actually fairly interesting

Most middle-class Americans at least act as if:
- Exactly four years of higher education is precisely the right level of training for the overwhelming majority of good careers.
- You should spend most of your waking hours most days of the week for the previous twelve+ years preparing for those four years. In your free time, be sure to do the kinds of things guidance counselors think are impressive; we as a society know that these people are the best arbiters of arete.
- Forty hours per week is exactly how long it takes to be reasonably successful in most jobs.
- On the margin, the cost of paying for money management exceeds the cost of adverse selection from not paying for it.
- You will definitely learn important information about someone’s spousal qualifications in years two through five of dating them.
-Human beings need about 50% more square feet per capita than they did a generation or two ago, and you should probably buy rather than rent it.
- Books are very boring, but TV is interesting.

All of these sound kind of dumb when you write them out. Even if they’re arguably true, you’d expect a good argument. You can be a low-risk contrarian by just picking a handful of these, articulating an alternative — either a way to get 80% of the benefit at 20% of the cost, or a way to pay a higher cost to get massively more benefits — and then living it.[1]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909404
Kevin Buzzard (the Lean guy)

- general reflection on proof asssistants/theorem provers
- Kevin Hale's formal abstracts project, etc
- thinks of available theorem provers, Lean is "[the only one currently available that may be capable of formalizing all of mathematics eventually]" (goes into more detail right at the end, eg, quotient types)

This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164005

actually covers a lot more than just education or the signaling hypothesis

mentioned by Benq among others

The data suggest that foreign-born Teaching Assistants have an adverse impact on the class performance of undergraduate students.

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1151681120787816448
https://archive.is/Bp5eu
Freedman's book is something of a shadow history of Western intellectual thought between 1850 and 2010. Marx, Tolstoy, Foucault, game theorists, economists, business law--it is all in there.

Thus the thoughts prompted by this book have surprisingly little to do with war.
Instead I am left with questions about the long-term trajectory of Western thought. Specifically:

*Has America really dominated Western intellectual life in the post 45 world as much as English speakers seem to think it has?
*Has the professionalization/credential-iization of Western intellectual life helped or harmed our ability to understand society?
*Will we ever recover from the 1960s?

Differences are also seen when analyzing results based on the type of institution. Positions related to Security have the highest percentages for all but top-100 institutions. The area of Artificial Intelligence/Data Mining/Machine Learning is of most interest for top-100 PhD institutions. Roughly 35% of positions for PhD institutions are in data-oriented areas. The results show a strong interest in data-oriented areas by public PhD and private PhD, MS, and BS institutions while public MS and BS institutions are most interested in Security.

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1199702832728948737
https://archive.is/cc4zf
I reviewed today my catalogue of 420~ books I have read over the last six years and I am in despair. There are probably 100~ whose contents I can tell you almost nothing about—nothing noteworthy anyway.

A friend of mine and I couldn't understand why some people were having so much trouble; the material seemed like common sense. The Feynman Method was the only tool we needed.

1. Write down the problem
2. Think real hard
3. Write down the solution

The Feynman Method failed us on the last project: the design of a divider, a real-world-scale project an order of magnitude more complex than anything we'd been asked to tackle before. On the day he assigned the project, the professor exhorted us to begin early. Over the next few weeks, we heard rumors that some of our classmates worked day and night without making progress.

...

And then, just after midnight, a number of our newfound buddies from dinner reported successes. Half of those who started from scratch had working designs. Others were despondent, because their design was still broken in some subtle, non-obvious way. As I talked with one of those students, I began poring over his design. And after a few minutes, I realized that the Feynman method wasn't the only way forward: it should be possible to systematically apply a mechanical technique repeatedly to find the source of our problems. Beneath all the abstractions, our projects consisted purely of NAND gates (woe to those who dug around our toolbox enough to uncover dynamic logic), which outputs a 0 only when both inputs are 1. If the correct output is 0, both inputs should be 1. The input that isn't is in error, an error that is, itself, the output of a NAND gate where at least one input is 0 when it should be 1. We applied this method recursively, finding the source of all the problems in both our designs in under half an hour.

How To Debug Any Program: https://www.blinddata.com/blog/how-to-debug-any-program-9
May 8th 2019 by Saketh Are

Start by Questioning Everything

...

When a program is behaving unexpectedly, our attention tends to be drawn first to the most complex portions of the code. However, mistakes can come in all forms. I've personally been guilty of rushing to debug sophisticated portions of my code when the real bug was that I forgot to read in the input file. In the following section, we'll discuss how to reliably focus our attention on the portions of the program that need correction.

Then Question as Little as Possible

Suppose that we have a program and some input on which its behavior doesn’t match our expectations. The goal of debugging is to narrow our focus to as small a section of the program as possible. Once our area of interest is small enough, the value of the incorrect output that is being produced will typically tell us exactly what the bug is.

In order to catch the point at which our program diverges from expected behavior, we must inspect the intermediate state of the program. Suppose that we select some point during execution of the program and print out all values in memory. We can inspect the results manually and decide whether they match our expectations. If they don't, we know for a fact that we can focus on the first half of the program. It either contains a bug, or our expectations of what it should produce were misguided. If the intermediate state does match our expectations, we can focus on the second half of the program. It either contains a bug, or our understanding of what input it expects was incorrect.

Question Things Efficiently

For practical purposes, inspecting intermediate state usually doesn't involve a complete memory dump. We'll typically print a small number of variables and check whether they have the properties we expect of them. Verifying the behavior of a section of code involves:

1. Before it runs, inspecting all values in memory that may influence its behavior.
2. Reasoning about the expected behavior of the code.
3. After it runs, inspecting all values in memory that may be modified by the code.

Reasoning about expected behavior is typically the easiest step to perform even in the case of highly complex programs. Practically speaking, it's time-consuming and mentally strenuous to write debug output into your program and to read and decipher the resulting values. It is therefore advantageous to structure your code into functions and sections that pass a relatively small amount of information between themselves, minimizing the number of values you need to inspect.

...

Finding the Right Question to Ask

We’ve assumed so far that we have available a test case on which our program behaves unexpectedly. Sometimes, getting to that point can be half the battle. There are a few different approaches to finding a test case on which our program fails. It is reasonable to attempt them in the following order:

1. Verify correctness on the sample inputs.
2. Test additional small cases generated by hand.
3. Adversarially construct corner cases by hand.
4. Re-read the problem to verify understanding of input constraints.
5. Design large cases by hand and write a program to construct them.
6. Write a generator to construct large random cases and a brute force oracle to verify outputs.

occupations paired with the attitudes a good society has toward them:

Financier: contempt
Civil servant: esteem
Doctor: approval
Labourer: respect
Professor: indifference
Actor: disgust
Soldier: respect
Politician: distrust
Journalist: disapproval

I’m going to review David Reich’s new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here. Extensively: in a sense I’ve already been doing this for a long time. Probably there will be a podcast. The GoFundMe link is here. You can also send money via Paypal (Use the donate button), or bitcoins to 1Jv4cu1wETM5Xs9unjKbDbCrRF2mrjWXr5. In-kind donations, such as orichalcum or mithril, are always appreciated.

This is the book about the application of ancient DNA to prehistory and history.

height difference between northern and southern europeans: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/who-we-are-1/
mixing, genocide of males, etc.: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/who-we-are-2-purity-of-essence/
rapid change in polygenic traits (appearance by Kevin Mitchell and funny jab at Brad Delong ("regmonkey")): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/rapid-change-in-polygenic-traits/
schiz, bipolar, and IQ: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/rapid-change-in-polygenic-traits/#comment-105605
Dan Graur being dumb: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/the-usual-suspects/
prediction of neanderthal mixture and why: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/03/who-we-are-3-neanderthals/
New Guineans tried to use Denisovan admixture to avoid UN sanctions (by "not being human"): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/who-we-are-4-denisovans/
also some commentary on decline of Out-of-Africa, including:
"Homo Naledi, a small-brained homonin identified from recently discovered fossils in South Africa, appears to have hung around way later that you’d expect (up to 200,000 years ago, maybe later) than would be the case if modern humans had occupied that area back then. To be blunt, we would have eaten them."

Live Not By Lies: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/live-not-by-lies/
Next he slams people that suspect that upcoming genetic genetic analysis will, in most cases, confirm traditional stereotypes about race – the way the world actually looks.

The people Reich dumps on are saying perfectly reasonable things. He criticizes Henry Harpending for saying that he’d never seen an African with a hobby. Of course, Henry had actually spent time in Africa, and that’s what he’d seen. The implication is that people in Malthusian farming societies – which Africa was not – were selected to want to work, even where there was no immediate necessity to do so. Thus hobbies, something like a gerbil running in an exercise wheel.

He criticized Nicholas Wade, for saying that different races have different dispositions. Wade’s book wasn’t very good, but of course personality varies by race: Darwin certainly thought so. You can see differences at birth. Cover a baby’s nose with a cloth: Chinese and Navajo babies quietly breathe through their mouth, European and African babies fuss and fight.

Then he attacks Watson, for asking when Reich was going to look at Jewish genetics – the kind that has led to greater-than-average intelligence. Watson was undoubtedly trying to get a rise out of Reich, but it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than the average bear and everybody knows it. Selection is the only possible explanation, and the conditions in the Middle ages – white-collar job specialization and a high degree of endogamy, were just what the doctor ordered.

Watson’s a prick, but he’s a great prick, and what he said was correct. Henry was a prince among men, and Nick Wade is a decent guy as well. Reich is totally out of line here: he’s being a dick.

Now Reich may be trying to burnish his anti-racist credentials, which surely need some renewal after having pointing out that race as colloquially used is pretty reasonable, there’s no reason pops can’t be different, people that said otherwise ( like Lewontin, Gould, Montagu, etc. ) were lying, Aryans conquered Europe and India, while we’re tied to the train tracks with scary genetic results coming straight at us. I don’t care: he’s being a weasel, slandering the dead and abusing the obnoxious old genius who laid the foundations of his field. Reich will also get old someday: perhaps he too will someday lose track of all the nonsense he’s supposed to say, or just stop caring. Maybe he already has… I’m pretty sure that Reich does not like lying – which is why he wrote this section of the book (not at all logically necessary for his exposition of the ancient DNA work) but the required complex juggling of lies and truth required to get past the demented gatekeepers of our society may not be his forte. It has been said that if it was discovered that someone in the business was secretly an android, David Reich would be the prime suspect. No Talleyrand he.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/who-we-are-6-the-americas/
The population that accounts for the vast majority of Native American ancestry, which we will call Amerinds, came into existence somewhere in northern Asia. It was formed from a mix of Ancient North Eurasians and a population related to the Han Chinese – about 40% ANE and 60% proto-Chinese. Is looks as if most of the paternal ancestry was from the ANE, while almost all of the maternal ancestry was from the proto-Han. [Aryan-Transpacific ?!?] This formation story – ANE boys, East-end girls – is similar to the formation story for the Indo-Europeans.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/who-we-are-7-africa/
In some ways, on some questions, learning more from genetics has left us less certain. At this point we really don’t know where anatomically humans originated. Greater genetic variety in sub-Saharan African has been traditionally considered a sign that AMH originated there, but it possible that we originated elsewhere, perhaps in North Africa or the Middle East, and gained extra genetic variation when we moved into sub-Saharan Africa and mixed with various archaic groups that already existed. One consideration is that finding recent archaic admixture in a population may well be a sign that modern humans didn’t arise in that region ( like language substrates) – which makes South Africa and West Africa look less likely. The long-continued existence of homo naledi in South Africa suggests that modern humans may not have been there for all that long – if we had co-existed with homo naledi, they probably wouldn’t lasted long. The oldest known skull that is (probably) AMh was recently found in Morocco, while modern humans remains, already known from about 100,000 years ago in Israel, have recently been found in northern Saudi Arabia.

While work by Nick Patterson suggests that modern humans were formed by a fusion between two long-isolated populations, a bit less than half a million years ago.

