Friday, June 14, 2024

Updating my Priors: Short Takes 6/2024

I’ve been confused as to why the Palestine activists have made college presidents the target of their ire, demanding they divest the college's endowment from profiting from the war in Israel. Divesting from any organization tangentially related to the IDF seems unlikely to have much of an impact on the lives of Gaza citizens. But then I remembered an old post of mine. 
“The next time you roll your eyes as some Gen Z student goes on about the need to create a safe space for vulnerable populations, try this experiment. Replace the word 'safe' with 'sacred.'

This isn’t about censoring speech, it's about sacredness, the moral foundation of sanctity. These don’t students don’t want the speech to take place on their campus. Move it to a conservative church and watch the activists go home.”
This isn’t real action; its purging dissidents, trying to purify their community. They want their college campus to reflect their values, and that means making it a sacred place free from "oppressors" like the Israelis. 

Derek Thompson said something that made me think of an old post. In the early 20th century, when everyone got their news from the same 3 sources of TV, we had a shared reality for the first time. Before, everything was local. You heard things from your neighbors or the local paper. Nothing was shared on the national level. Now, we have a million sources and can choose our own reality.

This is the simplest explanation for Putnam's Upswing. We were communitarian because the source of news became consolidated. What if, rather than being a communitarian/individual pendulum—where we were individualist in the 19th century, communitarian in the mid 20th century, and individualist once again—the 20th century upswing was a rare outlier that will never repeat? This unified "we" was an outlier and individualism is our natural state.

In my blogpost I suggested that big tech companies could censor the news on their platforms, leading to a more controlled message. And you could argue that the dissolution of local papers and the rise of national ones like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are turning the tide. But I think newspapers are just less influential, especially among conservatives.
I’ve often wondered what caused the trend of serial killers in the 60s and 70s. Paul Skallas has an interesting theory. These people have always existed. They just never thought they could get away with it before.


Another thread that speaks to my belief about the hero complex. 

Interesting paper about meaningful work, and how women are killing men in this area.

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Friday, May 24, 2024

The Life and Death of an Industry

Photographer Name: Greg Henshall
 

On the Ezra Klein Podcast, he recently had a conversation with Hannah Ritchie about the challenges of growing a green industry.

From the podcast:

"for a lot of the history of the environmental movement ... we had to get people to stop doing things or we had to add new technologies to things we were already doing, like the scrubbers for sulfur dioxide.

And now we have this capacity to substitute with solar panels and wind and electric vehicles and heat pumps. And it requires a huge amount of construction, transmission lines. And so you have this movement and this politics that for a lot of its life was about trying to get human beings to do fewer destructive things and now needs them, very rapidly, to do far more constructive things."

For all his insanity, James Lindsay actually made a really salient point on The Joe Rogan Podcast. In one of his rants about critical social justice studies, he talked about how much of postmodernism was about tearing things down, and how it is much easier to tear things down than it is to build them. There is a reason more people work on demolition crews than in architectural firms.

There is a cycle that industries seem to go through. When a new industry arrives, it attracts builders. People are anxious to be the first to arrive to build the new thing. Sure, there is money involved. But the real draw is that builders like to build, and this allows them to do that. Plus, it's something new and there is a lot of room to move fast and break things.

Over time, the industry gains traction and becomes more established. It attracts attention, investment, and wider adoption. This is when the building phase typically plateaus, as the industry stabilizes and becomes more prevalent in society.

The next stage deals with the fallout of the broken things created by the builders. The industry has stopped attracting builders and is now attracting building inspectors—people who don't actually build anything, they just point out all of the flaws in the buildings.

This stage was ready made for people like Ralph Nader. If the US government was an industry that attracted builders, Nader was the most hard-assed building inspector you could ever imagine. He lead a movement of new liberals who had lost their faith in government through the Vietnam War and Watergate.

From a book review: 

"it wasn’t simply a matter of getting the right people into power, as the very act of getting into power would mean they were no longer the right people. The only way to stay pure was to operate outside the system."
The only branch of government Nader trusted was the judicial one. He put his faith in the courts. Nader and his followers filed lawsuit after lawsuit until government agencies were blanketed in layers of red tape.

This leads to the next stage in the cycle: The HRification of the new industry. Now the companies that hire the builders have to staff legal teams and HR staff to prevent them from getting sued by Ralph Nader and the other building inspectors of the world. To address the concerns raised by critics and mitigate potential harm, the industry starts attracting experts who specialize in areas like compliance, risk management, and responsible practices. These experts work to ensure that the industry meets regulatory requirements, follows ethical guidelines, and minimizes any negative consequences.

