Category: Books
What should I ask Slavoj Žižek?
Yes, I will be doing another Conversation with him. Here is the first one, in Norway with a live audience. I am very much enjoying his new book
So what should I ask him?
My contentious Conversation with Jonathan Haidt
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is the episode summary:
But might technological advances and good old human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks?
Jonathan joined Tyler to discuss this question and more, including whether left-wingers or right-wingers make for better parents, the wisest person Jonathan has interacted with, psychological traits as a source of identitarianism, whether AI will solve the screen time problem, why school closures didn’t seem to affect the well-being of young people, whether the mood shift since 2012 is not just about social media use, the benefits of the broader internet vs. social media, the four norms to solve the biggest collective action problems with smartphone use, the feasibility of age-gating social media, and more.
It is a very different tone than most CWTs, most of all when we get to social media. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: There are two pieces of evidence — when I look at them, they don’t seem to support your story out of sample.
HAIDT: Okay, great. Let’s have it.
COWEN: First, across countries, it’s mostly the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries, which are more or less part of the Anglosphere. Most of the world is immune to this, and smartphones for them seem fine. Why isn’t it just that a negative mood came upon the Anglosphere for reasons we mostly don’t understand, and it didn’t come upon most of the rest of the world? If we’re differentiating my hypothesis from yours, doesn’t that favor my view?
HAIDT: Well, once you look into the connections and the timing, I would say no. I think I see what you’re saying now, but I think your view would say, “Just for some reason we don’t know, things changed around 2012.” Whereas I’m going to say, “Okay, things changed around 2012 in all these countries. We see it in the mental illness rates, especially of the girls.” I’m going to say it’s not just some mood thing. It’s like (a), why is it especially the girls? (b) —
COWEN: They’re more mimetic, right?
HAIDT: Yes, that’s true.
COWEN: Girls are more mimetic in general.
HAIDT: That’s right. That’s part of it. You’re right, that’s part of it. They’re just much more open to connection. They’re more influenced. They’re more subject to contagion. That is a big part of it, you’re right. What Zach Rausch and I have found — he’s my lead researcher at the After Babel Substack. I hope people will sign up. It’s free. We’ve been putting out tons of research. Zach has really tracked down what happened internationally, and I can lay it out.
Now I know the answer. I didn’t know it two months ago. The answer is, within countries, as I said, it’s the people who are conservative and religious who are protected, and the others, the kids get washed out to sea. Psychologically, they feel their life has no meaning. They get more depressed. Zach has looked across countries, and what you find in Europe is that, overall, the kids are getting a little worse off psychologically.
But that hides the fact that in Eastern Europe, which is getting more religious, the kids are actually healthier now than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Whereas in Catholic Europe, they’re a little worse, and in Protestant Europe, they’re much worse.
It doesn’t seem to me like, oh, New Zealand and Iceland were talking to each other, and the kids were sharing memes. It’s rather, everyone in the developed world, even in Eastern Europe, everyone — their kids are on phones, but the penetration, the intensity, was faster in the richest countries, the Anglos and the Scandinavians. That’s where people had the most independence and individualism, which was pretty conducive to happiness before the smartphone. But it now meant that these are the kids who get washed away when you get that rapid conversion to the phone-based childhood around 2012. What’s wrong with that explanation?
COWEN: Old Americans also seem grumpier to me. Maybe that’s cable TV, but it’s not that they’re on their phones all the time. And you know all these studies. If you try to assess what percentage of the variation in happiness of young people is caused by smartphone usage — Sabine Hossenfelder had a recent video on this — those numbers are very, very, very small. That’s another measurement that seems to discriminate in favor of my theory, exogenous mood shifts, rather than your theory. Why not?
Very interesting throughout, recommended. And do not forget that Jon’s argument is outlined in detail in his new book, titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
*Accelerating India’s Development*
The author is Karthik Muralidharan, and the subtitle is A State-Led Roapmap for Effective Governance. If you imagine a 600 pp. “state capacity libertarian” take on Indian development this is what you get, admittedly with the libertarian side of the equation downplayed a bit. Excerpt:
A common misconception is that the inefficiencies of the Indian state stem from its large size — that there are too many workers doing too few things. In practice, the opposite is true, and the Indian state is highly understaffed. As Figure 3.1 shows, India has only 16 public employees per 1000 people. For comparison, China has over three times as many (57) and Norway has nearly ten times as many (159). Even the US, often viewed as a leading example of a market-driven economy with limited government, has 77 public employees per 1000 people — nearly five times as many as India!
