Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This article provides experimental evidence that many people neglect the resulting double-counting problem in the updating process. In consequence, beliefs are too sensitive to the ubiquitous “telling and re-telling of stories” and exhibit excessive swings. We identify substantial and systematic heterogeneity in the presence of the bias and investigate the underlying mechanisms. The evidence points to the paramount importance of complexity in combination with people’s problems in identifying and thinking through the correlation. Even though most participants in principle have the computational skills that are necessary to develop rational beliefs, many approach the problem in a wrong way when the environment is moderately complex. Thus, experimentally nudging people’s focus towards the correlation and the underlying independent signals has large effects on beliefs.

By: Edward Feser

- John Gray the philosopher

• Given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned.

• Regardless of who, in a practical sense, owns and controls Huawei, it is clear that the employees do not.

How did the descendants of the Mayan Indians end up in the Eastern Orthodox Church?

Does Parental Quality Matter? Study using three sources of parental variation that are mostly immune to genetic confounding find that “the strong parent-child correlation in education is largely causal”. For example, “the parent-child correlation in education is stronger with the parent that spends more time with the child”.

Before and after pictures of tech leaders like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin suggest they’re taking supplemental testosterone. And though it may help them keep looking young, Palladium points out that there might be other effects from having some of our most powerful businessmen on a hormone that increases risk-taking and ambition. They ask whether the new availability of testosterone supplements is prolonging Silicon Valley businessmen’s “brash entrepreneur” phase well past the point where they would normally become mature respectable elders. But it also hints at an almost opposite take: average testosterone levels have been falling for decades, so at this point these businessmen would be the only “normal” (by 1950s standards) men out there, and everyone else would be unprecedently risk-averse and boring. Paging Peter Thiel and everyone else who takes about how things “just worked better” in Eisenhower’s day.

China’s SesameCredit social monitoring system, widely portrayed as dystopian, has an 80% approval rate in China (vs. 19% neutral and 1% disapproval). The researchers admit that although all data is confidential and they are not affiliated with the Chinese government, their participants might not believe that confidently enough to answer honestly.

I know how much you guys love attacking EAs for “pathological altruism” or whatever terms you’re using nowadays, so here’s an article where rationalist community member John Beshir describes his experience getting malaria on purpose to help researchers test a vaccine.

Some evidence against the theory that missing fathers cause earlier menarche.

John Nerst of EverythingStudies’ political compass.

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1013094074159517697
What happens when you combine #AI facial recognition and #genomics to identify a person in the US?
Half of American adults in facial recognition databases https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/18/police-facial-recognition-database-surveillance-profiling …
Long-range familial searches
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/18/350231 … @erlichya

https://news.stanford.edu/2018/02/01/cardinal-conversation-reid-hoffman-peter-thiel-technology-politics/
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2018/02/01/peter-thiel-reid-hoffman-talk-political-progressiveness-inequality-in-silicon-valley/
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/thiel-ai-cryptocurrency.html
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Peter-Thiel-East-Bay-stanford-failing-state-paypal-12544174.php
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tech-billionaires-Peter-Thiel-and-Reid-Hoffman-12543882.php

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?", though it is also known by variant translations.

The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though it is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the Republic. It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works.

...

This phrase is used generally to consider the embodiment of the philosophical question as to how power can be held to account. It is sometimes incorrectly attributed as a direct quotation from Plato's Republic in both popular media and academic contexts.[3] There is no exact parallel in the Republic, but it is used by modern authors to express Socrates' concerns about the guardians, _the solution to which is to properly train their souls_. Several 19th century examples of the association with Plato can be found, often dropping "ipsos".[4][5] John Stuart Mill quotes it thus in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), though without reference to Plato. Plato's Republic though was hardly ever referenced by classical Latin authors like Juvenal, and it has been noted that it simply disappeared from literary awareness for a thousand years except for traces in the writings of Cicero and St. Augustine.[6] In the Republic, a putatively perfect society is described by Socrates, the main character in this Socratic dialogue. Socrates proposed a guardian class to protect that society, and the custodes (watchmen) from the Satires are often interpreted as being parallel to the Platonic guardians (phylakes in Greek). Socrates' answer to the problem is, in essence, that _the guardians will be manipulated to guard themselves against themselves via a deception often called the "noble lie" in English_.[7] As Leonid Hurwicz pointed out in his 2007 lecture on accepting the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, one of Socrates' interlocutors in the Republic, Glaucon, even goes so far as to say "it would be absurd that a guardian should need a guard."[8] But Socrates returns to this point at 590d, where he says that _the best person "has a divine ruler within himself," and that "it is better for everyone to be ruled by divine reason, preferably within himself and his own, otherwise imposed from without."_[9]

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.

- Roger Scruton, etc.

The theoretically interesting question is what is the optimal size of a politically independent unit (“polity”) in today’s world. Clearly, optimal size changes with time and social environment. We know empirically that the optimal size of a European state took a step up following 1500. As a result, the number of independent polities in Europe decreased from many hundreds in 1500 to just over 30 in 1900. The reason was the introduction of gunpowder that greatly elevated war intensity. The new evolutionary regime eliminated almost all of the small states, apart from a few special cases (like the Papacy or Monaco).

In today’s Europe, however, war has ceased to be an evolutionary force. It may change, but since 1945 the success or failure of European polities has been largely determined by their ability to deliver high levels of living standards to their citizens. Economics is not the only aspect of well-being, but let’s focus on it here because it is clearly the main driver behind Catalonian independence (since culturally and linguistically Catalonia has been given a free rein within Spain).

...

This is applied cultural evolution. We can have lots of theories and models about the optimal polity size, but they are worthless without data.

And it’s much more than a scientific issue. The only way for our societies to become better in all kinds of ways (wealthier, more just, more efficient) is to allow cultural evolution a free rein. More specifically, we need cultural group selection at the level of polities. A major problem for the humanity is finding ways to have such cultural group selection to take place without violence. Which is why I find the current moves by Madrid to suppress the Catalonian independence vote by force criminally reckless. It seems that Madrid still wants to go back to the world as it was in the nineteenth century (or more accurately, Europe between 1500 and 1900).

A World of 1,000 Nations: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/a-world-of-1000-nations/

Brief note on Catalonia: https://nintil.com/brief-note-on-catalonia/
This could be just another footnote in a history book, or an opening passage in the chapter that explains how you got an explosion in the number of states that began around 2017.

Nationalism, Liberalism and the European Paradox: http://quillette.com/2017/10/08/nationalism-liberalism-european-paradox/
Imagine for a moment that an ethnic group declared a referendum of independence in an Asian country and the nation state in question promptly sought to take the act of rebellion down. Imagine that in the ensuing chaos over 800 people were injured in a brutal police crackdown. Imagine the international disgust if this had happened in Asia, or the Middle East, or Latin America, or even in parts of Eastern and Central Europe. There would be calls for interventions, the topic would be urgently raised at the Security Council —and there might even be talks of sanctions or the arming of moderate rebels.

Of course, nothing of that sort happened as the Spanish state declared the Catalonian independence referendum a farce.

...

Remarkably, EU officials have largely remained mute. France’s new great hope, Monsieur Macron has sheepishly supported Spain’s “constitutional unity,” which is weasel-speak for national sovereignty—a concept which is so often dismissed by the very same European nations if it happens immediately outside the geographical region of EU. And this attitude towards nationalism—that it is archaic and obsolete on the one hand, but vitally important on the other—is the core paradox, and, some would say, hypocrisy, that has been laid bare by this sudden outbreak of tension.

