My March 28 talk at MIT
What happens when a simulated system becomes more real than the system itself? Will the internet become “more real” than the world of ideas it is mirroring? Do we academics live in a simulacra? If the “alt right” exists mainly on the internet, does that make it more or less powerful? Do all innovations improve system quality, and if so why is a lot of food worse than before and home design was better in 1910-1930? How does the world of ideas fit into this picture?
Here are details on the lunch seminar.
Are the Amish unhappy?
We were able to recruit 52 Amish participants for our study of which 56 % were male and for which the average age was 44. Interestingly, the average levels of life satisfaction as measured by the SWLS (Diener et al., 1985) was 4.4; just above the neutral point. Above neutral scores are consistent with the idea that “most people are mildly happy” (Diener & Diener, 1996), and that mild happiness is evolutionarily advantageous (Fredrickson, 2001). Comparatively, the Amish satisfaction in our study can be interpreted as meaning that the Amish fall lower than members of many other groups. In a study of more than 13 thousand college students from 31 nations, for example, only students from Kenya (whose average life satisfaction was 4.0) scored lower than the Amish (Diener & Diener, 1995).
Anecdotally, the Amish society in which we conducted our study was fraught with contrasts. On the one hand, the Amish had a pronounced pro-social attitude. One man I interviewed, for example, had donated tens of thousands of US Dollars toward the medical treatment of his neighbor’s son, with no thought of repayment. Similarly, the Amish often helped one another in quilting, construction, and food preparation. On the other hand, these neighborly behaviors were confined to in-group members. There was a conspicuous degree of prejudice toward out-group members, especially ethnic or religious minorities. One bishop, for example, asked me whether I thought the space shuttle Challenger exploded because there was a Jewish person (Judith Resnick) aboard.
Another set of contrasts could be found in the relationship between the Amish and the larger “English” society in which they live. While on the one hand there is a strong cultural push to remain separate from industrialized society. The Amish I spoke with were highly invested in publicly conforming to group norms related to abstaining from the use of industrial technologies and from remaining aloof from broader society. Privately, however, the Amish revealed themselves to be as curious and as human as people from any other society. One participant, for example, admitted that he used his workplace telephone—an allowable technology—to phone a newspaper number that hosts recordings of the world’s news. Another informant revealed that she had secretly flown on an airplane. These examples reflect the on-going tension of a society that must—individually and collectively—continually re-negotiate its relation to the larger society in which it exists. Where subjective well-being is concerned, the tension between retaining traditions and adapting to new circumstances is an interesting issue for research.
…global and specific domain satisfaction should, theoretically, be in agreement. For example, if a person is satisfied with her romantic life, her friendships, and her family relationships—all specific domains—she should, logically, report about the same amount of satisfaction with her overall social life (the global domain). Diener and colleagues found that this correspondence occurred in some cultures, such as Japan. In other cultures, however, they discovered an inflationary effect. People in Colombia and the United States, for instance, are likely to inflate their global reports of satisfaction over that reported for specific satisfaction.
That is by Robert Biswas-Diener, there is much of interest in this paper on happiness in small societies. Via Rolf Degen. By the way, this article about Norway is worth a ponder too.
What should I ask Balaji Srinivasan?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, no associated public event. Here is his home page, here is his bio:
Balaji S. Srinivasan is the CEO of Earn.com and a Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to taking the CEO role at Earn.com, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Before joining a16z, he was the cofounder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, where he won the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine and was named to the MIT TR35.
Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC in 2013 which reached 250,000+ students worldwide.
His latest Medium essay was on ICOs and tokens. I thank you all in advance for your wise counsel.
From the new spending bill, arts funding is going up
ARTS FUNDING: It goes up despite Trump’s attempts to slash. NEA and NEH funding climbs $152.8M each. National Gallery of Art gets $165.9M; John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts receives $40.5 million. All increases over last year.
Here is a link. In the meantime, here is some tech and Facebook advice from Twitter.
Thursday assorted links
1. New results about Denisovans.
2. “…the evidence suggests that electoral incentives successfully induce incumbents to exert professional effort.” And eliminating the university Boards of Regents would be a big mistake for Arizona.
