Razib Khan's reading list; CRT teaching regulated by state; Robert Wright on national paranoia; Mike Munger on law without the state; Ben Thompson on the Metaverse
Re Privilege Walk, it's obviously what Randall Collins would call an interaction ritual, and apparently a strong one that creates lots of emotional energy. Interaction rituals are important because they literally create sincere belief in participants:
----
To be clear: my argument is not about whether political people talk about interests-- they often do, although sometimes they also talk in idealized rhetoric. They may even believe what they say about their interests, and for that matter what they say about their ideals. Sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product: successful IRs make people into sincere believers. People become insincere and manipulative mainly when they go through a range of different IRs, switching from one camp to another; or in the case of the Communist back-stage organization, when they use one strong IR to anchor their beliefs against another more public IR which is not as emotionally intense. This leaves room for the cosmopolitan opportunist, who believes in nothing because s/he superficially surveys all factions but belongs emotionally to none. But such persons are rare in politics, probably because strong EE, which is so impressive in leading other political actors, comes from being deep into emotional IRs; pure manipulators are uncharismatic and off-putting. Yes, Hitler was manipulative; but he lived at the center of very strong IRs, and Nazi ceremonial made him a true extremist for Nazi ideals. In the end, he was so pumped up with self-confidence (EE) that he destroyed his regime by taking on overwhelming geopolitical odds. At any point in time, we can predict the lineup of persons with varying degrees of commitment to ideas and ideals, by looking at the degree of success or failure of the IRs they experience.
Let me repeat: Sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product. This one principle kills a whole class of political discussions, which frequently get very acrimonious because people tend to react very badly when others accuse them of duplicity and insincerity. I learned about it from this review of Leese's book on Mao's Cultural Revolution, another period when new interaction rituals were being devised and applied on a huge scale:
I'm impressed with Evans' range and erudition, but I'm a little skeptical of the moralizing tone of the whole thing. Take for example the following paragraph:
"Job queues were long and men were at the front. Firms preferred to hire, train and promote men. Women were likely to exit upon childbirth and leave early to take care of the kids. Employers would then lose their investment. In Victorian England, many teenage girls desperately wanted to work, to have a little economic autonomy and join the public sphere. Factory work was horrific, but girls still saw it as preferable to the relentless drudgery of care work, which confined them to the home, and provided no rewards. Yet their earnings were so low and the volume of housework so large that their parents didn’t consider it worthwhile. So in areas with low labour demand, girls were often saddled with childcare and scrubbing, while their brothers were out, earning their own money, and being valued as financial contributors."
"Factory work was horrific but girls still saw it as preferable..." Did they? Which girls? What factory did they want to work in, exactly, that was free of relentless drudgery? In general, the early days of industrialization were pretty ugly in every country. I think you have to squint kinda hard to see some massive injustice in women not having been able to join in the drudgery of England's dark Satanic mills. "My dreams of working in a cotton mill were thwarted by the patriarchy and I was stuck washing dishes and clothes as a domestic servant instead"....to my ears doesn't sound like the worst of tragedies.
The issue, as I understand it, is that there's a choice of two fairly bad options (factory work vs. care work). Both jobs were filled with relentless drudgery. Factory work was badly paid, but care work wasn't paid AT ALL.
Right, but I'm a little skeptical about that, too, because my impression of 19th Century England was that virtually everyone had servants in those days, both as a status signal and also because the volume of housework was indeed large, as the original quote says. But that means SOMEbody was getting paid for carework.
Carework was often "paid" in-kind; i.e., the "downstairs" staff was "paid" in room & board, rather than cash. There was typically a (small) cash payment for personal use, but it was quite small. Also, finding a new carework job was quite difficult; one typically needed a good reference. If one was good at the job, employers wouldn't give a good reference because they didn't want to lose the worker; if one was bad at the job, then dismissal without reference was fairly common.
So these jobs did exist, and they were paid badly, but they were in fact paid. Thanks, that's what I suspected. Again, my suspicion here is that the effective wages of factory workers weren't substantially better, particularly when considering that it was often more dangerous, physically taxing, and unpleasant than scrubbing pots and pans. E.G., Orwell was writing about malnutrition and terrible working and living conditions amongst coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier roughly a century after the period in question here. Life was hard two centuries ago; that story plus sports and weather, coming up at 11.
Re: Alice Evans on the origins of differences in female power. See also Paola Giuliano et al.'s recent study, "Herding, warfare, and a culture of honor: Global evidence" (NBER working paper 29250, September 2021):
"ABSTRACT
According to the widely known ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records, historical folklore information, global data on contemporary conflict events, and large-scale surveys. The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor. First, the culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking. Second, contemporary ethnolinguistic groups that historically subsisted more strongly on herding have more frequent and severe conflict today. Third, the contemporary descendants of herders report being more willing to take revenge and punish unfair behavior in the globally representative Global Preferences Survey. In all, the evidence supports the idea that this form of economic subsistence generated a functional psychology that has persisted until today and plays a role in shaping conflict across the globe."