So: genomics had made recent history Africa pretty clear. Bantu agriculuralists expanded and replaced hunter-gatherers, farmers and herders from the Middle East settled North Africa, Egypt and northeaat Africa, while Nilotic herdsmen expanded south from the Sudan. There are traces of earlier patterns and peoples, but today, only traces. As for questions back further in time, such as the origins of modern humans – we thought we knew, and now we know we don’t. But that’s progress.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/reichs-journey/
David Reich’s professional path must have shaped his perspective on the social sciences. Look at the record. He starts his professional career examining the role of genetics in the elevated prostate cancer risk seen in African-American men. Various social-science fruitcakes oppose him even looking at the question of ancestry ( African vs European). But they were wrong: certain African-origin alleles explain the increased risk. Anthropologists (and human geneticists) were sure (based on nothing) that modern humans hadn’t interbred with Neanderthals – but of course that happened. Anthropologists and archaeologists knew that Gustaf Kossina couldn’t have been right when he said that widespread material culture corresponded to widespread ethnic groups, and that migration was the primary explanation for changes in the archaeological record – but he was right. They knew that the Indo-European languages just couldn’t have been imposed by fire and sword – but Reich’s work proved them wrong. Lots of people – the usual suspects plus Hindu nationalists – were sure that the AIT ( Aryan Invasion Theory) was wrong, but it looks pretty good today.

Some sociologists believed that caste in India was somehow imposed or significantly intensified by the British – but it turns out that most jatis have been almost perfectly endogamous for two thousand years or more…

It may be that Reich doesn’t take these guys too seriously anymore. Why should he?

varnas, jatis, aryan invastion theory: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/who-we-are-8-india/

europe and EEF+WHG+ANE: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/who-we-are-9-europe/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/book-review-david-reich-human-genes-reveal-history/
The massive mixture events that occurred in the recent past to give rise to Europeans and South Asians, to name just two groups, were likely “male mediated.” That’s another way of saying that men on the move took local women as brides or concubines. In the New World there are many examples of this, whether it be among African Americans, where most European ancestry seems to come through men, or in Latin America, where conquistadores famously took local women as paramours. Both of these examples are disquieting, and hint at the deep structural roots of patriarchal inequality and social subjugation that form the backdrop for the emergence of many modern peoples.

Student group protests Apple over “addictive devices”: https://www.stanforddaily.com/2018/03/05/student-group-protests-apple-over-addictive-devices/

Education and Political Party: The Effects of College or Social Class?: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778029
The impact of education on political ideology: Evidence from European compulsory education reforms: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775716301704
correlation is with leftism, causal effect is shift to right

Greg thinks there are some effects: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:5adca8f16265

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/964209775419457536
https://archive.is/oFELz
https://archive.is/f1DBF
https://archive.is/5iiqn

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/12/education_ideol.html

https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/963451867912130561
https://archive.is/sHI7g
https://archive.is/B5Gdv
https://archive.is/hFERC
https://archive.is/8IUDm
Bryan Caplan has written a very persuasive book suggesting that retention/transfer of learning is very low. how do we know it’s not the same with the “PoMo ethos”

basically suggests switching to German-style apprenticeship program

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/talent-optimization-weak-strong.html
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/sectors-bad-finding-talent-comments.html

I don’t claim to be a modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville, nor do I have much in common with this famous observer of American life. He grew up in Paris, a city renowned for its culture and architecture. I grew up in Shijiazhuang, a city renowned for being the headquarters of the company that produced toxic infant formula. He was a child of aristocrats; I am the child of modest workers.

Nevertheless, I hope my candid observations can provide some insights into the elite institutions of the West. Certain beliefs are as ubiquitous among the people I went to school with as smog was in Shijiazhuang. The doctrines that shape the worldviews and cultural assumptions at elite Western institutions like Cambridge, Stanford, and Goldman Sachs have become almost religious. Nevertheless, I hope that the perspective of a candid Chinese atheist can be of some instruction to them.

...

So I came to the UK in 2001, when I was 16 years old. Much to my surprise, I found the UK’s exam-focused educational system very similar to the one in China. What is more, in both countries, going to the “right schools” and getting the “right job” are seen as very important by a large group of eager parents. As a result, scoring well on exams and doing well in school interviews—or even the play session for the nursery or pre-prep school—become the most important things in the world. Even at the university level, the undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge depends on nothing else but an exam at the end of the last year.

On the other hand, although the UK’s university system is considered superior to China’s, with a population that is only one-twentieth the size of my native country, competition, while tough, is less intimidating. For example, about one in ten applicants gets into Oxbridge in the UK, and Stanford and Harvard accept about one in twenty-five applicants. But in Hebei province in China, where I am from, only one in fifteen hundred applicants gets into Peking or Qinghua University.

Still, I found it hard to believe how much easier everything became. I scored first nationwide in the GCSE (high school) math exam, and my photo was printed in a national newspaper. I was admitted into Trinity College, University of Cambridge, once the home of Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Prince Charles.

I studied economics at Cambridge, a field which has become more and more mathematical since the 1970s. The goal is always to use a mathematical model to find a closed-form solution to a real-world problem. Looking back, I’m not sure why my professors were so focused on these models. I have since found that the mistake of blindly relying on models is quite widespread in both trading and investing—often with disastrous results, such as the infamous collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Years later, I discovered the teaching of Warren Buffett: it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. But our professors taught us to think of the real world as a math problem.

The culture of Cambridge followed the dogmas of the classroom: a fervent adherence to rules and models established by tradition. For example, at Cambridge, students are forbidden to walk on grass. This right is reserved for professors only. The only exception is for those who achieve first class honors in exams; they are allowed to walk on one area of grass on one day of the year.

The behavior of my British classmates demonstrated an even greater herd mentality than what is often mocked in American MBAs. For example, out of the thirteen economists in my year at Trinity, twelve would go on to join investment banks, and five of us went to work for Goldman Sachs.

...

To me, Costco represents the best of American capitalism. It is a corporation known for having its customers and employees in mind, while at the same time it has compensated its shareholders handsomely over the years. To the customers, it offers the best combination of quality and low cost. Whenever it manages to reduce costs, it passes the savings on to customers immediately. Achieving a 10 percent gross margin with prices below Amazon’s is truly incredible. After I had been there once, I found it hard to shop elsewhere.

Meanwhile, its salaries are much higher than similar retail jobs. When the recession hit in 2008, the company increased salaries to help employees cope with the difficult environment. From the name tags the staff wear, I have seen that frontline employees work there for decades, something hard to imagine elsewhere.

Stanford was for me a distant second to Costco in terms of the American capitalist experience. Overall, I enjoyed the curriculum at the GSB. Inevitably I found some classes less interesting, but the professors all seemed to be quite understanding, even when they saw me reading my kindle during class.

One class was about strategy. It focused on how corporate mottos and logos could inspire employees. Many of the students had worked for nonprofits or health care or tech companies, all of which had mottos about changing the world, saving lives, saving the planet, etc. The professor seemed to like these mottos. I told him that at Goldman our motto was “be long-term greedy.” The professor couldn’t understand this motto or why it was inspiring. I explained to him that everyone else in the market was short-term greedy and, as a result, we took all their money. Since traders like money, this was inspiring. He asked if perhaps there was another motto or logo that my other classmates might connect with. I told him about the black swan I kept on my desk as a reminder that low probability events happen with high frequency. He didn’t like that motto either and decided to call on another student, who had worked at Pfizer. Their motto was “all people deserve to live healthy lives.” The professor thought this was much better. I didn’t understand how it would motivate employees, but this was exactly why I had come to Stanford: to learn the key lessons of interpersonal communication and leadership.

On the communication and leadership front, I came to the GSB knowing I was not good and hoped to get better. My favorite class was called “Interpersonal Dynamics” or, as students referred to it, “Touchy Feely.” In “Touchy Feely,” students get very candid feedback on how their words and actions affect others in a small group that meets several hours per week for a whole quarter.

We talked about microaggressions and feelings and empathy and listening. Sometimes in class the professor would say things to me like “Puzhong, when Mary said that, I could see you were really feeling something,” or “Puzhong, I could see in your eyes that Peter’s story affected you.” And I would tell them I didn’t feel anything. I was quite confused.

One of the papers we studied mentioned that subjects are often not conscious of their own feelings when fully immersed in a situation. But body indicators such as heart rate would show whether the person is experiencing strong emotions. I thought that I generally didn’t have a lot of emotions and decided that this might be a good way for me to discover my hidden emotions that the professor kept asking about.

So I bought a heart rate monitor and checked my resting heart rate. Right around 78. And when the professor said to me in class “Puzhong, I can see that story brought up some emotions in you,” I rolled up my sleeve and checked my heart rate. It was about 77. And so I said, “nope, no emotion.” The experiment seemed to confirm my prior belief: my heart rate hardly moved, even when I was criticized, though it did jump when I became excited or laughed.

This didn’t land well on some of my classmates. They felt I was not treating these matters with the seriousness that they deserved. The professor was very angry. My takeaway was that my interpersonal skills were so bad that I could easily offend people unintentionally, so I concluded that after graduation I should do something that involved as little human interaction as possible.

Therefore, I decided I needed to return to work in financial markets rather than attempting something else. I went to the career service office and told them that my primary goal after the MBA was to make money. I told them that $500,000 sounded like a good number. They were very confused, though, as they said their goal was to help me find my passion and my calling. I told them that my calling was to make money for my family. They were trying to be helpful, but in my case, their advice didn’t turn out to be very helpful.

Eventually I was able to meet the chief financial officer of my favorite company, Costco. He told me that they don’t hire any MBAs. Everyone starts by pushing trolleys. (I have seriously thought about doing just that. But my wife is strongly against it.) Maybe, I thought, that is why the company is so successful—no MBAs!

...

Warren Buffett has said that the moment one was born in the United States or another Western country, that person has essentially won a lottery. If someone is born a U.S. citizen, he or she enjoys a huge advantage in almost every aspect of life, including expected wealth, education, health care, environment, safety, etc., when compared to someone born in developing countries. For someone foreign to “purchase” these privileges, the price tag at the moment is $1 million dollars (the rough value of the EB-5 investment visa). Even at this price level, the demand from certain countries routinely exceeds the annual allocated quota, resulting in long waiting times. In that sense, American citizens were born millionaires!

Yet one wonders how long such luck will last. This brings me back to the title of Rubin’s book, his “uncertain world.” In such a world, the vast majority things are outside our control, determined by God or luck. After we have given our best and once the final card is drawn, we should neither become too excited by what we have achieved nor too depressed by what we failed to … [more]

Since reading Tabarrok’s post, I’ve been trying to think of more examples of this sort of thing, especially in medicine. There are way too many discrepancies in approved medications between countries to discuss every one of them, but did you know melatonin is banned in most of Europe? (Europeans: did you know melatonin is sold like candy in the United States?) Did you know most European countries have no such thing as “medical school”, but just have college students major in medicine, and then become doctors once they graduate from college? (Europeans: did you know Americans have to major in some random subject in college, and then go to a separate place called “medical school” for four years to even start learning medicine?) Did you know that in Puerto Rico, you can just walk into a pharmacy and get any non-scheduled drug you want without a doctor’s prescription? (source: my father; I have never heard anyone else talk about this, and nobody else even seems to think it is interesting enough to be worth noting).

...

And then there’s the discussion from the recent discussion of Madness and Civilization about how 18th century doctors thought hot drinks will destroy masculinity and ruin society. Nothing that’s happened since has really disproved this – indeed, a graph of hot drink consumption, decline of masculinity, and ruinedness of society would probably show a pretty high correlation – it’s just somehow gotten tossed in the bin marked “ridiculous” instead of the bin marked “things we have to worry about”.
🤔🤔

https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/942917523627941888
https://archive.is/xpTgh

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/putting-meat-on-the-bones-of-america-first/

One of the most substantial credits for taxpayers is the Earned Income Tax Credit. Established in 1975—in part to offset the burden of Social Security taxes and to provide an incentive to work—the EITC is determined by income and is phased in according to filing status: single, married filing jointly or either of those with children. Eligibility and the amount of the credit are based on adjusted gross income, earned income and investment income.

