Ed West on academic prose; Scott Alexander on marriage; Robert Wright on retribution; Matt Yglesias puts on rose-colored glasses; so does Nellie Bowles
Jan 17, 2022·edited Jan 17, 2022Liked by Arnold Kling
Scott Alexander's marriage has some features which are still quite rare in our society, check out the comments.
I am not judging those features, but I think they do have bearing on the assessment of his advice.
Yeah, "keep trying, don't give up, don't be too down on yourself, sometimes it takes a while, don't stop getting yourself out there," is kind of banally good advice for higher success in eventually finding a match in the contemporary sexual marketplace. But it's good advice for people who tend to take a long time matching. Sometimes that's just how it is, but sometimes there's a good reason why it's taking a long time, and it's something they can do something about, as an alternative to the micromarriage strategy.
Micromarriage is treating the problem as exogenous, as if you are a fixed quantity hand and if you keep sorting through the giant pile of gloves eventually you will find one that fits just right.
But the problem is also endogenous. To the extent one can be flexible and change oneself, it helps not to be idiosyncratic or picky, so that there are move gloves which fit you. If you find it hard to match, you could try to expand the numbers of the class of acceptable matches by relaxing constraints.
And then, looking at that class, to the extent you can make some changes in that direction, it helps to be more of the kind of person the typical member of the class wants to match with. We should be very tolerant of people's quirks and eccentricities, but at the same time, an eccentric can't be too committed to his eccentricities is he wants an easier time at matching.
Do you want to be married to your eccentricities, or married to your wife?
If you want a wife, it will help to aim center-mass, and you might need to accept the need to sand off some rough edges.
Likewise, it also helps to be flexible on wants, so that one can want the same things out of matching that one's prospective matching partners want.
Also, people should keep in mind that, for complicated and subtle reasons I won't get into here, they tend to be really bad at understanding themselves and predicting what is 'required' in a partner them happy. They end up frequently surprised at being happy with situations they once believed they would find unacceptable. There are plenty of hilarious jokes online about this very real phenomenon.
“a good marriage is one that is embedded in the process of making someone a grandparent.”
I strongly agree, but I recently had a troubling thought. As delaying marriage and children becomes the norm, the probabilistic estimate of how many years you will have with grandchildren (and how many grandchildren you will have) goes down. It is also increasingly common for smart children with opportunities to move to other parts of the country, making it more difficult to spend time with them.
I think that searching for a marriage partner that you can raise children and grow old with is still a road map for success, but reaping the reward of grandchildren seems ever more distant in the future and for some dubious.
Different thought, more of a quibble:
“Unfortunately, in much of academia esoteric writing is treated as a positive signal instead of a negative one.”
I know what you mean but I’m not sure esoteric is the right term here. Esoteric writing is often the term used for Straussian writing.
Is it all just catastrophe porn, or are there reasonable grounds for deep concern over what is happening? I get the feeling Arnold wants to maintain a happy complacency rather than worry about things that probably can't be fixed, but only proceed to their likely disastrous end.
Also, I think Arnold is underrating the possibility that more people genuinely just wouldn't enjoy getting married and having kids. The opportunity cost of doing so is higher than ever today, and since more and more people aren't having kids, the social pressure to do so is deteriorating. Arnold's argument for having kids is too retrospective. Just because one wishes one had grandkids once one is old doesn't mean one should've had grandkids. Whenever you do something that gets you 10 utils now and costs you 1 util tomorrow, in some sense you 'regret' doing it tomorrow when you're paying the cost after enjoying the benefit, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong decision.
Odd as it is to suggest, I think the natural desire to actually have children may be much weaker than one would think. Until last century when we invented effective birth control, sexual instincts were sufficient to ensure procreation. It may be because it's now totally dependent on the, up to this point, rather auxiliary or even somewhat redundant desire to want to be around children, that we're seeing this decline in procreation.
If you can find writing explaining quantum mechanics that's intuitive and clear, then it's probably wrong. Unfortunately, you need to understand some complex math (literally, involving complex numbers) to even get the basics. Quantum mechanics isn't the only area where that's the case, just the most obvious one. Even novel economics research has reached the point where it's (often just the statistical models being fitted to the data) complicated enough that it couldn't be explained honestly in words without a book length treatise, and most journals have strict word limits. For scientific fields (let's include economics), rather than insisting they find some way to explain their models clearly with less math, perhaps argue that academics should eschew journal articles and articulate their ideas more fully in books, or longer articles published in something like arxiv?
