At Bismarck Analysis we’ve had a fairly easy time hiring excellent analysts. This surprises a lot of people. Here’s how we do it. 1/ There’s three pieces to our hiring success. The first is that we’ve maintained a public presence online and through in-person communities so the right people can find us. This is important but it’s not special, lots of people are better at this than we are. 2/

I see lots of people assuming that the health establishment's anti-mask crusade was a Noble Lie to keep the masses from using up valuable masks.

But why assume this? A pervasive yet uncoordinated conspiracy seems way more complicated than just "they were wrong".
1/ "But Ben, experts would never make such an obvious and boneheaded mistake!"

Look these are largely the same people who saw an exponential curve with a low absolute value and decided this meant everything was fine and the biggest problem was that people might "panic".
2/

You can learn a lot about a culture by reading their fiction and noticing what they take for granted.

In honor of the season, let’s look at A Christmas Carol.
1/ The thing people overlook in A Christmas Carol is the depth of Scrooge and Marley’s friendship.
Scrooge is this horrible old loner who everyone hates… except Marley, his business partner, who *comes back from the dead* for Scrooge.
2/

1 like = 1 extremely sensible cold take. 1/ Economic prosperity depends mostly on a society’s ability to produce physical goods. Factories and railroads are more fundamental than loans or interest rates.