brave enough to say, “Frankly, I want to go back to bed”?

This article is quite entertaining. I would make more witty comments about it, but I just got a text message.

The perils of good intentions:

The highest level of assurance that a property owner will not face an E.S.A. issue is to maintain the property in a condition such that protected species cannot occupy the property.

Global warming is my fault.

Steven Pinker on morality:

Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

It's long, but Pinker is a good writer and the mix of biology, philosophy, and even a little game theory make it worth your time. Another excerpt:

The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

A positive, but pretty lukewarm, take on microcredit:

Though its users avoid the kind of intimidation employed by moneylenders, microcredit could not work without similar incentives. The lender does not demand collateral, but if you can’t pay your share of the group loan, your fellow borrowers will come and take your TV.

Even after explaining, convincingly, all the ways microcredit doesn't work as advertised, Boudreaux and Cowen still come away saying it's a good thing.

Also from the making-the-world-better department, consider this profile of Norman Borlaug:

If he'd killed someone instead of saving hundreds of millions of lives, then they'd have been interested.

It's worth noting that "hundreds of millions" may not be an exaggeration here.

William Poundstone says our voting system is the worst of all possibilities. I had been a fan of the instant runoff, but this interview has persuaded me that approval voting may be better. Either one is an improvement over the current system.

And, in case you didn't already know, touch-screen voting is risky at best.

The Edge question for 2008 is up. They ask people what they've changed their mind about, which is a great question.

My favorite responses are from Stewart Brand, who says that they don't make stuff like they used to, which is a good thing, and Sherry Turkle who says - well, just read hers, it's good.

The theme I've caught this year is a certain disillusionment with science. Rebecca Goldstein argues that falsifiability is not that important, and Irene Pepperberg is against hypothesis testing. With just those two, the scientific method is crumbling. Add in two shocking realizations, one from Colin Tudge who no longer thinks science is omnipotent and the other from Ken Ford who has figured out that sometimes scientists do bad things. Also in this category is Karl Sabbagh, who doubts the value of expert opinion, and Rupert Sheldrake, who makes the broader and valuable point that skepticism is never from a neutral point of view, and is never an unqualified good thing.

I appreciate the people who make a focused point rather than a broad philosophical statement. Unfortunately, these people are relatively few. Lisa Randall talks about neutrino mixing, and Helena Cronin discusses how differences in variance rather than in mean explain the over representation of men in the sciences.

Keith Devlin argues that math is socially constructed rather than some manifestation of absolute truth; I agree, of course. Finally, we have Daniel Gilbert, who says being able to change your mind is maybe not a good thing, and makes a connection to love and romance.