My Beautiful Bubble: 2020

2020 December Links

Right-wing propaganda, idiocy and ideology all make me roll my eyes, but when the same comes from the left I feel a different emotion - like I have to suppress anger. Why would this be? I have a few hypotheses:

"Time is money" expresses the sentiment that the time you spend could be used to make money. But the opposite is true too - money is time.

Naive-hyper-literal-alien-bot saw someone holding a Black Lives Matter sign.

He thought, "Oh my gosh! Some people don't think Black Lives Matter!" So he picked up a sign and began protesting alongside them.

Then someone with an "All Lives Matter," sign came along.

"All Lives Matter? Of course all lives matter," naive-hyper-literal-alien-bot thought before he crossed out the "black" of his sign and wrote "all" to replace it.

Saying Free Speech A Little Too Much

The other day, Ricky Gervais said this,

"It's common now to mistake defending someone's right to say things, with agreeing with those things. If you don't support free speech for people who you disagree with, then you don't support free speech. And remember, it's your right not to listen and even say things back."

I get the sentiment, but everyone - even Ricky - agrees that hate speech doesn't count. This is where I have a problem with the people uttering "free speech" all the time. It's obvious that different groups of people have very different ideas about what hate speech means, and therefore what speech shouldn't be free. You can yell "free speech" all you want, it doesn't get at the crux of the dispute.

I feel like previous generations had a "callout bullshit" culture. They had a sensitivity to being fooled. And when someone tried to fool them, they'd say, "get that bullshit out of here. you can't fool me." It's not so much that there was more of an attitude of skepticism. I'm not sure if people were more or less skeptical than they are today if you control for what kinds of things to expect them not to be skeptical toward. But there was an attitude that conveying skepticism was okay.

I Am Scott Alexander

At least I wish I were. He's a much better writer than I am. If you're reading this, I suggest you go to his blog at https://slatestarcodex.com/ and read him instead. Here are a few of my favorite posts:

Meditations On Moloch

Beware The Man Of One Study

Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable

I Can Tolerate Anything Except For the Outgroup

Against Lie Inflation

Toxoplasma of Rage

The Categories Were Made For Man, not Man for the Categories

And so many others!

Oh wait...

SlateStarCodex is dead. Here's what happened.

Systemic Racism:

"Refers specifically to the ways in which institutional policies and practices create different outcomes for different racial groups. The institutional policies may never mention any racial group, but their effect is to create advantages for Whites and oppression and disadvantage for people from groups classified as People of Color."

In other words, systemic racism is anything that creates or exasperated racial disparities. If you believe in this definition of racism, you likely see racism pervading society. But when you think about it, systemic racism is not only common across almost every policy we do have, but every policy we could have.

I hear a lot of complaining about how Trump gets misinterpreted and taken out of context by the media.

The thing is, they're right. I can't tell you how often over the last 4 years I've thought, "I don't like Trump, but what you're saying is completely asinine."

When I hear right-wing people point out this media inanity in a plea for others to leave the left and embrace the right, where diverse and serious conversations are being had, I have to laugh. How short are their memories?!!

It wasn't so long ago that right-wingers quoted Barack Obama's book out of context, "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." Another time, Obama's line, "you didn't build that" was mistaken to mean, "you didn't build (any of) that" when he clearly meant, "You didn't build that (by yourself)." One ad quoted Obama as saying the troops in Afghanastan are, "just air-raiding villages and killing civilians," again, a quote that was completely taken out of context.

This kind of thing was nonstop throughout Obama's presidency. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a foreigner. Obama starts a war on Christmas. Obama kowtows to enemy leaders. Obama thinks he's a dictator. Obama is going try to stay in power past 2 terms. Now we're seeing the flipped version of the same thing and I'm supposed to join team Trump?

4 years ago I didn't think CNN was capable of simulating Fox News, but now that it has it doesn't make me any more of a right-winger. If anything I'm just more cynical now. When the left and right see their leaders through rose-colored glasses, and always thinks the enemy tribe leader is satan, the best thing to do is avoid them both and join the majority of Americans who embrace centrism.

Steelmen Vs. Everymen

There are two way to spend IQ points. You can spend them fighting dumb ideas that are wrong or you can spend them fighting smart ideas that are wrong. I don't know what the proper allocation of IQ points should be to battling dumb vs. smart ideas

The term Steelman refers to the best possible argument for your opponent's position, but if that's not what most people actually believe, does it do any good? Wouldn't it be more persuasive to battle the actual objections that average IQ people make? Instead of Steelmen, shouldn't we fight everymen?

When I'm told that something is rewiring our brains, I'm skeptical. The bad version of the story usually pertains to things that accidentally rewire your brain like smartphones, pornography, social media, or wifi. The good version usually pertains to things we can do to deliberately rewire our own brains, like brain training or meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy.

Last year I wrote a post in favor of trivialization. The accusation that one is trivializing shouldn't be an argument-ender. The relevant question isn't whether one is trivializing something bad, but whether someone is trivializing something being exaggerated.