Recommended, here is the link on Amazon India. An American edition is needed. Here is a review of the book from The Economist.
What should I ask Brian Winter?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is his bio:
Brian Winter is the editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a seasoned analyst of Latin American politics, with more than 20 years following the region’s ups and downs. He lived in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico as a correspondent for Reuters before taking on his current role in New York, where he is also the vice president of policy for the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. He has been called “the best foreign expert on Brazil of this moment” by GloboNews. Brian is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé; The Accidental President of Brazil, co-authored with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and Long After Midnight, a memoir about trying (and failing) to learn to tango in Argentina. He is a regular contributor to television and radio, the host of the Americas Quarterly Podcast and a prolific barbecuer and chef. Proficient in Spanish and Portuguese, Brian speaks frequently about Latin America’s past, present and future to investors and general-interest audiences. Follow him on Twitter @BrazilBrian
So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with Fareed Zakaria
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. You can tell he knows what an interview is! At the same time, he understands this differs from many of his other venues and he responds with flying colors. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Fareed to discuss what he learned from Khushwant Singh as a boy, what made his father lean towards socialism, why the Bengali intelligentsia is so left-wing, what’s stuck with him from his time at an Anglican school, what’s so special about visiting Amritsar, why he misses a more syncretic India, how his time at the Yale Political Union dissuaded him from politics, what he learned from Walter Isaacson and Sam Huntington, what put him off academia, how well some of his earlier writing as held up, why he’s become focused on classical liberal values, whether he had reservations about becoming a TV journalist, how he’s maintained a rich personal life, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why couldn’t you talk Singh out of his Nehruvian socialism? He was a great liberal. He loved free speech, very broad-minded, as you know much better than I do. But he, on economics, was weak. Or no?
ZAKARIA: Oh, no, you’re entirely right. By the way, I would say the same is true of my father, with whom I had many, many such conversations. You’d find this interesting, Tyler. My father was a young Indian nationalist who — as he once put it to me — made the most important decision in his life, politically, when he was 13 or 14 years old, which was, as a young Indian Muslim, he chose Nehru’s vision of secular democracy as the foundation of a nation rather than Jinnah’s view of religious nationalism. He chose India rather than Pakistan as an Indian Muslim.
He was politically so interesting and forward-leaning, but he was a hopeless social — a sort of social democrat, but veering towards socialism. Both these guys were. Here’s why, I think. For that whole generation of people — by the way, my father got a scholarship to London University and went to study with Harold Laski, the great British socialist economist. Laski told him, “You are actually not an economist; you are a historian.” So, my father went on and got a PhD at London University in Indian history.
That whole generation of Indians who wanted independence were imbued with . . . There were two things going on. One, the only people in Britain who supported Indian independence were the Labour Party and the Fabian Socialists. All their allies were all socialists. There was a common cause and there was a symbiosis because these were your friends, these were your allies, these were the only people supporting you, the cause that mattered the most to you in your life.
The second part was, a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
My own view was, that was a big mistake, though I do think there are elements of what the state was able to do that perhaps were better done in a place like South Korea than in India, but that really explains it.
My father was in Britain in ’45 as a student. As a British subject then, you got to vote in the election if you were in London, if you were in Britain. I said to him, “Who did you vote for in the 1945 election?” Remember, this is the famous election right after World War II, in which Churchill gets defeated, and he gets up the next morning and looks at the papers, and his wife says to him, “Darling, it’s a blessing in disguise.” He says, “Well, at the moment it seems very effectively disguised.”
My father voted in that election. I said to him, “You’re a huge fan of Churchill,” because I’d grown up around all the Churchill books, and my father could quote the speeches. I said, “Did you vote for Churchill?” He said, “Oh good lord, no.” I said, “Why? I thought you were a great admirer of his.” He said, “Look, on the issue that mattered most to me in life, he was an unreconstructed imperialist. A vote for Labour was a vote for Indian independence. A vote for Churchill was a vote for the continuation of the empire.” That, again, is why their friends were all socialists.