A person must be at least 25 years old and younger than 65 to qualify. If married, both spouses must have valid Social Security numbers and must have lived in the country for more than six months. If you may be claimed as a dependent on another filer's tax return, you do not qualify.

Those "married filing separately" do not qualify for the EITC, said Louis Barajas, a Santa Fe Springs, California-based financial planner and author who serves many low-to-moderate-income families in his boutique planning firm, Louis Barajas Wealth Planning.

https://archive.is/Ymsvn

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/952673677904175104
https://archive.is/Ku8h0
A lot of people have pointed out that, in the US, immigrants are more likely to have a university degree. Perhaps, but according to data from the OECD (https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac ), college-educated immigrants have skills much closer to those of natives who just finished high school.

Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. We find no relationship between preferences and school effectiveness after controlling for peer quality.

THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN Progress and Its Critics. By Christopher Lasch. 591 pp. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. $25.

reviewed by William Julius Wilson

Lower-middle-class culture, Mr. Lasch argues, reflects an emphasis on the family, the church and the neighborhood. A community's continuity is valued more highly than individual advancement, social solidarity is favored over social mobility and the maintenance of existing ways takes precedent over mainstream ideals of success. Parents want their children to succeed in life, but they also want them to be considerate of their elders, to willingly bear their responsibilities and to show courage under adversity. "More concerned with honor than with worldly ambition, they have less interest in the future than do upper-middle-class parents, who try to equip their children with the qualities required for competitive advancement."

Mr. Lasch acknowledges the provincialism and narrowness of lower-middle-class culture, and he does not deny that "it has produced racism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, and all the other evils so often cited by liberal critics." But, he maintains, in their zeal to condemn such objectionable traits, liberals have failed to see the valuable features of petty-bourgeois culture -- what he calls moral realism, skepticism about progress, respect for limits and understanding that everything has its price.

Some Notes on the Finances of Top Chinese Universities: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/world-view/some-notes-finances-top-chinese-universities
A glimpse into the finances of top Chinese universities suggests they share more than we might have imagined with American flagship public universities, but also that claims of imminent “catch up” might be overblown

A key contribution of our paper is to estimate the returns to an additional year of schooling while holding highest credential constant. We find the year generates a two percent gain in monthly income, with somewhat higher returns for China’s disadvantaged. This is much smaller than most estimates which do not separate the returns to additional schooling from those to earning a credential. We show that the policy, while redistributive, has generated a likely net loss of tens of billions of dollars. We interpret these results through a model of signaling and human capital accumulation and conclude that a high signaling value of earning a credential, also known as “credentialism,” plays a crucial role in household schooling decisions and in the returns to schooling in modern China.

Access to Elite Education, Wage Premium, and Social Mobility: Evidence from China’s College Entrance Exam: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/ecs/events/seminar/seminar-papers/17-08-31.pdf
woah:
Exploiting a discontinuity in elite university eligibility around the cut off scores, we find elite education increases the monthly wage by around 40%. While elite education eligibility does significantly affect mobility, it does not alter the influence of parental background. We also provide suggestive evidence that the wage premium is more likely to be explained by university-related networks and signaling than that of human capital.

I’ve come to the view that creativity and innovative capacity aren’t a fixed stock, coiled and waiting to be released by policy. Now, I know that a country will not do well if it has poor infrastructure, interest rate management, tax and regulation levels, and a whole host of other issues. But getting them right isn’t sufficient to promote innovation; past a certain margin, when they’re all at rational levels, we ought to focus on promoting creativity and drive as a means to propel growth.

...

When I say “positive” vision, I don’t mean that people must see the future as a cheerful one. Instead, I’m saying that people ought to have a vision at all: A clear sense of how the technological future will be different from today. To have a positive vision, people must first expand their imaginations. And I submit that an interest in science fiction, the material world, and proximity to industry all help to refine that optimism. I mean to promote imagination by direct injection.

...

If a state has lost most of its jobs for electrical engineers, or nuclear engineers, or mechanical engineers, then fewer young people in that state will study those practices, and technological development in related fields slow down a little further. When I bring up these thoughts on resisting industrial decline to economists, I’m unsatisfied with their responses. They tend to respond by tautology (“By definition, outsourcing improves on the status quo”) or arithmetic (see: gains from comparative advantage, Ricardo). These kinds of logical exercises are not enough. I would like for more economists to consider a human capital perspective for preserving manufacturing expertise (to some degree).

I wonder if the so-called developed countries should be careful of their own premature deindustrialization. The US industrial base has faltered, but there is still so much left to build. Until we’ve perfected asteroid mining and super-skyscrapers and fusion rockets and Jupiter colonies and matter compilers, we can’t be satisfied with innovation confined mostly to the digital world.

Those who don’t mind the decline of manufacturing employment like to say that people have moved on to higher-value work. But I’m not sure that this is usually the case. Even if there’s an endlessly capacious service sector to absorb job losses in manufacturing, it’s often the case that these new jobs feature lower productivity growth and involve greater rent-seeking. Not everyone is becoming hedge fund managers and machine learning engineers. According to BLS, the bulk of service jobs are in 1. government (22 million), 2. professional services (19m), 3. healthcare (18m), 4. retail (15m), and 5. leisure and hospitality (15m). In addition to being often low-paying but still competitive, a great deal of service sector jobs tend to stress capacity for emotional labor over capacity for manual labor. And it’s the latter that tends to be more present in fields involving technological upgrading.

...

Here’s a bit more skepticism of service jobs. In an excellent essay on declining productivity growth, Adair Turner makes the point that many service jobs are essentially zero-sum. I’d like to emphasize and elaborate on that idea here.

...

Call me a romantic, but I’d like everyone to think more about industrial lubricants, gas turbines, thorium reactors, wire production, ball bearings, underwater cables, and all the things that power our material world. I abide by a strict rule never to post or tweet about current political stuff; instead I try to draw more attention to the world of materials. And I’d like to remind people that there are many things more edifying than following White House scandals.

...

First, we can all try to engage more actively with the material world, not merely the digital or natural world. Go ahead and pick an industrial phenomenon and learn more about it. Learn more about the history of aviation, and what it took to break the sound barrier; gaze at the container ships as they sail into port, and keep in mind that they carry 90 percent of the goods you see around you; read about what we mold plastics to do; meditate on the importance of steel in civilization; figure out what’s driving the decline in the cost of solar energy production, or how we draw electricity from nuclear fission, or what it takes to extract petroleum or natural gas from the ground.

...

Here’s one more point that I’d like to add on Girard at college: I wonder if to some extent current dynamics are the result of the liberal arts approach of “college teaches you how to think, not what to think.” I’ve never seen much data to support this wonderful claim that college is good at teaching critical thinking skills. Instead, students spend most of their energies focused on raising or lowering the status of the works they study or the people around them, giving rise to the Girardian terror that has gripped so many campuses.

College as an incubator of Girardian terror: http://danwang.co/college-girardian-terror/
It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other. By construction, whatever distinctions any does have are usually earned through brutal, zero-sum competitions. These tournament-type distinctions include: SAT scores at or near perfection; being a top player on a sports team; gaining master status from chess matches; playing first instrument in state orchestra; earning high rankings in Math Olympiad; and so on, culminating in gaining admission to a particular college.

Once people enter college, they get socialized into group environments that usually continue to operate in zero-sum competitive dynamics. These include orchestras and sport teams; fraternities and sororities; and many types of clubs. The biggest source of mimetic pressures are the classes. Everyone starts out by taking the same intro classes; those seeking distinction throw themselves into the hardest classes, or seek tutelage from star professors, and try to earn the highest grades.

Mimesis Machines and Millennials: http://quillette.com/2017/11/02/mimesis-machines-millennials/
In 1956, a young Liverpudlian named John Winston Lennon heard the mournful notes of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, and was transformed. He would later recall, “nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis. If there hadn’t been an Elvis, there wouldn’t have been the Beatles.” It is an ancient human story. An inspiring model, an inspired imitator, and a changed world.

Mimesis is the phenomenon of human mimicry. Humans see, and they strive to become what they see. The prolific Franco-Californian philosopher René Girard described the human hunger for imitation as mimetic desire. According to Girard, mimetic desire is a mighty psychosocial force that drives human behavior. When attempted imitation fails, (i.e. I want, but fail, to imitate my colleague’s promotion to VP of Business Development), mimetic rivalry arises. According to mimetic theory, periodic scapegoating—the ritualistic expelling of a member of the community—evolved as a way for archaic societies to diffuse rivalries and maintain the general peace.

As civilization matured, social institutions evolved to prevent conflict. To Girard, sacrificial religious ceremonies first arose as imitations of earlier scapegoating rituals. From the mimetic worldview healthy social institutions perform two primary functions,

They satisfy mimetic desire and reduce mimetic rivalry by allowing imitation to take place.
They thereby reduce the need to diffuse mimetic rivalry through scapegoating.
Tranquil societies possess and value institutions that are mimesis tolerant. These institutions, such as religion and family, are Mimesis Machines. They enable millions to see, imitate, and become new versions of themselves. Mimesis Machines, satiate the primal desire for imitation, and produce happy, contented people. Through Mimesis Machines, Elvis fans can become Beatles.

Volatile societies, on the other hand, possess and value mimesis resistant institutions that frustrate attempts at mimicry, and mass produce frustrated, resentful people. These institutions, such as capitalism and beauty hierarchies, are Mimesis Shredders. They stratify humanity, and block the ‘nots’ from imitating the ‘haves’.

“The autodidact’s risk is that they think they know all of medieval history but have never heard of Charlemagne” - Umberto Eco

Facts are the least part of education. The structure and priorities they fit into matters far more, and learning how to learn far more again

https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/913863513038311426
https://archive.is/PYRx9
Trump tweets: For his voters.
Tax plan: Something else entirely.
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/913864779256692737
https://archive.is/5bzQz
This is appallingly stupid if accurate

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/28/upshot/what-the-tax-bill-would-look-like-for-25000-middle-class-families.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/30/us/politics/tax-cuts-increases-for-your-income.html

Treasury Removes Paper at Odds With Mnuchin’s Take on Corporate-Tax Cut’s Winners: https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-removes-paper-at-odds-with-mnuchins-take-on-corporate-tax-cuts-winners-1506638463

Tax changes for graduate students under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: https://bcide.gitlab.io/post/gop-tax-plan/
H.R.1 – 155th Congress (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) 1 proposes changes to the US Tax Code that threatens to destroy the finances of STEM graduate students nationwide. The offending provision, 1204(a)(3), strikes section 117(d) 2 of the US Tax Code. This means that under the proposal, tuition waivers are considered taxable income.

For graduate students, this means an increase of thousands of dollars in owed federal taxes. Below I show a calculation for my own situation. The short of it is this: My federal taxes increase from ~7.5% of my income to ~31%. I will owe about $6300 more in federal taxes under this legislation. Like many other STEM students, my choices would be limited to taking on significant debt or quitting my program entirely.

The Republican War on College: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/republican-college/546308/

Trump's plan to tax colleges will harm higher education — but it's still a good idea: http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tax-plan-taxing-colleges-is-a-good-idea-2017-11
- James Miller

The Republican Tax Plan Is a Disaster for Families With Children: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/11/the-republican-tax-plan-is-a-disaster-for-families-with-children/
- Kevin Drum

The gains from cutting corporate tax rates: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/11/corporate-taxes-2.html
I’ve been reading in this area on and off since the 1980s, and I really don’t think these are phony results.

Entrepreneurship and State Taxation: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2018003pap.pdf
We find that new firm employment is negatively—and disproportionately—affected by corporate tax rates. We find little evidence of an effect of personal and sales taxes on entrepreneurial outcomes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/us/politics/johnson-amendment-churches-taxes-politics.html
nobody in the comments section seems to have even considered the comparison with universities

The GOP Tax Bills Are Infrastructure Bills Too. Here’s Why.: http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-republican-tax-bills-impact-infrastructure.html

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student GPA by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional four-point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. These findings suggest that college administrators face significant trade-offs when crafting policies related to Greek life on campus.