"Hitler ate babies" is a statement that deserves to be trivialized. Hitler didn't eat babies. Yet, to say so trivializes how terrible Hitler was.

Some people defend this kind of exaggeration by claiming it's tactical. If we're honest in our representations, people don't care enough. So we have to exaggerate the problem to motivate a more urgent response. It's kind of like archery where you have to aim above the target because if you aim at the target you're going to fall short.

I am confident that on the margin some people are encouraged by exaggeration into more appropriate responses. This is the benefit of tactical exaggeration. I'm not going to say that this benefit doesn't exist (although doing so is an amusing contradiction). Rather, in my further defense of trivialization, I want to point out the price of tactical exaggeration.

Should you believe a woman who says she's been raped? Yes, but I have an important qualifier.

Consider two examples and ask yourself what they have in common:

1. Dan Crenshaw is a conservative politician who went on the Joe Rogan podcast. When the discussion came to marijuana legalization, Mr. Crenshaw said this,

"There's a normalization that occurs when you legalize something. Let's say you've made the age 21... what you've done is you've normalized it for teenagers. You said, "yeah, it's 21, but it's legal so there's no issues with it." I think that's what you're telling people.

2. A paper posted in the Progressive Economy Forum says that UBI would create social cohesion and prevent stigma because everyone would receive it. In regard to means testing, it says,

Applying for such benefits is shaming, undignified, often costly, time-consuming and an implicit admission of personal inadequacy. It is potentially and often stigmatising, to yourself, your family, your friends, neighbours and potential future employers.

A Very Important Paper on Infection Rate and Mortality

I was going to place this in my monthly links post, but it seems too timely to wait:

I don't want to beat the Republicans or Democrats. I want them both to get better.

You have been told, "history will judge," but I tell you, history is a bad judge.

Blogging: A lot of a LIttle or a Little of a lot

There are two ways to write a blog. You can do it a lot of a little style (Scott Alexander) or a little of a lot style (Tyler Cowen). At the moment, I am trying to do it a medium amount for a medium amount and utterly failing.

I get caught between writing an idea and writing a complete argument. An idea floats by itself in relation to other ideas, a complete argument bundles ideas together such that they can't easily be unpacked. I write incomplete arguments that I expect to complete over time in future posts. The problem is, I put so much time into each incomplete argument that I neither get the value of completing the entire argument nor the value of outputting many small ideas on paper.

Moving forward, this blog is going to become a lot more of a little. I will post more frequently but with less effort. They say that if you're falling to accomplish what you set out to do, break down the project into more manageable pieces. That's what I'll do.

This way not only lends itself to my skillset because I'm a terrible editor but also compliments the fractionated nature of my time. I am interrupted frequently when I try to write, and the intermittent process comes through in the final product. I zoom in and out of a post, losing my train of thought, and it's not only personally frustrating but it's also a broken method.

I will revise the style of this blog to fit better with more frequent, less effort posts. I will also transition my monthly links posts into posts of their own. This should also make them more timely.

It will be better this way.

Who Doesn't Understand Exponential Growth?

I don't know anyone who didn't understand exponential growth. Nobody is confused at why they get a big number when they hit the multiplication button on a calculator repeatedly. Nobody is confused at the lily pond example of exponential growth, or the chess board example, or the penny doubled everyday example.

I hear a lot about how Coronavirus "downplayers" just don't understand exponential growth. In my interaction with people, even lower intelligence people, I find this hard to believe.

Whether life begins at conception is the wrong framing for the abortion debate. "Life" is a funny word. A germ is alive in some sense, and so is an ant, and so is a cow, and so it a human. To argue when life begins is to make the issue too easy on yourself. What we really want to know is when life becomes worthy. Worthy of what? Worthy of protection. Worthy of rights. Worthy of dignity. Worthy of being treated the way we treat other human beings.

Coronavirus: How Bad is Bad?

I'm seeing a ton of tiptoeing around Coronavirus. Frightened of being proven wrong, few are willing to paint a clear picture of how good and bad it could be, or even what a good/bad outcome even looks like. I can listen to someone talk about it for hours and come away with absolutely no clue what they think best-case / worst-case scenarios are. I can't even ballpark most people's estimates based on the way they're talking about it.

I'm going to try to be different. After a lot of thinking, reading and introspection, here's how I assess the situation:

We live in our homes now
with nothing to do
One thing about Coronavirus
is it ain't no flu

More thoughts on Coronavirus:

Coronavirus: Pandemic or Panic?

Epistemic status: Bro, I'm not an expert.

I have several spurious thoughts at this point on Coronavirus. Here they are:

Have you heard of The Line? It's the line you're not supposed to cross. It's invisible so it's kinda vague whether or not you crossed it. People seem to think it's in different places so it's even harder to tell if you've crossed it.

We talk about "The" line as if it's one line that we all agree to. But that's not quite right. There are multiple lines for different people. What crosses the line for one person does not cross it for another. The ambiguity is killing me.

Today I want to define the great line.