3. Who’s complacent? The culture that is Maine.
4. China extrapolation of the day: “The famine in China 1959-61 was the single biggest in history, in terms of numbers of deaths. But in terms of long-run population trends, the impact was remarkably small.” And Amazon might produce three seasons of The Three-Body Principle.
5. A good take on Facebook and the Zuckerberg speech.
6. I recommend the Israeli movie Foxtrot, though it is best to see it without spoilers and without reading reviews.
China estimate of the day
But because of the way trade deficits are measured, almost all the value of those components is attributed to China, which exports the final product. Reuters reports that 61 million iPhones were shipped from China to the US in 2017 and suggests that just a single phone—the iPhone 7 model, released in 2016 and on sale for all of last year—accounted for $15.7 billion of the trade deficit, or 4.4%.
Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics research at Oxford Economics, told Reuters if trade deficits were measured to account for the complex nature of global supply chains like the ones used by sophisticated consumer products like smartphones, the US-China trade deficit would be about 36% lower, or $239 billion.
That is from Allison Schraeger.
Prisoners who study prison
After leaving prison, some ex-convicts are becoming academics themselves. There is a growing convict criminology group, which has members in countries around the world.
…Stephen Richards spent nine years in prison for conspiracy to distribute marijuana, and is now professor emeritus of criminology at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.
He was arrested while he was a college student, and finished his degree by correspondence while in U.S. federal prison. After he was released from prison, he went directly to graduate school and completed a Master’s degree and a PhD.
“Five years out of prison, I was a professor, and I became one of the first convict criminology professors,” he says.
Richards’s experiences in jail made him want to work to fix the system once he got out.
“Part of being a convict criminologist is realizing that you know something that most academics in the social sciences don’t know. You’ve got inside information about what’s wrong with the criminal justice system — literally, inside. You know what a failure the system is, and you want to do something about it,” he says.
That is from CBC Radio, via Michelle Dawson. And here is the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.
The decline of German food in America
German food’s decline “reflects the cultural mix of this country toward more Latin American, Asian and African American culture, and less of the mainstay Germanic culture that influenced this country for many decades,” said Arnim von Friedeburg, an importer of German foods and the founder of Germanfoods.org. “The cultural shift is going on, and German culture has to fight or compete to keep its relevance.”
Here is more from Maura Judkis at WaPo.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The lice culture that is Dutch (America). Is this representative?
2. A thread on the new Chetty result.
3. Francis Bator was killed by a car with a human driver (NYT obituary).
4. How to stay healthy on a plane?
5. A useful Cambridge Analytica/Facebook story. Here is the most analytical paragraph: “At its core, according to a former Facebook executive, the problem is really an existential one. The company is very good at dealing with things that happen frequently and have very low stakes. When mistakes happen, they move on. According to the executive, the philosophy of the company has long been “We’re trying to do good things. We’ll make mistakes. But people are good and the world is forgiving.”” And Clickhole on Facebook.
The state and culture that is Utah
SALT LAKE CITY — So-called free-range parenting will soon be the law of the land in Utah after the governor signed what appears to be the country’s first measure to formally legalize allowing kids to do things on their own to foster self-sufficiency.
The bill, which Gov. Gary Herbert announced Friday that he’d signed, specifies that it isn’t neglectful to let kids do things alone like travel to school, explore a playground or stay in the car. The law takes effect May 8.
Utah’s law is the first in the country, said Lenore Skenazy, who coined the term free-range parent. A records search by the National Conference of State Legislatures didn’t turn up any similar legislation in other states.
Here is more, bravo. Via Interfluidity.
In tech, we fear what we can’t control
That is the topic of my new Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Like drones, driverless cars possess some features of an especially potent scare story. They are a new and exciting technology, and so stories about them get a lot of clicks. We don’t actually know how safe they are, and that uncertainty will spook people above and beyond whatever is the particular level of risk. Most of all, driverless cars by definition involve humans not feeling in direct control. It resembles how a lot of people feel in greater danger when flying than driving a car, even though flying is usually safer. Driverless cars raise a lot of questions about driver control: Should you be allowed to sleep in the backseat? Or must you stay by the wheel? That focuses our minds and feelings on the issue of control all the more.
