Links: Buried treasure, buried writers, buried education, surface hazards, and more!

November 17, 2020 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “The Curse of the Buried Treasure: Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune—but it became a nightmare.” Extremely entertaining, and I didn’t realize how much treasure is apparently sitting around, near England’s surface. At what point do we exhaust our desire for treasure?

* “The Media Learned Nothing From 2016.” Seems sadly accurate, and Fallows, the author, wrote Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy in the ’90s, and I wrote about it in 2009, as you can see at the link, and here we are in 2020, and it still seems germane, if not worse now than it was then. News editors still seem unable to adapt to an environment in which at least one political side has given up on reality and retreated into its own fantasy.

* “‘No One Is Listening to Us:’ More people than ever are hospitalized with COVID-19. Health-care workers can’t go on like this,” and that I wonder if the experiences of front-line healthcare workers helped tip the election to Biden: for many people, COVID seems to be out of sight, out of mind, at least until it gets them or someone in their family, but for front-line healthcare workers, it’s been a grim, daily reality.

* “Is This the End of College as We Know It? For millions of Americans, getting a four-year degree no longer makes sense. Here’s what could replace it.” Granted, like all of these stories, there’s an improbable anecdote about someone who almost certainly spent a lot of time in super expensive private schools: “Rachael Wittern earned straight As in high school, a partial scholarship to college and then a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She is now 33 years old, lives in Tampa, earns $94,000 a year as a psychologist and says her education wasn’t worth the cost. She carries $300,000 in student debt.” $300,000? Where’d she go to undergrad? I agree that schools need more skin in the game, but that’s an absurd amount of money. This is promising: “The number of apprenticeships nearly doubled to more than 700,000 between 2012 and 2019, according to the Labor Department, and they are expanding beyond trades into white-collar industries like banking and insurance. California has plans in place to increase apprenticeships in the state to 500,000 from 75,000 by 2029.” Teaching college students has dramatically boosted my interest in and approval of apprenticeships, and it’s hard to read a book like Paying for the Party without thinking there are serious problems in today’s four-year college system.

* Peter Turchin, the historian who sees the future. For another argument, see “Turchin is wrong: There will be no coming collapse of America.”

* “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.” Better late than never and all that, but it is really, really late.

* The United States’s structure is causing or deepening many of the political problems we’ve been seeing over the last 20 years. It’s hard to discuss the content of current political debates without looking at their structure.

* College professors’s views on college; fairly accurate. I like 12, and wish 14 were more true (it’s likely school and student-age dependent: the more draconian the school’s admissions standards, and the further along the student is, the more true it likely is). 25 is extremely accurate and yet I don’t think I’ve heard anyone, ever, talk about teaching reading—and that’s in my own experience teaching freshman comp classes. Close reading seems erratically taught today, and basic comprehension seems too often to be lacking.

* “The Underground Movement Trying to Topple the North Korean Regime: Adrian Hong says he leads a group of “freedom fighters” conducting a revolution. Has the U.S. already betrayed them?”

* Rising Above a Flood-Tide of Writers: similarities between the 18th Century and today. It’s also possible that a century, or centuries, from now, writing will be little studied relative to visual media.

The margins are narrow; why?

November 16, 2020 By in Links, Politics Tags: , , , 3 Comments

“The Left Still Doesn’t Understand Trump’s Appeal:” 2020 should have been a “lay-up” election, as I’ve heard it phrased—but it wasn’t, and it would be useful to more carefully ask why it wasn’t. Moreover, “‘The joke is that the GOP is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of,’ says David Shor, a Democratic polling and data expert who developed the Obama 2012 campaign’s internal election-forecasting system.” Democrats seem to have become reliant on a highly educated elite group, who make a lot of noise in the media and academia but who may not be terribly popular more broadly. As norms between those two groups grow, whose preferences are going to be foregrounded?

Matt Yglesias has a new blog, Slow Boring, and in its inaugural post he writes: “The practical rhetorical function of that choice [to make racist statements], however, was the anathematize the idea of trying to cater to their cultural attitudes at all even though whatever you want to say about those attitudes they were compatible with voting twice for a Black president.” He also says, “The truth is Democrats have started burrowing-in on a very particular style of politics that simply has a limited range of appeal.”