In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein make a suggestion for reducing health care costs: allow patients to waive their right to sue for malpractice. Think about this for a second. One of the largest chunks of your medical bill goes to paying the hospital's legal team and covering the costs of other people's malpractice suits. The cost of building inspectors shows up in nearly every transaction of our lives; so much so that we hardly even notice it.

Before I go too far down the road of libertarianism I feel like I need to say this: the building inspectors aren't bullshitting. They are pointing out legitimate concerns: manufacturing's impact on the environment, the internet's impact on fraud and children seeing explicit content, AI's potential to kill everyone, etc. 

I am only here to point out tradeoffs, namely that builders want to build. And when they are prevented from building, everyone is deprived of potential opportunities for prosperity. And when a whole coalition that has dominated most of a society's powerful institutions builds its identity around being a building inspector and purges builders, or at least does a poor job of attracting them, they become incapable of building. And there will come a time when we need to build. And that time is now. And unfortunately, the leftists are unprepared to do it. 

But this isn't just a leftist thing. The rise Nader also explains the popularity of Trump and RJK Jr. They are building inspectors from outside the system like Nader, but unlike him, they are trying to get inside it (although Nader did run for president). For all his talk about deal making in the private sector, Trump has no experience building as a politician, which is very different running a business. 

My general take is to leaving building to the builders, which is why I like boring politicians like Joe Biden. I also happen to like his industrial policy based on strategically building things the private sector will not provide (like solar panels and micro chips). It just sucks having to watch his efforts get hamstrung by the building inspectors who, I'm afraid to say, hold way too much institutional power.
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Friday, April 12, 2024

The Scam to Force Your Kids to Play More

Jonathan Haidt released his new book, The Anxious Generation, and it has been receiving a lot of attention. With this attention comes status, and as the Gossip Trap theory suggests, when a crab tries to status-climb his way out of the bucket, society responds by pulling him down with us.

The book attempts to show how smartphones are causing the decline in youth mental health.

I am partial to Haidt so I have trouble decoupling criticism of him from my admiration. So take what I write with a grain of salt.

Without digging too deep into the Nature critique of his work, my impression is that it’s trying to say that the evidence Haidt presents isn’t particularly strong. Others have suggested alternative causes and when Haidt or Jean Twenge respond they seem to do a good job of showing that the alternatives are always weaker than the smartphone theory.

So now we have the funnel problem. How do I know what is true when the process for truth-finding produces conflicting results?

This is where I have learned to throw everything aside and ask: What does common sense tell me?

Let’s go back to our priors, our base rates before we knew anything about smartphones.

The year is 2006. Everyone still owns flip phones and logs into Facebook from their laptop. A portal opens and someone from the year 2024 steps out. You ask him: What is the future like?
“Donald Trump becomes president. Then he loses reelection and tries to overthrow the government. Then he becomes indicted on 91 criminal charges. Then he gets reelected.”

“No, seriously,” you say.

“Well, Apple invents a phone that has the internet on it. Every teenager in America gets one and joins Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.”

“What’s a TikTok?” you ask.

“Forget I said that. Just understand that kids flock to whatever new, cool social media platform that developers come up with.”

“Oh, just like they do with video games?”

“Sort of. Only the market share is much higher than video game users, like 95%. And they are on it all the time: when they are in bed, during class, while eating meals … always. Plus, the algorithms are designed to keep you on as long as possible and they heighten the most outrageous users with the most polarizing opinions. Teens spend less and less time meeting with one another face to face and more time using their phones.”
Now, knowing nothing more than this information—nothing about the coming recession, climate change worries, global conflicts, or any other coming disaster— would you predict that teen mental health would increase, decrease, or stay the same over the next 15 years?

Better yet: forget about smartphones for a minute. Imagine the time traveler shows you this chart. 

The number of hours a 12th grader spends with friends per week is 2.67, almost exactly what it was 25 years earlier in 1981. Then he tells you that in 2020 it will drop to 1.89, a 29% decrease. Do you expect there to be any second order effects from teens spending so much time alone in their bedrooms?

I get that some people require a high threshold for updating their priors but is it really that absurd to assume the second order effects of kids spending time reading comments on their Instagram feed instead of building a treehouse would have some negative consequences? And Haidt’s suggestions aren’t exactly draconian—no phones during school, age verification for social media to screen teens, more time for recess at school, etc.

