Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
1. Miles Kimball on Alan Krueger.
2. College major switching, interesting.
3. I’ve never written “wtf” before, but…”wtf”? Call it solar system fact of the day. Is Mercury really the planet most frequently closest to earth?
4. Adam Ozimek on opioids and the labor market. And a profile of Adam, economist and entrepreneur.
5. Waze uses many map-loving volunteers to update its maps.
6. Norway’s new underwater restaurant.
7. Julie Phillips on suicide, excellent piece.
Sentences to ponder
Oregon lawmakers are considering raising their annual pay by nearly $20,000, a move the sponsors say will attract more diverse candidates to the statehouse.
“We’re a diverse state, we need a diverse legislature,” Senate Majority Leader Ginny Burdick, one of the legislators leading the effort, told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Because of the low pay, we are automatically screening out people who really should be represented here.”
That may sound cynical, but in fact the case for doing this is not crazy, and in general the U.S. underpays many (not all!) of its public sector employees:
The move comes only a few weeks after a 28 percent legislative pay raise went into effect. Lawmakers were not behind that raise, and the increase was tied to collective bargaining agreements that affected nearly 40,000 state employees.
Legislators now make $31,200, plus an extra $149 a day when the Legislature is in session.
Here is the full story, with further detail of interest, and for the pointer I thank Mark West.
What is wrong with social justice warriors?
Curious if you’ve read this (has a PDF link):
http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249Is this paper bad? If it is bad, what is bad about it? How would you describe “what is bad about it” in a way that would connect to a college freshman who finds his/her economics and critical race theory classes to be equally interesting and deserving of further study? This extends to broader questions about “what precisely is undesirable about the state of social-justice-oriented academic study?” I have seen a lot of backhanded stuff from you on this topic, but not a centrally articulated, earnest answer.
That is from my email, and I would broaden the question to be about social justice warriors more generally. Most of all, I would say I am all for social justice warriors! Properly construed, that is. But two points must be made:
1. Many of the people who are called social justice warriors I would not put in charge of a candy shop, much less trust them to lead the next jihad.
2. Many social justice warriors seem more concerned with tearing down, blacklisting, and deplatforming others, or even just whining about them, rather than working hard to actually boost social justice, whatever you might take that to mean. Most of that struggle requires building things in a positive way, I am sorry to say.
That all said, do not waste too much of your own energies countering the not-so-helpful class of social justice warriors. It is not worth it. Perhaps someone needs to play such a role, but surely those neuterers are not, or at least should not be, the most talented amongst us.
No matter what your exact view of the world, or what kind of ornery pessimist or determinist or conservative or even reactionary you may be, you should want to be working toward some kind of emancipation in the world. No, I am not saying there always is a clear “emancipatory” side of a debate, or that most issues are “us vs. them.” Rather, if you are not sure you are doing the right thing, ask a simple question: am I building something? Whether it be a structure, an institution, or simply a positive idea, proposal, or method.
The answer to that building question may not always be obvious, but it stands a pretty good chance of getting you to an even better question for your next round of inquiry.
Thursday assorted links
1. The forty-year-old trying to make the NBA. This cricketer made his debut at age 41.
2. China MIE: “Once you’re in, you get praised by people in the group.”
3. What would Robin Hanson say?
4. A new explanation for why time flies as you age?: a slowdown in image processing. Paper here.
5. Edvard Munch’s Scream isn’t screaming, say some.
6. Moralizing gods follow rather than precede complex society.
Wednesday assorted links
*Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan*
The demographic legacy of four centuries of Slavic settlement is striking along Kazakhstan’s 6,846-kilometre frontier with Russia, the world’s second longest land border. In 2014, when the conflict erupted in Ukraine, Russians formed 22 per cent of Kazakhstan’s population nationwide (by 2018, that figure had fallen to just below 20 per cent), but in many places in the borderlands they were in large majorities: in Ust-Kamenogorsk, 67 per cent of people were Russians, while in the town of Ridder, further north towards the frontier, the figure was 85 per cent…
By 2018, the share of Kazakhs in the population had risen from 40 per cent to 67.5 percent and the share of the other largest ethnic group, Russians, had fallen from 37 per cent to 19.8 percent. Kazakhstan’s two main cities used to be predominantly Russians; now Kazakhs dominate. Astana’s Kazakh population hit 78 per cent in 2018, up from 17 per cent at independence (when it was still a backwater called Akmola and not yet Kazakhstan’s capital); Almaty’s Kazakh population had risen from 22 per cent to 60 per cent.