The structure of the United States is biased in favor of certain residents of relatively small states and while those biases are bogus, barring some unlikely changes to the Constitution (I favor those changes), they’re here and need to be acknowledged and dealt with by political parties that want to win elections—even elections unfairly stacked against them. Yglesias says, “The reality is that most people, most of the time, mostly don’t care whether the stuff they read about politics is true or if the ideas they advocate for actually work,” and that’s a good way of describing a version of what I’m trying to do here, and learning how something works is key to making it work better—or to working it better.

Megan McArdle writes, “The ‘highly educated elites’ are stuck in a nightmare of their own making.” The word “internet” doesn’t appear in her column, but that’s what it’s really about: the Internet makes talking back to authority (“highly educated elites”) easy, and it makes pointing out hypocrisy both easy and, often, viral. Not all allegations of hypocrisy or bad behavior are true, but some are, and, if you make enough casual claims on Twitter, some of them will likely turn out to contradict each other. The “highly education elites’s” views on race as the most salient feature of “diversity” may also not map onto normal people’s views: it may instead be that “Liberals Envisioned a Multiracial Coalition. Voters of Color Had Other Ideas: Democrats may need to rethink their strategy as the class complexities and competing desires of Latino and Asian-American demographic groups become clear.” The gap between media/academic discourse on this subject and how normal people seem to view it seems very wide, and it seems like a gap that doesn’t get a lot of play in the media or academia—perhaps because we’re all caught in our own little bubbles. To be sure, something is broken in the Republican party, and that brokenness should be acknowledged, liken a broken bone should, but if the left can’t get away from unpopular (and borderline racist) identity politics, that’s going to reinforce the problems on the right.

It would be very nice if the alternate, fact-free world facilitated by parts of cable news and talk radio didn’t have an audience, but for whatever reason they do. If we’re lucky, it turns out that Trump is the biggest problem, and the right will feel itself forced back towards a reality-based universe. If we’re unlucky, Trump really is the symptom, not the problem.

Overall, trying to learn more is good, and elections are also information machines.

Links: The story of Sugarland, Lockwood on Nabokov, carbon news, and more!

November 11, 2020 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* What philosopher Peter Singer has learned in 45 years of advocating for animals.

* “‘Sleeping giant’ Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find.” This might be the most important, evolving story of the year and decade.

* I Have Started for Canaan: The Story of the African American Town of Sugarland.

* Patricia Lockwood on, hilariously, Nabokov.

* Phoenix, the Capital of Sprawl, Gets a Radically Car-Free Neighborhood. The story concerns Culdesac’s development, which sounds incredibly charming. The author, Conor Dougherty, wrote Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, which is highly recommended.

* Stripe now offers carbon sequestration services with one mouse click. This is one of these seemingly small stories that could turn out to be very important—like the link immediately above, about the efforts to build neighborhoods that are much less carbon intensive than current, car-centric designs. If Stripe’s one-click carbon sequestration services take off, we may see massive investment in the industry and technology. Here is a good podcast interview with two of the Stripers responsible.

* “China Keeps Inching Closer to Taiwan” and that’s bad.

* Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard.

* Does the Democratic party have a highly educated elite (HEE) problem? It’s notable that Biden, perhaps because he is very old, didn’t attend and absorb the mores of the usual educational-institution subjects. Relatedly, the University of California—Irvine (UCI) appears to have a “Vc [of] Equity and Inclusion” who makes $334,000 a year, including $268,000 in regular pay and the rest in benefits. Nice work if you can get it. One does wonder what a lot of the students, who are struggling to pay tuition, and what a lot of recent grads, who are struggling to pay their student loans, might think.

* “Trump Is Gone. Trumpism Just Arrived.” Better than the usual, if not good overall. Still, one could look at the link immediately above and wonder how it relates to this essay.

* “How To Tell If You’re Being Canceled.” Better definitions than the usual, and an analysis of “cancel culture.”

* “ The need to touch: The language of touch binds our minds and bodies to the broader social world. What happens when touch becomes taboo?” One of the many and rarely acknowledged costs of PC paranoia.

* “How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?” On the guy who started collapse studies.

* The chip wars of the 21st century.

Personal epistemology, free speech, and tech companies

November 10, 2020 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , 5 Comments

The NYT describes “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation, and in response Hacker News commenter throwaway13337 says, in part, “It’s not unchecked free speech. Instead, it’s unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.” There’s some truth to the idea that social media companies have evolved to seek engagement, rather than truth, but I think the social media companies are reflecting a deeper human tendency. I wrote back to throwaway13337: “Try teaching non-elite undergrads, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you’ll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it’s not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.”