Excellent throughout. And don’t forget Fareed’s new book — discussed in the podcast — Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.
*Nuclear War: A Scenario*
By Annie Jacobsen, a very good book. What would happen if a nuclear weapon actually were launched at the United States? On the ground? In the chain of command? Organizationally and otherwise? A good book, sadly still of relevance. Full of drama throughout, and tactically astute. Excerpt:
Ted Postol is blunt. “Russian early-warning satellites don’t work accurately,” he says. “As a country, Russia doesn’t have the technological know-how to build a system as good as we have in the United States.” This means “their satellites can’t look straight down at the earth,” a technology known as look-down capability. And as a result, Russia’s Tundra satellites “look sideways,” Postol warns, “which handicaps their ability to distinguish sunlight from, say, fire”
Notably troublesome is how Tundra sees clouds.
It was North Korea who started the whole thing, you can buy the book here.
*Who’s Afraid of Gender?*
That is the title of the new Judith Butler book, focusing mostly on trans issues. To be clear, on most practical issues concerning trans, I side with the social conservatives. For instance, I don’t think trans women have a right to compete in women’s weightlifting contests. And I have not been happy with how many schools have been teaching about trans issues, due to social contagion effects that are larger than I would have expected. And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong. This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things). But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories? Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches? Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner? Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?
So I am happy to recommend this book, noting that not everyone will like it, to say the least. My main criticism is that Butler spends too much time with what I consider to be weaker views (e.g., the Pope), and not enough time with the more difficult problems concerning real and potential harms to children. Her neglect of the latter verges on the intellectually criminally negligent. And yet the key is to see that it is still a good and interesting book.
*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon
Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.
Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.
*Revolusi*
The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck. An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it. First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries. Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence. Excerpt:
In total no fewer than 120,000 Dutch conscripts would depart between 1946 and 1949, an enormous number that approached the general mobilization before World War II (150,000). Six thousand recruits who were examined and judged ‘fit for the tropics’ refused to embark. Many of these were tracked down and hauled out of beds to the military police. This hunt for deserters went on until 1958! Strict sentences were passed on 2,565 war resisters. Almost three-quarters received custodial sentences of up to two years, the rest remain in jail even longer. Altogether a total of fifteen centuries of prison sentences were pronounced, a remarkably large amount compared to the complete immunity granted to later war criminals. The conclusion was clear: those who refused to kill were locked up, those who murdered without reason went free.
Recommended, there should of course be more such books on Indonesia.
In Defense of Plagiarism
Google plagiarism and you will find definitions like “stealing someone else’s ideas” or “literary theft.” Here the emphasis is on the stealing–it’s the original author who is being harmed. I prefer the definition of plagiarism given by Wikipedia, plagiarism is the *fraudulent* use of other people’s words or ideas. Fraudulent emphasizes that it’s the reader who is being cheated, not the original creator. You can use someone else’s words without being fraudulent. We all do this. If you copy a definition or description of a technical procedure from a textbook or manual you are using someone else’s words but it’s not fraudulent because the reader doesn’t assume that you are trying to take credit for the ideas.
In contrast, a student who passes an essay off as their own when it was written by someone else is engaging in a kind of fraud but the “crime” has little to do with harming the original author. A student who uses AI to write an essay is engaging in fraud, for example, but the problem is obviously not theft from OpenAI. Indeed, in another context the same use of AI would not be fraudulent. If I use AI to help write this post, it’s not fraudulent because the primary purpose of this post is not, as it is with a student essay, to warrant the abilities of the author but rather to convey ideas to the reader. How those ideas came to be expressed in words is secondary and sometimes even irrelevant.
Indeed, using some else’s words and ideas is often how the world progresses. Plagiarism is a type of intellectual property law and I have long argued that IP law has grown too strong. Patents, for example, are often too broad and copyright is too long. Similarly, I was very much in support of Ed Sheeran in the ridiculous copyright case that ate of years of his life. Sheeran used ideas that had previously been used by many others but even if he had sampled, sampling is not a terrible crime. If I write, ‘he went on a wild goose chase’ or ‘it’s a brave new world’ need I credit the author? If an economics professor says ‘a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive’, well a little credit to Cowen and Tabarrok would be nice, but sooner or later might this phrase not enter the vernacular? Crediting authors of unique wordplay should have a time limit, after which such wordplay becomes part of the common pool of expressions available for all. Crediting authors of boilerplate shouldn’t even be required.