Are we really worried that Haidt is in the pocket of Big Recess and wants to trick us into letting kids play more? It’s beginning to sound like this:


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Friday, March 15, 2024

Privilege Paralysis

Scott Paul is the associate director of peace and security at Oxfam. Here is his view on Gaza aid:

Jeff Brooks is a fundraising writer. This is from a blog post he wrote titled “Worried about “donor as hero” fundraising?”
“One of the most common edits … relates to the perception of white saviourism. The idea that charitable donors are only helping people in a self-serving way reinforces patriarchal, colonial, and white supremacist attitudes and systems.”
A blogger who writes about school and race wrote a post about pandemic pods. She addresses the question "Would it be more socially just to invite families with fewer resources to join our pod?", saying, 
"This entire conversation is largely an exercise in privileged people trying to feel better about their own complicity in generations of inequality and injustice."
There is an idea behind these statements that I have seen enough to pique my curiosity. I am going to do my best to try and articulate this idea, which I’m calling Privilege Paralysis, and then do a little bit of speculating.

Privilege Paralysis starts like this. Imagine a person, we’ll call him James. James is a person of privilege: white, male, rich, married, inheritor of old money, etc. James feels guilty about his privilege. James decides to give some of his money to help disadvantaged people. Maybe he gives to UNICEF, or the ACLU, or his local food bank. It doesn’t matter where. What matters is that when he gives, it resolves his guilt.

The people who hold Privilege Paralysis DO NOT want his guilt to be resolved via this act of charity. If they are in a position to do so, they will take away his ability to make this donation that resolves his guilt.

So far, I am 90% confident that I have passed the ideological Turing Test. Now comes the speculating part.

The reason the adherents of Privilege Paralysis do not want James to resolve his guilt via his donation is that they want him to hold onto his guilt. They believe that the way to solve the BIG PROBLEM that they care about (Capitalism, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, whatever) is not by small acts of kindness but by tearing down entire systems and building equitable ones in their place. Therefore, they need James and his guilt to help accomplish this. And the only way to do this is to get enough powerful people to feel that guilt and for it to propel them to tear down these systems.

Now I’m more like 65% confident that I am passing the Ideological Turing Test.

Jeff Brooks’ blog post, which I quote above, also tries to steelman Privilege Paralysis. He writes: 
“The idea is that donors unfairly get to feel good about helping those who are less fortunate than themselves. Because donors are part of and contribute to an unfair system — even if it’s unconsciously done. It’s this unfair system that keeps people in need in their disadvantaged state … But when we use these messages, we may be propping up a patriarchal, white, colonialist system.”
As someone who also works in fundraising, I am beginning to come across people who follow Privilege Paralysis. And while Brooks uses his blog post to try and find common ground, I am going to use this post to put my foot down. 

Because this is mission creep.

The people espousing this idea have lost the plot of their organization’s mission. Instead of helping people they are trying to solve a global problem with a solution that lacks consensus. And in the process of solving the global problem, they are denying care to the very people they are supposed to be helping.

Instead, their thinking looks like this:



And that’s fine if that’s what you want to do. But then leave your goddamn organization and start a new one because there are people who want to help those in need and your idealistic ass is getting in the way.

And when you start your anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist organization to create your vision of utopia, don’t forget that every fringe ideology is trying to do the same thing and none of you are good at building anything. It always ends up looking like this:


Happy Friday, everyone!
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Friday, February 23, 2024

Updating my Priors: Short Takes 2/2024

Center-left libs seem maddened by the fact that people think the economy is bad when their data says it is good. This thread takes a stab at explaining the disconnect by looking at how we are informed by "the vibes." In short, people care less about the unemployment rate than they once did. Now they care about home prices and interest rates.


George Carlin once had this bit where he proposed his plan for world peace. Once a year, for 24 non-stop hours, everyone in the world would be required to dance. Turns out that dancing is actually the single greatest cure for depression. Man was ahead of his time.

This chart was flying around X for a while. The political views of Gen Z differ wildly by gender. I like Paul Graham's hypothesis that youth isolation is causing asymmetric polarization.

In the past, I would've watched the video and rolled my eyes at this GenZer complaining about how work is hard. But after reading this explanation, I kinda think its right. I once left a job as a bank teller (somewhat high status) for a job mowing grass (low status), simply because I hated dealing with people all day long. I chose physical labor over emotional labor. Now, a much greater percentage of jobs require emotional rather than physical labor.