- III. Methodology has details
- it's an instrumental variable method paper

Table 5: Fraternity Membership and Grades

Do High School Sports Build or Reveal Character?: http://ftp.iza.org/dp11110.pdf
We examine the extent to which participation in high school athletics has beneficial effects on future education, labor market, and health outcomes. Due to the absence of plausible instruments in observational data, we use recently developed methods that relate selection on observables with selection on unobservables to estimate bounds on the causal effect of athletics participation. We analyze these effects in the US separately for men and women using three different nationally representative longitudinal data sets that each link high school athletics participation with later-life outcomes. We do not find consistent evidence of individual benefits reported in many previous studies – once we have accounted for selection, high school athletes are no more likely to attend college, earn higher wages, or participate in the labor force. However, we do find that men (but not women) who participated in high school athletics are more likely to exercise regularly as adults. Nevertheless, athletes are no less likely to be obese.

Online Social Network Effects in Labor Markets: Evidence From Facebook's Entry into College Campuses: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3381938
My estimates imply that access to Facebook for 4 years of college causes a 2.7 percentile increase in a cohort's average earnings, relative to the earnings of other individuals born in the same year.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/might-facebook-boost-wages.html
What Clockwork_Prior said. I was a college freshman when facebook first made its appearance and so I know that facebook's entry/exit cannot be treated as a quasi-random with respect to earnings. Facebook began at harvard, then expanded to other ivy league schools + places like stanford/MIT/CMU, before expanding into a larger set of universities.

Presuming the author is using a differences-in-differences research design, the estimates would be biased as they would essentially be calculating averaging earnings difference between Elite schools and non elite schools. If the sample is just restricted to the period where schools were simply elite, the problem still exist because facebook originated at Harvard and this becomes a comparison of Harvard earnings v.s. other schools.

Brown University's Glenn Loury: "We're arguing about labels, about what to call our holidays or which portraits to rearrange on the wall."

hard classics + basicish math

How Democratic or Republican is your job? This tool tells you: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/03/how-democratic-or-republican-is-your-job-this-tool-tells-you/?utm_term=.e19707abd9f1

http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/index.html

What you do and how you vote: http://www.pleeps.org/2017/01/07/what-you-do-and-how-you-vote/

trending blue across white-collar professions:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opinion/trump-fundraising-donors.html
https://twitter.com/adam_bonica/status/1174536380329803776
https://archive.is/r7YB6

https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1174735746088996864
https://archive.is/Cwrih
This is partly because the meaning of left and right changed during that period. Left used to about protecting workers. Now it's mainly about increasing the power of the elite class over the working class - thus their increased support.
--
yes, it is a different kind of left now

academia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics

The Legal Academy's Ideological Uniformity: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2953087

Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1007/s12129-018-9700-x
includes crosstab by discipline

https://www.conservativecriminology.com/uploads/5/6/1/7/56173731/lounsbery_9-25.pdf#page=28
Neil Gross, Solon Simmons
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS OF AMERICAN PROFESSORS

another crosstab
description of data sampling on page 21, meant to be representative of all undergraduate degree-granting institutions

Computer science 32.3 58.1 9.7

It’s finally out–The big review paper on the lack of political diversity in social psychology: https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/21/political-diversity-response-to-33-critiques/
http://righteousmind.com/viewpoint-diversity/
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/real-academic-diversity
http://quillette.com/2017/07/06/social-sciences-undergoing-purity-spiral/
What’s interesting about Haidt’s alternative interpretation of the liberal progress narrative is that he mentions two elements central to the narrative—private property and nations. And what has happened to a large extent is that as the failures of communism have become increasingly apparent many on the left—including social scientists—have shifted their activism away from opposing private property and towards other aspects, for example globalism.

But how do we know a similarly disastrous thing is not going to happen with globalism as happened with communism? What if some form of national and ethnic affiliation is a deep-seated part of human nature, and that trying to forcefully suppress it will eventually lead to a disastrous counter-reaction? What if nations don’t create conflict, but alleviate it? What if a decentralised structure is the best way for human society to function?

Most PhD students in the biological sciences will not go on to become academics. For these individuals, choosing the best career path can be difficult. Fortunately, there are many options that allow them to take advantage of skills they hone during graduate and postdoctoral work.

The declining interest in an academic career: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0184130

Results indicate that traditional lecture style teaching is associated with significantly higher student achievement.

The idea that venesection was a good thing, or at least not so bad, on the grounds that one in a few hundred people have hemochromatosis (in Northern Europe) reminds me of the people who don’t wear a seatbelt, since it would keep them from being thrown out of their convertible into a waiting haystack, complete with nubile farmer’s daughter. Daughters. It could happen. But it’s not the way to bet.

Back in the good old days, Charles II, age 53, had a fit one Sunday evening, while fondling two of his mistresses.

Monday they bled him (cupping and scarifying) of eight ounces of blood. Followed by an antimony emetic, vitriol in peony water, purgative pills, and a clyster. Followed by another clyster after two hours. Then syrup of blackthorn, more antimony, and rock salt. Next, more laxatives, white hellebore root up the nostrils. Powdered cowslip flowers. More purgatives. Then Spanish Fly. They shaved his head and stuck blistering plasters all over it, plastered the soles of his feet with tar and pigeon-dung, then said good-night.

...

Friday. The king was worse. He tells them not to let poor Nelly starve. They try the Oriental Bezoar Stone, and more bleeding. Dies at noon.

Most people didn’t suffer this kind of problem with doctors, since they never saw one. Charles had six. Now Bach and Handel saw the same eye surgeon, John Taylor – who blinded both of them. Not everyone can put that on his resume!

You may wonder how medicine continued to exist, if it had a negative effect, on the whole. There’s always the placebo effect – at least there would be, if it existed. Any real placebo effect is very small: I’d guess exactly zero. But there is regression to the mean. You see the doctor when you’re feeling worse than average – and afterwards, if he doesn’t kill you outright, you’re likely to feel better. Which would have happened whether you’d seen him or not, but they didn’t often do RCTs back in the day – I think James Lind was the first (1747).

Back in the late 19th century, Christian Scientists did better than others when sick, because they didn’t believe in medicine. For reasons I think mistaken, because Mary Baker Eddy rejected the reality of the entire material world, but hey, it worked. Parenthetically, what triggered all that New Age nonsense in 19th century New England? Hash?

This did not change until fairly recently. Sometime in the early 20th medicine, clinical medicine, what doctors do, hit break-even. Now we can’t do without it. I wonder if there are, or will be, other examples of such a pile of crap turning (mostly) into a real science.

good tweet: https://twitter.com/bowmanthebard/status/897146294191390720
The brilliant GP I've had for 35+ years has retired. How can I find another one who meets my requirements?

1 is overweight
2 drinks more than officially recommended amounts
3 has an amused, tolerant atitude to human failings
4 is well aware that we're all going to die anyway, & there are better or worse ways to die
5 has a healthy skeptical attitude to mainstream medical science
6 is wholly dismissive of "a|ternative” medicine
7 believes in evolution
8 thinks most diseases get better without intervention, & knows the dangers of false positives
9 understands the base rate fallacy

EconPapers: Was Civil War Surgery Effective?: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/htrhcecon/444.htm
contra Greg Cochran:
To shed light on the subject, I analyze a data set created by Dr. Edmund Andrews, a Civil war surgeon with the 1st Illinois Light Artillery. Dr. Andrews’s data can be rendered into an observational data set on surgical intervention and recovery, with controls for wound location and severity. The data also admits instruments for the surgical decision. My analysis suggests that Civil War surgery was effective, and increased the probability of survival of the typical wounded soldier, with average treatment effect of 0.25-0.28.

Medical Prehistory: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/
What ancient medical treatments worked?

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76878
In some very, very limited conditions, bleeding?
--
Bad for you 99% of the time.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76947
Colchicine – used to treat gout – discovered by the Ancient Greeks.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76973
Dracunculiasis (Guinea worm)
Wrap the emerging end of the worm around a stick and slowly pull it out.
(3,500 years later, this remains the standard treatment.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebers_Papyrus

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/medical-prehistory/#comment-76971
Some of the progress is from formal medicine, most is from civil engineering, better nutrition ( ag science and physical chemistry), less crowded housing.

Nurses vs doctors: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/nurses-vs-doctors/
Medicine, the things that doctors do, was an ineffective pseudoscience until fairly recently. Until 1800 or so, they were wrong about almost everything. Bleeding, cupping, purging, the four humors – useless. In the 1800s, some began to realize that they were wrong, and became medical nihilists that improved outcomes by doing less. Some patients themselves came to this realization, as when Civil War casualties hid from the surgeons and had better outcomes. Sometime in the early 20th century, MDs reached break-even, and became an increasingly positive influence on human health. As Lewis Thomas said, medicine is the youngest science.

Nursing, on the other hand, has always been useful. Just making sure that a patient is warm and nourished when too sick to take care of himself has helped many survive. In fact, some of the truly crushing epidemics have been greatly exacerbated when there were too few healthy people to take care of the sick.

Nursing must be old, but it can’t have existed forever. Whenever it came into existence, it must have changed the selective forces acting on the human immune system. Before nursing, being sufficiently incapacitated would have been uniformly fatal – afterwards, immune responses that involved a period of incapacitation (with eventual recovery) could have been selectively favored.

when MDs broke even: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/nurses-vs-doctors/#comment-58981
I’d guess the 1930s. Lewis Thomas thought that he was living through big changes. They had a working serum therapy for lobar pneumonia ( antibody-based). They had many new vaccines ( diphtheria in 1923, whopping cough in 1926, BCG and tetanus in 1927, yellow fever in 1935, typhus in 1937.) Vitamins had been mostly worked out. Insulin was discovered in 1929. Blood transfusions. The sulfa drugs, first broad-spectrum antibiotics, showed up in 1935.

DALYs per doctor: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/
The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden – the number of years lost. I’m wondering just much harm premodern medicine did, per doctor. How many healthy years of life did a typical doctor destroy (net) in past times?

...

It looks as if the average doctor (in Western medicine) killed a bunch of people over his career ( when contrasted with doing nothing). In the Charles Manson class.

Eventually the market saw through this illusion. Only took a couple of thousand years.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100741
That a very large part of healthcare spending is done for non-health reasons. He has a chapter on this in his new book, also check out his paper “Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism” http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/showcare.pdf
--
I ran into too much stupidity to finish the article. Hanson’s a loon. For example when he talks about the paradox of blacks being more sentenced on drug offenses than whites although they use drugs at similar rate. No paradox: guys go to the big house for dealing, not for using. Where does he live – Mars?

I had the same reaction when Hanson parroted some dipshit anthropologist arguing that the stupid things people do while drunk are due to social expectations, not really the alcohol.
Horseshit.

I don’t think that being totally unable to understand everybody around you necessarily leads to deep insights.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100744
What I’ve wondered is if there was anything that doctors did that actually was helpful and if perhaps that little bit of success helped them fool people into thinking the rest of it helped.
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Setting bones. extracting arrows: spoon of Diocles. Colchicine for gout. Extracting the Guinea worm. Sometimes they got away with removing the stone. There must be others.
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Quinine is relatively recent: post-1500. Obstetrical forceps also. Caesarean deliveries were almost always fatal to the mother until fairly recently.

Opium has been around for a long while : it works.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100839
If pre-modern medicine was indeed worse than useless – how do you explain no one noticing that patients who get expensive treatments are worse off than those who didn’t?
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were worse off. People are kinda dumb – you’ve noticed?
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My impression is that while people may be “kinda dumb”, ancient customs typically aren’t.
Even if we assume that all people who lived prior to the 19th century were too dumb to make the rational observation, wouldn’t you expect this ancient practice to be subject to selective pressure?
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Your impression is wrong. Do you think that there some slick reason for Carthaginians incinerating their first-born?

