Category: Uncategorized
What should I ask R.F. (Roy) Foster?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. He is Ireland’s greatest historian, here is part of his Wikipedia entry:
He has written early biographies of Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill, edited The Oxford History of Ireland (1989), and written Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (1988) and several books of essays. He collaborated with Fintan Cullen on a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Conquering England: the Irish in Victorian London.[1] Foster produced a much-acclaimed two-part biography of W. B. Yeats,[2][3] which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Seamus Deane wrote a review of the biography in which he quoted the last line of Yeats’ poem The Municipal Gallery Revisited: “My glory was that I had such friends”, and stated that Yeats was also lucky to have Foster as his biographer.
Modern Ireland 1600-1972 would be the place to start, and it is a book you can read more than once. Here is an excellent Guardian profile of Foster, worth reading in its own right. So what should I ask him?
Saturday assorted links
Buy Things Not Experiences!
A nice, well-reasoned piece from Harold Lee pushing back on the idea that we should buy experiences not goods:
While I appreciate the Stoic-style appraisal of what really brings happiness, economically, this analysis seems precisely backward. It amounts to saying that in an age of industrialization and globalism, when material goods are cheaper than ever, we should avoid partaking of this abundance. Instead, we should consume services afflicted by Baumol’s cost disease, taking long vacations and getting expensive haircuts which are just as hard to produce as ever.
Put that way, the focus on minimalism sounds like a new form of conspicuous consumption. Now that even the poor can afford material goods, let’s denigrate goods while highlighting the remaining luxuries that only the affluent can enjoy and show off to their friends.
[The distinction is too tightly drawn]…tools and possessions enable new experiences. A well-appointed kitchen allows you to cook healthy meals for yourself rather than ordering delivery night after night. A toolbox lets you fix things around the house and in the process learn to appreciate how our modern world was made. A spacious living room makes it easy for your friends to come over and catch up on one another’s lives. A hunting rifle can produce not only meat, but also camaraderie and a sense of connection with the natural world of our forefathers. In truth, there is no real boundary between things and experiences. There are experience-like things; like a basement carpentry workshop or a fine collection of loose-leaf tea. And there are thing-like experiences, like an Instagrammable vacation that collects a bunch of likes but soon fades from memory.
Indeed, much of what is wrong with our modern lifestyles is, in a sense, a matter of overconsuming experiences. The sectors of the economy that are becoming more expensive every year – which are preventing people from building durable wealth – include real estate and education, both items that are sold by the promise of irreplaceable “experiences.” Healthcare, too, is a modern experience that is best avoided. As a percent of GDP, these are the growing expenditures that are eating up people’s wallets, not durable goods. If we really want to live a minimalist life, then forget about throwing away boxes of stuff, and focus on downsizing education, real estate, and healthcare.
Hat tip: The Browser.
Photo Credit: MaxPixel.
What is actually a heretical view?
I was two days ago at Hereticon, and wondering which views actually should be considered heretical. It seems there are some distinct categories, for instance here are a few categories of the “partially heretical”:
1. Used to be heretical, or on the verge of switching.
Favoring gay marriage, or more on the border thinking that UFOs are of alien origin. The latter view is now presented with a straight face by former presidents and CIA heads, so it is not heretical any more. In polls, it is not even so unusual amongst the American public, though some elites will mock it and it remains outside of the mainstream.
2. It’s heretical to say but the actual idea is not heretical.
Presenting “eugenics” ideas is heretical, but talking about “dating” and “matchmaking” is not. Embryo selection is on the verge of not being heretical, if it ever was. Or talking about “the feminization of society” is modestly heretical, but believing women have a much greater cultural influence is not heretical at all. You just have to talk about it the right way.
3. The idea is not heretical globally.
But it might be heretical domestically, such as saying “the CCP is great.” Or “women should have their kids really young.” Those are a special category of heretical ideas, extremely common around the world, for better or worse, but still a no-no in some locales.
4. Popular views, but heretical with many elites.
Try “Darwin is wrong,” or “Facebook is fine.” How about “autocracy is good”? NB: In all of these discussions, I am not considering whether the belief is right or wrong.
Which would be a truly heretical belief that does not fall into these “partially heretical” categories? But it can’t be absurd either, for instance it is not “heretical” for me to believe I can jump one hundred feet in the air, rather it is simply stupid. I am also not looking for beliefs that offend or insult groups per se, as that is too easy. “Group X is crummy” is not interesting for my purposes.
Maybe here are a few outright heretical views, again noting that I am not endorsing them:
5. ESP works.
6. Whales are smarter than people and deeper thinkers too.
7. In fact you can trust Congress to do the right thing.
8. Ten percent inflation a year is just fine.
9. Fortunately America has so many guns that we couldn’t do very strict lockdowns for Covid.
10. It would be better if humans never had existed, as they have destroyed more welfare than they created. Most of all because of their effects on non-human animals.
