Faith, Hope And Chemistry. It’s very easy to have your rather positive notions of doctors annihilated, you just need to have contact with the medical system about something that’s not immediately fixed by whatever the current standard of treatment is. As soon as you break through that wall, you’re into this confusing mess of appointments and drugs and being told your symptoms aren’t important and so on. This is partly because doctors are fundamentally living textbooks. Particularly in the UK, they don’t have time to think, they only have time to put together information from this enormous index they’ve compiled through years of arduous study. Anyway, this article talks about why medicine is so hard, and it made me slightly more sympathetic. A better understanding of why doctors fail so spectacularly when things start going off-piste will probably help you help them not fail so spectacularly.

Slow Fade Of The Formatting Fetish. This is a great article that explains why word processors like Microsoft Word are ridiculous, and that we should all switch to Markdown. But really, it’s very interesting to see behind the tools we use everyday, especially compared to an alternative that’s truly taking over behind the scenes. Even if it doesn’t convince you to make the switch, it’ll be illuminating.

The story of the creation of the two Korean states. It won’t surprise you, but I’d never thought about it before.

The Roots Of Democratic Legitimacy. This is a technical article, but you can skim it to draw out the main point. We balance majority (representative) decision-making with rules that are more consistent. You could even just read the last paragraph:

This serves as a useful reminder that the majority should not be sacralized. The legitimacy of democracy is rooted in the fact that it permits relatively efficient decision-making while protecting the interests and values of everyone. When one of those two requirements cannot be satisfied by majoritarian choice, we should look for other ways to self-govern, e.g., private decision-making or expert-based (or even epistocratic) collective choices. To return to my opening example, when deciding between coal, nuclear, or wind power, simple majority rule might lead to unstable or harmful outcomes - today’s majority might choose coal, next year’s nuclear, creating costly policy whiplash. Instead, legitimate decisions emerge from established procedures: environmental impact assessments, expert consultations, and parliamentary deliberation, all operating within constitutional limits that protect minority interests.
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Majoritarianism has pragmatic value, but it’s not constitutive of political legitimacy. The latter finds its roots in the rules in which collective decision-making is embedded, rules that we all have reasons to abide by.

It’s the kind of thing Plato was all upset about when he wrote the Republic.