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2020 December Links


    1. One of my favorite filmmakers, Don Hertzfeldt, has put out the third part of his World of Tomorrow series. I love these movies. They're dense with surreal beauty, existential sadness, absurdist humor, and ideas. How I love the ideas.

Is it better or worse than It's Such a Beautiful Day? Probably worse. But World of Tomorrow still needs a lot more watching and rewatching to get everything out of it.

Here is the first part of the World of Tomorrow series

    2. Blogger MetaLevelUp Metalevels criticism of my post about rewiring your brain. He's diplomatic about it - accurately describing my view and finding common ground. 

I plan to write a full post which will hopefully make some clear cuts to divide the issue usefully. Maybe I'm wrong, but let me try to be right first to see if that works out.

    3. Stalin said a single death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic (Thanos snap = statistic, Tony Stark death = tragedy). Apparently, there's research that confirms this idea, The More Who Die The Less We Care.

"We analyze valence, arousal, and specific emotional content of over 100,000 mentions of death in news articles and social media posts, and find that language shows an increase in valence (i.e., decreased negative affect) and a decrease in arousal when describing mortality of larger numbers of people."

Sam Harris frequently points this out in his podcast, and Paul Bloom says it's a serious flaw in empathy. It also reminds me of Adam Smith's little finger.

This is all to say, stop caring so much about stories close to you and care more about the calculus of human suffering

    4. 18 misconceptions about the state of the world.

Test yourself on other common misconceptions.

    5. "Go ahead and flag this tweet for when we do not have a vaccine by the end of the year"

Our collective consciousness has a short memory for failed predictions like this. We need to Stop listening to people who make bold predictions and turn out wrong.

We also have a Mr. Irwin Redlener on MSNBS saying it is "impossible" so have a vaccine by the end of the year.

"Once you fully absorb the distinction between what sounds good and what is good, however, the implied political danger will weigh upon your mind."

     7. Tyler Cowen on whether to take UFO reports seriously,

"The major reason I take UFO reports seriously is simply the “gradient” of other people who take them seriously — the people with the very highest security clearances! It is not just Brennan and Harry Reid, there are others too, namely people with the very highest level of security clearance who believe these issues deserve further investigation, and are not just weather phenomena, instrument mistakes, weather balloons, etc."
This is inspired by a conversation Tyler had with a former director of the CIA.

    8. I have mixed feelings about Netflix's A Social Dilemma.


    9. Meet Wim Hof


Wim Hof (The Iceman) holds 26 world records for feats like the longest ice bath, fastest half marathon barefoot in ice and snow, and furthest swim under the ice. He also climbed 7200 meters up Mount Everest and to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in only a pair of shorts and shoes. He also ran a full marathon in the Namib desert without water and when he got to the end he rehydrated with beer. He controls is erections at will, he speaks 10 languages, and has only eaten one meal a day for 38 years. Researchers had to rethink the science when he not only demonstrated that he could not only voluntarily influence his sympathetic nervous system and immune system, but train others to do so as well. 

Damn.

There is no doubt that Wim Hof is an incredible human being, but stories about him blur the line between incredible human and superhuman - between history and legend. I don't believe in superhumans or legends. He has accomplished what was formerly considered impossible in ways that have been documented and verified, but there's a spectrum within impossible that has to be considered. The idea that his method can cure some forms of cancer has not been verified, and that's a claim that is a lot more impossible than climbing Mount Kilimanjaro wearing only a pair of shorts.

He definitely ran a marathon in the Namib desert without water, but did he subsequently rehydrate with beer? He says so, buuuuuut did he?

Wim Hof was interviewed with Mikhaila and Jordan Peterson where they all practice Wim Hof's breathing technique, but I prefer Tim Ferriss' interview with him.

    10. Coleman Hughes was named in Forbe's 30 under 30 in media. As someone who has listened to Coleman Hughes from the beginning, I'm glad his popularity has grown so much. My favorite content of his doesn't have nearly enough views; Anti Racism and Humanism; Two Competing Visions, I also like his interview with Chloe Valdarie, and Where Do Morals Come From? With Sean Carroll.