I wrote that there are no longer songs about duty and responsibility since those are silent generation values. I recently realized the second verse of the 1988 hit “Fast Car” is about precisely those values. The narrator is sacrificing her own desires to care for her father.


See, my old man's got a problem
He live with the bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his

Mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said, "Somebody's got to take care of him"
So, I quit school and that's what I did

Arthur Brooke states his rules for evaluating research. Seems like good advice.

  1. "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
  2. Let ideas age a bit.
  3. Useful beats clever.
So, in life as in work, when I see a bandwagon going by, I always ask, Does this seem too good to be true? I let the cultural moment or social trend age for a while. And then I consider whether it is useful, as opposed to simply novel."

Adam Grant says that in conspiracy theories has more to do with low trust than IQ.
I've been thinking again about one of my favorite SSC posts about the dichotomy of mistake theorists and conflict theorists. I wonder if the simplest explanation to distinguish the two views is that it all comes down to intention. When something bad happens, mistake theorists assuming well-intentioned people made a mistake, while conflict theorists assume people with bad intentions knowingly made the bad thing happen.

Based on Grants work, I would guess that mistake theorists have more trust than conflict theorists, the latter seem more prone to conspiracy beliefs.
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Friday, January 5, 2024

Responsible to Someone

I saw a Facebook post recently. I didn’t know its author, but she tagged someone I am connected to—the father of one of my son’s friends. It was a post that publicly acknowledged their relationship; i.e. they were officially a couple. The missing context is that he—the father of my son’s friend, heretofore known as K—was married. So it was also indirectly the public acknowledgement of the end of K’s marriage.

I am reading a book that echoes a lot of Putnam’s findings in The Upswing, namely the shift among Americans from a communitarian ethos to an individualistic one. One of the book’s observations is that the old America used to have a concept of duty and responsibility that has since been replaced by individualism and something like "the search for happiness."

I am reminded of the movie Spanglish, in which Flor, a Mexican American* mother, and Adam Sandler’s character are falling in love. Sandler’s marriage is on the rocks; he is married to a selfish person, a bad mother, and a cheater. The movie ends with Flor resisting her feelings for Sandler and walking away. I think how you feel about her decision says a lot about who you are. She felt a commitment to the duties and responsibilities of not only her own family, but Sandler’s as well. A life with Sandler might have made the two of them happier, but her daughter would have to adjust to a new person in her life and he would be fighting for custody of his own kids. It would have been messy.

Now I don’t know the details of K’s situation, but his marriage seemed happy from the outside. I’m wondering if he simply found someone he fell in love with, and that love overpowered everything, including his marriage. You could even make the case that he felt a duty to love, and he was making the difficult but right decision.

Or you could say he was acting selfish.

There are a lot of reasons for the rising divorce rate. But a non-trivial contributing factor is that people used to have a sense of duty to family and marriage that trumped their own happiness.

In 1967, right as Putnam’s downswing toward individualism was turning, The Beatles released “All You Need is Love.” The theme was that all you need is love, and that love is all you need. Love is the most popular theme of pop music over the last 50 years. Here is a list of more than 100 songs with “love” in the title. Love was the central tenet of the hippie movement. Woodstock was “Three Days of Peace and Love.” How many songs are there about responsibility, family, duty, citizenship? Those are all old, silent generation values.

My grandfather worked in a hot, loud factory his whole life. It made him hard of hearing. He hated it but it allowed him to support his wife and four kids. As my dad, a baby boomer, was growing up there was an increase in professional creative jobs that only continued to grow with my generation.

This increase in various types of work meant that there was a good chance you could find something you really liked doing and didn’t have to settle for the soulless factory job like my grandfather who didn’t have many options. So I, like many of my peers, was told to “follow my passion.” Don't settle for any old job, you should be happy.

But that’s just another way of telling a child: “Your sole responsibility is to your own happiness. If a job isn’t making you happy, find one that will.”

For the Gen X, Kurt Coban types it was authenticity that replaced love. How can I live an authentic life?

For Older Millennials it was about meaning and purpose. How can I find a job that gives meaning to my life and is best suited to my unique skills?

For Zoomers it is “quality of life”— Is this raising or lowering my quality of life?

Notice the focus on the self—I, I, me.