Theodoric of York, bloodletting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvff3TViXmY

details on blood-letting and hemochromatosis: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/dalys-per-doctor/#comment-100746

Starting Over: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/starting-over/
Looking back on it, human health would have … [more]

Jason Stanley:
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jason-stanley/
https://twitter.com/ortoiseortoise/status/905098767493455872
https://archive.is/5XPs9
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/swinburne-jason-stanley-homosexuality/
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/10/05/philosophy-professor-under-fire-for-online-post/

https://twitter.com/RoundSqrCupola/status/915314002514857985
https://twitter.com/ortoiseortoise/status/915395627844063233
https://archive.is/1sgGU
https://archive.is/5CUJG

Epistemic Exploitation: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ergo/12405314.0003.022/--epistemic-exploitation?rgn=main;view=fulltext
On Benefiting from Injustice: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/214594

https://twitter.com/ortoiseortoise/status/917476129166028801
https://archive.is/J57Gl
this Halloween, "straw men" come to life
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~corp1468/Research_&_Writing_files/Does%20Feminist%20Philosophy_KCL%20talk.pdf
Bauer’s answer to this puzzle is that feminist philosophy must involve a radical reimagining
of philosophy itself – philosophy, to be feminist, must become more
concerned with lived reality, and less concerned with the metaphilosophical goal, as
Bernard Williams put it, of ‘getting it right’ (1989, 3). Thus Bauer endorses the view
that ‘feminist philosophy’ is a sort of contradiction in terms, a contradiction that
must be resolved through a radical revision of philosophy itself.

https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/917336658239946752
https://archive.is/rBa47
Voila. This @LizzieWurtzel quote is the logical endpoint of identity epistemology/ethics discourse. Not sarcasm:
https://longreads.com/2017/06/23/exile-in-guyville/
WURTZEL: I see sexism everywhere, and I think it has to do with that. I’ve begun to blame sexism for everything. I’ve become so overwhelmed by it that, even though I love Bob Dylan, I don’t want to listen to Bob Dylan, because I don’t want to listen to men anymore. I don’t care what men have to say about anything. I only want to pay attention to what women do. I only want to read women. I’ll tell you how intense my feelings about this are: You know The Handmaid’s Tale, the show, which is feminist in its nature? Because men are behind it, I don’t want to watch it. That is the extent to which I am so truly horrified by what is going on.

Scholars, Eyewitnesses, and Flesh-Witnesses of War: A Tense Relationship: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/267004/

Confession Booth: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/confession-booth-frost
The trouble with the trauma industry

Zipf law

Some Thoughts and Advice for Our Students and All Students: https://jmp.princeton.edu/announcements/some-thoughts-and-advice-our-students-and-all-students
California Today: Berkeley’s New Chancellor and a ‘Free Speech Year’: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/us/california-today-berkeley-chancellor-free-speech.html

from the New Criterion

The failure of Communism was consecrated in the fall of the Soviet Union. The remarkable thing is that, as in most cases when prophecy fails, the faith never faltered. Indeed, an alternative version had long been maturing, though cast into the shadows for a time by enthusiasm for the quick fix of revolution. It had, however, been maturing for at least a century and already had a notable repertoire of institutions available. We may call it Olympianism, because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement. And just as Communism had been a political project passing itself off as the ultimate in scientific understanding, so Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy—the universities.

We may define Olympianism as a vision of human betterment to be achieved on a global scale by forging the peoples of the world into a single community based on the universal enjoyment of appropriate human rights. Olympianism is the cast of mind dedicated to this end, which is believed to correspond to the triumph of reason and community over superstition and hatred. It is a politico-moral package in which the modern distinction between morals and politics disappears into the aspiration for a shared mode of life in which the communal transcends individual life. To be a moral agent is in these terms to affirm a faith in a multicultural humanity whose social and economic conditions will be free from the causes of current misery. Olympianism is thus a complex long-term vision, and contemporary Western Olympians partake of different fragments of it.

To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self-ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them. Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice. The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olympianism.

To be an Olympian is to be entangled in a complex dialectic involving elitism and egalitarianism. The foundational elitism of the Olympian lies in self-ascribed rationality, generally picked up on an academic campus. Egalitarianism involves a formal adherence to democracy as a rejection of all forms of traditional authority, but with no commitment to taking any serious notice of what the people actually think. Olympians instruct mortals, they do not obey them. Ideally, Olympianism spreads by rational persuasion, as prejudice gives way to enlightenment. Equally ideally, democracy is the only tolerable mode of social coordination, but until the majority of people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding. Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice. The overriding passion of the Olympian is thus to educate the ignorant and everything is treated in educational terms. Laws for example are enacted not only to shape the conduct of the people, but also to send messages to them. A belief in the power of role models, public relations campaigns, and above all fierce restrictions on raising sensitive questions devant le peuple are all part of pedagogic Olympianism.

...

One of the central problems of Olympianism has always been with the nation state and its derivative, nationalism. A world of nation states is one of constant potential antipathy. It makes something of a mockery of the term “world community.” Hence it is a basic tenet of Olympianism that the day of the nation state has gone. It is an anachronism. And on this point, events have played into the hands of this project. The homogeneity of these nation states is a condition of democracy, but it also facilitates the wars in which they have engaged. If, however, homogeneity were to be lost as states became multicultural, then they would turn into empires, and their freedom of action would be seriously constrained. Empires can only be ruled, to the extent that they are ruled, from the top. They are ideal soil for oligarchy. Olympianism is very enthusiastic about this new development, which generates multiculturalism. Those who rule a rainbow society will have little trouble with an unruly national will, because no such thing remains possible. The Olympian lawyer and administrator will adjudicate the interests of a heterogeneous population according to some higher set of principles. Indeed, quite a lot of this work can be contracted out to independent agencies of the state, agencies whose judgments lead on to judicial tribunals in cases of conflict. This is part of a process in which the autonomy of civil institutions (of firms to employ whom they want, of schools to teach curricula they choose, and so on) is steadily eroded by centralized standards. Multiculturalism in the name of abstract moral standards has the effect of restricting freedom across the board.

On the role of radical feminism in the decline of civilization.

Marx provided the model for all subsequent movements aiming to take power. His “make your own tribe” kit was found useful by nationalists, anarchists, and many brands of socialist. Hitler made the most creative use of it by playing down victimization and representing every Aryan as a superior type of person. It took the world in arms to get rid of him. But before long, revolutionaries discovered that a revolution based on the proletarian tribe only really worked if you were dealing with pretty unsophisticated peoples—preferably non-Europeans who lacked all experience of freedom and genuine political life. In socially mobile European states, the workers mostly found better things to do with their time than waste it on revolutionary committees and the baby talk of political demonstrations. Something new was needed.

It was provided by such socialists as Mussolini and Lenin who adopted the principle of the Praetorian Guard: a tightly knit vanguard party, which could use the masses as ventriloquial dummies and seek power on its own terms. This development was part of _a wider tendency towards the emergence of oligarchies ruling through democratic slogans_.

...

In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan’s radical feminists. It was a tribe constructed out of women who had taken some sort of degree and were living domestic lives. Technology had largely liberated them from the rigors of beating, sweeping, and cleaning, while pharmacology had released them from excessive procreation. In tactical terms, radical feminists made one innovation that has turned out to be crucial to the destiny of the West over the last half century. They suppressed almost completely the idea that their project involved a transfer of power and operated entirely on the moralistic principle that their demands corresponded to justice.

What lay behind this momentous development? It is a complicated question, but I think that Diana Schaub understood the essence of it in her essay “On the Character of Generation X”: 1

[Betty] Friedan was right that the malaise these privileged women were experiencing was a result of “a slow death of the mind and spirit.” _But she was wrong in saying that the problem had no name—its name was boredom._ Feminism was born of boredom, not oppression. And what was the solution to this quandary? Feminists clamored to become wage-slaves; they resolutely fled the challenge of leisure.

...

The most obvious fact about it is one that we can hardly mention, now that the revolution has succeeded, without embarrassment or derision, because it is a fact which powerful contemporary forces make recessive. It is simply that this civilization is, in the crude terms of creative hits, the achievement of white males. The history of Western civilization is a succession of clever men developing the set of traditions or inventing the benefits which, intertwined, constitute the West. And from Thales and Euclid to Einstein and George Gershwin, nearly all of them were male. They constitute the set of “dead white males” whom the radical revolutionaries in the sub-academic culture have denigrated and vowed to remove from their pedestals. I once heard a feminist put it this way: “There’s no such thing as a great mind.” This doctrine is so powerful that the simple factual statement that it has been men who have created what is commonly meant by Western (and for that matter, any other) civilization seems like an insensitive affront to the equality of mankind. And the next step in my argument must be to deal with this as a problem.

...

_The key to modern Western civilization is its openness to talent wherever found._ The feminist demand for collective quotas has overturned this basic feature of our civilization. The crucial point is that the character of a civilization is revealed by its understanding of achievement. European civilization responded to achievement wherever it could be found. To replace achievement by quota entitlements is to destroy one civilization from within and to replace it with another. We are no longer what we were. The problem is to explain how the West collapsed.

...

This example not only illuminates the success of radical feminism, but also reveals something of the long-term significance of these massive shifts of power. For the real threat to universities came not from students but from government. Students were a minor irritant in academic life, but governments were now bent on destroying the autonomy of the institutions of civil society. Students merely functioned as their fifth column. They had the effect of forcing universities even more into a public domain. Students wanted the academic to become the political and that was the effect they had. _Before 1960 universities largely ran their own affairs. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, they had all succumbed to the state subsidies that destroyed their autonomy._

...

In a few significant areas, however, no such demands are made. These areas are either where women graduates have no wish to go (rough outdoor work) or where lack of ability could lead to instant disaster, such as brain surgery or piloting commercial aircraft. Women are to be found in both, but only on the basis of ability. Universities are obviously a soft touch because the consequences of educational betrayal take decades to emerge. The effect of university quotas for “gender diversity” for example has often been to fill humanities departments with women in order to equalize numbers “distorted” (one might say) by technology and the hard sciences where even passably able women are hard to come by. Many women in the humanities departments are indeed very able, but many are not, and they have often prospered by setting up fanciful ideological courses (especially in women’s studies), _which can hardly pretend to be academic at all_.

What however of areas where women are patently unsuited—such as the army, the police force, or fire fighting? They have in fact all been under attack because although women are unsuited to the rough work at the bottom, these areas have enviable managerial opportunities higher up. They are _one more irresistible gravy train_. The fire-fighting case was dramatized by the New York judicial decision that a test of fitness for the force that nearly all women failed must be discriminatory, and therefore illegal, an extension of the idea of “the rule of law” far beyond any serious meaning. This was the doctrine called “disparate impact.” Similar considerations have affected women in the armed forces. Standards of entry have been lowered in order that women may qualify. One argument for so doing is that the rejected tests looked for qualities only rarely needed in the field, and that may indeed be true. Yet, the idea that soldiers are heroic figures doing something that women generally cannot do has forever been part of the self-understanding of men, even those who have never heard a shot fired in anger. A small boy inclined to cry out at the sting of iodine or the prick of an injection might be told “be a soldier.” Today according to the feminist doctrine he is more likely to be told to express his feelings.

The assault of women on areas such as the church raises similar issues. In principle there is not the slightest reason why women should not take on a priestly role, and one might indeed suspect that feminists may be right in diagnosing resistance in part to an unhealthy attitude to women on the part of some of the clergy. In a pastoral role, women might well be better than men, as some women are in politics. The problem is that women priests raise very awkward questions of Christian theology. Jesus selected only male disciples. Was the son of God then merely a creature of his own culture? Here most conspicuously the entry of women changes entirely the conception of the activity and not for the better. Female clergy have done little to reverse the current decline of the church. Indeed while women as individuals have often enhanced what they have joined, _the entry of women in general has seldom done much for any area previously dominated by men—except, significantly, bureaucracy_.

...