From what I can tell, we evolved to form tribes, not to be “right:” Jonathan’s Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion deals with this topic well and at length, and I’ve not seen any substantial rebuttals of it. We don’t naturally take to tracking the question, “How do I know what I know?” Instead, we naturally seem to want to find “facts” or ideas that support our preexisting views. In the HN comment thread, someone asked for specific examples of poor undergrad epistemic hygiene, and while I’d prefer not to get super specific for reasons of privacy, I’ve had many conversations that take the following form: “How do you know article x is accurate?” “Google told me.” “How does Google work?” “I don’t know.” “What does it take to make a claim on the Internet.” “Um. A phone, I guess?” A lot of people—maybe most—will uncritically take as fact whatever happens to be served up by Google (it’s always Google and never Duck Duck Go or Bing), and most undergrads whose work I’ve read will, again uncritically, accept clickbait sites and similar as accurate. Part of the reason for this reasoning is that undergrads’s lives are minimally affected by being wrong or incomplete about some claim done in a short assignment that’s being imposed by some annoying professor toff standing between them and their degree.

The gap between elite information discourse and everyday information discourse, even among college students, who may be more sophisticated than their peer equivalents, is vast—so vast that I don’t think most journalists (who mostly talk to other journalists and to experts) and to other people who work with information, data, and ideas really truly understand it. We’re all living in bubbles. I don’t think I did, either, before I saw the epistemic hygiene most undergrads practice, or don’t practice. This is not a “kids these days” rant, either: many of them have never really been taught to ask themselves, “How do I know what I know?” Many have never really learned anything about the scientific method. It’s not happening much in most non-elite schools, so where are they going to get epistemic hygiene from?

The United States alone has 320 million people in it. Table DP02 in the Census at data.census.gov estimates that 20.3% of the population age 25 and older has a college bachelor’s degree, and 12.8% have a graduate or professional degree. Before someone objects, let me admit that a college degree is far from a perfect proxy for epistemic hygiene or general knowledge, and some high school dropouts perform much better at cognition, meta cognition, statistical reasoning, and so forth, than do some people with graduate degrees. With that said, though, a college degree is probably a decent approximation for baseline abstract reasoning skills and epistemic hygiene. Most people, though, don’t connect with or think in terms of aggregated data or abstract reasoning—one study, for example, finds that “Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts.” We’re tribe builders, not fact finders.

Almost anyone who wants a megaphone in the form of one of the many social media platforms available now has one. The number of people motivated by questions like “What is really true, and how do I discern what is really true? How do I enable myself to get countervailing data and information into my view, or worldview, or worldviews?” is not zero, again obviously, but it’s not a huge part of the population. And many very “smart” people in an IQ sense use their intelligence to build better rationalizations, rather than to seek truth (and I may be among the rationalizers: I’m not trying to exclude myself from that category).

Until relatively recently, almost everyone with a media megaphone had some kind of training or interest in epistemology, even they didn’t call it “epistemology.” Editors would ask, “How do you know that?” or “Who told you that?” or that sort of thing. Professors have systems that are supposed to encourage greater-than-average epistemic hygiene (these systems were not and are not perfect, and nothing I have written so far implies that they were or are).

Most people don’t care about the question, “How do you know what you know?” are fairly surprised if it’s asked, implicitly or explicitly. Some people are intrigued by it but most aren’t, and view questions about sources and knowledge to be a hindrance. This is less likely to be true of people who aspire to be researchers or work in other knowledge-related professions, but that describes only a small percentage of undergraduates, particularly at non-elite schools. And the “elite schools” thing drives a lot of the media discourse around education. One of the things I like about Professor X’s book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is how it functions as a corrective to that discourse.

For most people, floating a factually incorrect conspiracy theory online isn’t going to negatively affect their lives. If someone is a nurse and gives a patient a wrong medication or incorrect medication, that person is not going to be a nurse for long. If the nurse states or repeats a factually incorrect political or social idea online, particularly but not exclusively under a pseudonym, that nurse’s life likely won’t be affected. There’s no truth feedback loop. The same is true for someone working in, say, construction, or engineering, or many other fields. The person is free to state things that are factually incorrect, or incomplete, or misleading, and doing so isn’t going to have many negative consequences. Maybe it will have some positive consequences: one way to show that you’re really on team x is to state or repeat falsehoods that show you’re on team x, rather than on team “What is really true?”

