Josh Shear – Final Archive – Page 5 – The final archive of the former JoshShear.com

The role of sports in a post-fact world

Note: I work in the news industry. Opinions herein are my own and are not endorsed by my employer. If the world were “normal” right now, we’d be watching baseball. The NBA playoffs would be going on. The NHL would begin its long, slow march toward the Stanley Cup. Nobody would know anything about Bill…
Counting

Do you count the things you have, or the things you lack? If you’re quarantined due to COVID-19 like much of the rest of United States (and probably the world), you might be lacking: – Work – A place to go – A minute away from your kids But you might have time to: –…
Time, revisited

A couple years ago, I wrote this: Time is always moving, but it doesn’t fly. It doesn’t even meander. It stretches and contracts and flows and fits into whatever mold you need it to fit into. I called that post Tempus tabescet — “Time melts.” A couple months later, I wondered if I was stuck…
Motivation, mindfulness and meditation

Note: As of this writing, over a hundred million Americans are under stay-at-home orders due to a pandemic of COVID-19, a disease caused by a novel coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. Unemployment claims are through the roof as non-essential businesses have been told to close, and some businesses that were allowed to stay open are starting to…
COVID-19 and the death of manufactured offense

I don’t know when you’re reading this, but if it’s not long after it goes up, you’re probably still mostly sticking to your home. And if you’re doing that, you probably have a lot of extra time to find new ways to ignore the people you live with reflect. I was part of a wave…
Creation, adversaries and disruption: The War of Art, fundamentalism and humanism

In The War of Art, author Steven Pressfield puts in terms of art fundamentalism and humanism. I usually read the book once or twice a year, and this is the first time this particular passage has jumped out at me. The main character (if you will) of this book is Resistance — whatever it is…
Coronavirus: Personal responsibility, public responsibility, truth and vetting

It’s been a crazy couple of months, right? It’s so difficult to vet information about something as confusing and fast-moving as a new virus — that’s what this new coronavirus, COVID-19, is — and knowing what to do and when to do it is tough. The most level-headed discussion I’ve heard so far is Joe…
Causal reductionism and causation vs. correlation

Did you know that the more films Nicolas Cage appears in, the more people are likely to drown in their swimming pools? Or that the more cheese we eat, the more likely we are to die by being tangled in bedsheets? Or that the more people killed in a year by venomous spiders, the longer…
Bayt al-Hikma 2.0: Knowledge and the limitations of language

Once upon a time, the story goes, everyone on Earth spoke the same language. One day, a bunch of people got together and said, “Let’s build a tower up to the heavens so we can be equal with God.” And God looked down upon their arrogance and made them all speak different languages. So goes…
How do we pick a winner? The Condorcet paradox and our crazy primary season

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I’d do a deeper dive on some new-to-me concepts? Well, primary season here in the U.S. seems like a good time to look at the Condorcet Paradox. Condorcet Paradox: a special instance of Simpson’s paradox applied to elections, in which a populace prefers candidate A to…