The reason plagiarism has come to be defined more by “literary theft” than by the “fraudulent use of other’s people’s ideas and words” is that it’s much easier to prove when someone else’s words have been copied than it is to prove fraudulent use. A computer can scan the text of millions of documents to discover “plagiarism” but the computer has a harder time saying what is fraudulent. I argued earlier, that if I used AI to write this post it wouldn’t be fraudulent. But what if Marginal Revolution won a Pulitzer for twenty years of high quality writing and this post were give as an example? Well, its a judgement call.
In short, the focus of any charge of plagiarism should not be on whether someone else’s words have been used. The use of other’s people’s words is a necessary condition for plagiarism but it’s not sufficient. The focus should be on whether readers have been harmed by a fraudulent use of other people’s ideas and words. Focusing on the latter will dispense with many charges of plagiarism.
My excellent Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the intricacies of human nature. Beyond her writing, Robinson’s 25-year tenure at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop allowed her to shape and inspire the new generations of writers. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, displays her scholarly prowess, analyzing the biblical text not only through the lens of religious doctrine but also appreciating it as a literary masterpiece.
She joined Tyler to discuss betrayal and brotherhood in the Hebrew Bible, the relatable qualities of major biblical figures, how to contend with the Bible’s seeming contradictions, the true purpose of Levitical laws, whether we’ve transcended the need for ritual sacrifice, the role of the Antichrist, the level of biblical knowledge among students, her preferred Bible translation, whether The Winter’s Tale makes sense, the evolution of Calvin’s reputation and influence, why academics are overwhelmingly secular, the success of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, why she wrote a book on nuclear pollution, what she’ll do next, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: As a Calvinist, too, would not, in general, dismiss the Old Testament, what do you make of a book such as Leviticus? It’s highly legalistic, highly ritualistic. Some Christians read Leviticus and become a split Christian Jew almost. Other Christians more or less dismiss the book. How does it fit into your worldview?
ROBINSON: I think that when you read Herodotus, where he describes these little civilizations that are scattered over his world — he describes them in terms of what they eat or prohibit, or they paint themselves red, or they shave half their head. There are all these very arbitrary distinctions that people make in order to identify with one clan over against another.
At the point of Leviticus, which of course, is an accumulation of many texts over a very long time, no doubt, but nevertheless, to think of it as being Moses — he is trying to create a defined, distinctive human community. By making arbitrary distinctions between people so that you’re not simply replicating notions of what is available or feasible or whatever, but actually asking them to adopt prohibitions of food — that’s a very common distinguishing thing in Herodotus and in contemporary life.
So, the arbitrariness of the laws is not a fault. It is a way of establishing identification of one group as separate from other groups.
COWEN: So, you read it as a narrative of how human communities are created, but you still would take a reading of, say, Sermon on the Mount that the Mosaic law has been lifted? Or it’s still in place?
ROBINSON: Oh, it’s not still in place. We’ve been given other means by which to create identity. Moses was doing something distinctive in a certain period of the evolution of Israel as a people. He didn’t want them to be Egyptians. He didn’t want them to subscribe to the prevailing culture, which was idolatrous, and so on. He’s doing Plato in The Republic. He’s saying, “This is how we develop the idea of a community.”
Having said that, then there are certain other things like “Thou shall not kill,” or whatever, that become characterizing laws. Jesus very often says, when someone says to him, “How can I be saved?” He says, “You know the commandments.” It’s not as if God is an alien figure from the point of view of Christ, whom we take to be his son.
Interesting throughout.
*Build, Baby, Build*, by Bryan Caplan
Here is my blurb for the book:
“Bryan Caplan is a pioneer in the use of graphic novels to expound economic concepts. His new book Build, Baby, Build is thus a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration of economic analysis and graphic visuals. If you want to learn the economics, ethics, and political economy of YIMBY— namely the freedom to build this is the very best place to start.”