    11. The Caretaker's Everywhere At The End Of Time is a piece of music that spans 6 albums and 6 1/2 hours meant to portray the gradual effects of dementia from memory decay to death. I think it's beautiful and dark. 6 1/2 hours is a significant time investment, but once I started listening I found it hard to turn off.

    12. Clearer Thinking Podcast's interview with Aella. They talk about sex work, psychedelics, and definitions of enlightenment. She's brutally honest and a clear speaker. She has that head-tilting way of looking at things.
"I think there's a category of thing where the act of putting words on it disrupts it, so you cannot communicate the thing because in communicating it you've ruined it."

"After I decided to not die, then everything after that became a choice. It was like, okay I'm going to push away death and I'm going to push away all the things that I haven't been pushing away before. I'm going to push away my acceptance for anxiety, and suddenly it became like everything that I was doing became integrated with me like an agent thing. Like instead of anxiety happening to me, I was choosing to do anxiety because I was choosing to not die."

Aella also wrote some of my favorite pieces of writing, The Trauma Narrative and Blame-Game Theory.

    13. Psychologist and intelligence researcher James Flynn has passed away. He is well known for discovering The Flynn Effect; the fact that IQs have been generally rising around the world year after year for about a century.


As Garrett Jones argues, intelligence is an important factor in positive national outcomes. Not so much because individual intelligence is important, but because group intelligence is.
"1. Intelligence is associated with patience and hence higher savings rates; 
2. Intelligence causes cooperation; 
3. Higher group intelligence opens the door to using fragile, high value production technologies, and 
4. Intelligence is associated with supporting market-oriented policies. "
"For every mile walked drunk, turns out to be eight times more dangerous than the mile driven drunk."

Drunk walking may be more dangerous than you think it is, but remember

Question: is the average drunk walker is more or less drunk than the average drunk driver?

    15. At the beginning of the year Trump made history by appointing the first openly gay cabinet member. Now, Biden is making history by appointing the first openly gay cabinet member. Wait what?

Here's what's going on:

The usual suspects are trying to retroactively write the rules of the game so that their gay guy wins. The two games:

A. The first gay senate confirmed person to serve in the cabinet on a permanent basis (Pete Buttigieg - Biden appointed)

B. The first gay person to serve in the cabinet position role (Richard Grenell - Trump appointed)

The Trump guy did serve in the role of acting director of national intelligence - a cabinet-level position. Acting meaning he temporarily took on all the duties as the director of national intelligence until they found another guy.

Consider as an analogy: If Kamela Harris had to fill in for the last 3 months of Joe Biden at the end of his term because he got Coronavirus, would she then be the first female president?

I'll let you decide who's doing more mental gymnastics.

    16. Remember these?


    17. Study finds that if your college roommate is conservative you become more conservative, if your college roommate is liberal you become more liberal.

A reminder that the answers to big questions don't actually affect their lives very much, so they use these beliefs to navigate social terrain. If your friend group is conservative, you'll adopt conservative views. If your friend group is liberal you'll adopt liberal views. If your friend group is complicated, you'll adopt complicated views.

    18. Poe's law is the idea that without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.

    19. Putanumonit Jacob Malkovich shares advice on how to write. It's not universal, but it worked for him.

-write confidently and trust the readers to discount appropriately
-write in one sitting, but sit often
-write before I understand it all
-use Twitter as a first draft
- writer’s block is fake

"people often use the fact that they have a right to do something as an excuse for doing it. As a justification... But, and I think it is a very dangerous way of thinking. Because we have a right to be jerks. We have a right to be unpleasant. And, I think that's good. I think that's an essential part of a free society, is that we aren't--we can't be coerced to be good people, to be a decent people."

When losing an argument, people subtly turn the subject of the conversation from whether X is true or good, to whether they have the right to believe X or do X.

Another quote from the interview: 

"I think people on the Left have alienated a lot of fellow citizens by acting as if the only way to argue for that is to say that health care is a right, is an entitlement. And, you could just say, 'Well, whether or not it's a right, it's something that, if we're affluent enough, if we have the ability to do it'"
    21. Research and data: The tendency for interpersonal victimhood: The personality construct and its consequences (Sci-Hub Link). 