It is a hypocrisy because one could argue that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a consistent and very real attempt to undermine sovereignty in many different parts of the world. To be fair, this has been done with mostly good intentions in the name of institutionalism and global governance, the “responsibility to protect” and universal human rights. With history in the Hegelian sense seemingly over after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, nationalism and great power politics were thought to be a thing of the past—a quaint absurdity—an irrelevance and a barrier to true Enlightenment. But unfortunately history does tend to have a sardonic sense of humour.

The entire European project was built on two fundamentally different ideas. One that promotes economic welfare based on borderless free trade, the free market and social individualism. And the other, promoting a centralized hierarchy, an elite in loco parentis which makes decisions about how many calories one should consume, what plastic one should import, and what gross picture of shredded lungs one should see on the front of a cigarette packet. It endorses sovereignty when it means rule by democracy and the protection of human rights, but not when countries decide to control their borders or their individual monetary and economic policies. Over time, defending these contradictions has become increasingly difficult, with cynical onlookers accusing technocrats of defending an unjustifiable and arbitrary set of principles.

All of this has resulted in three things. Regional ethnic groups in Europe have seen the examples of ethnic groups abroad undermining their own national governments, and they have picked up on these lessons. They also possess the same revolutionary technology—Twitter and the iPhone. Secondly, as Westphalian nation-states have been undermined repeatedly by borderless technocrats, identity movements based on ethnicity have begun to rise up. Humans, tribal at their very core, will always give in to the urge of having a cohesive social group to join, and a flag to wave high. And finally, there really is no logical counterargument to Catalans or Scots wanting to break apart from one union while staying in another. If ultimately, everything is going to be dictated by a handful of liege-lords in Brussels—why even obey the middle-man in Madrid or London?

https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/914521100263890944
https://archive.is/WKfIA
Spain should have either forcibly assimilated Catalonia as France did with its foreign regions, or established a formal federation of states
--
ah those are the premodern and modern methods. The postmodern method is to bring in lots of immigrants (who will vote against separation)

The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
by ryszard legutko

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.

Universal Basic Income and the Threat of Tyranny: http://quillette.com/2017/10/09/universal-basic-income-threat-tyranny/

https://twitter.com/APaverDarkly/status/955166916590612480
https://archive.is/saGZL
I've seen this quite often so let's clarify. Universal basic income would place immeasurable power in the hands of a few megacorporations
1/

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]

In his book The Case for Democracy, published in 2004, Sharansky explains the term: If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a "fear society" has finally won their freedom.[1]

Heckler's veto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto

key fact: cognitive ability is not growing in importance, but non-cognitive ability is

The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs—including many STEM occupations—shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s. JEL Codes: I20, I24, J01, J23, J24, J31

The Increasing Complementarity between Cognitive and Social Skills: http://econ.ucsb.edu/~weinberg/MathSocialWeinberger.pdf

The Changing Roles of Education and Ability in Wage Determination: http://business.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@commerce/@research/documents/doc/uow130116.pdf

Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research: http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf
Moderator analyses showed that the relationship between intelligence and success is dependent on the age of the sample but there is little evidence of any historical trend in the relationship.

https://twitter.com/khazar_milkers/status/898996206973603840
https://archive.is/7gLXv
that feelio when america has crossed an inflection point and EQ is obviously more important for success in todays society than IQ
I think this is how to understand a lot of "corporate commitment to diversity" stuff.Not the only reason ofc, but reason it's so impregnable
compare: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:e9ac3d38e7a1
and: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:a38f5756170d

g-reliant skills seem most susceptible to automation: https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/06/14/g-reliant-skills-seem-most-susceptible-to-automation/

THE ERROR TERM: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/the-error-term/
Imagine an objective function- something you want to maximize or minimize- with both a deterministic and a random component.

...

Part of y is rules-based and rational, part is random and outside rational control. Obviously, the ascent of civilization has, to the extent it has taken place, been based on focusing energies on those parts of the world that are responsive to rational interpretation and control.

But an interesting thing happens once automated processes are able to take over the mapping of patterns onto rules. The portion of the world that is responsive to algorithmic interpretation is also the rational, rules-based portion, almost tautologically. But in terms of our actual objective functions- the real portions of the world that we are trying to affect or influence- subtracting out the portion susceptible to algorithms does not eliminate the variation or make it unimportant. It simply makes it much more purely random rather than only partially so.

The interesting thing, to me, is that economic returns accumulate to the random portion of variation just as to the deterministic portion. In fact, if everybody has access to the same algorithms, the returns may well be largely to the random portion. The efficient market hypothesis in action, more or less.

...

But more generally, as more and more of the society comes under algorithmic control, as various forms of automated intelligence become ubiquitous, the remaining portion, and the portion for which individual workers are rewarded, might well become more irrational, more random, less satisfying, less intelligent.

Golden age for team players: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/10/social-skills-increasingly-valuable-to-employers-harvard-economist-finds/
Strong social skills increasingly valuable to employers, study finds

Number of available jobs by skill set (over time)

Changes in hourly wages by skill set (over time)

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/947904725294260224
https://archive.is/EEQA9
A resolution for the new year: Remember that intelligence is a predictor of social intelligence!

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

https://archive.is/fur9V

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/893504340496961537
https://archive.is/fur9V
As if more than five members of Congress could understand this.

Don't know! I know that we're all supposed to endorse open government, but that presumption should be interrogated.

Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Rooms: http://web.archive.org/web/20150503211359/http://cookpolitical.com/story/8407

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/893506016905752577
https://archive.is/LGtHN
Lowi's End of Liberalism & McCubbins/Schwartz 🔥 Alarms haunt CBO oversight:
Members won't get expertise: Delegation is the only option.

Lowi: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/ted-lowi-in-memoriam-of-his-work-bc88822b3419
basically the managerial state

A second, and more dangerous form of bureaucracy, is “government by decree.” It is a government that sees the law as a hindrance, an obstacle to be overcome in the bureaucratic effort to govern the people directly. Decrees are anonymous. They give the impression of constant action. It is government that eschews principles for the quick and personalized response to ever-changing circumstances. Arendt writes, “People ruled by decree never know what rules them because of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical significance in which all administrators keep their subjects.”

Reflecting Arendt, Lowi argues that liberalism has led in the United States to a government of “policy without law,” something like a government by decree. An essential part of this government by decree is the abandonment by the Congress of its governing responsibility, which it has increasingly delegated to the administrative state. The effort of liberal government, Lowi argues, is to “avoid enunciating a rule” and to replace clear rules and standards with “the principle of bargaining on each decision.” This is in fact Lowi’s overarching thesis: That liberalism replaces power with bargaining. “Liberal governments cannot plan. Planning requires the authoritative use of authority. Planning requires law, choice, priorities, moralities. Liberalism replaces planning with bargaining. Yet at bottom, power is unacceptable without planning.”

In the second edition of The End of Liberalism, Lowi added a subtitle, “The Second Republic of the United States.” The book tells a story of the transformation from the First to the Second Republic. In the First Republic, which goes from 1787 until about 1960, the states did most of the governing. The national government was both small and, more importantly, did very little governing. To the extent the federal government did govern, government was “Congress-centered.” The Congress was the main legislative arm of government. It was where the power of the Federal government was located.

...

The result of such a government by administration is what Lowi calls “socialism for the organized, capitalism for the unorganized.” It is a system that favors bigger and more organized businesses, unions, and interest groups. “It is biased not so much in favor of the rich as in favor of the established and the organized…. Above all it respects the established jurisdictions of government agencies and the established territories of private corporations and groups.” In short, the Second Republic offers a kind of politics that is “supportive of the clientele it seeks to deal with,” the organized interest groups that make claims upon it.