11. Non-human animals suffer more than they enjoy, and it would be better if they did not exist.
12. American TV was much better in the 1960s and 1970s.
What else?
Friday assorted links
1. David Brooks on America falling apart (NYT).
2. Jonah Goldberg is right. And Megan McArdle is right.
3. Shawn Bradley’s life is tough.
4. “Likewise, authors from the same PhD program or who previously worked with the reviewer are significantly more likely to receive a positive evaluation. We also find that sharing “signals” of ability, such as publishing in “top five”, attending a high ranked PhD program, or being employed by a similarly ranked economics department significantly influences editor decisions and/or reviewer recommendations.” Link here.
5. So a virus triggers multiple sclerosis? And more here (NYT). And, not unrelated, the nature of Long Covid.
6. Links from Chris Blattman, who is blogging again.
7. Good Bridgewater/Dalio piece (FT).
*The Voltage Effect*
From the excellent John List, the subtitle is How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.
The reader requests of Celestus
I’ll break this into parts, and put my answer after each query:
1) I’m a remote worker. Why should I live in a city? Heck, why should I live in a suburb, or anywhere that has a state income tax? Even if I want “city amenities” why bother with NYC or SF or anywhere else that is built around the local job market? Why don’t I live in Puerto Rico and skirt income tax entirely?
You live in a city for culture, for sex, and to marry well. If those don’t apply to you, don’t live in a city. And your state income tax probably does not lower your level of happiness, so for most people it should not be a major factor in their location decisions. Puerto Rico has seen population outflow for a long time, what is that telling you? Or do you love mofongos? I would have a hard time making friends there, though I love the place and have visited twice, and hope to go again. (Did you see the museum in Ponce is closed right now? It has excellent pre-Raphaelite works.)
2) Why is it so hard for non-US countries to develop a tech industry?
The best entrepreneurs so often want to come to the U.S., and can. Venture capital as a financial center also tends to be relatively centralized, as are many other financial centers, and that pushes some centralization onto tech itself, though less and less in this age of work from a distance. That said, I challenge the premise of this question. There are plenty of start-up scenes around the world, and most of them are growing. I don’t see an obvious end to that process in sight.
3) If, tomorrow, we get a breaking news alert that an epidemic of a previously unknown disease is spreading in, say, Gabon, how should the federal government- before it gets any other information about spread, severity, etc- react?
The federal government needs to ban travel from Gabon. I am far from sure this will prove effective, but it is the kind of security theater you need for the rest of the public health response not to get too caught up with recriminations over this issue. There are some (possible) stupidities you simply need to tolerate.
4) Seriously, why a University of Austin and not “Socrates Institutes” or whatever at established universities?
Established universities already are dominated by a particular set of interest groups and incentives. Let’s try something new! That said, I am all in favor of innovating within established universities too, and have made various efforts in that direction myself. New universities were common in the American past, why should we be running away from them now?
5) Content creator economy discussion. For example in the long run who will have higher mean/median earnings on Twitch, men or women? Will people with college degrees have higher earnings (and if so will it be causal, or just because people with degrees happen to be more conscientious or whatever)?
The very highest earners will be men with college degrees, but with a very long second-tier tail of women earning lots.
6) Seems like a lot of people are claiming that immigration is a solution for low fertility rates. So why doesn’t the US go all the way and set a target of 75% of immigrants being young unmarried women and buy them a match.com account?
“A good start,” but since single-parent families usually are suboptimal, we should import the men to marry them as well.
Basta!
Thursday assorted links
1. In Austin, Caplan and Razib Khan will comment on Hanania. I am telling them to put it on YouTube.
2. Pushing Zambia to become a start-up hub?
3. Can software identify your chess-playing style?
4. Support for the child tax credit is waning (NYT).
5. Western Arkansas is offering 10k in Bitcoin and bike to relocate there.
6. Why are so many defectors from North Korea to South Korea women?
The Abundance Agenda
Excellent piece by Derek Thompson:
America has too much venting and not enough inventing. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change—but in practice, many Americans are basically dead set against the clean-energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar-power projects. We say that housing is a human right—but our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new houses, infrastructure, or megaprojects. Politicians say that they want better health care—but they tolerate a catastrophically slow-footed FDA that withholds promising tools, and a federal policy that deliberately limits the supply of physicians.
The way I put it in Launching the Innovation Renaissance is that we can be an Innovation Nation or what we are now which is a Welfare-Warfare State.
To give one example, the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was long and vociferous. One of the reasons the debate was vociferous is that the PPACA is part of the vision of the welfare state, a redistributive vision.