Let us now return to the teasing question of _why the male custodians of our civilization sold the pass_. Some element of _cowardice_ must certainly be recognized, because the radicals were tribal warriors making ferocious faces and stamping their feet. The defenders were white, male, and middle class, and the radicals had long been engaged in a campaign to erode the morale of each of these abstract categories. They denoted racism, sexism, and elitism respectively. Caricatured in terms of these abstractions, men found it difficult not to be written off as oppressors of women. Again, _the defenders were not united_. Many had been longstanding advocates of liberal feminism and from confusion believed that radical feminism was _merely a rather hysterical version of classical liberalism_. Retreat is a notoriously difficult maneuver to control. Each concession could be used to demand further concessions in the name of consistency. Hence the appearance in all English-speaking countries of legislation mandating equal opportunities—and who could possibly be against that? Before long, the movement had taken over the universities, many public bodies, industrial firms and, above all, the media. _Quite rapidly, hiring for status-giving jobs requiring degrees had become closely circumscribed by a set of rules. The dogma was that 50 percent of all jobs belonged to women, though the reality of quotas was long denied._

There are, of course, deeper currents. One of them is that men tended to react to radical feminism with a high-minded feeling that nothing but justice, a notoriously fluid idea, should determine public policy. _The balancing of … [more]

Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors that reduce trust are: i) a recent history of traumatic experiences, even though the passage of time reduces this effect fairly rapidly; ii) belonging to a group that historically felt discriminated against, such as minorities (black in particular) and, to a lesser extent, women; iii) being economically unsuccessful in terms of income and education; iv) living in a racially mixed community and/or in one with a high degree of income disparity. Religious beliefs and ethnic origins do not significantly affect trust. The latter result may be an indication that the American melting pot at least up to a point works, in terms of homogenizing attitudes of different cultures, even though racial cleavages leading to low trust are still quite high.

Understanding Trust: http://www.nber.org/papers/w13387
In this paper we resolve this puzzle by recognizing that trust has two components: a belief-based one and a preference based one. While the sender's behavior reflects both, we show that WVS-like measures capture mostly the belief-based component, while questions on past trusting behavior are better at capturing the preference component of trust.

MEASURING TRUST: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/laibson/files/measuring_trust.pdf
We combine two experiments and a survey to measure trust and trustworthiness— two key components of social capital. Standard attitudinal survey questions about trust predict trustworthy behavior in our experiments much better than they predict trusting behavior. Trusting behavior in the experiments is predicted by past trusting behavior outside of the experiments. When individuals are closer socially, both trust and trustworthiness rise. Trustworthiness declines when partners are of different races or nationalities. High status individuals are able to elicit more trustworthiness in others.

What is Social Capital? The Determinants of Trust and Trustworthiness: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7216
Using a sample of Harvard undergraduates, we analyze trust and social capital in two experiments. Trusting behavior and trustworthiness rise with social connection; differences in race and nationality reduce the level of trustworthiness. Certain individuals appear to be persistently more trusting, but these people do not say they are more trusting in surveys. Survey questions about trust predict trustworthiness not trust. Only children are less trustworthy. People behave in a more trustworthy manner towards higher status individuals, and therefore status increases earnings in the experiment. As such, high status persons can be said to have more social capital.

Trust and Cheating: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18509
We find that: i) both parties to a trust exchange have implicit notions of what constitutes cheating even in a context without promises or messages; ii) these notions are not unique - the vast majority of senders would feel cheated by a negative return on their trust/investment, whereas a sizable minority defines cheating according to an equal split rule; iii) these implicit notions affect the behavior of both sides to the exchange in terms of whether to trust or cheat and to what extent. Finally, we show that individual's notions of what constitutes cheating can be traced back to two classes of values instilled by parents: cooperative and competitive. The first class of values tends to soften the notion while the other tightens it.

Nationalism and Ethnic-Based Trust: Evidence from an African Border Region: https://u.osu.edu/robinson.1012/files/2015/12/Robinson_NationalismTrust-1q3q9u1.pdf
These results offer microlevel evidence that a strong and salient national identity can diminish ethnic barriers to trust in diverse societies.

One Team, One Nation: Football, Ethnic Identity, and Conflict in Africa: http://conference.nber.org/confer//2017/SI2017/DEV/Durante_Depetris-Chauvin.pdf
Do collective experiences that prime sentiments of national unity reduce interethnic tensions and conflict? We examine this question by looking at the impact of national football teams’ victories in sub-Saharan Africa. Combining individual survey data with information on over 70 official matches played between 2000 and 2015, we find that individuals interviewed in the days after a victory of their country’s national team are less likely to report a strong sense of ethnic identity and more likely to trust people of other ethnicities than those interviewed just before. The effect is sizable and robust and is not explained by generic euphoria or optimism. Crucially, national victories do not only affect attitudes but also reduce violence. Indeed, using plausibly exogenous variation from close qualifications to the Africa Cup of Nations, we find that countries that (barely) qualified experience significantly less conflict in the following six months than countries that (barely) did not. Our findings indicate that, even where ethnic tensions have deep historical roots, patriotic shocks can reduce inter-ethnic tensions and have a tangible impact on conflict.

Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?: http://www.columbia.edu/~mh2245/papers1/HHPW.pdf
We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to public goods provision—–what we term “preferences,” “technology,” and “strategy selection” mechanisms—–and run a series of experimental games that permit us to compare the explanatory power of distinct mechanisms within each of these three families. Results from games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects from a slum neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, suggest that successful public goods provision in homogenous ethnic communities can be attributed to a strategy selection mechanism: in similar settings, co-ethnics play cooperative equilibria, whereas non-co-ethnics do not. In addition, we find evidence for a technology mechanism: co-ethnics are more closely linked on social networks and thus plausibly better able to support cooperation through the threat of social sanction. We find no evidence for prominent preference mechanisms that emphasize the commonality of tastes within ethnic groups or a greater degree of altruism toward co-ethnics, and only weak evidence for technology mechanisms that focus on the impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.

does it generalize to first world?

Higher Intelligence Groups Have Higher Cooperation Rates in the Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma: https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp8499.html
The initial cooperation rates are similar, it increases in the groups with higher intelligence to reach almost full cooperation, while declining in the groups with lower intelligence. The difference is produced by the cumulation of small but persistent differences in the response to past cooperation of the partner. In higher intelligence subjects, cooperation after the initial stages is immediate and becomes the default mode, defection instead requires more time. For lower intelligence groups this difference is absent. Cooperation of higher intelligence subjects is payoff sensitive, thus not automatic: in a treatment with lower continuation probability there is no difference between different intelligence groups

Why societies cooperate: https://voxeu.org/article/why-societies-cooperate
Three attributes are often suggested to generate cooperative behaviour – a good heart, good norms, and intelligence. This column reports the results of a laboratory experiment in which groups of players benefited from learning to cooperate. It finds overwhelming support for the idea that intelligence is the primary condition for a socially cohesive, cooperative society. Warm feelings towards others and good norms have only a small and transitory effect.

individual payoff, etc.:

Trust, Values and False Consensus: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18460
Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming trust beliefs about the same pool of potential partners - i.e., more (less) trustworthy individuals form more optimistic (pessimistic) trust beliefs - and that this tendency continues to color trust beliefs after several rounds of game-play. Moreover, we show that one's own type/trustworthiness can be traced back to the values parents transmit to their children during their upbringing. In a second closely-related experiment, we show the economic impact of mis-calibrated trust beliefs stemming from false consensus. Miscalibrated beliefs lower participants' experimental trust game earnings by about 20 percent on average.

The Right Amount of Trust: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15344
We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Our interpretation is that highly trusting individuals tend to assume too much social risk and to be cheated more often, ultimately performing less well than those with a belief close to the mean trustworthiness of the population. On the other hand, individuals with overly pessimistic beliefs avoid being cheated, but give up profitable opportunities, therefore underperforming. The cost of either too much or too little trust is comparable to the income lost by forgoing college.

...

This framework allows us to show that income-maximizing trust typically exceeds the trust level of the average person as well as to estimate the distribution of income lost to trust mistakes. We find that although a majority of individuals has well calibrated beliefs, a non-trivial proportion of the population (10%) has trust beliefs sufficiently poorly calibrated to lower income by more than 13%.

Do Trust and … [more]

Carl Sagan w/ vaguely related prediction: https://twitter.com/KStreetHipster/status/894574338409672708

Warne and Astle looked at 29 best-selling undergraduate textbooks, which is where psychology students learn about intelligence, because less than 10% of graduate courses offer an intelligence option.

3.3% of textbook space is dedicated to intelligence. Given its influence, this is not very much.

The most common topics start well, with IQ and Spearman’s g, but do not go on to the best validated, evidence-led Cattell-Horn-Carol meta-analytic summary, but a side-stream, speculative triarchic theory from Sternberg; and a highly speculative and non-specific sketch of an idea about multiple intelligences Gardner. The last is a particular puzzle, since it really is a whimsical notion that motor skill is no different from analytical problem solving. All must have prizes.
Commonly, environmental influences are discussed, genetic ones rarely.

What Do Undergraduates Learn About Human Intelligence? An Analysis of Introductory Psychology Textbooks: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZOTl3clpiX0JKckk/view

Education or Indoctrination? The Accuracy of Introductory Psychology Textbooks in Covering Controversial Topics and Urban Legends About Psychology: http://sci-hub.tw/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-016-9539-7

Twenty-four leading introductory psychology textbooks were surveyed for their coverage of a number of controversial topics (e.g., media violence, narcissism epidemic, multiple intelligences) and scientific urban legends (e.g., Kitty Genovese, Mozart Effect) for their factual accuracy. Results indicated numerous errors of factual reporting across textbooks, particularly related to failing to inform students of the controversial nature of some research fields and repeating some scientific urban legends as if true. Recommendations are made for improving the accuracy of introductory textbooks.

this is completely unrelated AFAICT:

Mapping the scale of the narcissism epidemic: Increases in narcissism 2002–2007 within ethnic groups: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656608000949

The increasing numbers of Asian-Americans at the UCs over time may have masked changes in narcissism, as Asian-Americans score lower on the NPI. When examined within ethnic groups, Trzesniewski et al.’s data show that NPI scores increased significantly between 2002 and 2007 at twice the rate of the yearly change found over 24 years in Twenge et al. (2008a). The overall means also show a significant increase 2002–2007. Thus the available evidence suggests that college students are endorsing progressively more narcissistic personality traits over the generations.

Birth Cohort Increases in Narcissistic Personality Traits Among American College Students, 1982–2009: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550609355719

Both studies demonstrate significant increases in narcissism over time (Study 1 d = .37, 1982–2008, when campus is controlled; Study 2 d = .37, 1994–2009). These results support a generational differences model of individual personality traits reflecting changes in culture.

could this just be a selection effect (more people attending)?

http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2014/08/how-can-public-research-universities.html
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/13/report-shows-public-higher-educations-reliance-tuition
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2015/06/federal-and-state-funding-of-higher-education
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/06/12/study-us-higher-education-receives-more-federal-state-governments
http://www.air.org/news/press-release/taxpayer-subsidies-most-colleges-and-universities-average-between-8000-more

Federal and State Funding of Higher Education: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/assets/2015/06/federal_state_funding_higher_education_final.pdf

Financial Report FISCAL YEAR 2017: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/final_harvard_university_financial_report_2017.pdf
Report of the Treasurer: https://finance.princeton.edu/princeton-financial-overv/report-of-the-treasurer/index.xml
Financial Reports: https://your.yale.edu/work-yale/finance-and-business-operations/accounting/financial-reports
Stanford University Annual Financial Report: http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/SU_AnnualFinancialReport_2016.pdf

- Huntington, 2004

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/889953571650891776

The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability--within acceptable conditions for evolution--of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.

...

Estimated to number about 20 million in 2000, of whom 40 percent were American, this elite is expected to double in size by 2010. Comprising fewer than 4 percent of the American people, these transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations. In the coming years, one corporation executive confidently predicted, "the only people who will care about national boundaries are politicians."

...

In August 1804, Walter Scott finished writing The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Therein, he
asked whether

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
'This is my own, my native Land?'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned, . . .
From wandering on a foreign strand?"

A contemporary answer to Scott's question is: Yes, the number of dead souls is small
but growing among America's business, professional, intellectual and academic elites.

My time here has thus given me a rare vantage point to judge many of the claims made over the course of these campaigns. In few places is this sort of outside perspective more useful than when judging the claims of an American jeremiad. Jeremiading is a fine art. Its practitioners hail from lands both left and right, but my sympathies lie with the cultural traditionalists. You know the type. In America they find little but a shallow husk. For some it is the husk of a nation once great; for others it is the decaying remains of Western civilization itself. Few of these gloom-filled minds deny that wonders have marked their days on this earth. It is not that advances do not happen. It is just that each celebrated advance masks hundreds of more quiet destructions. These laments for worlds gone by are poignant; the best are truly beautiful. The best of the best, however, do not just lament. Every one of their portraits of the past is a depiction of a future—or more properly, a way of living worth devoting a future to.