The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dobbin/files/1998_ajs_sutton.pdf

related: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:e295cdb33beb

'police patrol' vs. 'faire alarms': https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/teaching/PLSC541_Fall08/mcubbins_schwartz_1984.pdf

https://quaslacrimas.wordpress.com/2017/06/28/discussion-of-defection/

Kindness Against The Grain: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/kindness-against-the-grain/
I’ve heard from a number of secular-ish sources (Carse, Girard, Arendt) that the essential contribution of Christianity to human thought is the concept of forgiveness. (Ribbonfarm also has a recent post on the topic of forgiveness.)

I have never been a Christian and haven’t even read all of the New Testament, so I’ll leave it to commenters to recommend Christian sources on the topic.

What I want to explore is the notion of kindness without a smooth incentive gradient.

The Social Module: https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/the-social-module/
Now one could propose that the basic principle of human behavior is to raise the SP number. Sure there’s survival and reproduction. Most people would forget all their socialization if left hungry and thirsty for days in the jungle. But more often than not, survival and reproduction depend on being high status; having a good name among your peers is the best way to get food, housing and hot mates.

The way to raise one’s SP number depends on thousands of different factors. We could grab most of them and call them “culture”. In China having 20 teenage mistresses as an old man raises your SP; in Western polite society it is social death. In the West making a fuss about disobeying one’s parents raises your SP, everywhere else it lowers it a great deal. People know that; which is why bureaucrats in China go to great lengths to acquire a stash of young women (who they seldom have time to actually enjoy), while teenagers in the West go to great lengths to be annoying to their parents for no good reason.

...

It thus shouldn’t surprise us that something as completely absurd as Progressivism is the law of the land in most of the world today, even though it denies obvious reality. It is not the case that most people know that progressive points are all bogus, but obey because of fear or cowardice. No, an average human brain has much more neurons being used to scan the social climate and see how SP are allotted, than neurons being used to analyze patterns in reality to ascertain the truth. Surely your brain does care a great deal about truth in some very narrow areas of concern to you. Remember Conquest’s first law: Everybody is Conservative about what he knows best. You have to know the truth about what you do, if you are to do it effectively.

But you don’t really care about truth anywhere else. And why would you? It takes time and effort you can’t really spare, and it’s not really necessary. As long as you have some area of specialization where you can make a living, all the rest you must do to achieve survival and reproduction is to raise your SP so you don’t get killed and your guts sacrificed to the mountain spirits.

SP theory (I accept suggestions for a better name) can also explains the behavior of leftists. Many conservatives of a medium level of enlightenment point out the paradox that leftists historically have held completely different ideas. Leftism used to be about the livelihood of industrial workers, now they agitate about the environment, or feminism, or foreigners. Some people would say that’s just historical change, or pull a No True Scotsman about this or that group not being really leftists. But that’s transparent bullshit; very often we see a single person shifting from agitating about Communism and worker rights, to agitate about global warming or rape culture.

...

The leftist strategy could be defined as “psychopathic SP maximization”. Leftists attempt to destroy social equilibrium so that they can raise their SP number. If humans are, in a sense, programmed to constantly raise their status, well high status people by definition can’t raise it anymore (though they can squabble against each other for marginal gains), their best strategy is to freeze society in place so that they can enjoy their superiority. High status people by definition have power, and thus social hierarchy during human history tends to be quite stable.

This goes against the interests of many. First of all the lower status people, who, well, want to raise their status, but can’t manage to do so. And it also goes against the interests of the particularly annoying members of the upper class who want to raise their status on the margin. Conservative people can be defined as those who, no matter the absolute level, are in general happy with it. This doesn’t mean they don’t want higher status (by definition all humans do), but the output of other brain modules may conclude that attempts to raise SP might threaten one’s survival and reproduction; or just that the chances of raising one’s individual SP is hopeless, so one might as well stay put.

...

You can’t blame people for being logically inconsistent; because they can’t possibly know anything about all these issues. Few have any experience or knowledge about evolution and human races, or about the history of black people to make an informed judgment on HBD. Few have time to learn about sex differences, and stuff like the climate is as close to unknowable as there is. Opinions about anything but a very narrow area of expertise are always output of your SP module, not any judgment of fact. People don’t know the facts. And even when they know; I mean most people have enough experience with sex differences and black dysfunction to be quite confident that progressive ideas are false. But you can never be sure. As Hume said, the laws of physics are a judgment of habit; who is to say that a genie isn’t going to change all you know the next morning? At any rate, you’re always better off toeing the line, following the conventional wisdom, and keeping your dear SP. Perhaps you can even raise them a bit. And that is very nice. It is niceness itself.

Leftism is just an easy excuse: https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/leftism-is-just-an-easy-excuse/
Unless you’re not the only defector. You need a way to signal your intention to defect, so that other disloyal fucks such as yourself (and they’re bound to be others) can join up, thus reducing the likely costs of defection. The way to signal your intention to defect is to come up with a good excuse. A good excuse to be disloyal becomes a rallying point through which other defectors can coordinate and cover their asses so that the ruling coalition doesn’t punish them. What is a good excuse?

Leftism is a great excuse. Claiming that the ruling coalition isn’t leftist enough, isn’t holy enough, not inclusive enough of women, of blacks, of gays, or gorillas, of pedophiles, of murderous Salafists, is the perfect way of signalling your disloyalty towards the existing power coalition. By using the existing ideology and pushing its logic just a little bit, you ensure that the powerful can’t punish you. At least not openly. And if you’re lucky, the mass of disloyal fucks in the ruling coalition might join your banner, and use your exact leftist point to jump ship and outflank the powerful.

...

The same dynamic fuels the flattery inflation one sees in monarchical or dictatorial systems. In Mao China, if you want to defect, you claim to love Mao more than your boss. In Nazi Germany, you proclaim your love for Hitler and the great insight of his plan to take Stalingrad. In the Roman Empire, you claimed that Caesar is a God, son of Hercules, and those who deny it are treacherous bastards. In Ancient Persia you loudly proclaimed your faith in the Shah being the brother of the Sun and the Moon and King of all Kings on Earth. In Reformation Europe you proclaimed that you have discovered something new in the Bible and everybody else is damned to hell. Predestined by God!

...

And again: the precise content of the ideological point doesn’t matter. Your human brain doesn’t care about ideology. Humans didn’t evolve to care about Marxist theory of class struggle, or about LGBTQWERTY theories of social identity. You just don’t know what it means. It’s all abstract points you’ve been told in a classroom. It doesn’t actually compute. Nothing that anybody ever said in a political debate ever made any actual, concrete sense to a human being.

So why do we care so much about politics? What’s the point of ideology? Ideology is just the water you swim in. It is a structured database of excuses, to be used to signal your allegiance or defection to the existing ruling coalition. Ideology is just the feed of the rationalization Hamster that runs incessantly in that corner of your brain. But it is immaterial, and in most cases actually inaccessible to the logical modules in your brain.

Nobody ever acts on their overt ideological claims if they can get away with it. Liberals proclaim their faith in the potential of black children while clustering in all white suburbs. Communist party members loudly talk about the proletariat while being hedonistic spenders. Al Gore talks about Global Warming while living in a lavish mansion. Cognitive dissonance, you say? No; those cognitive systems are not connected in the first place.

...

And so, every little step in the way, power-seekers moved the consensus to the left. And open societies, democratic systems are by their decentralized nature, and by the size of their constituencies, much more vulnerable to this sort of signalling attacks. It is but impossible to appraise and enforce the loyalty of every single individual involved in a modern state. There’s too many of them. A Medieval King had a better chance of it; hence the slow movement of ideological innovation in those days. But the bigger the organization, the harder it is to gather accurate information of the loyalty of the whole coalition; and hence the ideological movement accelerates. And there is no stopping it.