Below are the dimensions that make up this new personality construct, and the questions researchers ask to identify it.

This is not a personality construct I score high in.

The researchers suggest this stable personality characteristic is connected with primary caregivers (upbringing), and behavioral revenge - an effect of the combination of entitlement of immoral behavior and negative emotion. Channeling Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, and company.


"There really is a fetishization of victimhood, to the point where people of my daughter's generation like to make up social groups that are oppressed and join them so that they can be part of the oppressed."
Agnes Callard also mentions her op-ed in the New York times, "Should We Cancel Aristotle?" and how it has been misunderstood.
"I think people when they read newspapers there's already a set of categories to which they're placing people, so if you make yourself a little bit difficult to place, you become a Rorschach test."

    23.  Two key graphs to take away from the More In Common American Fabric Survey showing progressive activists are out of touch... and in touch.



    24. A big thank you goes out to Freakonomics podcast for making my 6-hour car trip very enjoyable. Listen to Does Advertising Actually Work part 1 and 2, and Does Anyone Know What Socialism Actually Is?

    25. After a winter hiatus that ended up taking an entire year, Rationally Speaking with Julia Galef is back. The first episode tries to answer the question, Are Boomers Responsible for Millenials' Struggles? It pulls from three different interviews with three different perspectives.

After listening to the interviews, Julia's assessment,

    26. France is Bacon


Someone should compile a list of these idioms of non-argument and write an essay, nay, a book!

    28. Women showed no clear preference regarding men's facial hair. The study leans heavily on self-reports.

Some men look better with facial hair than others, so this shouldn't be taken as advice.

    29. The ovulatory shift hypothesis, the idea that women's mate preferences change with their ovulatory cycles, has always felt condescending, which is not a real criticism. But lately, more and more studies have challenged it.

    30. Israel is rolling out 100,000 vaccines for Covid19 per day, more than any other country. At this rate, most of the country should be done by March.

Remember that any downside risk of vaccinating has to be compared to the downside risk of not vaccinating.

    31. Thing of the Month: Let this criticism of optionality change your life. When life gives you too many doors you spend to much time peeking through them rather than walking into one.
"While the serial option and lottery ticket buyers seem like different creatures, they are, in fact, close cousins. Both types postpone their dreams and undertake choices that they think will enable their dreams. But they fail to understand that all of these intervening choices will change them fundamentally—and they are, in fact, the sum total of those choices.
The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you."

The point of this essay is at odds with a lot of what is taught (assumed) in economics.

    32. "Significantly more fathers reported having been unfaithful in the current relationship than non-fathers (30.7% vs. 17.2%)"

    33. Related:

Sorry, Johnny six-pack. Huffington Post: 'Dad Bods' Are More Attractive To Women, Study Finds. Inside Hook: Dad Bods Are Desirable, Healthy, Claims Yale Professor. The Dawg: Very important Yale study says women find dad bods more attractive. Newsweek: Why the 'Dad Bod' Physique Is the Future of Sexual Selection. The Cut: Dadbods make men more attractive according to science.


This reminds me of an old Scott Alexander post Reporter Degrees of Freedom.
Stalin once said that “those who vote decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.” It’s starting to look like those who do the studies decide nothing and those who report the studies decide everything. The only solution is to actually read the study and not just the headlines. Sometimes we might even have to – God help us – read beyond the abstract.

    34. There was a satirical study in 2018 finding that parachutes don't prevent death or injury. The punchline is that the plane was parked.

It reminds me that the idea that putting cloth over your face will block saliva from going in and coming out should be the default view.

    35. Did the WHO change the definition of Herd Immunity? 

Obviously, as a reasonable person, I believe that science has discovered a new definition of herd immunity because that's totally how definitions work.

    36. Elizabeth Kim on how ideologies are snow globes.

IncludedSpencer Greenberg's 4 components of ideology:

A. Sacred values (think 3 languages of politics)
B. A simple model of how the world works (too simple)
C. Sense of identity (I am a...)
D. People (us, them, and neutrals)

    37. Michael Huemer and Steve Patterson disagree on the metaphysics of mathematics.

This podcast kept me up until 3am. Highly recommended.


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