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A batch of the best highlights from what Louis's read, .
That mordant critic of the social scene, the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his classic *Theory of the Leisure Class*, invented a phrase to describe the way the great nineteenth-century American *nouveaux riches* like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers once employed their surplus wealth in competitive display. He called it ‘conspicuous consumption’: the building of the great Rhode Island mansions which they barely used, the throwing of the massive parties which none but the hideously rich could equal. Driven by such sumptuary competition, they sometimes reached the point which Veblen identified as ‘conspicuous waste’ – the spending of very large amounts of money simply to defeat their rivals in a war of pointless ostentation.
Painfully Rich
John Pearson
World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Confirmation bias was the technical term; it meant, among other things, that when you chose your information sources, there was a notable tendency to choose information sources that agreed with your current opinions.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Eliezer Yudkowsky
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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