Like the Ancients, We Have Gods. They’ll Get Greater: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/like-the-ancients-we-have-gods-they-may-get… [more]

https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/the-poverty-of-the-peasant-mode-of-production-121b90c933b4
historians: low taxes not priming the pump
everyone else: barbarians
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/mark-koyama-review-roman-economy.html
https://twitter.com/markkoyama/status/765881117266370560
https://soundcloud.com/macro-musings/markkoyama
https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/peter-temin-and-the-malthusian-hypothesis-for-the-limits-of-roman-growth-12489edce93a

"The Power of the Powerless" (October 1978) was originally written ("quickly," Havel said later) as a discussion piece for a projected joint Polish Czechoslovak volume of essays on the subject of freedom and power. All the participants were to receive Havel's essay, and then respond to it in writing. Twenty participants were chosen on both sides, but only the Czechoslovak side was completed. Meanwhile, in May 1979, some of the Czechoslovak contributors who were also members of VONS (the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted), including Havel, were arrested, and it was decided to go ahead and "publish" the Czechoslovak contributions separately.

Havel's essay has had a profound impact on Eastern Europe. Here is what Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, told me: "This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road. Inspired by KOR [the Polish Workers' Defense Committee], we had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be coming up with other methods, other ways?

"Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later—in August 1980—it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement. When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel's essay."

Translated by Paul Wilson, "The Power of the Powerless" has appeared several times in English, foremost in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). That volume includes a selection of nine other essays from the original Czech and Slovak collection.

...

THE MANAGER of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

...

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Live Not By Lies: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth our loud or to express aloud what we think. It's not necessary.

It's dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think.

This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted. And it is much easier—it's dangerous even to say this—than the sort of civil disobedience which Gandhi advocated.

Our path is to talk away fro the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside.

That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.

So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood—of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies—or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.

The Kolmogorov option: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376
As far as I can tell, the answer is simply: because Kolmogorov knew better than to pick fights he couldn’t win. He judged that he could best serve the cause of truth by building up an enclosed little bubble of truth, and protecting that bubble from interference by the Soviet system, and even making the bubble useful to the system wherever he could—rather than futilely struggling to reform the system, and simply making martyrs of himself and all his students for his trouble.

I don't really agree w/ this

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles7/SolzhenitsynWarning.php

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2015/07/08/revisiting-aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-warnings-to-the-west/
At first regarded as a hero by Americans, he eventually found his popularity waning, thanks in part to his controversial 1978 commencement address at Harvard University.

...

"Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life."

“The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries,” he also insisted, “more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?”

Our Culture, What’s Left Of It: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7445
FP: You mention how 19th century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Custine, made several profound observations on how border guards in Russia wasted his time pushing their weight around in stupid and pointless ways, and that this is connected to the powerlessness that humans live under authoritarianism. Tell us a bit more of how this dynamic works in Russia.

Dalrymple: With regard to Russia, I am not an expert, but I have an interest in the country. I believe that it is necessary to study 19th century Russian history to understand the modern world. I suspect that the characteristic of Russian authoritarianism precedes the Soviet era (if you read Custine, you will be astonished by how much of what he observed prefigured the Soviet era, which of course multiplied the tendencies a thousand times).

...

FP: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Dalrymple: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is … [more]

That's why I propose the creation of the Tenth Commandment Club. The tenth commandment—"You shall not covet"—is a foundation of social peace. The Nobel Laureate economist Vernon Smith noted the tenth commandment along with the eighth (you shall not steal) in his Nobel toast, saying that they "provide the property right foundations for markets, and warned that petty distributional jealousy must not be allowed to destroy" those foundations. If academics, pundits, and columnists would avowedly reject covetousness, would openly reject comparisons between the average (extremely fortunate) American and the average billionaire, would mock people who claimed that frugal billionaires are a systematic threat to modern life, then soon our time could be spent discussing policy issues that really matter.

Enlightenment -> social justice: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/866448789825105920
US reconquista: https://twitter.com/AngloRemnant/status/865980569397731329
https://archive.is/SR8OI
envy and psychology textbooks: https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/887115182257917952

various Twitter threads: https://twitter.com/search?q=GarettJones+inequality

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/09/13/542261863/cash-aid-changed-this-family-s-life-so-why-is-their-government-skeptical

Civilization means saying no to the poor: https://bonald.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/civilization-means-saying-no-to-the-poor/
Although I instinctively dislike him, I do agree with Professor Scott on one point: “exploitation” really is the essence of civilization, whether by exploitation one simply means authority as described by those insensible to its moral force or more simply the refusal of elites to divulge their resources to the poor.

In fact, no human creation of lasting worth could ever be made without a willingness to tell the poor to *** off. If we really listened to the demands of social justice, if we really let compassion be our guide, we could have no art, no music, no science, no religion, no philosophy, no architecture beyond the crudest shelters. The poor are before us, their need perpetually urgent. It is inexcusable for us ever to build a sculpture, a cathedral, a particle accelerator. And the poor, we have it on two good authorities (the other being common sense), will be with us always. What we give for their needs today will have disappeared tomorrow, and they will be hungry again. Imagine if some Savonarola had come to Florence a century or two earlier and convinced the Florentine elite to open their hearts and their wallets to the poor in preference for worldly vanities. All that wealth would have been squandered on the poor and would have disappeared without a trace. Instead, we got the Renaissance.

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/904169207293730816
https://archive.is/tYZAi
Reward the lawless; punish the law abiding. Complete inversion which will eventually drive us back to the 3rd world darkness whence we came.

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/917492530308112384
https://archive.is/AeXEs
This idea that a group is only honorable in virtue of their victimization is such a pernicious one.
for efficiency, just have "Victims of WASPs Day." A kind of All Victims' Day. Otherwise U.S. calendar will be nothing but days of grievance.
Bonald had a good bit on this (of course).
https://bonald.wordpress.com/2016/08/05/catholics-must-resist-cosmopolitan-universalism/
Steve King is supposedly stupid for claiming that Western Civilization is second to none. One might have supposed that Catholics would take some pride as Catholics in Western civilization, a thing that was in no small part our creation. Instead, the only history American Catholics are to remember is being poor and poorly regarded recent immigrants in America.

https://twitter.com/AngloRemnant/status/917612415243706368
https://archive.is/NDjwK
Don't even bother with the rat race if you value big family. I won the race, & would've been better off as a dentist in Peoria.
.. College prof in Athens, OH. Anesthesiologist in Knoxville. State govt bureaucrat in Helena.
.. This is the formula: Middle America + regulatory capture white-collar job. anyone attempting real work in 2017 america is a RETARD.
.. Also unclear is why anyone in the US would get married. knock your girl up and put that litter on Welfare.
You: keep 50% of your earnings after taxes. 25% is eaten by cost of living. save the last 25%, hope our bankrupt gov doesn't expropriate l8r
The main difference in this country between welfare and 7-figure income is the quality of your kitchen cabinets.

wtf: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dentists.htm
$159,770 per year
$76.81 per hour

18% (Much faster than average)

http://study.com/how_long_does_it_take_to_be_a_dentist.html
Admission into dental school is highly competitive. Along with undergraduate performance, students are evaluated for their Dental Admissions Test (DAT) scores. Students have the opportunity to take this test before graduating college. After gaining admission into dental school, students can go on to complete four years of full-time study to earn the Doctor of Dental Surgery or Doctor of Dental Medicine. Students typically spend the first two years learning general and dental science in classroom and laboratory settings. They may take courses like oral anatomy, histology and pathology. In the final years, dental students participate in clinical practicums, gaining supervised, hands-on experience in dental clinics.

https://twitter.com/AngloRemnant/status/985935089250062337
https://archive.is/yIXfk
https://archive.is/Qscq7
https://archive.is/IQQhU
Career ideas for the minimally ambitious dissident who wants to coast, shitpost, & live well:
- econ phd -> business school prof
- dentistry
- 2 years of banking/consulting -> F500 corp dev or strategy
- gov't bureaucrat in a state capital
--
Bad career ideas, for contrast:
- law
- humanities prof
- IT
- anything 'creative'

[ed.: Personally, I'd also throw in 'actuary' (though keep in mind ~20% risk of automation).]

https://twitter.com/DividualsTweet/status/1143214978142527488
https://archive.is/yzgVA
Best life advice: try getting a boring, not very high status but decently paying job. Like programming payroll software. SJWs are uninterested.

longform history of alt-right
The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/16/secret-history-trumpism-donald-trump
pretty good actually. did not know the "Journal of American Greatness" was a thing and read by beltway types.

also good introduction to James Burnham and Samuel Francis.

