Category Archives: Links

Why do people, including other “humanists,” love to hate the humanities?

April 3, 2015 By in Academia, Links Tags: , , , 2 Comments

In “The Hierarchy of Humanities Schadenfreude: Scoffing at academic job-market losers comes from some unexpected places” Rebecca Schuman posits some of the reasons why other academics look down on humanities professors, and why humanities professors look down on the adjuncts. I have some theories of my own:

* The simple answer is stated in Schuman’s second paragraph: “Allow me to explain supply and demand to you.” Teaching 18 – 22-year-old undergrads is just not that hard and a lot of people can do it. Grad school in the humanities is more time-consuming than hard. There is in fact a lot of supply and limited demand. The simple answers are often correct.

* Regarding tenured professors looking down on adjuncts, academia is not solely a lottery (though it has some lottery-like elements); people who write in a disciplined, perhaps even demonic, way tend to succeed, at least for some value of “success.” Tenure-track gigs in rural Wisconsin or Florida are much easier to be had than TT gigs in New York and Chicago.

* Academia is ridiculously hierarchical and status-oriented, even if its status ladder is different than the mainstream American status ladder. It’s also, interestingly, very transparent. People at the very top of any ladder rarely have a need to piss on those lower than themselves, but the nervous middle classes often piss downwards to make themselves feel better. Humanities professors are convinced they got where they are because of their hard work and adjuncts got where they are because of their lack of it, yet humanities professors rarely if ever apply the same thinking to income or to non-academic status.

* The unspoken fear underneath much of the status jockeying entails realizing that, even among the employed, much of the “research” being done either doesn’t matter or is just wrong.

That last one is important. To some extent humanists are destroying themselves and have been for decades. They’ve lost whatever ability they had to ask themselves, “Is this important?” and “Why should other people give a shit about it?” I don’t think I ever heard those discussions among academics, and I rarely if ever read them among the marginalized scribblers online. If you want to know whether going to grad school in the humanities is a good idea, start by reading the journals or books. Many are filled with garbage and the ongoing fascination with 19th and early 20th century economists and psychologists is bizarre. Humanists rarely even cite each other. The simplest way to learn about these problems is just to read the output.

People are talked out of their creative, interesting, and original ideas. People with those kinds of ideas get MFAs, or blog, or leave. The field has no space for such ideas, per Peter Thiel. At one point academia was growing fast enough that even humanities disciplines had space for heterodox thinkers, but since ~1975 that hasn’t been true.

The lessons of academic satires and Camille Paglia have been largely ignored. The cost to the individual who manages to get tenure is low but the cost to the field as a whole is high.

Within the field no one can say this and outside the field everyone is ignored. The equilibrium is not a good one.

Robin Hanson’s “The Age of Em” scheduled for 2016—

March 31, 2015 By in Links Tags: , 1 Comment

See his blog announcement for more; I’ll definitely be getting a copy.

One could profitably read it next to Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which is also recommended for some but not all readers. I don’t have enough intelligent commentary to add to blog about Superintelligence.

What a bizarre set of sentences:

March 29, 2015 By in Links, News Tags: , , Leave a comment

The first paragraph from a New York Times article:

Kleiner Perkins’s victory Friday in the gender discrimination suit brought by Ellen Pao could be seen as an affirmation of the Silicon Valley old boys club. But venture capitalists have said that the trial has already put the tech industry on notice: It can no longer operate as a band of outsiders, often oblivious to rules that govern the modern workplace — even if that has been a key to its success.

So venture capitalists have to stop doing the very things that have “been a key to [their] success?” Won’t they then presumably be outcompeted by those who are willing to do those things? The “rules that govern the modern workplace” may also be one of the reasons startups are popular: they don’t have those rules. Paul Graham notes that “Nothing kills startups like distractions.” “Workplace rules” seem like they’d fall under the heading “distractions.”

The most intelligent commentary I’ve seen on this matter is Philip Greenspun’s. The gap between the press’s portrayal and what I’ve seen from people in the industry is even vaster than the gap between what I see in the press about nonprofits / government, and what actually happens on the ground.

Links: Political ideas, evolved preferences, rejection of the modern world, we are what we eat, and more!

March 24, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* “The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse.” Or, important news that no one wants to hear or act on.