The government is also working hard to “Kazakhify” towns along the Russian border.
That is all from the new and excellent book by Joanna Lillis. You may also have read that Nazerbayev, who has held power in Kazakhstan since 1991, announced yesterday that he is stepping down, hoping to take on more of a Lee Kuan Yew role in the country.
Who is most receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit?
This research systematically mapped the relationship between political ideology and receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit—that is, obscure sentences constructed to impress others rather than convey truth. Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullshit receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity); (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement; and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters [emphasis added]. Most of the results held up when we controlled for the perceived profundity of genuine aphorisms, cognitive reflection, numeracy, information processing bias, gender, age, education, religiosity, and spirituality. The results are supportive of theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in cognitive orientation, while also pointing to the existence of bullshit receptivity among both right- and left-wingers.
Here is the piece, byArtur Nilsson, Arvid Erlandsson, and Daniel Västfjäll. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Minimum wage hikes increase property crime.
2. Your memory influences the rent you end up with.
3. An alert whenever “danger” is nearby, a really bad idea (NYT).
4. “Women with a male twin were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school than women with a female twin, and those who went to college were 4 percent less likely to finish it. They had a 12 percent lower probability of being married, and a 6 percent lower probability ofhaving children.” Link here (NYT).
5. Peter Thiel and Cornel West speaking at Harvard.
6. The psychology of elite sports.
7. “Armando, the ‘Lewis Hamilton of pigeons’ sells for record €1.25m.“
Monday assorted links
1. Amplifunds: “Donate to portfolios curated by expert grantmakers and amplify your impact.”
2. Do you want to live next door to The Flintstones? And would you sue them?
3. Those new service sector jobs: “Deciding whether to have kids has never been more complex. Enter parenthood-indecision therapists.”
4. Are Republicans now more anti-tech than the Dems?
6. Race biases in student evaluations in South Africa? Do also read the comments.
What I’ve been reading
1. Aladdin, a new translation by Yasmine Seale. A wonderful, lively small volume, a good reintroduction to the Arabian Nights, recommended.
2. Shalini Shankar, Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success. Not as analytical as I was wanting, but more analytical than I had been expecting.
3. Rowan Ricardo Phillips, The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. Provides a good look at the interior world of tennis competition, with emphasis on very recent times. A good look at how to think about the game, not only in the abstract, but as it plays out through the logic of particular events and tournaments.
4. Tim Smedley, Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution. Perhaps the best extant introduction to the air pollution issue, one of the world’s most important and underrated crises, and no I am not talking about carbon.
5. Gordon Peake, Beloved Land: Stories, Struggles, and Secrets from Timor-Leste. Mostly analytical, with real information blended with travelogue. I can’t judge the content, but I was never tempted to put this one down and throw it away.
6. Roderick Beaton, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation. Excellent survey and overview, makes the late 19th century intelligible, among other achievements. “For Greeks, unlike the concept of the nation, the state had always been an object of popular derision.”
Sunday assorted links
1. Ross Douthat on whether we need more meritocracy (NYT).
2. Was Irish migration negative selection?
3. Pierre Lemieux reviews Stubborn Attachments (scroll down through the file).
4. Interesting claim that 737 not a software problem (speculative?).
5. India, Pakistan.
Saturday assorted links
1. Treating Alzheimer’s with clicks and flashes? (NYT)
2. Slot restrictions raise airfares.
3. Never forget the attorneys general, they may move against the big tech companies.
Has the Tervuren Central African museum been decolonized?