And I’m not trying to do some Jordan Peterson, trad movement pitch here where I wag my finger at Zoomers and tell them to get married and start a family because that is the natural order of things. I just believe that everybody worships; but our default setting is to worship ourselves. The one thing the Silents and trads have right is that a duty to family, country, community or whatever takes the focus off of one’s self. And I think that is the way.

A lot of my posts sound like rants against social justice warriors and how they have it wrong, but the fact is that they are rightly guided by a sense of responsibility— to protecting the environment, to raising wages for minorities, or to ensuring their 401K does not invest in oil or anything Israel. The focus beyond the self.

The rationalist-affiliated website 80,000 hours has a unique framing for one’s career. Whatever you do, you’re going to do it for ~80,000 hours of your life. Therefore, you have a responsibility to choose the most effective way to spend those working hours. Not everyone needs to become a nurse and administer vaccines in third world countries; some people can spend their hours making a killing in investment banking and sending their bonuses to supply mosquito nets in Somalia. The idea is that you have a duty to spend your working hours in a way that best benefits society, not to enhance your quality of life. And if you try to do both you will probably fail at both.

But why do I still think there is a difference between the dad who volunteers to coach his daughter’s youth basketball team, among his many other responsibilities, because no other parent would do it, vs. the activists who chain themselves across a highway to protest the war in Gaza? Why is Martin Luther King Jr. idolized as the leader of the civil rights movement, but not Lyndon Johnson, the seasoned politician willing to make any deal to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed? Why does the Sunrise Movement take credit for the passage of Biden’s climate bill when it was Chuck Schumer who worked non stop to get Manchin’s tie breaking vote? Conservatives praise the brave Christians who pray to end abortion and harass women entering Planned Parenthood clinics, but it was Mitch McConnell breaking congressional norms, and tolerating the least conservative Republican president of my lifetime, who stacked the court to ensure the end of Roe v. Wade.

Because in modern society there is a lack of opportunity for heroism. And politics is the long slow boring of hard boards, which precludes heroes. Politicians never get the social credit and valor for their achievements. Greta Thunberg is viewed as a hero among environmentalists, not Chuck Shumer.

And therein lies the true nature of duty—doing the right thing for others when no one is looking.


When it comes to discourse, I try to follow Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” But when it comes to responsibility, I go in the opposite direction. Rather than being responsible grand ideas, be responsible to actual people who know you. Be there for them. Show up. Be a hero for your daughter; not your TikTok followers.

*I only mention Flor's ethnicity because I think it was important to the movie, which contrasts the cultural norms of marriage in America vs. Mexico.
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Lessons I hope my children learn



In 2018 I wrote a Jorden Peterson-esque "rules for life" post. I reread and think it is mostly good. But I have more kids since then and now I need a list of things that I hope my children learn, things that I found most helpful as I have navigated through life up until this point.

Beware of your false positive bias. We tend to see patterns that are not there and to attribute human agency and evil intentions to bad outcomes. But randomness is almost always the culprit. Resist the temptation to blame people for misfortunes and accept that bad stuff just happens.

Beware of your hero complex. We want to be well-regarded by our peers and within our community. This can lead us to want to be seen performing virtuous acts, which produces brave heroes. It also produces terrorists.

Favor the tried and true. We feel morally superior to the way things used to be and tend to view history through the present lens, which means our present will be viewed through someone’s future lens. Many current morals and beliefs that we think of as righteous today will shift in the future, so put your trust in those virtues that have withstood the test of time, like kindness, courage, honesty, compassion, temperance, and justice.

Reading a well-respected book written 100 years ago will give you a better understanding of the current world than staying on top of the daily news coverage.

Go golfing with your buddies. It’s not about golf. It’s about 5 uninterrupted hours of socializing, light exercise, sunlight exposure, and being in nature. You will feel recharged.

Learn to play guitar. Or drums. Or saxophone. Or landscape painting. Have some artistic hobby that you can always come back to and work on. Creating art is one of the most beautiful things a human can do, even if it’s just strumming a three-chord progression alone in your bedroom.

Volunteer in a homeless shelter. Envy is the most common human emotion. If you spend too much time around people more successful than you, you will come to feel like a failure. Spending time with people less fortunate than you will remind you how well-off you are.

Treasure the little moments. Life isn’t about the yearly beach vacations, getting a big Christmas bonus, or buying your dream car. It’s about making a baby smile, watching a sunset during an evening walk, the smell of pizza coming from a restaurant’s kitchen, or feeling a cool breeze blow across your face on a summer day. On their deathbed, no one looks back and wishes they had worked more. They think about the little moments.

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