* “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas: How it is that we once again find ourselves rooting out sin, shunning heretics, and heralding the end times:”

Our social and political life is awash in unconsciously held Christian ideas broken from the theology that gave them meaning, and it’s hungry for the identification of sinners—the better to prove the virtue of the accusers and, perhaps especially, to demonstrate the sociopolitical power of the accusers. Moreover, in our curious transformation from an honor culture into a full-fledged fame culture over the past century, we have only recently discovered that fame proves just as fragile as honor ever was, a discovery hurried along by the lightning speed of the Internet.

I’ve long said in private that the religious influence on American culture remains much stronger than is often supposed. That strain is particularly strong, though rarely acknowledged, in modern feminism.

* “8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man: An analysis of modern DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture.”

* Why is the world so troubled right now? Rejection of modernity and technology may be to blame.

* “An Interview With the NYU Professor Banned From the United Arab Emirates,” which tells you a lot in particular about NYU.

* On government, voting, and costs.

* “The Myth of High-Protein Diets.” Maybe. Nonetheless, everyone approves of vegetables.

* “Hospitals Are Robbing Us Blind: Forget Obamacare. The real villains in the American health care system are greedy hospitals and the politicians who protect them.”

* “The spectacular rise and surprising exit of a Hollywood executive: Richard Nanula had big jobs at Disney, Amgen and Miramax. Now he is alleged to have filmed sex scenes with porn actresses” is not that interesting, except for one thing: “Saint told AVN that she had her attorney make sure that the scene was posted to St. Clair’s website to legitimize the shoot.” So it’s illegal to buy or sell sex… unless it’s being taped. I think Richard Pryor observed that it’s odd that it’s legal to have sex and legal to buy things but not legal to buy sex.

Links: Best-seller list bogosity, unions and schools, book design, DNA tests, and more

March 17, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* Manipulating best-seller lists, which is well known to people in the industry but little known outside it. This especially is interesting: “To end up in the top ten on Amazon, all it takes is about 300 printed copies sold in one day,” because it’s well within my own not-substantial financial reach.

* “What Do Unions Know About Running Schools?” Hilariously, not much it would appear; the New York City Teachers Union opened a charter school in 2005, but it’s now closing: “What’s striking is that the school was managed poorly even after the union staked its reputation on the project. This suggests that the union either did not take the charter project seriously – or that it knows less about running schools than it thinks.”

* We’ve entered a golden era of book design; I myself am shocked at how well Damonza’s cover design for Asking Anna works.

* “To Have and To Hold: The challenges of digital publishing have galvanised a new spirit in book design and production. Is it just the decadent flourish of a disappearing format?” I’ve long said that publishers need to differentiate paper books from ebooks by making the former into the art objects they really ought to be.

* Terence Tao: the Mozart of maths.

* Someone found this blog by searching for “poems about the consequences of sexting.” I’m… puzzled.

* “Radical Vaccine Design Effective Against Herpes Viruses,” which is hugely important in many ways, but the development of this vaccine should retard AIDS transmission.

* “Who’s the daddy? Paternity can now be verified by a simple test” is interesting mostly for its subtext: that men are suckers and don’t matter. Farrell may be more right than many want to admit in The Myth of Male Power.

* Grantland (and hence SFW): What happens when teenagers and young adults, the main consumers of porn, won’t pay for it? Or: “A trip to the Adult Video News Awards.”

* “US students are fleeing law schools and pouring into engineering,” or, economics works!

* “Why great novels don’t get noticed now: ‘Dear Thief’ was one of the best novels published last year. So why haven’t you heard of it? Gaby Wood meets its author, Samantha Harvey.” I ordered a copy.

* “Dancing On Our Own: Why White America Ditched Couple Dancing.”

* Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, 10 years later.

Does IKEA enable mobility?

March 10, 2015 By in Culture, Links Tags: , 3 Comments

In “How Ikea took over the world” Beth Kowitt writes:

In the furniture world there’s an oft-cited statistic that we have our sofas longer than our cars and change our dining room tables as frequently as our spouses. Furniture can be its own kind of ball and chain. It’s passed down from generation to generation, or it’s so expensive that people feel it’s forever. From the get-go, Ikea shook up that paradigm. “It traumatized furniture retailing,” says Martin Toogood, who has run several companies that have competed against Ikea over two decades.