Re: Grayson Slover's question, "What type of educational philosophy can a school be based on in our country today?" Vouchers (redeemable by any school) and a laissez-faire approach to curricula would allow parents and schoolchildren to sort across a variety of curricula, instead of fighting over *the* (one-size-fits-all) curriculum. Competition is good, also for curricula. Exit empowers families more than voice does.
I hear you: Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. But I also fear a slippery slope of political centralization (and seesaw legislative battles) about curriculum. If memory serves me well, Arnold wrote a post, a while back, about anti-CRT bills at the state level.
When I was in school most of this stuff was extremely foreign to the university BUT there was a required class for any students who were hired as Resident Assistants (RAs) in the dorms. This class was taught by licensed therapists and presented a lot of the material we now broadly recognize today as critical race theory (e.g. white privilege) along with related dogmas (toxic masculinity, body shaming, trans).
The discussions on these topics were extremely emotionally charged (in contrast to other topics which were more practical and matter of fact) which made it hard to question or object, even though within the university’s stated mission any objector would have stood on extremely solid ground. I was one of the few that pushed back during the sessions, if not the only one, though many agreed with me in private.
What troubled me the most was seeing how effectively these ideas gained a foothold in people who might have taken a different view if exposed to other ideas. Often when I expressed a few simple points in private conversations with others who had begun to buy into the program a look of realization would come to their face. After a conversation with the two most senior managers of the housing program it was relayed to me afterward (by a third party) that I had made “a lot of good points” they had never considered before.
Fortunately I was absent the day of the privilege walk. I think it would have made my position as a conscientious objector even more tenuous to take a step forward in response to items of privilege they read off their list.
Re: Wright and Michta on psychological dynamics of arms races in international relations. It is harder reliably to discern the intentions of a rival nation's statesmen than to ascertain the military capability of that nation. Moreover, intentions can change more quickly than capabilities; for example, when a change in leadership occurs. Therefore, it is prudent to have military capability sufficient to deter a potential attack, whatever the intentions of the current leadership of a rival nation seem to be. Rival nations can negotiate to reduce the resource burden of mutually credible deterrence. "Trust but verify." This approach, too, can fail if surveillance and intelligence cannot reliably ascertain a rival nation's military capability. (See WMD controversy.) But it seems more likely to work than would a quest for symmetrical, stable insight among rival nations. Am I missing something?
"... there is no reason why the Metaverse, or any web application for that matter, will be built on the blockchain. Why would you use the world’s slowest database when a centralized one is far more scalable and performant?"
'No reason' - come on. Ben Thompson moves in circles where the several compelling reasons have been discussed for over a decade and even implemented in actual platforms with lots of users. Explicating these reasons is a major and often-revisited theme of Balaji Srinivasan's work and writing, with which Thompson is clearly familiar. See also Urbit ( recent "town hall" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YSwt0vDPj0 )
It would be like saying "there is no need for anyone to use strong end-to-end encryption". Strong encryption is pretty inefficient and annoyingly slow sometimes, but the computational intensity is *the point* and the price one pays for security, privacy, and control and, well, take a look around, lots of people are using lots of encryption.
Sure, there is no reason to believe that *Facebook* in particular or Apple or other Big Tech companies would build their own particular walled gardens this way, because that would hurt the bottom line of their whole business model which vision relies upon network lock-in and monetizing the absolute control and surveillance that can only be achieved in a fully centralized scheme.
Is there really 'no reason' for anyone to prefer alternative systems that allocates more control, power, and ownership to the user?
On Munger, I was struck by this quote fragment: "all that is necessary is that citizens adopt a set of institutions..." that align with my priors. So easy to write, nearly impossible to execute. The battle, after all, is over institutions, because there is deep disagreement among the citizenry about their proper function.
