Links

• Blunt Object links to Popehat on SOPA and Citizen's United.  Wonderful.
• Bryan Caplan gets confused by the unitary mind hypothesis, but otherwise asks a good ethics question.
• AtomicNerds points us at Anonymous's Twitter feed around the MegaUpload shutdown.  I approve.
• Sailer asks if schoolteachers are really that dumb.  An ex-employer of mine, Lindamood Bell, once did a reading skills study in a random rural missouri county.  The results:  
• %age of adults with under 6th grade reading level:  30%.  
• %age of K-4 teachers with under a 6th grade reading level:  60%
Having put myself through college tutoring (mostly other college students and mostly math)...I can say that apart from the folks labeled disabled (the guy on his 4th retake of Remedial Algebra), the folks in the Teacher's Master's program were the least capable of abstract thinking and math of any group I ever worked with...except the folks in the Preschool-Teacher (developmental psychology) group who were being amazed by learning the math that Montessori's materials taught.  Indeed, the complete lack of ability to think among (most of) the students was a substantial part of why I don't have an education degree.

• Tyler Cowen crosslinks the Fermi paradox and simulations.  Hanson disagrees?  The Aretae position is that the simulation argument is massively less certain than anyone talking about it, because we don't actually know if heavy-duty sims are possible.  If they aren't...p=???...then the whole sim-argument is dead.  But no one actually knows if they are or not.  It may be that the great filter prevents sims.  
• Tyler also links to Paul Romer on dynamic rules.  I'm interested in Sonic Charmer's take...as his comments on financial regulation are nearly always of top-quality.
• Mead on the reality of drug-war whackamole.  I remain completely befuddled by the notion that the net value of the drug war could possibly be anything but massively negative.
• Susan Walsh is smart.
• Insty links to a discussion of business in US vs. Singapore.