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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