And:
The recent brouhaha over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (read here and here) reflects some similar issues. Could most Americans clearly and correctly articulate exactly what went wrong in this episode? Probably not, but people do know that when it comes to social networks, their personal data and algorithms, they don’t exactly feel in control. The murkiness of the events and legal obligations is in fact part of the problem.
When I see a new story or criticism about the tech world, I no longer ask whether the tech companies poll as being popular (they do). I instead wonder whether voters feel in control in a world with North Korean nuclear weapons, an erratic American president and algorithms everywhere. They don’t. Haven’t you wondered why articles about robots putting us all out of work are so popular during a time of full employment?
We are about to enter a new meta-narrative for American society, which I call “re-establishing the feeling of control.” Unfortunately, when you pursue the feeling rather than the actual control, you often end up with neither.
Do read the whole thing.
*Waste of a Nation*
The authors are Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey and the subtitle is Garbage and Growth in India, here is one excerpt from this worthy book:
In India, the tool for cleaning teeth and gums had long been a twig usually taken from a neem tree…, which can be plucked each morning, chewed into a teeth-cleaning brush, and then thrown away. Neem also has medicinal properties. Tooth powders gained popularity in towns and cities in preindependence times, but in smaller towns as late as the 1960s shops that sold toothpaste had to be searched for. Consumption of toothpaste was meager. India’s toothpaste industry in the mid-1970s was estimated to produce about 1,200 metric tons a year for a population of more than 600 million. An Australian population of 16 million consumed 5,000 metric tons of toothpaste. By the late 1980s, the Indian market was said to be growing rapidly, but the industry estimated that only 15 percent of the population used toothpaste and that per capita consumption was only 30 grams a year.
…By 2014, a single new factory set up in Gujarat by Colgate-Palmolive was capable of making 15,000 metric tons of toothpaste a year, more than ten times the quantity produced in all of India two generations earlier.
Recommended.
Markets in everything, probably more where this came from edition
Mr. Sarkozy, 63, was taken into custody in Nanterre, northwest of Paris, after answering a police summons, according to a French judicial official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in line with department policy…
The suspicions behind this case first emerged in 2012, when the investigative news website Mediapart published a report suggesting that Mr. Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign had received up to 50 million euros, or nearly $62 million at current exchange rates, from the regime of Colonel Qaddafi, the longtime Libyan strongman who was killed in 2011. Such support would have violated France’s strict campaign finance laws, which cap spending and prohibit foreign funding.
Here is the NYT account. Here is my earlier post on Gerhard Schröder.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Sam Harris interviews Robin Hanson.
2. I still find the Cambridge Analytica story confusing. This article is useful, but it heightens my confusion too. Who exactly did what wrong? And I don’t think I agree with the framing of this Michael Dougherty piece, but it does pose some useful questions. Here is the Bershidsky take.
3. “Ask a child to draw a scientist, and she’s more likely than ever to draw a woman.”
4. Megan is skeptical about the greater safety of driverless cars.
Should America retire the penny and the nickel?
I am agnostic on this question, but Jay L. Zagorsky presents the case for no:
First of all, the Mint creates coins in response to demand, and demand for small-denomination coins is soaring. Over the past decade, the Mint roughly doubled the number of pennies and nickels it shipped. Both coins enjoy widespread popular support in opinion polls as well.
It’s true that it costs more to mint these two coins than they are worth. In 2017, it cost the U.S. Mint 1.8 cents to make each penny and 6.6 cents for each nickel. Overall, however, the Mint is a profit machine. In 2017, it earned almost $400 million in profits producing circulating coins. For every dollar’s worth of coins it shipped out, the Mint made 45 cents. That is a profit margin many business owners dream about.
So, think of pennies and nickels as the Mint’s loss leader. They help create demand for more profitable coins in the cash economy. Eliminating pennies and nickels could make people think coins overall aren’t useful. And if we stop using all coins, the Mint will lose $400 million of profit a year.
…Stores and other businesses bothered by small-denomination coins can set prices so the final cost ends up in round numbers that eliminate using pennies or nickels. Food trucks and restaurants have used this kind of flat pricing to speed up checking out.
At the WSJ link, Henry Aaron argues the other side of the issue. I should note that I have acted privately to abolish pennies (and occasionally nickels) from my own life. Think of it as unilateral privatization, quite literally an idea for the trash and gutter.