I don’t want to get into daily political discourse, since that tends to raise defenses and elicit anger, but the last eight months have demonstrated many people’s problems with epistemology, and in a way that can have immediate, negative personal consequences—but not for everyone.

Pew Research data indicate that a quarter of US adults didn’t read a book in 2018; this is consistent with other data indicating that about half of US adults read zero or one books per year. Again, yes, there are surely many individuals who read other materials and have excellent epistemic hygiene, but this is a reasonable mass proxy, given the demands that reading makes on us.

Many people driving the (relatively) elite discourse don’t realize how many people are not only not like them, but wildly not like them, along numerous metrics. It may also be that we don’t know how to deal with gossip at scale. Interpersonal gossip is all about personal stories, while many problems at scale are best understood through data—but the number of people deeply interested in data and data’s veracity is small. And elite discourse has some of its own possible epistemic falsehoods, or at least uncertainties, embedded within it: some of the populist rhetoric against elites is rooted in truth.

A surprisingly large number of freshmen don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, or that novels are fiction. Not a majority, but I was surprised when I first encountered confusion around these points; I’m not any longer. I don’t think the majority of freshmen confuse fiction and nonfiction, or genres of nonfiction, but enough do for the confusion to be a noticeable pattern (modern distinctions between fiction and nonfiction only really arose, I think, during the Enlightenment and the rise of the novel in the 18th Century, although off the top of my head I don’t have a good citation for this historical point, apart perhaps from Ian Watt’s work on the novel). Maybe online systems like Twitter or Facebook allow average users to revert to an earlier mode of discourse in which the border between fiction and nonfiction is more porous, and the online systems have strong fictional components that some users don’t care to segregate.

We are all caught in our bubble, and the universe of people is almost unimaginably larger than the number of people in our bubble. If you got this far, you’re probably in a nerd bubble: usually, anything involving the word “epistemology” sends people to sleep or, alternately, scurrying for something like “You won’t believe what this celebrity wore/said/did” instead. Almost no one wants to consider epistemology; to do so as a hobby is rare. One person’s disinformation is another person’s teambuilding. If you think the preceding sentence is in favor of disinformation, by the way, it’s not.

Briefly Noted: Of Human Bondage, Three-Ring Circus, and One-Billion Americans

November 5, 2020 By in Briefly Noted Tags: , , , 1 Comment

* Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman: Sports are reality TV for guys, and this book covers the inside drama; maybe guys use sports as a way of developing knowledge of human personalities and foibles that are otherwise available in fiction (noting that fiction may depict obsession and the achievement of technical mastery infrequently). Unfortunately, Three-Ring Circus is full of weird repetitions and language infelicities, despite its impressive reporting. An example: “Jerome Crawford, O’Neal’s King Kong Bundy-esque bodyguard and constant companion,” “When [Shaq] finally was reached, he told the team he expected three members of his personal entourage (including his longtime bodyguard, Jerome Crawford,” “The altercation was finally broken up when Jerome Crawford, O’Neal’s bodyguard,” and “O’Neal writes that he and his bodyguard, Jerome Crawford, arrived at the coach’s house unannounced.” How many times do we need to be reminded of who Jerome Crawford is?

Then there are comments like: “Walker [a Laker player] often returned home at 6 a.m., took a quick nap, forgot to brush his teeth, then darted off for practice with the scent of Budweiser and Bar Hag IV on his breath.” Bar hag? Does he mean a woman at a bar? What separates a woman at a bar and a “Bar Hag?” Where does the line of demarcation occur? If she is a Bar Hag, is Walker the male equivalent? These kinds of jarring comments throw me and should, I think, throw many readers. They’re a shame, because there’s an excellent book in this not-bad book.

* One Billion Americans by Matt Yglesias: I already basically bought the premise of this book before starting, but One Billion Americans goes through a lot of the data showing the immigration is good, the U.S. is not densely populated, and people moving to an effective legal and regulatory regime is good for the people who move here and the ones who are already here. An excerpt summarizing One Billion Americans is here, and I’ve not seen good, data-informed rebuttals of its main point. “Good” and “data-informed” are near-synonyms in the preceding sentence, but most beliefs manage to achieve neither. The two most important policies Yglesias likes, liberalizing zoning codes (the same ones raising the cost of housing across the country) and improving transit, are good whether you want the approximate number of Americans to stay the same or want it to triple. There are some tentative steps in these directions (earlier this week, Austin, Texas finally approved some light rail lines), but they could use some federal heft behind them.