I have read a few of these books in 2017. The best of these (both for its lyricism and for the demands it places on the intellect) is Anthony Esolen's newest book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. This blog is not the place for a full review. I plan to write a proper review for it and a few of the other recently published books of this type for a less personal publication than the Scholar's Stage. Here I will just share one of my strongest reactions to the book—a thought that occurred again and again as I drifted through its pages. Esolen presents a swarm of maladies sickening American society, ranging from a generation of children suffocated by helicopter parenting to a massive state bureaucracy openly hostile to virtuous living. My reaction to each of his carefully drawn portraits was the same: this problem is even worse in China.

Are you worried about political correctness gone awry, weaponized by mediocrities to defame the worthy, suffocating truth, holding honest inquiry hostage through fear and terror? That problem is worse in China.

Do you lament the loss of beauty in public life? Its loss as a cherished ideal of not just art and oratory but in the building of homes, chapels, bridges, and buildings? Its disappearance in the comings-and-goings of everyday life? That problem is worse in China.

Do you detest a rich, secluded, and self-satisfied cultural elite that despises, distrusts, and derides the uneducated and unwashed masses not lucky enough to live in one of their chosen urban hubs? That problem is worse in China.

Are you sickened by crass materialism? Wealth chased, gained, and wasted for nothing more than vain display? Are you oppressed by the sight of children denied the joys of childhood, guided from one carefully structured resume-builder to the next by parents eternally hovering over their shoulders? Do you dread a hulking, bureaucratized leviathan, unaccountable to the people it serves, and so captured by special interests that even political leaders cannot control it? Are you worried by a despotic national government that plays king-maker in the economic sphere and crushes all opposition to its social programs into the dust? Do you fear a culture actively hostile to the free exercise of religion? Hostility that not only permeates through every layer of society, but is backed by the awesome power of the state?

These too are all worse in China.

Only on one item from Esolen's catalogue of decline can American society plausibly be described as more self-destructive than China's. China has not hopped headlong down the rabbit's hole of gender-bending. The Chinese have thus far proved impervious to this nonsense. But it would not be meet to conclude from this that Chinese society's treatment of sex is healthier than the West's.

https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/07/25/on-the-precipice-of-the-kali-yuga/
interesting comments:
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/07/25/on-the-precipice-of-the-kali-yuga/comment-page-1/#comment-3091
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/07/25/on-the-precipice-of-the-kali-yuga/comment-page-1/#comment-3093
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/07/25/on-the-precipice-of-the-kali-yuga/comment-page-1/#comment-3109
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/07/25/on-the-precipice-of-the-kali-yuga/comment-page-1/#comment-3130
Re: authoritarianism and all that. I sometimes describe modern China as “slouching towards totalitarianism.” Bill Bishop descried it recently as a “leninist panopticon.”

(e.g. here http://cmp.hku.hk/2017/07/20/big-data-big-concerns/ here https://amp.ft.com/content/5ec7093c-6e06-11e7-b9c7-15af748b60d0 and here https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d676a4e3267444e/share_p.html# ).

But I think we need to dispense with some illusions. The elites of the CPC are unrelentingly hostile towards the West. They are King Goujian. They won’t be satisfied until China has displaced the United States as the world’s super power and they have the power to control the entire Chinese diaspora. (For those not familiar with the last bit see here http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2017/chinas-operation-australia/soft-power.html and http://insidestory.org.au/beijings-guoqing-versus-australias-way-of-life ). On the long term will not tolerate an India or Japan that is not subservient, and they are not afraid to interfere with protected liberties in Western countries as long as Chinese-speakers are involved. For the most part they get away with it, as the censorship and intimidation they exercise in Western China-towns is all done in the Chinese language.

https://www.quora.com/Is-Chinese-history-taught-unbiasedly-in-China-Are-historical-figures-portrayed-as-heroes-villains/answer/Jamin-Chen-1
https://archive.is/XVRRC
While the book is primarily designed for overseas Chinese (hence it is bilingual), it is published by the Chinese government and is used in some Chinese schools in America to teach Chinese history. So presumably, students in China are taught something similar in their schools.

...

The Korean War is unabashedly called the “War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea,” while the Chinese title adds the phrase 保家卫国, or “defend our country and homes.” Notice how the book does not mention anything about the North Korean invasion, but it does mention how the US sent troops to Korea and how the Chinese involvement in the war “crushed the imperialists’ aggressive ambitions.”

In most US/Western textbooks, only three events in Chinese history post-1949 are extensively covered: the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen Square, while other events are scantly acknowledged. This book covers all of Chinese history up until around 1999 (the year of Macau’s return to China), but between 1949 and 1999 it mentions three events: the “War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea,” Zhou Enlai’s diplomacy, Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up, and Hong Kong’s return to China.

...
--
I actually agree that Western textbooks have a more objective view of history, or at least they’re better at hiding their bias.

My point is that there is bias in every country’s textbooks; how much bias is present and how the bias manifests is another question.
--
And you did a good job. I’ve just seen way too many false equivocations on western bias vs Chinese bias and may be a bit touchy. Apologies.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/01/06/tencent_s_wechat_worldwide_internet_users_are_voluntarily_submitting_to.html
In the last few years, usage of the mobile messaging app WeChat (Weixin), developed by Chinese corporation Tencent, has skyrocketed not only inside China but also around the world. For 500 million mobile users in mainland China, WeChat is one of the only options for mobile messaging available, due to frequent or permanent blockage of apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Line, Twitter, and Facebook. For more than 100 million mobile users in the rest of the world, a highly polished user experience, celebrity marketing, and the promise of “free calls and texts” has proven to be nearly irresistible for far-flung members of the Chinese diaspora. This global user base also includes the Tibetan exile diaspora, who through WeChat have become connected on both sides of the Himalayas in near real time like never before.

Beijing Hinders Free Speech in America: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/opinion/beijing-free-speech-america.html

https://visegradpost.com/en/2017/07/24/full-speech-of-v-orban-will-europe-belong-to-europeans/
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/19/15998154/netanyahu-orban-crazy-eu-bashing-hot-mic
https://www.defendevropa.org/2017/population-replacement/orban-plan-declining-population/
https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/feminist-nationalism/

Where many philosophy departments either capitulated or accommodated to the coming wave of leftist politicisation, Sydney's had two leading members, David Armstrong and David Stove, who were associated with Quadrant and the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, and were not prepared to compromise with the Left. The battle lines of the era, normally dividing parties who had never met each other, were drawn across a department of a dozen people sharing a common room. It is for these reasons that the inside story of that department and its split is of special interest. Those baffled by the developments in universities in the last thirty years have been offered many in-principle analyses, but only a detailed look at events in a single department at the centre of intellectual life will reveal what really happened.

Meanwhile, in my very large network of professional academics, almost no one recognizes any threat at all. Many, I can say with great confidence, would reply to the poll above with glee. They would tell you that they don’t want the support of Republicans. There’s little attempt to grapple with the simple, pragmatic realities of political power and how it threatens vulnerable institutions whose funding is in doubt. That’s because there is no professional or social incentive in the academy to think strategically or to understand that there is a world beyond campus. Instead, all of the incentives point towards constantly affirming one’s position in the moral aristocracy that the academy has imagined itself as. The less one spends on concerns about how the university and its subsidiary departments function in our broader society, the greater one’s performed fealty to the presumed righteousness of the communal values. I cannot imagine a professional culture less equipped to deal with a crisis than that of academics in the humanities and social sciences and the current threats of today. The Iron Law of Institutions defines the modern university, and what moves someone up the professional ranks within a given field is precisely the type of studied indifference to any concerns that originate outside of the campus walls.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449418/right-wing-populism-next-target-american-higher-education
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/07/10/wages-campus-revolts/
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/polarized-attitudes-about-college/

https://twitter.com/jttiehen/status/911475904731275265
https://archive.is/zN0Dh
TBH, if people like Ben Shapiro need $600k security details, universities are on borrowed time. There will be a push to defund
https://twitter.com/jttiehen/status/911618263909404672
https://archive.is/lDXly
https://twitter.com/jttiehen/status/911625626251026432
https://archive.is/GNUDM
https://twitter.com/RoundSqrCupola/status/911631431348183040
https://archive.is/KYyGy

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/74up3r/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following/do4mntc/
https://archive.is/LrvLo
It's interesting that this bill was passed at Wisconsin.
I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with what's been going on there, but the University system in Wisconsin has been the site of some serious, really playing-for-keeps, both-sides-engaged-and-firing-on-all-cylinders culture war the last 8 years. Anyone interested in Freddie de Boer's claims about the significant threat Universities face from plummeting support from conservatives should probably be familiar with Wisconsin, as it's been a real beachhead.

Republicans Stuff Education Bill With Conservative Social Agenda: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/us/first-amendment-education-bill.html
Religious colleges would be able to bar openly same-sex relationships without fear of repercussions.
Religious student groups could block people who do not share their faith from becoming members.
Controversial speakers would have more leverage when they want to appear at colleges.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opinion/whos-really-placing-limits-on-free-speech.html

https://twitter.com/ortoiseortoise/status/879785012270436352
https://archive.is/6CYck
lost in "left v. right free speech" debate is that right="don't agree with BLM"; left: "white men deserve to die" @jttiehen @iamcuriousblue
the left needs free speech protections not just bc it "has less power", contra FDB and others, but because it says far more egregious shit
fact is, it's a "microaggression" to say america's a land of opportunity, scholarly&woke to say white males are fragile idiots, deserve pain

On Tommy Curry: https://necpluribusimpar.net/on-tommy-curry/
A few days ago, Rod Dreher wrote a piece in The American Conservative about a 4 year old interview of Tommy Curry, a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University. (I would like to add that, although I’m going to criticize Dreher’s article, I think The American Conservative is actually a pretty good publication. In particular, on foreign policy, it’s one of the few publications in the US where sanity has not totally disappeared.) In that article, among other things, Dreher quotes Curry as saying that “in order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die”.

...

With the context, it’s clear that, in the statement quoted by Dreher, Curry wasn’t necessarily expressing his own view, but lamenting what he takes to be the erasure of the fact that, throughout American history, many black leaders have taken seriously the possibility of resorting to violence in order to protect themselves. (I actually think he is right about that, but that’s a pretty common phenomenon. Once a political/cultural figure becomes coopted by the establishment, he is turned into a consensual figure, even though he used to be quite controversial. This happened to Martin Luther King and Gandhi, but also to Charles De Gaulle and Winston Churchill, so despite what Curry seems to think I doubt it has much to do with race.)

...

Although he deserves censure for misrepresenting Curry’s interview, there is one thing Dreher says which strikes me as correct. Indeed, even if you don’t misrepresent what Curry said, it’s clear that any white person saying even half of it would immediately become the object of universal vilification and be cast out of polite society. Indeed, it’s striking how bigoted and, let’s say it, racist and/or sexist language has become on the left, which is apparently okay as long as no minority is targeted.

Texas College Op-Ed Calls For Ethnic Cleansing: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/texas-college-op-ed-calls-for-ethnic-cleansing/

Opposing Liberal Academia Doesn't Make One 'Anti-Intellectual': http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/444031/opposing-liberal-academia-doesnt-make-one-anti-intellectual
David French on David Gelernter

Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions: http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/
Americans’ Attitudes About the News Media Deeply Divided Along Partisan Lines: http://www.journalism.org/2017/05/10/americans-attitudes-about-the-news-media-deeply-divided-along-partisan-lines/

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/925509885848059904
https://archive.is/Q2x1T
I'm going through this survey... it just keeps getting better famalam

from the Cato study here: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:75ca38a74b99

https://twitter.com/AngloRemnant/status/884984883512307712
https://archive.is/bEj6i
Near perfect symmetry between Rep/Dem positive opinion on Church/College, because, well..
Yes, it's amazing how well each of these hostile tribes recognize each other's religious institutions.
.. income & education are Inversely related to positive view of universities among right-leaning folks.
wew, means there's so much room to grow among the proles

The salient feature of an individualist environment is that nobody directly tries to make you do anything.