In a word, no. They shut the place down for five years and spent $84 million, to redesign the displays, and what they reopened still looks and feels incredibly colonial. That’s not an architectural complaint, only that the museum cannot escape what it has been for well over a century. Most of the 180,000 art objects there were either stolen or bought under terms of implicit coercion. There is an Africa Gallery covering the crimes of King Leopold in the Congo, but it is easy enough to be transfixed by the art and not really take it in. How about a full room near the entrance devoted to the anti-imperialist E.D. Morel? And while there are now more art works from the post-colonial period, there is no room devoted to the often very impressive art worlds of Central Africa today. Having more African people talk on screens was nice, but it doesn’t do the trick. The colonial still seems glorious, and the post-colonial mediocre.
Despite DRC demands, I do understand that the repatriation of the objects themselves would not be wise, given the current state of the DRC. In 1976-1982, 114 objects were in fact restituted, but most of them ended up stolen (NYT). For me preserving the art comes first, and furthermore the current DRC government is hardly a legitimate spokesperson for the historic civilizations of the region. But might the museum at least have presented the issue in some morally conscious manner?
Before you walk into the museum proper, there is a room devoted to all the sculptures and displays now considered too colonial or too racist for the current museum. Of course this draws more attention to them, and furthermore the dividing lines are by no means always clear. That said, there is a double irony, namely that some of the items in this room are sufficiently obnoxious that their display represents a better apology than any part of what is intended as apology.
This is still all much better than the past, when at one time a human zoo of 267 enslaved Congolese was put on display here, in fact that was the inaugural exhibit in 1897. At least there is now a memorial to those of the enslaved who died of influenza. And the plaque “Belgium Brings Civilization to the Congo” has been taken down. Yet this:
The rapacious monarch’s monogram dots the walls of the palatial museum on the former royal estate, which he used to drum up investment for his colonial ventures at the 1897 World Exhibition.
Oh, and there are colonial statues built into the walls:
One was of black children clinging to a white missionary. Another was of a topless African woman dancing.
They cannot be removed because of cultural heritage laws in Belgium.
The animal displays also no longer seem of our time, more about size and stuffing and the conquest of nature rather than with much of a notion of environmental or biodiversity or animal welfare awareness.
It is nonetheless a spectacular museum, the best chronicle anywhere for the Central African artistic achievement by an order of magnitude, and one of the best and most interesting places in Europe right now. It is worth the rather convoluted one hour trip you must take from Brussels, or if you are visiting Waterloo it isn’t far away at all. For all its flaws (or in part because of them?), go if you can.
The art aside, the other lesson is imperialism and colonialism cast a longer shadow than you might at first think. The realities of cultural constipation remain underrated.
Friday assorted links
2. Asperger was a bad guy. “Put another way, autists were ‘enemies of the people’.”
3. GMU strivers not schemers. And yet not everyone envies my corner of the world, fancy that.
Ghent travel notes
Ghent is one of the loveliest small- to mid-sized cities in Europe, perhaps lucky to have never received UNESCO World Heritage status, unlike Bruges. Ghent was one of the earliest seats of the continental Industrial Revolution, through textiles, and the city core has splendid architecture from late medieval times up through the early 20th century. It is what Amsterdam should be, but no longer is.
The center is full of interesting, quirky small shops, along the lines of the cliche you do not expect to actually find. Only rarely are restaurant menus offered in English. Most of the tourists in the hotel seemed to be Chinese.
Walk around, don’t miss Graffiti Street, and the Ensors and the Roualt in the Fine Arts museum complement the more famous items there. The Industrie Museum has numerous textile machines from the 18th century onwards; I found it striking how different the 1770 machine was from the 1730 vintage, but how little by 1950 the machines had advanced .
For dining I recommend the Surinamese restaurant Faja Lobi and the Syrian Layali Habab, the mainstream Belgian places seem to be good but no better than good unless you pay a lot of money.
Most of all, you should walk around and ponder why we seem unable (or is it unwilling?) to build such compelling cities these days.