Bryan Caplan's intellectual history is intriguing. When he was in high school he read Ayne Rand, met Murray Rothbard at the Mises Institute, and became an adherent of Austrian Economics. Later, he learned "real" economics and eventually decided that Ayne Rand and the Austrian School of Economics was basically wrong.

Here's the thing; Bryan converted to libertarianism based on Ayne Rand and Austrian Economics. He later threw away his justification for libertarianism but maintained his libertarian conclusions. He found new and genuinely smarter justifications for libertarian doctrine.

This post is my list of links for February 2020. My intellectual trade deficit every month is usually massive - I import a lot more information than I output. Link posts largely, though nowhere near entirely, track my intellectual imports.

Link posts give me a log to look back on. Moreover, the act of writing these links posts is a practice that helps embed the information into my head.

In a lot of ways writing these link posts throughout the month is one of my favorite things about keeping this blog.

Now the links:

I don't believe life begins at conception. I think an embryo is far too unlike anything that has right's worth respecting, or dignity worth preserving. The more you know about the characteristics of an embryo (or lack thereof) the more claims about it deserving protection violates normal human intuitions.

Some people might call my position pro-choice. Regardless of whether that label truly applies to me, I notice the people who call themselves pro-choice generally justify their position on very different grounds.

Recently Richard Dawkins got in trouble for this Tweet pictured on the left.

His Tweet is structurally equivalent to,

"You may object to me killing you by shooting you in the head on moral or ideological grounds. It's quite another to conclude it wouldn't physically work in practice."

This should be pretty uncontroversially true. But saying "Eugenics would work in practice" is like saying, "Hitler didn't eat babies." Sure it's true, but why are you saying it?

In this post I'm going to talk about areas where researchers only look at half the story. When I notice something like this; a big gaping mistake that all the smart people seem to ignore, I'm very open to the possibility that I'm the one who's missing something. But since I can't seem to figure out where I've gone awry, this is much a post about pointing out other's mistakes as asking to be shown my own.

The two topics where I see half the story notably absent from researcher's view are climate change and the gender wage gap. I will start with climate change.

Somehow, despite anyone's insight or directive, the phrases "paying" attention and "spending" time got built into our vocabulary. I think this is amazing because attention and time are overlooked currencies. The opportunity cost of wasted time and the depletion of cognitive resources are heralded as great insights by economists and psychologists. But they're right beside us, nested within our language.

Your Brain is an Organ

We think differently about muscles than we do organs. Generally, we consider organs robust, and muscles anti-fragile.

Remember that robust refers to the kind of thing that does not easily break under pressure, and anti-fragile refers to the kind of thing that actually gets stronger under pressure.

The heart is largely made up of cardiac muscle, which is why exercising your heart by jogging is good for your heart. This is anti-fragile. Your liver is an organ, which is why it can probably tolerate excessive amounts of alcohol, but ultimately the drinking will wear your liver down not make it stronger. This is robust.

My society has a popular saying: "the brain is a muscle," often followed by the words, "use it or lose it." The Use it/Lose it part accurately depicts the anti-fragile quality that they're trying to bestow upon the brain. But it's important to understand, the brain is not a muscle in any literal sense. It is an organ. This expression that I hear all the time is an explanation of what society believes, it is not evidence.

This post is my list of links for January 2020. My intellectual trade deficit every month is usually massive - I import a lot more information than I output. Link posts largely, though nowhere near entirely, track my intellectual imports.

Link posts give me a log to look back on. Moreover, the act of writing these links posts is a practice that helps embed the information into my head.

In a lot of ways writing these link posts throughout the month is one of my favorite things about keeping this blog.

Now the links:

While reading research on teething pain, I came across several shocking historic superstitious beliefs about the topic. Ready for this?

In my travels through idea land, I often cross paths with people I consider bigots and people I consider bullshitters. They're on different ends of the intellectual domain, but they have something in common, their membership seems to be an overresponse to the other. Bigots slip into bigotry because they hate the bullshit, and bullshitters embrace the bullshit because they fear becoming bigots. They both think they're protecting society from the other, but in fact, they unknowingly maintain a symbiotic relationship.

Earlier, I wrote a post called Short Term Pain Long Term Trauma. It said that when parents make their children suffer, the potential for long-term trauma should be the same regardless of whether the suffering was justified. Two examples of this might be spanking and vaccinations. I want to zoom in on these examples now.

Story 1: Mr. bad parent pushes his 4-year-old son to the ground for no reason. The son scrapes his elbow and bangs his head. After a trip to the emergency room finds that the son will be fine, the child wonders, "why would daddy do this?" Although the incident resulted in no physical trauma to the child's head, the psychological trauma takes a toll. The child goes on to get fewer years of education, receives a lower income and is more likely to end up in prison.

Story 2: Mr. good parent pushes his 4-year-old son to the ground and out of the way of a moving vehicle. The son scrapes his elbow and bangs his head. After a trip to the emergency room finds that the son will be fine, the child, too young to understand what happened, wonders, "why would daddy do this?" Although the incident resulted in no physical trauma to the child's head, the psychological trauma takes a toll. The child goes on to get fewer years of education, receives a lower income and is more likely to end up in prison.

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