The point being though, while I agree that academics are often unnecessarily obscure, and even in the harder fields like econ, you can sometimes get a paper to pass peer review by dazzling the reviewer with a bunch of complex math they can't hope to understand, there's no easy way around it, because much of the discourse takes place at a level that it's hard or in some cases impossible to make broadly accessible. To use an extreme example: a mathematician proving the Poincare conjecture could just be writing jibberish on the chalkboard and I probably wouldn't be able to tell, I'd just watch in awe. But there's not really a solution. Insisting he just write more clearly isn't one. If it's possible for him to make me to grasp what he's doing, it probably would take more time and effort than it's worth. So while doubtless much academic obscurity is gratuitous (especially in the humanities), there are true positive cases where it's unavoidable, and it's not necessarily a trivial task to tell which is which; ironically, it requires you to understand the fancy math to tell whether it's nonsensical or unnecessary.
Perhaps scientific papers in economics and other areas need more mathematics to make it easier to understand. However, implicit assumptions should be made explicit especially, when dealing with complex multi-variable issues. Being able to more or less "read mathematics" is essential to being literate in the modern world.
I got a kick out of looking at a graph showing that housing values in California started showing decade long oscillations much higher that the national average and the oscillations started after the very rapid population growth of the '40s to the late '60s. If you understand that supply/demand system are feedback control systems where excess demand drive a supply response and you see the mathematics and dynamics of such systems you know that delays in permissions allowing a supply response can make the system unstable and create oscillations. The article (economists at Chapman University) did a lot of hand waving but a quick look at the mathematics of dynamics of supply/demand systems (feedback control systems) using complex math (with imaginary numbers ( -1^.5 = sq-root of -1)) would have show how delay impacts the dynamics and point to the expansion of regulation in California as the cause. Mathematics would point to the time delays not the nature of the regulations.
It is the hand waving thinking of social sciences that leads to people believing that if they see one case of a vaccinated person getting sick believing that they will be safer if they don't get vaccinated. Mathematics and statistics expose these beliefs as being nonsense.
Notice that with todays Journalists you seldom see the numbers and math. You see statements like this variant of SARS-CoV-2 is "less lethal" than Delta but no indication of the fact that most of the people are vaccinated and the people getting the worst infections are un-vaccinated and they are younger that last years data with fewer co-morbidities. How lethal this variant is relative to Delta has to be mathematically determined and adjusted for age and co-morbidities.
Nice straw man from Bowles, on "What if we’re not in the last days, on the edge of slaughtering each other? Things always need improving. Suffering needs alleviating."
Well, what if we are, if not *clearly* in the last days, but still clearly on the edge of slaughtering each other?
Anyone who can’t see, that this country is closer to tyranny, or civil strife, than it was, say, a decade ago, may as well have been living under a rock, and/or is hopelessly ignorant of human nature/ human history.
Yet, even Bowles, earlier in that post, wrote about how the chief executive of Mozilla Corp. "came out strongly against the open internet".
How many such Sil. Valley brass were talking like that a decade ago?
Isn't that another rather powerful Tell, of a country sliding toward conflict?
How many more such Tells need we see, before folks like Bowles remove the blinders from their eyes?
I view most of our current political conflicts as a mix of deranged and idiotic, so I would welcome a message that says everything's actually going to be okay, in spite of this.
I won't admit it! My priors are that there has always been sharp, jostling conflict in our society. And, although today things are made uniquely worse by the social mediazation, we can galumph our way through.
I'm of two minds about the jargon of specialization. Like everyone else, I deplore it - especially when I'm trying to understand a paper outside my field. On the other hand, it inevitably develops in every higher human endeavor.
In recent years, I've encountered esoteric prose in the fields of construction management, 78 rpm record collecting, and proteomic physics. I've flat out asked my financial advisors why their profession so assiduously avoids clarity of communication, and been answered with ... jargon.
A friend of mine had a successful business advising Wall Street firms, among others, on how to communicate more simply. From him, I learned that even specialists in the field of clarity use jargon when communicating when each other.
I suspect that specialized language will inevitably grow from pools of unique knowledge. And don't forget that there is a strong sentiment among certain linguists as to why a place like New Guinea has developed 850 different languages. Language, they say, evolves in two simultaneous directions: to make us understood by our friends and opaque to our enemies.
If this is so, the esoteric element in language is intrinsic to its formation. It may be reduced, but it can never be eliminated.
I avoid "disaster porn" (including disasters caused by rampant wokeism) becasue it does not (by definition?) advance a positive program for avoiding disaster embedded in a more general program of social and economic improvement, but that's just old Liberal (Neoliberal to be precise) me.