...

I see a lot of writers these days raising problems with modern individualist culture, and it may be an especially timely topic. The Internet is a novel superstimulus, and it changes more rapidly, and affords people more options, than ever before. We need to think about the actual consequences of a world where many people are in practice being left alone to do what they want, and clearly not all the consequences are positive.

But I do want to suggest some considerations in favor of individualist culture — that often-derided “atomized modern world” that most of us live in.

We Aren’t Clay

interesting: https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/162329749236/httpssrconstantinwordpresscom20170627in-de

bleck:
Patriarchy is the Problem: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/

https://twitter.com/NoTrueScotist/status/842284212329762820/photo/1
https://archive.is/NGaln

https://twitter.com/pnin1957/status/876835822842130433
https://archive.is/1Noyi
this is ominous
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/the_upper_middle_class_is_ruining_all_that_is_great_about_america.html
Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/opinion/democratic-party-rich-thomas-edsall.html
Saving the American Dream: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/saving-american-dream/
It’s not just about the people at the top
- Amy Wax

ow can we arrange things so that more people with different levels of affluence can prosper and live meaningful lives? How can we make the advantages that the rich now “hoard” more widely available, thus reducing their incentive to separate themselves? Although these goals are elusive and difficult for any society to attain, ours can probably do better. But the changes required would be far bolder than the tepid ones Reeves proposes, which do little to disrupt current “structures of privilege.” And more dramatic reforms might also advance the causes he holds dear, including enhancing mobility and reducing inequality.
So here goes my laundry list.

Let’s start with Reeves’s proposal to ban legacy admissions. Not only would this increase fairness, but it would discourage private contributions. This would, in turn, promote the worthy goal of defunding the Ivies and other selective universities, which have become counterproductive sites of snobbery, dogma, and progressive indoctrination. Save for the kind of scientific research that benefits everyone, they don’t need any more money and could do with much less.

But we shouldn’t stop there. As suggested by the late Justice Antonin Scalia during oral argument in the Grutter affirmative-action case, selective admissions should simply be abolished and students admitted by lottery, except for math and hard sciences, for which a simple test can determine entrance. The steep pyramid of colleges, in which the affluent crowd monopolizes prestigious institutions, will be immediately flattened, and the need for affirmative action would disappear. In this respect, our system would simply mimic those in northern European countries like Holland and Germany, where enrolling in the university nearest to home is the usual practice and there is no clear elite pecking order. And since fewer than a fifth of colleges take less than half their applicants, with only a tiny group much more competitive, this change would have no effect on most institutions of higher learning.

While we’re at it, we should give up on the fetish of college for all by significantly reducing the number of students attending four-year academic programs to no more than 10 to 15 percent of high-school graduates. The government should dial back on student loans and grants to universities, except for scientific research.

That step, which would reduce the burden of educational debt, is not as drastic as it appears, since many students who start college end up dropping out and only 25 percent of high-school graduates manage to obtain a four-year degree. At the same time, we should step up the effort to recruit highly qualified low-income students to the most selective colleges across the country—something that Caroline Hoxby’s research tells us is not currently taking place. Finally, we should copy some of Western Europe’s most successful economies by tracking more students into job-related nonacademic programs, and by redirecting the private and public money that now goes to universities to creating and maintaining such programs.

More broadly, the amounts freed up by defunding elite colleges and private schools should be used to help average Americans. The Gates Foundation and other rich private philanthropies should stop chasing after educational schemes of dubious value and devote their billions to improving community colleges, supporting the people who attend them, and dramatically expanding vocational programs.

Although Reeves does mention vocational education, he does so only in passing. That option should receive renewed emphasis. And private donors should provide grants to thousands of students of modest means, including stipends for rent and living expenses, to enable them to do the summer internships that Reeves claims are now so important to getting ahead.

also by Lyman Stone:
Can Uncle Sam Boost American Fertility?: https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-uncle-sam-boost-american-fertility

The US needs more babies, more immigrants, and more integration: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/11/10/16631980/fertility-immigration-economics-growth-family-friendly

Throwing Natalist Benefits At Women Won’t Fix Low Fertility Rates: http://www.socialmatter.net/2016/03/01/throwing-natalist-benefits-at-women-wont-fix-low-fertility-rates/

How to Fix the Baby Bust: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/25/how-to-fix-the-baby-bust/
- Lyman Stone, W. Bradford Wilcox, et al

https://twitter.com/WilcoxNMP/status/1154763316482510849
https://archive.is/NLi0G

Sometimes we touch upon the question of what people know or don’t know. Probably this has something to do with what they study, assuming that they remember any of what they are exposed to in school.

So what do college students major in?

I have national figures, as well as recent numbers for Harvard.

College as signaling – exceptin’ always Steam: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/college-as-signaling-exceptin-always-steam/
Some economists [like Bryan Caplan] are now arguing that the benefits of college are almost entirely signaling – showing that you can learn and how much crap you can swallow – rather than conferring knowledge that makes you better at doing something people would pay you for. Ideally, something genuinely useful.

This cannot be entirely true, at least if you consider education in the broadest sense. Once upon a time nobody knew how to build a decent steam engine. After James Watt developed one, other people learned about it at some point in their lives – maybe not in college, but somewhere. Acquiring that knowledge increased their human capital.

But it’s mostly true. If you look at college majors, it is easy to see most college instruction is not very useful. 21% business majors, 10% social sciences and history, 7% educational majors, 6% psych majors, 5% in visual and performing arts, 5% in “communication, journalism, and related programs”, 3% English and literature – well over half at first cut. When I looked at a more detailed breakdown, I had a hard time arguing that the useful fraction was as high as 20%. Even when someone studies a subject that is potentially useful, there’s a significant probability that they’ll end up doing something entirely different. And then there’s forgetting – I don’t think most people retain much of what they studied in school, unless they use it in their work or happen to find a subject fascinating.

Majors, II: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/majors-ii/
I talked about what people major in earlier, but this is useful, I think. I’m revving up for some posts about education.

A question: I’d like to hear some thoughts about which degrees are worthless. Define you terms. For example< I can imagine degrees that teach you to do things that are useful but somehow out of fashion, useless but highly in demand, useful to you but worse than useless to society as a whole, etc.

It is this dichotomy between postmodern and modern that is the most important takeaway from this entire affair. In many ways, the old left/right dichotomy no longer applies. Instead we are faced with a three-part distinction between postmodern/modern/traditional. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn, and discuss why they are particularly important today. Starting with the most right-leaning, the traditionalists. These folks do not like the direction in which modernity is headed, and so are looking to go back to an earlier time when they believe society was better. They may disagree with same-sex marriage, label sexual promiscuity as “deviance,” and feel threatened by racial and demographic changes in Western society. These folks include typical status-quo conservatives, Evangelical Christians as well as more nefarious types such as white nationalists and the “alt right”. Even though there is much furor in the media about the threat that these groups represent, I would argue that they have largely been pushed to the fringes in terms of their social influence, not withstanding the election of Trump who was actually opposed by many traditionalists such as the Never Trumpers.

Indeed, it is between the modernists and postmodernists where the future of society is being fought. Modernists are those who believe in human progress within a classical Western tradition. They believe that the world can continuously be improved through science, technology, and rationality. Unlike traditionalists, they seek progress rather than reversal, but what they share in common is an interest in preserving the basic structures of Western society. Most modernists could be classified as centrists (either left or right-leaning), classical liberals and libertarians.

Postmodernists, on the other hand, eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials rather than anything that could possibly be mutually agreed upon. Informed by such thinkers as Foucault and Derrida, science therefore becomes an instrument of Western oppression; indeed, all discourse is a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. In this scheme, there is no Western civilization to preserve—as the more powerful force in the world, it automatically takes on the role of oppressor and therefore any form of equity must consequently then involve the overthrow of Western “hegemony.” These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos.

http://quillette.com/2017/07/20/evergreen-state-battle-modernity-part-2-true-believers-fence-sitters-group-conformity/
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/08/engineering-education-social-engineering-rather-actual-engineering/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/878741086616813569

First, They Came for the Biologists: https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-they-came-for-the-biologists-1506984033

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/remember-canon-wars

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.

It's this latter debate that's crucial to understanding what's wrong with the contemporary university. In a better world, the multiculturalists and the canonists should have been able to meet halfway - preserving the idea of a canon, while expanding it to include more works from outside the circle of Dead White Males. Such a compromise would have ended up cluttering syllabi with more politically-correct junk than a reactionary like myself might like, but it would have preserved the essential liberal-arts notion that there are great books, and that one of the missions of the university should be to expose its students to as many of them as possible.

Brad Delong, in his course on economic history, lists the following among the reasons for the decline of the British empire and its loss of industrial superiority to Germany and the US.

British deficiencies:
* low infrastructure investment
* poor educational system
* lags behind in primary education
* teaches its elite not science and engineering, but how to write Latin verse

Sound familiar? What is the ratio of Harvard students who have studied Shakespeare, Milton or (shudder) Derrida to the number who have thought deeply about the scientific method, or know what a photon is? Which knowledge is going to pay off for America in the long haul?

Most photon experts are imported from abroad these days. We're running a search in our department for a condensed matter experimentalist (working on things ranging from nanoscale magnets to biomembranes). The last three candidates we've interviewed are originally from (1) the former Soviet Union (postdoc at Cornell), (2) India (postdoc at Berkeley) and (3) China (postdoc at Caltech).

Of course, these Harvard kids may be making a smart decision - why fight it out in an efficiently globalized meritocracy (i.e. science), when there are more lucrative career paths available? Nevertheless, I think we would be better off if our future leaders had at least some passing familiarity with the science and technology that will shape our future.

The future of US scientific leadership: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/07/future-of-us-scientific-leadership.html
Does Globalization of the Scientific/Engineering Workforce Threaten US Economic Leadership?: http://www.nber.org/papers/w11457
Note Freeman's Proposition 2: Despite perennial concerns over shortages of scientific and engineering specialists, the job market in most S&E specialties is too weak to attract increasing numbers of US students. Nevertheless, US S&E pay rates are still high enough to attract talented foreigners. This competition further reduces the attractiveness of S&E careers to US students.

Foreign Peer Effects and STEM Major Choice: http://ftp.iza.org/dp10743.pdf
Results indicate that a 1 standard deviation increase in foreign peers reduces the likelihood native-born students graduate with STEM majors by 3 percentage points – equivalent to 3.7 native students displaced for 9 additional foreign students in an average course. STEM displacement is offset by an increased likelihood of choosing Social Science majors. However, the earnings prospects of displaced students are minimally affected as they appear to be choosing Social Science majors with equally high earning power. We demonstrate that comparative advantage and linguistic dissonance may operate as underlying mechanisms.

fall of Rome: https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/886075755364360192
But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilization itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life without diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about busily saying that the barbarians were not such bad fellows after all, finding good points in their regime with which to castigate the Romans and crying that except ye become as little barbarians ye shall not attain salvation; the people who did not observe in 476 that one half of the Respublica Romanorum had ceased to exist and nourished themselves on the fiction that the barbarian kings were exercising a power delegated from the Emperor. _All these people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome (the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they breathed and the earth they tread Ave Roma immortalis, most magnificent most disastrous of creeds!_

The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? _Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell._

But still more responsible for their unawareness was the educational system in which they were reared. Ausonius and Sidonius and their friends were highly educated men and Gaul was famous for its schools and universities. The education which these gave consisted in the study of grammar and rhetoric, which was necessary alike for the civil service and for polite society; and it would be difficult to imagine an education more entirely out of touch with contemporary life, or less suited to inculcate the qualities which might have enabled men to deal with it. The fatal study of rhetoric, its links with reality long since severed, concentrated the whole attention of men of intellect on form rather than on matter. _The things they learned in their schools had no relation to the things that were going on in the world outside and bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday that everything was the same, whereas everything was different._