From Extreme to Mainstream: How Social Norms Unravel: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23415
Unleashed: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3025749
Liberals against Liberation: http://www.unz.com/isteve/liberals-against-liberation/
nurse ratched state
The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth About Political Illigitimacy: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/tkpn5/

https://twitter.com/jackallisonLOL/status/868174588500336640
http://observer.com/2017/05/mark-zuckerberg-running-for-president-photos/
https://qz.com/882475/facebook-fb-ceo-mark-zuckberg-hires-david-plouffe-and-ken-mehlman-to-the-chan-zuckerberg-initiative/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-08/facebook-s-investors-criticize-marc-andreessen-for-conflict-of-interest
zuckerberg thinking about getting into government

possibility of mass-censorship and narrative control not to be taken lightly: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:e57f3968f202

http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/on-the-state-of-economics/
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/how-effective-is-economic-theory
I have a long essay on the scientific status of economics in National Affairs. A few excerpts from the conclusion:

In the end, can we really have effective theory in economics? If by effective theory we mean theory that is verifiable and reliable for prediction and control, the answer is likely no. Instead, economics deals in speculative interpretations and must continue to do so.

Young economists who employ pluralistic methods to study problems are admired rather than marginalized, as they were in 1980. But economists who question the wisdom of interventionist economic policies seem headed toward the fringes of the profession.

This is my essay in which I say that academic economics is on the road to sociology.

example...?:
Property Is Only Another Name for Monopoly: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494
Hanson's take more positive: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/10/for-stability-rents.html

women:
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/college-women-and-the-future-of-economics/
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/road-to-sociology-watch-2/
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/road-to-sociology-watch-3/

older: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2007/09/the-past-and-the-future/
That being said, the past is likely a guide that the Chinese imperialism of the 21st century will not take the form of massed invasions and conquests, but rather client-patron relationships which reinforce the rise of a new hegemon.

Why Confucianism Matters: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/01/10/why-confucianism-matters/
Why look to China? After all, there were ethical systems in the West. First, I’m not sure that the supernaturalistic religions work to bind elites together anymore due to lack of credibility. Christianity is getting weaker. My own personal hunch is that the current wave of Islamic assertiveness and violence is the paroxysm of a civilization confronting its irrelevance.

Second, Classical Antiquity had plenty of ethical systems, especially during the Hellenistic and Roman period. But Rome collapsed. There was a great rupture between antiquity and the medieval period. In contrast, the Confucian and Neo-Confucian system persisted down to the early 20th century in classical form and casts a strong shadow over East Asia even today. While Stoicism had personal relevance, Confucianism was designed to scale from the individual all the way to the imperial state.

The 1960s saw a radical transition to notional social egalitarianism in the West. This is the world I grew up and matured in. Arguably, I believed in its rightness, inevitability, and eternal dominance, until very recently. But I think that today that model is fraying and people are looking to find some mooring. In particular, I think we are in need of a rectification of names. From Wikipedia:

Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. The phrase has now become known as a doctrine of feudal Confucian designations and relationships, behaving accordingly to ensure social harmony. Without such accordance society would essentially crumble and “undertakings would not be completed.”

How are we supposed to behave with each given person? A lot of this is free-form and improvisational today, and it turns out that many people are not comfortable with this. Humans need scripts.

Finally, the world that Confucianism developed was highly stratified, though there was some chance of advancement. It was not a calcified caste system, but it was a hierarchical one. I believe that is the system that we are moving toward in the West, and it seems that a system that takes for granted non-egalitarianism, such as Confucianism, may benefit us.

Spandrell: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/01/10/why-confucianism-matters/#comment-6358
I’d say that arguably Confucianism only really flourished after the Song dynasty broke the Chinese aristocracy and instituted a fully civilian ruling class. Confucianism was a force for egalitarianism if anything. It was the religion of the mandarins, not of the people.

If we were to make an analogy to Chinese history I’d say we are more like in the Eastern Han, with private patronage networks taking over the state from within. The result of that wasn’t a strong confucianism. The result was the spread of Buddhism. A very different beast.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/951469782053871616
https://archive.is/m0XAq
Read and check the comments. I wish it were true; I could sell a couple of books if anything. But Confucianism is an ideology of absolutism, not of oligarchy.

The Western Rectification Of Names: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2015/03/09/the-western-rectification-of-names/
The important insight we can gain from the longevity of a Confucian political philosophy is that its core theses do have some utility for complex societies. Unlike that of Rome the Chinese order of two thousand years ago actually persisted down to living memory, with the fall of the Ching in the early 20th century. Confucius believed he was a traditionalist, rediscovering ancient insights as to the proper relations between human beings. I suspect this is correct, insofar as the Golden Mean he and his humanistic followers recommended between the cold and cruel utilitarianism of the Legalists and the unrealistic one of the followers of Mozi is probably the best fit to human psychological dispositions (both the Legalists and Mohists were suspicious of the family).** In the disordered world of the late Zhou, on the precipice of the Warring States period, Confucius and his followers elucidated what was really common sense, but repackaged in a fashion which would appeal more systematically to elites, and scaffold their own more egotistical impulses (in contrast to the Legalists, who seem to have enshrined the ego of the ruler as the summum bonum).

And that is the reality which we face today. Our world is not on the precipice of war, but social and technological changes are such that we are in a period where a new rectification of names is warranted. Old categories of sex, gender, religion and race, are falling or reordering. Western society is fracturing, as the intelligentsia promote their own parochial categories, and traditionalists dissent and retreat into their own subcultures. To give two examples, there are those who might find offense if addressed by the pronoun he or she, even though this is an old convention in Western society. In contrast, traditionalist Christian subcultures no longer have unified control of the public domain which would allow for them to promulgate the basis of their values. There are those who might accede to traditional Christian claims who can not agree with their metaphysics, which the traditional Christians hold to be necessary to be in full agreement.*** In contrast, the progressive faction which declaims the morally restrictive manners of the traditionalist Right in fact belies its own assertions by the proliferation of terms which serve to define the elect from those who do not uphold proper morals and manners.

Why I Am Not A New Atheist: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/01/11/why-i-am-not-a-new-atheist/
Fundamentally I do not think this is correct. Nor do I think that religious beliefs have much to do with logic or reason. Religion is a complex phenomenon which is rooted in supernatural intuitions and then evolves further in a cultural context, with some possible functional utility as a group-marker.

Second, I do not think religion is the “root of all evil”, and so see no need to convert the world to atheism. Obviously, the horror of Communism illustrates that removing supernatural religion does not remove the human impulse to atrocity.

More recently, I have been convinced that truth and knowledge is a minor value to most humans, including elites. Lying is pretty ubiquitous, and most people are rather satisfied with big lies girding social norms and conventions. One may try to avoid “living by lies” in private, but actually promoting this viewpoint in public is ridiculously self-destructive. Most people could care less about the truth,* while elites simply manipulate facts to buttress their social positions and engage in control.

In other words, the New Atheists seem to think that it’s a worthy to aim to enlighten humanity toward views which they believe align with reality.