So that’s the technical side of things, but I think the cultural and psychological might be neglected; there are problems in the U.S., like (potentially rising) narcissism and small-minded self-satisfaction, that may impede arguments towards greatness. One way to look at the United States today is as a nation of persons who think, “I’ve got mine, and I don’t give a f- about anyone else.” That’s a fair reading of contemporary zoning laws, and of the federal government’s attitude: about 40% of federal spending goes to straight subsidies of old people, and most of those old people bought housing units decades ago; they’re effectively being subsidized twice. And subsidies to old people aren’t going towards the future. Younger people, meanwhile, are often most focused on themselves and getting laid. Who’s the real constituency for greatness today? When we can gaze endlessly at ourselves in the smartphone’s reflection, why bother changing? That’s not my view, but it’s a view compatible with many local and national voter priorities today. My view is closer to Yglesias’s, but I’m not sure there’s a great way from here to there.

This review is good, as is this one. My other challenge with One Billion Americans is that I’ve read a lot of the same stuff Yglesias has; it’s nice to have so much of it in one convenient place, though.

* Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham: Lots of subtle commentary on human nature, but it’s a windy and often boring novel. Don’t know where to go next with the plot? Introduce the protagonist to another random person. Most of the school years should be cut, and Of Human Bondage was too early to say what really went on in many all-male English boarding schools of the day: some of the masters accepted low pay and social status in return for a horrifying “reward” of sorts.

If it were shorter, it could be great—but lots of individual observations are astute, and the basic struggles of Philip, the protagonist, are modern feeling: the fading power of religion, the struggle to find work, the struggles between the sexes (at one point, Mildred “had taken their measure. They were boys, and she surmised they were students. She had no use for them.”). Mildred is right, but for reasons irrational Philip takes to her, perhaps seeking out rejection. It’s not a great book, but it is sometimes a compelling one, and its most compelling aspects occur in its last quarter: not when Philip is young, but when he is older. Not when he has promise, but when he sees where life has brought him, which is different than what he’d imagined, as it is for most of us. There’s a bit of a cupcake ending, but the struggle is felt throughout.

Philip’s uncle, a vicar, tells Philip to get in line: “You’ve been brought up like a gentleman and a Christian, and I should be false to the trust laid upon me by your dead father and mother if I allowed you to expose yourself to such temptation” and Philip declines: “Well, I know I’m not a Christian and I’m beginning to doubt whether I’m a gentleman.” How one reads their relationship probably depends on the reader’s age: a younger reader sees Philip wanting to be himself, and the older reader may understand the Vicar’s good intentions despite his limitations.

Heady stuff for 1915. I wonder how many people then pretended to be Christians but weren’t in their hearts, and I wonder too what the equivalent of a “gentleman” is today.

Links: Early work, some election talk, some privacy talk, deep thinking, and more!

November 2, 2020 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* Paul Graham on early work: highly relevant to artists, too.

* The psychedelic election.

* Moxie Marlinspike and Signal. The number of people who care about privacy seems very small, but not zero, and Signal seems to convenience.

* “America Is Having a Moral Convulsion: Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail. Can we get it back before it’s too late?” An important essay that I think under-emphasizes two important trends: legally-imposed housing scarcity and the student-loan racket. The former is important because it raises the cost of almost every household’s largest expense. The latter distorts incentives and ensures that colleges and universities get paid regardless of the quality of the product or the outcome of the customer. Yet both can be changed, if enough voters want them changed: we look for the villain, thrashing about angrily in the search, until we find a mirror, and see that the villain is us. Remember that the voter turnout rate 18 – 29 is about half that of people 60+, a consistent trend that ought to be further emphasized.

* Is geothermal energy happening? My impression is, or was, that only particular geologies are suited to geothermal energy, which limits its appeal. The fall in gas prices is interesting, though: I’ve worked on grant projects related to oil and gas companies deploying fracking and related technologies to geothermal power. If gas prices stay low, the temptation to shift towards geothermal, or least balance portfolios, will rise.

* Tyrants hate a plague.

* “Reopen the American Mind: In the midst of an existential crisis for higher education, is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive?” I’m surprised to see this argument in this venue, and The Closing of the American Mind is weird and dated in some ways (the jeremiad against rock music, for example), but, as the writers note, it’s prescient in others.