Scott Alexander's marriage has some features which are still quite rare in our society, check out the comments.
I am not judging those features, but I think they do have bearing on the assessment of his advice.
Yeah, "keep trying, don't give up, don't be too down on yourself, sometimes it takes a while, don't stop getting yourself out there," is kind of banally good advice for higher success in eventually finding a match in the contemporary sexual marketplace. But it's good advice for people who tend to take a long time matching. Sometimes that's just how it is, but sometimes there's a good reason why it's taking a long time, and it's something they can do something about, as an alternative to the micromarriage strategy.
Micromarriage is treating the problem as exogenous, as if you are a fixed quantity hand and if you keep sorting through the giant pile of gloves eventually you will find one that fits just right.
But the problem is also endogenous. To the extent one can be flexible and change oneself, it helps not to be idiosyncratic or picky, so that there are move gloves which fit you. If you find it hard to match, you could try to expand the numbers of the class of acceptable matches by relaxing constraints.
And then, looking at that class, to the extent you can make some changes in that direction, it helps to be more of the kind of person the typical member of the class wants to match with. We should be very tolerant of people's quirks and eccentricities, but at the same time, an eccentric can't be too committed to his eccentricities is he wants an easier time at matching.
Do you want to be married to your eccentricities, or married to your wife?
If you want a wife, it will help to aim center-mass, and you might need to accept the need to sand off some rough edges.
Likewise, it also helps to be flexible on wants, so that one can want the same things out of matching that one's prospective matching partners want.
Also, people should keep in mind that, for complicated and subtle reasons I won't get into here, they tend to be really bad at understanding themselves and predicting what is 'required' in a partner them happy. They end up frequently surprised at being happy with situations they once believed they would find unacceptable. There are plenty of hilarious jokes online about this very real phenomenon.
“a good marriage is one that is embedded in the process of making someone a grandparent.”
I strongly agree, but I recently had a troubling thought. As delaying marriage and children becomes the norm, the probabilistic estimate of how many years you will have with grandchildren (and how many grandchildren you will have) goes down. It is also increasingly common for smart children with opportunities to move to other parts of the country, making it more difficult to spend time with them.
I think that searching for a marriage partner that you can raise children and grow old with is still a road map for success, but reaping the reward of grandchildren seems ever more distant in the future and for some dubious.
Different thought, more of a quibble:
“Unfortunately, in much of academia esoteric writing is treated as a positive signal instead of a negative one.”
I know what you mean but I’m not sure esoteric is the right term here. Esoteric writing is often the term used for Straussian writing.
Is it all just catastrophe porn, or are there reasonable grounds for deep concern over what is happening? I get the feeling Arnold wants to maintain a happy complacency rather than worry about things that probably can't be fixed, but only proceed to their likely disastrous end.
Also, I think Arnold is underrating the possibility that more people genuinely just wouldn't enjoy getting married and having kids. The opportunity cost of doing so is higher than ever today, and since more and more people aren't having kids, the social pressure to do so is deteriorating. Arnold's argument for having kids is too retrospective. Just because one wishes one had grandkids once one is old doesn't mean one should've had grandkids. Whenever you do something that gets you 10 utils now and costs you 1 util tomorrow, in some sense you 'regret' doing it tomorrow when you're paying the cost after enjoying the benefit, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong decision.
Odd as it is to suggest, I think the natural desire to actually have children may be much weaker than one would think. Until last century when we invented effective birth control, sexual instincts were sufficient to ensure procreation. It may be because it's now totally dependent on the, up to this point, rather auxiliary or even somewhat redundant desire to want to be around children, that we're seeing this decline in procreation.
If you can find writing explaining quantum mechanics that's intuitive and clear, then it's probably wrong. Unfortunately, you need to understand some complex math (literally, involving complex numbers) to even get the basics. Quantum mechanics isn't the only area where that's the case, just the most obvious one. Even novel economics research has reached the point where it's (often just the statistical models being fitted to the data) complicated enough that it couldn't be explained honestly in words without a book length treatise, and most journals have strict word limits. For scientific fields (let's include economics), rather than insisting they find some way to explain their models clearly with less math, perhaps argue that academics should eschew journal articles and articulate their ideas more fully in books, or longer articles published in something like arxiv?
