My friends call me Jack, and you can too!

If you are looking for a formal homepage, you may find my website or academic site more useful to you in that pursuit. Instead, I will instead keep this page updated with some stuff (hence the title). Everybody and their cat seem to have a convictions page, so I figured I do the same here.

• You can just do things, remember that Stardew was made by one guy
• Being optimistic and upbeat has the following surprising properties
  • Its infectious
  • Its self-propagating
• “always the stairs, never the escalator”
• Your most high value action is to be a cheerleader and steelman of your friends
  • this frequently means that contextualized harsh feedback is often the best thing you can tell someone
• Relentlessly question assumptions, and understand things from first principles
• Guard your time fiercely, partition it consciously, otherwise it’ll disappear on you
• It’s really fun to be fast!

Having now spewn forth very Bay-Area classic takes, I now have some Bay Area revisionism for you: I think the Bay has its own very groupthink mentality which is conducive to high velocity, but perhaps have lost some of the high-impact (read: “hippy”) stuff it did in the 80s and 90s. And so…

Several authors we have read questioned the possibility or appropriateness of democracy in countries where certain social structures and cultural ideologies are dominant—e.g., cases of Singapore and China. Do you think that particular cultures hinder the practice of democracy? Evaluate the debate on whether democracy has a universal appeal or is only appropriate to some cultures. What evidence exists to support each side of the debate and is it compelling? Take a position in this debate and make an argument for that position.

General Information

> Please indicate which prompt you have selected (Q1, Q2, or Q3) at the beginning of your essay.

In recent years, political polarization has increased in many democratic societies. As Diamond has observed, “among the liberal democracies, partisan and ideological polarization is often worrisomely high, while political tolerance and trust have eroded.” This trend also manifests itself in the growing ideological distance between political parties, increasing partisanship among the electorate, and the erosion of civility in public discourse.

Key Sequence

Notation

New Concepts

Important Results / Claims

Questions

Interesting Factoids

Not published to prevent AIV.