* “What to Do About Xinjiang:” an unusually substantive essay.

* “Is Deep Thinking Incompatible With an Academic Career?” On

* “I am an Uighur who faced China’s concentration camps.” See above regarding Xinjiang. Are you paying attention to the genocide?

* Seriously considering going back to desktop computers, for reasons of privacy, fairness, and security. Granted, I’m writing this on an iMac, which is not as open or secure as many other choices, like the cited System76 boxes. What’s the state of Linux desktop search, I wonder?

Links: Housing challenges, Kubrick’s work, where the money’s going, and more!

October 19, 2020 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* 2020 had the warmest September on record. And still we continue to dither.

* “Prefab was supposed to fix the construction industry’s biggest problems. Why isn’t it everywhere? The Canadian company Bone Structure can produce zero net energy homes months faster than a traditional builder. But its challenges highlight the difficulty of disrupting the entrenched construction industry.”

* “Don’t Pay for 95%,” something we seem almost psychologically incapable of understanding.

* Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s work.

* “College Enrollment Slid This Fall, With First-Year Populations Down 16%.”

* Speaking of education: “Large variation in earnings returns among postgraduate degrees, with returns of more than 15% for masters in business and law, but negative returns for many arts and humanities courses.”

* Psilocybin is going to be legalized, at least therapeutically, in the near future.

* Cruise is actually going to deploy driverless cars as an Uber-like service in San Francisco?

* American magical realism, with Bruno Maçães, who has written various interesting things.

* The Great Unread: On William Deresiewicz’s The Death of the Artist. Seems like a book for which the reviews suffice.

* Where has San Francisco’s money gone? A useful framing starts the story: “In 2009, San Francisco’s municipal budget totaled $6.5 billion—$8.6 billion in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation and population. San Francisco’s budget for 2019 is an eye-popping $12.2 billion, a 10 percent increase just since 2018.”

* Why is wokeness winning?, Andrew Sullivan asks. I’m not sure that it is, or that the reasons stated are really the correct “why,” as opposed to a post-hoc story.

* Are gas stoves bad?

* Where are all the successful rationalists?

* Labor’s share of national income is falling, but it’s primarily going to increased rents—which are increasing due to laws that prevent the development of new housing.

Vote for Biden for president

October 19, 2020 By in Philosophy Tags: , Leave a comment

In 2016 I did something I’d never done before and hoped I wouldn’t do again: encouraged readers to vote for Clinton or Johnson for president. What I wrote then is still true:

Trump is unfit to be president. There are longer explanations as to why Trump is such a calamity and so unfit for office, like “SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein” or many others, but perhaps the best thing I’ve read on Trump is “The question of what Donald Trump ‘really believes’ has no answer”

We’ve seen the basic failures in governance that the last four years have brought: let’s not repeat that mistake now.

I’d like to return to writing primarily about books and ideas, since there is too much political background noise, but I’ve also asked myself what I would have done if I’d been alive during the 1920s or 1930s, when many were complicit with the rise of totalitarian ideologies. Although there are important differences between then and now, the temptation towards totalitarian ideologies apparently remains.  I hadn’t endorsed a specific candidate before 2016 because I’d not seen prominent national candidates who are threats to democratic governance itself. Now I have, and we have.

Links: SF’s decline, the tyranny of IDs, a meaningful career, mushrooms’s moment, and more!

October 11, 2020 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* FYI, you don’t need an ID to fly on a plane for a domestic trip within the United States: courts have consistently found that such a rule is an unfair limitation on the freedom to travel and on interstate commerce. Just because a government agent tells you something is true, does not mean that it is true.

* “How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time.” Substack writers are doing a lot of disproportionately interesting work.

* “What a Second Bauhaus Movement Means for Europe:” the potential to build lots of new housing and thus lower the cost of housing—something that seems to elude the United States.

* “More Doctoral Programs [in the humanities and social sciences] Suspend Admissions. That Could Have Lasting Effects on Graduate Education.” Maybe word is finally getting out?

* “As everything else changes, my Dover paperbacks hold up.” I note:

The right paperback encountered at just the right moment — the Fawcett Crest edition of “Good Grief, Charlie Brown!” I got in Florida when I was 7 or 8; the Collier edition of Thomas Helm’s “Shark! Unpredictable Killer of the Sea” my father gave me a few summers later, in 1974 — became an object out of time, a marker that would last forever.