At this point, I care about converting the common man to a true understanding of reality as much as I care about a cow grokking trigonometry. I don’t.

https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/954392158198525953
https://archive.is/TXjN0
i have long believed many 'traditional' institutions and folkways which we in the post-materialist world look askance at are not traditional, but ad hoc cultural kludges and patches for ppl to manage to survive in villages where our cognitive toolkit wasn't sufficient
in an affluent liberal democratic context they may indeed be outmoded and easy to slough off. but if a different form of life, characterized by malthusian immiseration, comes to dominate then the kludges will come back

“Wheel And Fight”—Pat Buchanan’s Nixon Book Provides Road Map For Trump: http://www.vdare.com/articles/wheel-and-fight-pat-buchanans-nixon-book-provides-road-map-for-trump
After The Anti-Trump Coup, What Then?: http://www.vdare.com/articles/pat-buchanan-after-the-anti-trump-coup-what-then
https://twitter.com/avermeule/status/895711695192174602
Best real example of (1) an enduring polity composed of (2) large blocs (3) fundamentally at odds over ideological and cultural premises?
United In Tragedy—But For How Long?: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/united-in-tragedy-but-for-how-long/

Unlike Nixon, Trump Will Not Go Quietly: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/unlike-nixon-trump-will-not-go-quietly/

Mueller obtains "tens of thousands” of Trump transition emails: https://www.axios.com/scoop-mueller-obtains-tens-of-thousands-of-trump-transition-emails-1513456551-428f0b7a-b50e-4d9e-8bc4-9869f93c2845.html
https://act.moveon.org/event/mueller-firing-rapid-response-events/search/

https://twitter.com/netouyo_/status/942187038958333952
https://archive.is/4oKKB
I suspect there is gonna be a big finale for Trump-Mueller before the end of the year, shit goin down

https://twitter.com/netouyo_/status/942201841869312005
https://archive.is/GQKmD
who needs laws/due process when daddy Mueller is gonna save us from the evil Russians?

mass-education as tool for dissolving class structure
http://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1467-937X.2006.00370.x
mass-migration too?: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/862857043199139841
Marx on Irish immigration: https://monthlyreview.org/2017/02/01/marx-on-immigration/

Worsening American Income: Inequality: Is world trade to blame?: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/worsening-american-income-inequality-is-world-trade-to-blame/
America: A dromedary, not a Bactrian camel: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/05/america_a_drome.html

Department of Awful Statistics: Income Inequality Edition: https://thedailybeast.com/department-of-awful-statistics-income-inequality-edition
A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality
Income inequality in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States
The Geography of U.S. Inequality: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/06/upshot/up-geo-inequality.html

40 Years Of Income Inequality In America, In Graphs: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/02/349863761/40-years-of-income-inequality-in-america-in-graphs
good charts of trends in income percentiles, wage stagnation, etc.
Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts: http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
FIGURE 4
Middle-class wages are stagnant—Middle-wage workers’ hourly wage is up 6% since 1979, low-wage workers’ wages are down 5%, while those with very high wages saw a 41% increase
Cumulative change in real hourly wages of all workers, by wage percentile,* 1979–2013

A Relentless Widening of Disparity in Wealth: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/business/economy/a-relentless-rise-in-unequal-wealth.html
Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html
American Inequality in Six Charts: http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts

US income inequality: caused by financiers and tech entrepreneurs: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2006/09/us-income-inequality-caused-by.html

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/933118496363311104
https://archive.is/Cs7Yu
i wonder to what extent pensions, social security, medicare, old age benefits etc depress fertility
joke: slashing broad-based entitlements because you yearn for the "desolate freedom of the wild ass"
woke: slashing broad-based entitlements because they're a t o m i z i n g you

The signs of pent-up social discontent are everywhere. Some 63 percent of young French claim to be ready for a "large scale revolt." The head of France’s general directorate for internal security warned, in a parliamentary commission deposition last year, that the country was "on the verge of civil war." The numbers of days lost to strike action is the largest among comparable countries; 40,000 cars are set ablaze annually in France's often ghettoized suburbs. The portion of voters who rejected mainstream political offerings -- over 40 percent -- was higher than at any time in France's modern political history, revealing a much deeper level of discontent than previously acknowledged.

elites very different from public (much more selfish, more efficiency-focused)

The survey was designed to expose two ranges of preferences. The first concerns how individuals rank their self-interest as compared to the interests of others. A fair-minded person sees them as equal. A selfish person is more likely to prefer his own interests. An “intermediate” person (the term the research paper uses) falls in between. The second preference concerns the relative importance of equality as compared to efficiency. A person who favors equality is willing to accept lower efficiency, while those who favor efficiency focus on growing the pie rather than cutting it evenly.

About half the Yale Law students are intermediates, people who give themselves a bit of a preference. The other half tilts strongly in the direction of the selfish. When it comes to equality or efficiency, which is to say, pie growing, the Yale Law students overwhelmingly opt for the latter.

To illuminate these results, the researchers did some comparative work. They mined data about under­graduates from the University of California at Berkeley. Then they looked at Americans in general.

The comparative results are fascinating. Under­graduates at the University of California at Berkeley tilt even more strongly in the selfish direction than the Yale Law students. They’re also efficiency-focused, though less so. The general population, by contrast, shows markedly different preferences. They’re significantly more likely to be fair-minded than selfish. They’re also more likely to favor cutting the pie equally rather than emphasizing efficiency to grow the pie.

...

The remarkable preference for efficiency we see in the overwhelmingly Democratic student body at Yale Law School also sheds light on today’s progressive priorities, which focus on identity politics, especially sexual identity. Gay rights are favored by rich liberals in large part because they’re seen as a cost-free way toward greater equality. There are lots of well-educated gays and les­bians who look, act, and think just like other elites. Sexual ­orientation “diversity” requires no bending of meritocratic rules, no set-asides, and no expensive, large-scale government programs.

...

I regret that places like Yale now use young people in such transparent ways: minorities bring “diversity,” rich kids keep the money flowing, foreign students facilitate the formation of a new global network, and meritocratic winners ensure “excellence.” There’s something intrinsically ugly about engineered “communities,” especially ones engineered for the purpose of maintaining and extending power. (Why would anyone concerned about the future of our society give money to these universities?)

So I wish Yale President Peter Salovey the worst. May the universities continue on their trajectory toward becoming rigid, mechanical, and artificial communities dominated by rent-seeking faculty, populated by alienated students, and governed by feckless administrators. Such institutions cannot attract loyalty, and they cannot create a culture for the future.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/chris-eisgruber-and-the-inversion-of-power/
In some ways, this is a natural evolution of the increasing importance that racial inclusion has taken on in academic environments. Since the civil rights movement, racial inclusion has in the United States been the central measure of whether an institution has stood by its ethical commitments. Universities and academics were, more than any other institutions, the ones that pursued and promoted that measure of legitimacy, as it was meanwhile incorporated into law in the form of disparate impact legislation and a large portion of federal regulations; clearly their commitment to that ideology extends beyond affirmative action in admissions. Universities seemingly sincerely believe that their role in the world would diminish if they were seen to be non-inclusive institutions. (Seen to be is perhaps the operative term here, since visible diversity is what is most important.) When that ideology turns against the institution itself, what can a college president do but bow before it?

But there probably is still one more source of the inversion of power. Colleges and Universities garner an increasing portion of their donations not from the ordinary millionaires of old, but from the mega-rich created by our New Gilded Age. While the merely rich probably swing conservative in their political beliefs, this is not at all clear of the very richest people in the world; Carlos Slim, for example, #2 on the 2014 list, is the largest shareholder in the New York Times whose editorial board endorsed the protesters, and speakers aligned with the Black Lives Matters protests are have been regular guests at Aspen Ideas, Davos, and similar gatherings of the global rich. Whether Eisgruber is bowing before an impassioned undergraduate– or before the Davos Set’s priorities– is hard to know.