How would the innovative state approach the issue of health care? From an innovation perspective two facts about health care are of great importance. First, a huge amount of health care spending is wasted. A strong consensus exists on this point from health care researchers all along the political spectrum. More money will get you a much bigger house, but once you have basic health insurance more money won’t get you much better health care. Should Bill Gates get prostate cancer, his billions will get him a private room and a personal physician, but they won’t do much to extend his lifespan beyond that of a middle-class man with the same disease.
…The second fact is that although spending more on health care now doesn’t get you much, spending more on health care research gets you a lot. It has been estimated, for example, that increases in life expectancy from reductions in mortality due to cardiovascular disease over the 1970-1990 period were worth over $30 trillion–yes, 30 trillion dollars. In other words, the gains from better health over the period 1970-1990 were comparable to all the gains in material wealth over the same period.
Looking at the future, if medical research could reduce cancer mortality by just 10 percent, it would be worth $5 trillion to U.S. citizens (and even more taking into account the rest of the world). The net gain would be especially large if we could reduce cancer mortality with new drugs, which are typically cheap to make once discovered. A reduction in cancer mortality of this size does not seem beyond reach, and the value of such a reduction in mortality far exceeds that of spending more on medical care today. Yet because the innovation vision is not central to our thinking, we overlook potentially huge improvements in human welfare.
The numbers would be higher now due to inflation, population and income growth but you get the idea.
My Conversation with Ana Vidović
She is one of the world’s leading classical guitarists. Here is the transcript and audio, here is part of the CWT summary:
She joined Tyler to discuss that transition from prodigy to touring musician and more, including how Bach challenges her to become a better musician, the most difficult piece in guitar repertoire, the composers she wish had written for classical guitar, the Beatles songs she’d most like to transcribe, why it’s important to study a score before touching the guitar, the reason she won’t practice more than seven hours per day, how she prevents mistakes during performances, what she looks for in young classical guitarists, why she doesn’t have much music on streaming services, how the pandemic has changed audiences, why she stopped doing competitions early on, what she’d change about conservatory education for classical guitarists, her favorite electric guitarists, her love of Croatian pop music, the benefits and drawbacks of YouTube for young musicians, and what she’ll do next.
Excerpt:
COWEN: You once said that you don’t practice past seven hours a day. What would happen in that eighth hour if you were to go there?
VIDOVIĆ: [laughs] I would probably go crazy.
COWEN: Is it mental? Is it physical? Or . . . ?
VIDOVIĆ: I just had a conversation with a friend of mine about that — how the amount of hours are actually not important as much as the quality of the practice. As a child, I used to practice many, many hours because I didn’t know, I didn’t find a way. You kind of experiment over the years. At this age, I finally learned that it’s more about concrete work, focused work, working on things that give you trouble, either if it’s technical or musical, and then you practice in sections. That takes less time.
You practice very slowly before playing fast, and then you put it all together. It just takes a lot of years to get to a point where you know what you need to work on. Two or three hours of focused practice is more efficient than seven or eight hours because sometimes there is a danger of just playing the piece through and not really working on sections and things that we should work on. I think at the eighth hour, we should all stop. [laughs]
And here is a very good Ana performance on YouTube. And here is Bartkus discussing Conversations with Tyler.
What are good long-term investments in your health?
1) what do you think are good long-term investments in your health? I know you’re a teetotaler and non-smoker, what about exercise? where do returns start not making sense?
I do not think I am the expert you should consult, but I can tell you where my knowledge base comes from. I have endured a lifetime of people with very exact ideas about health maximization, but with a paucity of data or carefully controlled studies. I thus tend to be skeptical of very specific advice. At the same time, common sense appears to yield some broad dividends, or will involve no real cost. I think the answers that follow are pretty stupid and uninteresting, but this was the highest rated reader request, so here goes:
1. Don’t drink. It is fine or even beneficial for most people, but terrible for 10-15% That might be you. And even for those who are not “problem drinkers,” I’ve had plenty of people write me and tell me their lives are much better since they stopped drinking. Stop treating “drinking” as a default.
2. Exercise every day. For me the main options are basketball, tennis, walking, weights, and Peloton. I am not suggesting those are best, they are simply what I bring myself to do. And indeed that is probably the most important factor for you. I am skeptical of very high stress exercises, such as risky rock climbing, and so on. I don’t see the case for making your exercise into a health risk.
3. Get good sleep. I am blessed in this regard. For me what works is going to bed and waking up at regular hours, and not treating weekends any differently. I don’t pretend that advice has universal validity, but perhaps for some of you it is worth trying. Other people have theories about sleeping in the cold, sleeping with masks, etc. I am not opposed! Try those if you need them. I don’t.
4. Don’t eat junk food. Try to eat mostly unprocessed foods. That said, I don’t think we understand diet very well or have good data on what works. I just don’t seem the harm in eating mostly natural foods. They taste better anyway, and there is possible upside.
