...and we're back! Staring at a critical mass of cool things in my feed today, I decided to dust off this old format, and serve seven things that I think are worth reading, even if I don't have time to write more than a paragraph or so about each.

First, a reminder that my own Reading Feed is still going strong, being the place that I leave links in the top quartile or so of the things I'd read that day. It updates every day or too, so check back whenever you've got time to kill...or see the nifty widget on the upper-right of the Faults homepage for the most recent of them.

The most recent (as of Sept. 18) links, to provide a taste, are to Dylan Matthews on the anti-vax movement and anti-autism bigotry, Bruce Schneier on "The War on the Unexpected", and Alex Tabarrok on how increasing the severity of sentences fails to provide significant deterents to crime (in a way other interventions don't).

First out of the gate: My good friend Mike Yu has an excellent piece on Medium titled "What i really learned this summer":

Whenever somebody asks me what I learned this summer, I usually say, "Probably more than I have the rest of my life combined," which is true. It turns out that what I really got out of my summer was a whole new way of thinking about the world, something that’s applicable to everything from trading to business to product to politics. The premise of this framework is:

Assuming that everybody else is stupid is usually wrong, and always arrogant.

(...)

Coming

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If you haven't heard, the Harvard Class of 2016 elected Program Marshals for commencement (graduation) exercises this week. Basically, it's a popularity contest to determine who gets to sit on stage with Natalie Portman or John Oliver or whoever it is this year. At some point, I guess we'll hear the results.

Of course, in the post-Clark–Mayopoulos era, exactly zero of the campaigns were serious. I think the most serious policy proposal that made it through my spam filter was, verbatim, "P.S. Jon Stewart/John Oliver for Class Day??". But, of course, posters, facebook groups, and an infuriating flood of mass emails have made an appearance nonetheless. One in particular stands out, because I think it represents a lapse in judgment so egregious, the party in question should be lowered in public status.

Karim Pirbay sent two mass emails to the senior class. The first included this gem:

If there is any way I can bribe you for a vote, I’d be happy to work something out… I recently sent some money to the Prince of Nigeria and should be receiving $10 million very soon. Should this not suffice, maybe the few screenshots I preciously saved these past three years cataloguing slightly embarrassing, potentially incriminating Snapchats will compel you to cast your vote this coming Tuesday.

Which was un-funny, and definitely lost my vote, but not the reason that we're talking now. The second was worse:

That's an email, sent from "Drew Faust" (address: kpirbay@college.harvard.edu), on letterhead that says "Harvard Office of the President", and formatted substantially similarly to the typical email sent by, well, Drew

These kids have learned some history
   and they know what warfare used to be:
tanks and guns and soldiers
   that moved across the land—
with strategies and battlelines
   converging at a place in time;
and lives were lost for reasons
   that the world could understand

On the History Channel, war
   can look exactly like before,
when you were certain it was over
   by the ticker tape parade.
They could come back home to safety;
   they could celebrate the victory;
and the landmines were all buried
   ’cross the ocean far away.

But a different kind of war
   has reached our shore,
and you never see it coming anymore.

Daniel Gelernter, CEO of Dittach, has a WSJ op-ed titled "Why I’m Not Looking to Hire Computer-Science Majors":

The thing I look for in a developer is a longtime love of coding -- people who taught themselves to code in high school and still can't get enough of it...

The thing I don't look for in a developer is a degree in computer science. University computer science departments are in miserable shape: 10 years behind in a field that changes every 10 minutes. Computer science departments prepare their students for academic or research careers and spurn jobs that actually pay money. They teach students how to design an operating system, but not how to work with a real, live development team.

There isn't a single course in iPhone or Android development in the computer science departments of Yale or Princeton. Harvard has one, but you can’t make a good developer in one term. So if a college graduate has the coding skills that tech startups need, he most likely learned them on his own, in between problem sets. As one of my developers told me: "The people who were good at the school part of computer science -- just weren’t good developers." My experience in hiring shows exactly that. (...)

Now, full disclosure: I'm a computer science major, and Harvard's course in iPhone development is taught by my current boss. Then again, I've had a longtime love of coding, taught myself to code in high middle school and still can't get enough of it, and so on. But I still have so many things to say about this, which I hope aren't too biased

A friend posted the following on Wednesday:

Dear everyone posting That Video to Facebook today:
Yes, there was another shooting. VA this time, caught on live news.

Yes, the murderer (no, he doesn't deserve to be named) filmed his victims' deaths and immediately posted them to his Facebook and Twitter.

No, you're not obligated to help him out by publicizing them. All that does is put attention on the wrong person, make the victims' friends and families miserable, inspire imitators, and give the murderer exactly what he wanted. So please, knock it off.

(...)

He was more timely than I, but I've still got a few short things to add on.

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In the days since, we've learned that the killer wrote a manifesto calling for a race war. This is probably good grounds for rounding up everyone who helped to publicize the last killer who wrote a manifesto calling for a race war, and give them a stern talking-to about how, yes, their carelessness has real consequences. It is certainly good grounds for not giving his political opinions any publicity, since that's quite obviously what he wanted here.

Remember, terrorists lose when you forget about them. Killers who share videos of themselves killing and espouse political agendas that they want discussed more broadly lose when you don't give them the satisfaction of watching their videos, or paying their political agendas any mind. They're deranged and wrong; what good are you doing by enabling them?

Zeynep Tufekci, in the Atlantic:

You might not have noticed, but the mass media rarely reports on suicides, particularly teen suicides. When it does, the coverage is careful, understated, and dampened. This

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Our grandfather, Man-Hyong Yoo, died about a week ago, two months after his eightieth birthday.

He had been diagnosed with colon cancer, which, since March, had progressed rapidly from Stage II to Stage IV. On August 11th, he was admitted to surgery. His post-operative condition was nominal at first, but degenerated over the next day. When his kidneys failed and he was no longer breathing independently, my grandmother made the decision to withdraw life support, in accordance with his expressed wishes. He did not suffer, as so many do. He ended a life of eighty years with a few months of terrible sickness, but he died under anesthesia before he had begun to lose his mental facilities, and that was no small mercy.

Family and friends gathered for a funeral on Saturday; he was cremated on Tuesday. I was with my family in Philadelphia until Thursday.

I haven't told many of my friends until now, because I haven't yet figured out what to say. I've made efforts to write, but they haven't been very good. I've been reading a lot, trying to make sense of things, and that helped more. In particular, I've been reading some about the horrors of death in the modern medical system, from those who know more of it than I:

• Who By Very Slow Decay, Scott Alexander
• How Doctors Die, Ken Murray
• I Hope My Father Dies Soon, Scott Adams
• You Can't Save Them All, Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg

...and some philosophy, from some people I

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Political betting site PredictIt offers everyone the ability to (legally) bet (real money) on the outcome of political events. For example:

You can pay 39¢ for a Yes share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $1 if Jeb Bush wins the Republican nomination, and $0 if he does not. Similarly, you can pay 63¢ for a No share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $0 if he wins and $1 otherwise. (Another way to think about this is that you can sell a Yes share for 37¢ or buy one for 39¢. These numbers are different for pretty much the same reason that you can't sell your used textbooks back to Amazon for the full price you paid.)

If you have a strong information that Bush is, say, 50% likely to win, then you might buy a lot of Yes shares, and therefore drive the price up. In this way, the market records a sort of weighted-vote among the people willing to bet on the site -- the fact that it's stabilized at 37¢–39¢ should mean, in an efficient market, that all participants agree that the probability that he wins is above 37% and below 39%. If they disagreed, they could make money in expectation by betting their beliefs, which would move (or at least widen) the market.