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Thomas Levenson
Personal blog · inversesquare.wordpress.comsciencepolitics
Thomas Levenson writes The Inverse Square Blog, a personal blog at inversesquare.wordpress.com about science and politics. Since 2010, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-02-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts by Thomas Levenson that debunk and fact-check Megan McArdle's columns, such as a 2010 piece on credit card rates, and for a post on Isaac Newton's college notebook.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
science and the public square -- by thomas levenson
What Hacker News says?
I guess I'm in the medium unlikability school. I mean, he seems as unlikable as a significant number of programmers who are not Isaac Newton despite pretensions to equivalent accomplishment. https://inversesquare.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/friday-isaac-... on edit: meaning some programmers are not quick to make friends, and are not convivial, perhaps due to some neuro-atypical qualities, which I expect was probably th…
Comment linking /2008/03/21/friday-isaac-newton-blogging-how-mean-was-he/
on “College Notebook of Isaac Newton”Submitted Megan McArdle is Always Wrong... as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere were bloggers whose raison d'être was debunking her. IDK if they've moved to twitter or not: https://inversesquare.wordpress.com/tag/mcardle/ The lesson is, glibertarians always fail up.
Comment linking /tag/mcardle/
on “Rent Control Needs Retirement, Not a Comeback”Here's one example of a McArdle debunking: http://inversesquare.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/why-friends-do... Many more are lurking around the internet, should you feel inclined to dig them up.
on “Unintended Consequences: Credit Card Interest Rates now Much Higher”I don't understand why this comment was downvoted. The author, in the updated post to this article, said "I was wrong." http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/anatomy-... Unsurprisingly, it was not maliciously intended, it was just misattributed. As McArdle acknowledges, a facebook user had posted the first sentence, followed by the King quotation in quotations marks. When retweeted, the quotation marks…
Comment linking /2009/10/07/its-not-that-mcardle-cant-read-its-that-she-cant-wont-think-part-one/
on “Out of Osama's Death, A Fake Quotation is Born”I suspect that, as with last time, I'll get to meet some people who conflate criticism of an unreliable source with ad hominem attacks, but this is your official reminder that: 1. Megan McArdle has a pretty lengthy documented history of playing at least somewhat loosely with her facts (and, frequently, of just outright misrepresenting or getting them wrong). 2. As such, it's probably a good idea to do some fact-chec…
Comment linking /2009/07/29/why-andrew-sullivan-is-right-about-megan-mcardle-but-not-in-the-way-he-thinks/
on “Megan McArdle: The Cost Of Meth Prohibition”