5. Be happy. Have goals and projects. Have sex. Have good social networks. There is some evidence on these, I am not sure how strongly causal it is. “Go to church” might work as well, but I don’t do that one. It would frustrate me more than anything.
6. Unless you have strong evidence to the contrary, take a minimum of medications. Don’t just pop random stuff because it might have some modest short-run benefit. But yes I do believe in vaccines and most of all those kinds of medicine that have direct parallels with what we do to try to fix animals.
That is my advice. I consider it mostly trivial, but still it is better than violating the advice.
Wednesday assorted links
Tuesday assorted links
Where are the Variant Specific Boosters?
I wasn’t shocked at the failures of the CDC and the FDA. I am shocked that our government still can’t get its act together in the third year of the pandemic. Consider how lucky, yes lucky, we have been. Here’s Eric Topol:
…the original vaccines were targeted to the Wuhan ancestral strain’s spike protein from 2019. The spike protein, no less the rest of the original SARS-CoV-2 structure, is almost unrecognizable now in the form of the Omicron strain (see antigenic drift from prior post). While there’s naturally been much focus on the extraordinary number of mutations in the receptor binding domain and the rest of the spike protein, over 50 mutations are spread out throughout Omicron, making the prior major variants of concern (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) lightweights with respect to changes in structure that are not just linear or uni-dimensional. Each mutation can interact with others (epistasis); any mutation or combination of mutations has the potential to change the 3D structure of the virus. In this sense, Omicron is an overwhelming reboot of the ancestral strain.
Omicron is very different from the Wuhan ancestral strain and it’s only a matter of luck that the vaccines continue to work and that Omicron is likely less severe than Delta. Don’t tell me that viruses evolve to be less severe over time–that isn’t correct in theory or practice. The most one might say is that a very deadly virus may be difficult to transmit but that only closes off a small part of the evolutionary design-space. There is plenty of room for transmission and lethality to both increase. So the vaccines continue to work well. We got lucky. But for how long will our luck last? Do we really have to wait for a more transmissible, more deadly, more vaccine escaping variant before we act?
Where are the variant-specific boosters? The FDA has said they would approve them quickly, without new efficacy trials so I don’t think the problem is primarily regulatory. Why not catch-up to the virus and maybe even get a jump ahead with pan-coronavirus vaccines?
More generally, in our February 2021 paper in Science my co-authors and I argued that we were still leaving trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk by not investing in more vaccine capacity. I am sorry to say that we were right. Why the failure to invest more broadly?
Mostly I blame American lethargy. After 9/11 the country was angry and united and we had troops in Afghanistan within a matter of weeks and we had taken over the country in a matter of months. For better or worse, we acted quickly and with resolve. Yet, when the virus was killing at 9/11 levels every day the public never reached the same level of anger or resolve. Even now Congress has spent trillions on unemployment insurance, business protection, money for schools and stimulus but has not passed the American Pandemic Preparedness Plan, a pretty decent, mostly science-based investment plan.
80,000 hours ranks research and investment against Global Catastrophic Biologic Risk (GCBR) as among the most pressing and yet tractable problems to work on and yet they estimate that quality-adjusted only about a billion dollars is being spent on these risks. Moreover, COVID doesn’t even count as a GCBR, i.e. 80000 hours at least recognizes that things could be much worse.
I understand that future people don’t vote but even so I expected a little bit more foresight.
Noah Smith Substack interviews me
Here is the interview. Here is one excerpt:
N.S.: So how would you generally describe the zeitgeist of the moment, if you had to give a simple summary? What do you think are a couple of most important trends in culture and thought right now? My impression has been that we’re sort of in a replay of the 70s — a period of exhaustion after several years of intense social unrest, where people are looking around for new cultural and economic paradigms to replace the ones we just smashed. But maybe I’ve just been reading too many Rick Perlstein books?
T.C.: I view the 1970s as a materialistic time, sexually highly charged, and America running into some significant real resource constraints, at least initially stemming from high oil prices. Mainstream culture was often fairly crass — just look at disco, or the ascendancy of mainstream network television. The current time I see as quite different. Sexually, we are withdrawing. Society is more feminized. America has far more immigrants. And we are obsessed with the virtual and with make-believe, to a degree the 1970s could not have imagined. Bruno Macaes is one author who is really on the right track here, with his emphasis on how America is building virtual and indeed often “unreal” fantasies.
I think today the variance of weirdness is increasing. Conformists can conform like never before, due say to social media and the Girardian desire to mimic others. But unusual people can connect with other unusual people, and make each other much weirder and more “niche.” For instance, every possible variant of political views seems to be “out there” these days, and perhaps that is not entirely reassuring. A higher variance for weirdness probably encourages creativity. But is it a positive development on net? We are going to find out.
Recommended throughout, and of course do subscribe to Noah’s Substack.