Ikea kept its prices down with an obsessive focus on costs. It might skip an extra coating of lacquer on the underside of a table that people never see or use. The company has also stripped out as much labor as possible from the system, pushing tasks that were once done by traditional retailers onto the customer. Flat packed furniture made it easier for customers to take purchases with them, cutting out the expense of stocking and delivery. (Ikea figured out flat packing in 1956, when a designer took the legs off a Lövet table to get it in his trunk.)

I’ve read that IKEA might enable greater mobility by making moving cheaper. Rather than buying a bunch of expensive furniture and then spending thousands of dollars to haul it, IKEA allows people to quickly, and with low search costs, buy functional stuff when they move—and sell or throw away what they don’t use. I’ve been the beneficiary of lightly used stuff: Kowitt says that “One Billy bookcase, an Ikea classic, is sold every 10 seconds,” and the couple of them in my apartment came from Craigslist, either free or for $10.

A modern person looking for a job might find it easier to pack a laptop, a Kindle, a (few) paper books, some pots and pans, and clothes into a couple boxes, ship them, and re-buy everything else on the other side. Being able to focus more experiences, and spending on experiences, might be enabled by IKEA. And with more and more other stuff available cheaply online—Tuft & Needle beds are my favorite pet example, but Campaign Living also makes interesting and movable furniture—a lot of people can be substantially more mobile. Craigslist may be a substitute for U-Haul.

Furniture isn’t “forever” anymore, and I’ve met “minimum furniture” people who seem very happy with not much stuff: usually they want a desk of some sort, a bed, and maybe a small table and chairs. They rarely have friends over, or if those friends do come over it’s to pre-game, and the apartment is mostly for the big “S”es: sleeping, showering, or sex. Why bother with more?

EDIT: In “A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Chris Dixon About Venture Capital and Startups” Tren Griffin writes:

McKinsey placed little or no value on what Craig McCaw called the ability of people to be “nomadic.” The mobile phone had each of the attributes Chris Dixon noted above. Some people thought of the mobile phone as a toy. Since my first mobile phone cost more than $4,000 dollars I actually felt awkward using it in some social settings. Talking into a mobile phone in some pubic settings would cause people to frown at you.

To continue my example, Craig McCaw was also an enthusiastic personal user of what we then called “cellular” phones. Craig McCaw loved working out of the ‘mobile office’ – meaning cars, planes, boats and ships. Which meant he was a natural enthusiast for the product. When the time came to sell his cable TV business in order to double down on the mobile phone business, the choice was made easy by his love of the mobile phone.

Mobility seems like a long-term secular trend. Cheryl Strayed glamorizes it in Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Her writing is as excellent as her life choices are dubious yet revealing of modern character. Bet against a wandering lifestyle at your own peril, and invest in it when you can.

EDIT 2: Older books show evidence of a pre-IKEA world. In Mary Gaitskill’s novel Veronica, Alison moves from New York to L.A. and when she gets there:

John took me to flea markets to shop for furniture: a polka-dot rug, an orange sectional couch, a red Formica table with matching chairs. He took me to lunch and sometimes to dinner.

That rug, couch, and table are probably ugly, not very functional, and take a lot of time to search for and acquire. One trip to IKEA can replace a lot of time in “flea markets,” leaving flea markets for those who really, really like them. This may say more about my cultural milieu and friend set than about culture, but I’ve never heard anyone around me talk about going to flea markets. Pretty much every move any of my friends has ever done has entail a trip to IKEA.

Links: Toni Bentley on “50 Shades,” MFA madness, global climate change, media politics, and more!

March 4, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* “Fifty Shades of Grey Is an Ode to Female Sexuality, but There’s One Thing Missing” by Toni Bentley, whose amazing and amazingly lascivious book The Surrender I often want to recommend and yet rarely do, for reasons that will probably be obvious to readers of said book.

* “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One,” though it’s false that “Writers are born with talent” and that people who didn’t start as teenagers are probably doomed. The rest, though, are true, especially this: “If you aren’t a serious reader, don’t expect anyone to read what you write.”

* “Scientists know there are more giant craters in Siberia, but are nervous to even study them,” which may be the most important article you’re going to skip.