Although the books from my childhood wouldn’t become “a marker that would last forever,” because most were printed on pulp paper that yellows and falls apart with age. this obscure tax case is part of the reason publishers use such crappy paper today. There are exceptions: The New York Review of Books imprint makes really physically good paperbacks, but they mostly specialize in literary oddballs.

One problem with having physical books over the long term is the sheer number of moves many people make today. For that reason I’ve shifted to a lot more Kindle reading, even though the totality of the experience is worse.

* On mushrooms’s moment. A charming story: I hope Smallhold succeeds.

* “Adam Tooze on World Order, Then and Now: Do fiscal constraints matter? How contingent was WWII? Can Nazi Germany teach us anything about the CCP? Did the West Win the Cold War? Plus, Xinjiang and Soviet Gulags.” Unusually substantive.

* On the destruction of America’s best high school. Views rarely heard.

* “The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out.” Nuclear war is an issue that should be much closer to the top of various policy agendas, and global fears, than it is.

* “People are leaving San Francisco. After decades of growth, is the city on the decline?” For anyone but a startup founder, SF does seem like an awful place to live.

Links: Characters, reading aloud, love hurts, systems, and more!

October 1, 2020 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “Everyone Has a Tom Pritchard Story. Only I Have His Bike.” Unexpectedly hilarious.

* How to read aloud. If you’ve not, try reading aloud to your partner/lover. Make it a habit.

* “Love Hurts,” on the new culture of fragility and dubious safetyism.

* “How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole: Instead of optimizing work, technology has created a nonstop barrage of notifications and interactions. Six months into a pandemic, it’s worse than ever.” Fits my experiences, but I also think few people actively push against this. See Cal Newport’s books for more on it.

* “America’s Exceptional Housing Crisis: How the Rest of the World Tamed Runaway Home Prices.” Short answer: the rest of the world built a lot more housing. America hasn’t.

* Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie on various things; the former’s work has always seemed more interesting than the latter’s. Note: “AMIS: I certainly feel part of a generation that saw a fairly radical change in the way novels are written and in the way novels are read. You can no longer expect the reader to surmise, to infer, to second-guess. As an adaptation, writers will cease to imply, to hint, to tease. Now they have to declare.”

Amis also says, “the novel has had to speed itself up—in answer to an accelerated reality. Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift—long, static, and digressive—spent several months as a bestseller in the 1970s. That audience has more or less disappeared.” I’ve started Humboldt’s Gift a few times and never finished: I’d call it rambling and aimless. A novel need not be overly aimed, in my view, but it felt like a lot of nothing.

* On the movie Stay Woke, and more significantly on the difference between destructive and constructive reformist energy. It’ll be interesting to see what the 2020 and 2022 elections are like. So far, even in very left-wing California, “Police reforms face defeat as California Democrats block George Floyd-inspired bills.” Who do city and state legislators, where most policing policy happens, most worry about? Not protesters, it seems.

* “ How the US Start-Up Industry is Faltering.” One of these important, easily-missed pieces. The really important news is often not in the headlines.

* “Facebook to Curb Internal Debate Over Sensitive Issues Amid Staff Discord: Mark Zuckerberg says employees shouldn’t have to confront social issues in their day-to-day work unless they want to.” Companies appear to be re-learning the “leave politics and religion at home” rule that used to be reasonably common, and may become reasonably common again. Similarly, Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, has announced that the company is focusing on its mission.

* “They Don’t Need No Education: Elementary schools deliberately fail to teach knowledge, hurting their most vulnerable students.” I have a theory: to get tenure, most professors need to publish “novel” research. In many fields—like education—there are not many truly novel and useful ideas available. So how does one get tenure? By inventing new paradigms, even if they are maybe not so accurate and not much of an improvement, and then publishing and attempting to propagate them. “New math” seems to be worse than teaching multiplication, division, algebra, and so on. But lots of professors still need tenure, so with a little self-delusion and p-hacking they can come up with something new. And people have to keep re-discovering the value of simply memorizing a lot of stuff.

* “The new intolerance: On the rise of an authoritarian ideology ‘hostile to the rule of reason.’”

* “The housing market is building snowflakes: How an industry of endless one-offs is holding our society back.” Are these characters the solution? I have no idea, but they do identify an important problem.