1. Where meritocracy came from

The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined by my father, a left-wing sociologist called Michael Young, to describe a dystopian society of the future. In his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy, he imagines a 21st Century Britain in which status is determined by a combination of IQ and effort. He acknowledged that this was fairer than an aristocratic society in which status is simply passed on from parents to their children, but it was precisely because meritocracy gave a patina of legitimacy to the inequalities thrown up by free market capitalism that he disapproved of it.

2. Is a meritocratic society fairer?

The political philosopher John Rawls pointed out that a meritocratic society isn’t necessarily fairer than an aristocratic one. After all, the qualities that meritocracy rewards – exceptional intelligence and drive – are, for the most part, natural gifts that people are born with. Since successful people have done nothing to deserve those talents, they don’t deserve the rewards they bring any more than they deserve to inherit a fortune.

3. Complete equality of opportunity

For a society to be 100% meritocratic, you need complete equality of opportunity. But the only way to guarantee that is to remove children from their parents at birth and raise them in identical circumstances. If you don’t do that, the socio-economic status of a child’s parents will inevitably affect that child’s life chances.

4. Is it in the genetics?

According to the political scientist Charles Murray, meritocracy inevitably leads to a genetically-based caste system. Why? Because the traits selected for by the meritocratic sorting principle are genetically-based and, as such, likely to be passed on from parents to their children. Genetic variation means some highly able children will be born to people of average and below average intelligence, but the children of the meritocratic elite will, in aggregate, always have a competitive advantage and over several generations that leads to social ossification.

5. Noblesse oblige

One of the things my father disliked about meritocracy was that it engendered a sense of entitlement amongst the most successful. Because they regard their elevated status as thoroughly deserved, they’re not burdened by a sense of noblesse oblige. At least in an aristocratic society, members of the lucky sperm club are afflicted by guilt and self-doubt and, as such, tend to be a bit nicer to those below them.

6. Is America the most meritocratic country?

Americans like to tell themselves that they live in the most meritocratic country in the world but, in fact, it may be one of the least. In most international league tables of inter-generational social mobility, which measure the chances a child born into one class has of moving into another over the course of their lifetime, America is at the bottom.

Toby Yong on meritocracy earlier: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/09/meritocracy-and-dna.html

meritocracy and credentialism:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/24/targeting-meritocracy/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/25/highlights-from-the-comment-thread-on-meritocracy/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/26/dont-blame-griggs/
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/890307620791357440
http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2016_Summer_Andrews.php
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war-on-stupid-people/485618/

https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/852935953505280000
https://archive.is/E9fRu
The original NIT experiments got killed by Moynihan after it was shown they reduced marriage rates among recipients,prob wouldn't matter now
you mean UBI wouldn't reduce marriage today or ppl wouldn't care?
People wouldn't care
http://www.nytimes.com/1978/11/16/archives/moynihan-says-recent-studies-raise-doubts-about-negative-income-tax.html

Why settle for bombing one side when you can bomb both?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/jihadists-receiving-most-arms-sent-to-syrian-rebels.html

- "cheap chalupa" talking point is one of his main arguments
- crime point has unstated caveats ofc
- generally good summary of the standard neolib case

https://twitter.com/kausmickey/status/851175139874021376
http://www.vdare.com/articles/national-data-the-vox-pox-makes-america-stupid-on-immigration

If the program is reauthorized, it will inculcate an entire generation with the belief that government, not their parents or themselves, is primarily responsible for what they eat every day. Mom making breakfast and handing off a homemade lunch on the way out the door is an experience millions of children will miss, not necessarily because of adverse family circumstances, but because the government has made it much easier and cheaper to forgo that duty. “It’s one less thing for them [the parents] to do in the morning,” commented the Chicago teacher.

https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/school-lunched/

But Chinese analysts, whose advice is sometimes sought by the government on foreign policy questions, were scornful of the strike, which they viewed as a powerful country attacking a nation unable to fight back. And they rejected what they viewed as an unspoken American message equating Syria, which has no nuclear arsenal, with North Korea, which has carried out five nuclear arms tests and hopes to mount a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental missile.

“I don’t deny that the United States is capable of such an attack against North Korea, but you need to see that North Korea is capable of striking back,” said Lu Chao, director of the Border Studies Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences. “That would create chaos.”

If Syria had nuclear weapons, the United States would not dare attack it, said Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Chemical weapons and nuclear weapons are totally different,” Mr. Shen said. “A chemical bomb kills dozens of people, and the atomic bomb at Hiroshima killed hundreds of thousands.”

Mr. Shen added that many Chinese were “thrilled” by the attack because it would probably result in the United States becoming further mired in the Middle East.

“If the United States gets trapped in Syria, how can Trump make America great again? As a result, China will be able to achieve its peaceful rise,” Mr. Shen said, using a term Beijing employs to characterize its growing power. “Even though we say we oppose the bombing, deep in our hearts we are happy.”

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/07/what-trump-calls-strength-china-calls-stupidity-xi-jinping-summit-syria-strikes/
https://apnews.com/a01d0cf576e047248bc20439314f7481
https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/850806960526176256
🤔
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/us/politics/what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-the-syria-airstrikes.html
jfc, that was fast: https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/850089008990494720

1. News Media: Murdoch and the Purple Land
2. The Effects of Money and Lobbying in Politics
3. Video Games: Crash Bandicoot Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theatre
4. Porn: Having an Orgasm in a Crowded Theatre
5. Sexist Speech: Crash Bandicoot Making Rape Jokes in a Crowded Theatre
6. Race Related Speech: Hollywood, Skokie and Umugandas in Rwanda
7. Incitement, Obedience and Speech Act Theory: Eichmann to Jihadi Twitter
8. Conclusion: Epistemic Humility

...

Here is what I am seeking to show in the next few paragraphs:
1. Corporate ownership of the media does not lead to corporate-friendly media output arising from a conflict of interest.
2. The main driver of media output is consumer demand (i.e., people read what they already agree with) as the above extract indicates.
3. This could create a new negative effect of a free media: people living in a bubble where their views are reinforced by an uninformative partisan press.
4. I do not believe this bubble exists: reputational effects and consumer demand for truth rather than reinforcement of existing beliefs means that the partisan media does not, uniformly or consistently, distort the truth.

...

For clarity: my primary argument is that things like campaign contributions and lobbying don’t matter. But, in deference to how mixed the literature is, I would say that our aversion to interest groups is misguided. Whether it’s Save the Children campaigning for minimum levels of aid or Citigroup lobbying for certain legislation, we needn’t jump to accusations of corruption or cronyism. Democratic politics is about legislators listening, being persuaded in a marketplace of ideas – and it really doesn’t matter if the person putting forward that idea is Exxon Mobil or a constituent. The burden for suggesting that there is impropriety is necessarily high and I simply haven’t seen any convincing evidence that there is necessarily or mostly a link between money, lobbying, politics and impropriety.

...

[some stuff on video games, porn, sexism, and racial hate speech]

[this is pretty crazy:]
In essence, ‘learning from the peasant ideology… and the everyday propaganda during umuganda had also motivated people to see their fellow ba-Tutsi as enemies’ in the run up the genocide. When the genocide finally hit, umugandas were used more directly in the genocide:

During the genocide, umuganda did not involve planting trees but ‘clearing out the weeds’ – a phrase used by the genocidaires to mean the killing of Tutsis. Chopping up men was referred to as ‘bush clearing’ and slaughtering women and children as ‘pulling out the roots of the bad weeds’... The slogan, ‘clearing bushes and removing bad weeds’, were familiar terms used in the course of ordinary agricultural labour undertaken in umuganda.

...