* The Robots Are Coming: John Lancaster, brilliantly, on Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over and Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age. Both are good but if you’re a non-specialist be biased towards Average is Over.

* “Dave Barry: The Greatest (Party) Generation.”

* “Mercedes Carrera Explains Why Cytherea’s Rape Was Not Covered By The Feminist-Dominated Media.”

* “Are landlords the future global plutocracy?” See also Yglesias, The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think; I find it fascinating that many superficial liberals claim to be concerned about income distributions but also favor heavy land-use controls that exacerbate inequality. One or the other, people!

* “University labour strife underscores cost of tenured academics;” tenure costs much more than its distortionary effects are worth. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

* “Finding the Dense City Hidden in Los Angeles,” which surprises me too.

Links: Child payment nightmares, Houellebecq, Hanson, publishing, 50 Shades, and more

February 26, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “Man Ordered by Judge to Pay $30,000 in Support for Child That Isn’t His.”

* “The Next Thing: Michel Houellebecq’s Francophobic satire.” Though this may not seem related at first, Salon.com’s “ Sex orgies of the 1 percent: What really happens when the rich and powerful gather for group sex” could be compared and contrasted with the Houellbecq article. The second link is SFW, at least in photo terms.

* Hanson on “Ian Morris on Foragers, Farmers, Industry, & Ems.”

* Read the full title: “Brontosaurus BDSM, Werewolf Marines, and Serious Social Issues: Self-Publishing in the Wild.”

* “Why GM Hired 8,000 Programmers.”

* “Lenovo installs ghastly spyware on all its laptops,” in a move that is shocking, dangerous, and cruel.

* The bizarre opposition to due process on campuses.

* “The Accurate Erotics of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” which is perhaps overgenerous; see also my essay.

* Someone found this blog by searching for “technology wrecks relationship.”

* Why so-called “digital natives” prefer to read paper.

* Silicon Valley’s War on Sex continues as Google bans adult blogs.

Links: The power and beauty of design, the great software revolution, sex workers, Minneapolis, and more!

February 19, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* “The Shape of Things to Come: How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product,” my favorite piece of this batch, about Jonathan Ive—who has improbably done more to shape the modern world than all but a handful of other people.

* Nurse throws down in the comments section of “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school.”

* “The Great Software Revolution,” which is similar to “Software is Eating the World” but with different emphasis.

* “Meet the [Washington] Sex Workers Who Lawmakers Don’t Believe Exist,” from The Stranger and SFW.

* “Why Authors Walk Away From Good, Big 5 Publishers.”

* “The Days and Nights of an NBA Groupie: Meet the ladies who will do anything to bed a pro baller.” There is a novel here, something like Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life; I don’t think I’m the right person to write it. The mental contortions sometimes evident here are also amusing.

* An unintentionally hilarious comment from David Brin, from the post about his post on characters in fiction; the comment is guilty of the very thing he accuses me of doing!

* “The Miracle of Minneapolis: No other place mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth so well. What’s its secret?” Land-use controls are an underrated driver of many ills in the contemporary U.S.; if you meet someone who complains about income inequality but doesn’t want to remove urban height limits and parking limits, they’re either not serious or don’t know much about the issue.

* Lesbian takes testosterone, feels shocked when her whole worldview changes.

* Employers want better technical writers but aren’t getting them.

Links: Phones and markets, publishing, DNA tests, lying, murder, and more!

February 15, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “An outfit called Midtraffik is trying to address [the image problems of busses] the old-fashioned way — with advertising.”

* You can now unlock your phone, which should lead to a more robust second-hand cell phone market.

* The Faces of Publishing.

* “Your DNA Is Nothing Special: It’s time to relax about genetic testing,” a terrible headline and great sub-head.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* “Good Lovers Lie,” by Clancy Martin of, perhaps not coincidentally, How to Sell fame.

* “How We Write About Love,” interesting throughout, though if the genders were switched and the generalizations remained I predict the author would either have not written the piece or would get blowback because of it.

* The Internet makes questions of meaning more salient, not less; one man’s boring is another’s interesting; and I’m struck by how many ways we have to say things and how little many of us have to say.

* College students use social media to be anti-social.

* Cops murder a guy on camera.

* “Keep typing until it turns into writing.”