Reading Roundup: 2018–11–18
This year my link posting sustained a double blow. Facebook blocked apps like Buffer from posting to user profiles, and Instapaper locked…
This year my link posting sustained a double blow. Facebook blocked apps like Buffer from posting to user profiles, and Instapaper locked the ability to highlight text behind a paywall. So I’m experimenting with a new way to share links.
This is a semi-regular series of my commentary on interesting articles, in the vein of Slate Star Codex and What’s News in Education. As always, a link is not an endorsement. Like Marginal Revolution, many links are a comment on another.
Read
What It’s Like Knowing You’ll Die of Cancer at 35
Reader, I want you to take a moment to savor what you have and let go of what anger you may hold.
“What makes us change is when something is taken away from us that we feel entitled to. Our bodies are rented. This day is rented. Nothing will stay. And if we live from a mindset of “I am entitled to this,” “I deserve this,” at some point we get stuck trying to hold onto something that is not ours, that is no longer there, and have to change.”
Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die
Take a hard look at the end of your life and work backwards. How long do you have to do what you want to do? Maybe it’s to have kids, maybe it’s something else entirely.
“I hope someday my children can do the same things for their own children. Maybe I’ll see them do it, but maybe I won’t: If my firstborn waits till he’s 35, going on 36, to have a child, the way I did, my grandchild will arrive the year I would turn 71. When that grandchild finishes fifth grade, I’ll be due to turn 81. And that would be the first of my grandchildren.”
Jessica Hische: Tomorrow I’ll Be Brave
There are no earth shattering facts here, only aid and comfort in the struggle to achieve work life balance.
“I’ve found that I’ve had to navigate away from projects with unpredictable schedules and clients who require late-night and weekend work because of their own mismanagement of timelines. I feel excluded from working on last-minute campaigns, which can be very lucrative, because I’m unbending in my boundaries about family time. I have to be more proactive about projects and pursue different kinds of work that can fill the gap left from high-pressure, crazy-timeline agency work.
I couldn’t imagine doing it any other way, though. I know that years from now I won’t have regrets over passing on a client project that could have been cool but would have insane regrets.”
Preschool: I Was Wrong
It’s hard to draw a broader lesson for researchers here. If you cram all the outcome measures you can into a study, the odds of finding a spurious improvement goes up. But if you only record narrowly defined measures, then you can miss important benefits such as these.
“Despite the earlier studies of achievement being accurate, preschools (including the much-maligned Head Start) do seem to help children in subtler ways that only show up years later. Children who have been to preschool seem to stay in school longer, get better jobs, commit less crime, and require less welfare. The thing most of the early studies were looking for — academic ability — is one of the only things it doesn’t affect…
Head Start seems to work for reasons unrelated to the ones that made people want to do it. Those people were still wrong, and this is still a good example of policy effects being difficult to predict. It seems to have succeeded by coincidence, not because “early childhood education” is a good idea.”
Why Is the Fight for Free Speech Led by the Psychologists?
Psychology isn’t scientific enough to have an exclusively empirical debate but, it is scientific enough that facts are very important.
“Behavioral science self corrects. Uncomfortable data and uncomfortable arguments have the power to force change. Given enough time researchers will converge upon the truth.
But all of this is true if and only if scientists are allowed to debate and investigate freely. Haidt et. al. are confident they can win the debate if they are allowed to debate.”
The Independence of Judges Reduced Legal Development in England, 1600–1800
At face value, it looks like judges with tenure are cited less often because they issue poor rulings. But the authors argue that judges look out for each other by citing un-tenured judges more often, shoring up that judge’s standing.
“Tenure has a strong, significant, and deleterious effect on the quality of associate-judge decisions. Tenure has no effect for chief judges. The Act of Settlement reduces citations by 20% in the 18th century. The results are interpretable in terms of the incentives provided by a powerful legal profession that could protect vulnerable judges in a politically volatile era.”
The Winnowing of American Democracy: A Few Readings
A short, well curated reading list about self-government. The quote is the part where I say: Yes and, capitalism trains the Il Duces to be bloodless financiers.
“Quadrennial contests over the imperial crown have very little to do with day-to-day democracy. Do not misunderstand: those contests are important, praiseworthy, and worth preserving. The reason why they are worth preserving, however, is little understood. The genius of representative elections is not that they encourage leaders to enact the popular will (the people’s representatives rarely enact such things), but because they are the centerpiece of a system that keeps political competition between the elites from escalating into terrible violence.”
Tribalism Isn’t Our Democracy’s Problem. The Conservative Movement is
Goldwater and Nixon’s Southern Strategy continues to be the defining realignment of American politics. Debate rages inside me whether they were the cause or the effect.
“Back when the major party coalitions were more socially heterodox, there were far more “cross-pressured” voters in the electorate; which is to say, voters who identified with one social group that was typically associated with Republicans (say, Protestants), and one that was linked to Democrats (say, union members). These “cross-cutting” social identities made it far less psychologically difficult for such Americans to respond to their party’s failures of governance — or candidate selection — by swinging to the other side: At least one important aspect of their self-conception was already pulling in that direction.”
The Grapes of Path Dependence: The Long-Run Political Impact of the Dust Bowl Migration
The title of this paper is so good I had to have a lie down.
“Hispanics living in areas with large Okie migrations in the 1930s are much more likely to have conservative social values and, importantly, to vote and identify as Republicans. Put together, these results suggest that the historical legacies of migration can have a strong and sustained impact even after nearly a century after the fact.”
A Determined Man: World War I, Hitler, and the unlikely march to World War II
So the piece argues, the post World War I fundamentals pointed to a negotiated, peaceful resumption of German influence. It was Adolf Hitler that caused World War II, not Versailles.
Hitler’s “own political tactics suggest the expansionary theme was not significantly popular. In fact, he found it politically wise to mellow and downplay this element of his thinking as he neared and then attained office. Indeed, for political expedience, he stressed his desire for peace in every foreign policy speech in the 1930s. As Hitler put it late in 1938, “Circumstances have forced me to talk almost exclusively of peace for decades.”
Watch
YouTube is my Netflix. I don’t recommend it. But if you must, there are some gems you should enjoy while you’re logged out of Gmail.
Watch Wisecrack. They unpack the themes and references in popular culture, it’s just fantastic. I highly recommend their episodes on the international relations of Spiderman, the Confucianism of NieR: Automata, the loneliness of Bojack Horseman, the ethics of The Good Place, and Deadpool being Deadpool. Their sub-channel Alien’s Guide is just as hilarious and clever.
Listen
It’s a podcast. It will always be a podcast. I recommend that you listen to Conversations with Tyler this month and every month. Tyler finds interesting people, reads everything they have ever written and discusses the Straussian interpretation of their work with them.
Listen to Cass Sunstein defend the metaphysics of nudge and the quintessential American governing principle. Atul Gawande lay down the value of good check lists and human fallibility in the operating theatre. Dani Rodrik argue the qualitative benefits of industrialisation and why Lebanon developed liberalism before democracy but lost it in the 1970s. If it’s not clear by now, Tyler often considers his guests to be underrated.