One more Saturday with rainfall above 10mm corresponds to a 0.41 percentage point reduction in the civilian participation rate. Those who wish to stop curtail certain forms of hate speech might very easily rely on studies like this. But there is an even better study which they can rely on in doing so: RTLM was the radio station in Rwanda and much like the umugandas: referring to Tutsis as cockroaches and dirty.

Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19201
Towns with one standard deviation higher association density saw at least 15% faster Nazi Party entry. All types of societies – from veteran associations to animal breeders, chess clubs and choirs – positively predict NS Party entry.

White, middle-class social capital helps to incarcerate African-Americans in racially diverse states.: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2017/09/22/white-middle-class-social-capital-helps-to-incarcerate-african-americans-in-racially-diverse-states/
Social capital is mostly seen as a ‘good’: bringing communities together and, in the case of criminal justice, encouraging social empathy which can lead to less harsh sentencing. But these analyses ignore racial divisions in social capital. In new research, Daniel Hawes finds that while social capital can reduce the Black-White disparity in incarceration rates in states with few African Americans, in states with greater numbers of African Americans, perceptions of racial threat can activate social capital in white communities, leading to greater targeting, profiling and arrests for minorities.

http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/06/26/worldwide-few-confident-in-trump-or-his-policies/

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/339433-poll-younger-republicans-have-more-liberal-opinions-on-immigration-issues
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/320487-poll-americans-overwhelmingly-oppose-sanctuary-cities

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/31/reuters_ipsos_muslim_ban_poll_finds_support_for_order.html
https://morningconsult.com/2017/02/08/trump-approval-rating-slides-despite-support-travel-ban/
data for a bunch of different executive orders (net positive for all)

the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15078

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/angus-deaton-qa/518880/
The Nobel laureate Angus Deaton discusses extreme poverty, opioid addiction, Trump voters, robots, and rent-seeking.

co-authored the "dead white people paper" w/ wife

http://andrewgelman.com/2017/03/23/mortality-rate-trends-age-ethnicity-sex-state/
point about expansion of education seems important
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/correlates-of-middle-aged-white-mortality/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/24/the-disease-killing-white-americans-goes-way-deeper-than-opioids/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/death-rates-rise-for-wide-swath-of-white-adults-1490240740
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-despair-of-learning-that-experience-no-longer-matters
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/02/upshot/fentanyl-drug-overdose-deaths.html

Diverging Life Expectancies and Voting Patterns in the 2016 US Presidential Election.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28817322
Changes in county life expectancy from 1980 to 2014 were strongly negatively associated with Trump's vote share, with less support for Trump in counties experiencing greater survival gains. Counties in which life expectancy stagnated or declined saw a 10-percentage-point increase in the Republican vote share between 2008 and 2016.

DESPAIR AND DECADES-LONG DEINDUSTRIALIZATION: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/despair-and-decades-long-deindustrialization/

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2018/01/12/weve-been-here-before/
A concept that seems to me to be missing from the Ruhm vs. Case/Deaton debate on “deaths of despair” is that of social crisis.

This seems to me to be the case for American Indians, who began experiencing what looks like a similar social crisis to non-college educated whites about a decade beforehand: rapidly escalating rates of suicide, drug overdoses, exit from the workforce, and even alcohol-related deaths (which were already very high for American Indians well before 2000, of course):

...

The common thread here would seem to be replacement of workforce participation with transfer payments, particularly cash transfers (since, my own reservations about Medicaid aside, increases in in-kind payments and SNAP since the 80s haven’t seemed to exert the same disruptive effect.) As I’ve said before, it seems very likely to me that technology will push an ever larger segment of society out of the economy, sooner or later, but how to prevent this from tearing apart our social fabric I don’t know.

Once It Was Overdue Books. Now Librarians Fight Overdoses.: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/nyregion/librarians-opioid-heroin-overdoses.html

somewhat related: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/male-loneliness-in-suburbia/

it's full of Mormons for one thing
some commentary: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/tuesday-assorted-links-106.html
eg, "The answer to it all is WASP theocrats that heavily push 1950s life scripts. It was better when most of the country was that way, and its still better now."

Matt Stoller is the trust-busting dude

Watching the European Model Implode

The simplest way in which the advanced welfare state will lose attractiveness is the looming bankruptcy of the European welfare states.

The financial bankruptcy is not anything that even the cleverest planner can avoid. As publicly financed benefits grow, so do the populations who find that they need them. The more people who need benefits, the more government bureaucracy is required. The more people who rely on support from the government and the larger the government, the fewer the people in the private sector who pay for the benefits and for the apparatus of the state. The larger the number of people who depend on government either for benefits or for their jobs, the larger the constituency for voting for ever-larger government.

These are arithmetical realities that have become manifest in every advanced Western country. They have brought some European welfare states within sight of bankruptcy as I write. Fertility rates that are far below replacement throughout western Europe ensure that the productive native-born population will fall still more in the years to come.

There is no permanent way out of the self-destructive dynamics of the welfare state, but Europe has a tempting palliative-encouraging large-scale immigration of younger populations who work in the private sector and pay taxes that make up the revenue deficit. It won't work forever-sooner or later, the immigrants, too, will succumb to the incentives that the welfare state sets up. But the more immediate problem is that most of the new workers come from cultures that are radically different from those of western Europe. In some cases, those cultures despise the values that led to the welfare state. The United States will have a chance to watch these events unfold before our own situation becomes as critical, and the sight will be a powerful incentive to avoid going down the same road.

Susan Rice and U.S. person information "derived solely from raw SIGINT": http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/04/susan-rice-and-us-person-information.html
Lawmakers Set Sights on Obama Unmasking Scandal: http://freebeacon.com/national-security/lawmakers-sights-obama-unmasking-scandal/

FISA, EO 12333, Bulk Collection, and All That: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/03/fisa-eo-12333-bulk-collection-and-all.html

How NSA Tracks You (Bill Binney): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/03/how-nsa-tracks-you-bill-binney.html

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voice-recognition-technology-nsa/
Forget About Siri and Alexa — When It Comes to Voice Identification, the “NSA Reigns Supreme”

GOP Lawmakers Shocked By House Intel Report Alleging Surveillance Abuse: http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/18/republicans-house-intelligence-report-surveillance-abuse/
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/01/18/gop-rep-gaetz-calls-house-release-important-intelligence-document-goes-foundations-democracy-involves-fbi-doj-trump/
The House Intel Memo On FISA Abuse Was Just Released. Read It Here: http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/02/house-intel-memo-fisa-abuse-just-released-read/
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/02/house-intel-memo-shows-just-politicized-obama-administration-become/
The memo is out, and it’s bad. Is shows, unequivocally, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used political opposition research paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to get a secret court warrant to spy on a Trump campaign member.

It also shows that the FBI omitted vital information in its warrant request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Namely, the FBI kept asking for warrant renewals (FISA wiretapping permission expires after 90 days) without telling the court the FBI itself had dismissed Christopher Steele, who generated the opposition research, for lying to the FBI and leaking his relationship with the agency to the press. Both are not only unethical but likely illegal.

https://twitter.com/netouyo__/status/954152713465614336
https://archive.is/NXDZd
No shit. But makes you wonder why all the House intel counter-investigation stuff into Fusion GPS has been behind closed doors/not for public consumption, while the newest tenuous Trump-Russia links and innuendos are beamed out everywhere.

When will Republicans learn?

Chomsky: Russia conspiracy theories "a joke": http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/04/chomsky-russia-conspiracy-theories-joke.html
Trump, Putin, Stephen Cohen, Brawndo, and Electrolytes: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-putin-stephen-cohen-brawndo-and.html

1. The mainstream media really does have the power to shift how the masses think on major issues.
2. If a topic is currently socially coded as pro-Trump, there’s a higher than usual likelihood that the mainstream media will take the other side, and dial their opposition up to 11.