The point being though, while I agree that academics are often unnecessarily obscure, and even in the harder fields like econ, you can sometimes get a paper to pass peer review by dazzling the reviewer with a bunch of complex math they can't hope to understand, there's no easy way around it, because much of the discourse takes place at a level that it's hard or in some cases impossible to make broadly accessible. To use an extreme example: a mathematician proving the Poincare conjecture could just be writing jibberish on the chalkboard and I probably wouldn't be able to tell, I'd just watch in awe. But there's not really a solution. Insisting he just write more clearly isn't one. If it's possible for him to make me to grasp what he's doing, it probably would take more time and effort than it's worth. So while doubtless much academic obscurity is gratuitous (especially in the humanities), there are true positive cases where it's unavoidable, and it's not necessarily a trivial task to tell which is which; ironically, it requires you to understand the fancy math to tell whether it's nonsensical or unnecessary.
Perhaps scientific papers in economics and other areas need more mathematics to make it easier to understand. However, implicit assumptions should be made explicit especially, when dealing with complex multi-variable issues. Being able to more or less "read mathematics" is essential to being literate in the modern world.
I got a kick out of looking at a graph showing that housing values in California started showing decade long oscillations much higher that the national average and the oscillations started after the very rapid population growth of the '40s to the late '60s. If you understand that supply/demand system are feedback control systems where excess demand drive a supply response and you see the mathematics and dynamics of such systems you know that delays in permissions allowing a supply response can make the system unstable and create oscillations. The article (economists at Chapman University) did a lot of hand waving but a quick look at the mathematics of dynamics of supply/demand systems (feedback control systems) using complex math (with imaginary numbers ( -1^.5 = sq-root of -1)) would have show how delay impacts the dynamics and point to the expansion of regulation in California as the cause. Mathematics would point to the time delays not the nature of the regulations.
It is the hand waving thinking of social sciences that leads to people believing that if they see one case of a vaccinated person getting sick believing that they will be safer if they don't get vaccinated. Mathematics and statistics expose these beliefs as being nonsense.
Notice that with todays Journalists you seldom see the numbers and math. You see statements like this variant of SARS-CoV-2 is "less lethal" than Delta but no indication of the fact that most of the people are vaccinated and the people getting the worst infections are un-vaccinated and they are younger that last years data with fewer co-morbidities. How lethal this variant is relative to Delta has to be mathematically determined and adjusted for age and co-morbidities.
Nice straw man from Bowles, on "What if we’re not in the last days, on the edge of slaughtering each other? Things always need improving. Suffering needs alleviating."
Well, what if we are, if not *clearly* in the last days, but still clearly on the edge of slaughtering each other?
Anyone who can’t see, that this country is closer to tyranny, or civil strife, than it was, say, a decade ago, may as well have been living under a rock, and/or is hopelessly ignorant of human nature/ human history.
Yet, even Bowles, earlier in that post, wrote about how the chief executive of Mozilla Corp. "came out strongly against the open internet".
How many such Sil. Valley brass were talking like that a decade ago?
Isn't that another rather powerful Tell, of a country sliding toward conflict?
How many more such Tells need we see, before folks like Bowles remove the blinders from their eyes?
I view most of our current political conflicts as a mix of deranged and idiotic, so I would welcome a message that says everything's actually going to be okay, in spite of this.
I won't admit it! My priors are that there has always been sharp, jostling conflict in our society. And, although today things are made uniquely worse by the social mediazation, we can galumph our way through.
I'm of two minds about the jargon of specialization. Like everyone else, I deplore it - especially when I'm trying to understand a paper outside my field. On the other hand, it inevitably develops in every higher human endeavor.
In recent years, I've encountered esoteric prose in the fields of construction management, 78 rpm record collecting, and proteomic physics. I've flat out asked my financial advisors why their profession so assiduously avoids clarity of communication, and been answered with ... jargon.
A friend of mine had a successful business advising Wall Street firms, among others, on how to communicate more simply. From him, I learned that even specialists in the field of clarity use jargon when communicating when each other.
I suspect that specialized language will inevitably grow from pools of unique knowledge. And don't forget that there is a strong sentiment among certain linguists as to why a place like New Guinea has developed 850 different languages. Language, they say, evolves in two simultaneous directions: to make us understood by our friends and opaque to our enemies.
If this is so, the esoteric element in language is intrinsic to its formation. It may be reduced, but it can never be eliminated.
I avoid "disaster porn" (including disasters caused by rampant wokeism) becasue it does not (by definition?) advance a positive program for avoiding disaster embedded in a more general program of social and economic improvement, but that's just old Liberal (Neoliberal to be precise) me.
First comment best: that’s why marriages arranged by aspiring grandparents are more efficient than spending micro marriages.