And from Bryan:
Please forgive my laughable arrogance, but I assure you that BBB is the most fascinating book on housing regulation ever written. In fact, I assure you that there will never be a more fascinating book on housing regulation!
While objective self-interest impels you to buy the book as soon as it releases, it would be a huge favor to me if you would take the extra step of pre-ordering right away from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Apple Books, or anywhere else. Why? Because all pre-orders count as “first-week sales” for national best-seller lists — and I’m aiming high.
Here is the book’s home page. It is really very good.
What I’ve been reading
1. Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. I agree with many of the anti-therapy arguments in this book, but still I feel that “bad therapy” is a second-order phenomenon, not the initial cause of the growing mental health problems of America’s young people. Furthermore, the analysis (much like Jon Haidt’s recent work) should be more tightly framed in the context of the “most interventions really don’t matter that much” results in social science at the very general level.
2. Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon. Well-written and well-organized, this checks all the boxes for what I would want from a Fanon biography. Here is an Adam Shatz NYT Op-Ed on Fanon.
3. Nabila Ramdani, Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic. What is wrong with France, from a French-Algerian point of view. The book is full of substance, and there aren’t enough “stand alone books on countries,” so this is a good one whether or not you agree with all of the observations.
4. Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin. “Tassting the urine was the doctors’ original test for diabetes.” An excellent biomedical history, noting that the key breakthrough came in Toronto in the 1920s.
And the AEI Press has reprinted the 1951 Edward Banfield classic Government Project.
Rainer Zitelmann has a new book out How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity.
Lewis E. Lehrman has published his autobiography The Sum of It All. He was one of the important figures behind the Reagan Revolution, in addition to his longstanding presence amongst New York elites.
Daniel Gross on the printing press and GPT
In a way, everyone’s been wondering, trying to analogize ChatGPT with the printing press, but in reality it’s almost the opposite.
The entire thing is happening in the inverse of that, where the printing press was a technology to disseminate information through a book basically and convince people to do things, and the kind of anti-book is the LLM agent, which summarizes things very succinctly. If anything, it awakens people to the fact that they have been complicit in a religion for a very long time, because it very neatly summarizes these things for you and puts everything in latent space and suddenly you realize, “Wait a minute, this veganism concept is very connected to this other concept.” It’s a kind of Reformation in reverse, in a way, where everyone has suddenly woken up to the fact that there’s a lot of things that are wrong…
So yeah, it takes away all the subtlety from any kind of ideology and just puts it right on your face and yeah, people are having a reaction to it.
That is from the Ben Thompson (gated) interview with Daniel and Nat Friedman, self-recommending.
*How Life Works*
The author is Philip Ball, and the subtitle is A User’s Guide to the New Biology. I thought this book was wonderful, one of the best popular science books I’ve read in a long time. I’m sure its contents are familiar to many MR readers, but for me it was a very good introduction to debunking Richard Dawkins-like “primacy of the gene” stories, rather seeing genes as part of a broader, fairly flexible biological ecosystem.
It is also a very good book for explaining just how much computation goes on in biological systems.
I learned the word “gastrulation.”
Have you ever wondered how the salamander grows its tail back in exactly the right way? It turns out we are not sure why:
These creatures maintain a reserve of pluripotent stem cells for such repair jobs. But making the missing part seems to entail an ability of the regenerating cells to “read” the overall body plan: to take a peek at the whole, ask what’s missing, and adapt accordingly to preserve morphological integrity. Levin believes that this information is delivered to the growing cells via bioelectric signaling. But there are other possibilities. To account for the ability of the zebrafish to regrow a truncated tail to exactly the shape it had oringlaly — stripe markings and all — cell biologist Stefano Di Talia believes that a memory of the target shape is somehow encoded within the cells throughout the tail. In effect, he suggests, the different cell growth rates needed to recapitatulate the missing part are recorded along the edge of the wound.
And I learned about “xenobots“, a new kind of living creature, sort of:
Levin and colleagues discovered xenobots from a “what if” experiment: they wondered what might happen if embryonic frog cells were “liberated” from the constraints imposed by making an embryonic frog body. “If we give them the opportunity to re-envision multicellularity,” he asked, “what is it they will build.”
I found much of interest in this book, definitely recommended. Here is one good review of the book.