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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