Re Privilege Walk, it's obviously what Randall Collins would call an interaction ritual, and apparently a strong one that creates lots of emotional energy. Interaction rituals are important because they literally create sincere belief in participants:
----
To be clear: my argument is not about whether political people talk about interests-- they often do, although sometimes they also talk in idealized rhetoric. They may even believe what they say about their interests, and for that matter what they say about their ideals. Sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product: successful IRs make people into sincere believers. People become insincere and manipulative mainly when they go through a range of different IRs, switching from one camp to another; or in the case of the Communist back-stage organization, when they use one strong IR to anchor their beliefs against another more public IR which is not as emotionally intense. This leaves room for the cosmopolitan opportunist, who believes in nothing because s/he superficially surveys all factions but belongs emotionally to none. But such persons are rare in politics, probably because strong EE, which is so impressive in leading other political actors, comes from being deep into emotional IRs; pure manipulators are uncharismatic and off-putting. Yes, Hitler was manipulative; but he lived at the center of very strong IRs, and Nazi ceremonial made him a true extremist for Nazi ideals. In the end, he was so pumped up with self-confidence (EE) that he destroyed his regime by taking on overwhelming geopolitical odds. At any point in time, we can predict the lineup of persons with varying degrees of commitment to ideas and ideals, by looking at the degree of success or failure of the IRs they experience.
----
https://web.archive.org/web/20131222154449/http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2012/10/material-interests-are-ambiguous_770.html
Let me repeat: Sincerity is not an important question in politics, because sincere belief is a social product. This one principle kills a whole class of political discussions, which frequently get very acrimonious because people tend to react very badly when others accuse them of duplicity and insincerity. I learned about it from this review of Leese's book on Mao's Cultural Revolution, another period when new interaction rituals were being devised and applied on a huge scale:
https://abandonedfootnotes.blogspot.com/2012/10/ten-thousand-melodies-cannot-express.html (h/t Spandrell)
I'm impressed with Evans' range and erudition, but I'm a little skeptical of the moralizing tone of the whole thing. Take for example the following paragraph:
"Job queues were long and men were at the front. Firms preferred to hire, train and promote men. Women were likely to exit upon childbirth and leave early to take care of the kids. Employers would then lose their investment. In Victorian England, many teenage girls desperately wanted to work, to have a little economic autonomy and join the public sphere. Factory work was horrific, but girls still saw it as preferable to the relentless drudgery of care work, which confined them to the home, and provided no rewards. Yet their earnings were so low and the volume of housework so large that their parents didn’t consider it worthwhile. So in areas with low labour demand, girls were often saddled with childcare and scrubbing, while their brothers were out, earning their own money, and being valued as financial contributors."
"Factory work was horrific but girls still saw it as preferable..." Did they? Which girls? What factory did they want to work in, exactly, that was free of relentless drudgery? In general, the early days of industrialization were pretty ugly in every country. I think you have to squint kinda hard to see some massive injustice in women not having been able to join in the drudgery of England's dark Satanic mills. "My dreams of working in a cotton mill were thwarted by the patriarchy and I was stuck washing dishes and clothes as a domestic servant instead"....to my ears doesn't sound like the worst of tragedies.
The issue, as I understand it, is that there's a choice of two fairly bad options (factory work vs. care work). Both jobs were filled with relentless drudgery. Factory work was badly paid, but care work wasn't paid AT ALL.
Right, but I'm a little skeptical about that, too, because my impression of 19th Century England was that virtually everyone had servants in those days, both as a status signal and also because the volume of housework was indeed large, as the original quote says. But that means SOMEbody was getting paid for carework.
Carework was often "paid" in-kind; i.e., the "downstairs" staff was "paid" in room & board, rather than cash. There was typically a (small) cash payment for personal use, but it was quite small. Also, finding a new carework job was quite difficult; one typically needed a good reference. If one was good at the job, employers wouldn't give a good reference because they didn't want to lose the worker; if one was bad at the job, then dismissal without reference was fairly common.
So these jobs did exist, and they were paid badly, but they were in fact paid. Thanks, that's what I suspected. Again, my suspicion here is that the effective wages of factory workers weren't substantially better, particularly when considering that it was often more dangerous, physically taxing, and unpleasant than scrubbing pots and pans. E.G., Orwell was writing about malnutrition and terrible working and living conditions amongst coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier roughly a century after the period in question here. Life was hard two centuries ago; that story plus sports and weather, coming up at 11.
Re: Alice Evans on the origins of differences in female power. See also Paola Giuliano et al.'s recent study, "Herding, warfare, and a culture of honor: Global evidence" (NBER working paper 29250, September 2021):
"ABSTRACT
According to the widely known ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records, historical folklore information, global data on contemporary conflict events, and large-scale surveys. The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor. First, the culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking. Second, contemporary ethnolinguistic groups that historically subsisted more strongly on herding have more frequent and severe conflict today. Third, the contemporary descendants of herders report being more willing to take revenge and punish unfair behavior in the globally representative Global Preferences Survey. In all, the evidence supports the idea that this form of economic subsistence generated a functional psychology that has persisted until today and plays a role in shaping conflict across the globe."
Link to un-gated PDF:
https://benjamin-enke.com/pdf/Culture_of_Honor.pdf
Re: Grayson Slover's question, "What type of educational philosophy can a school be based on in our country today?" Vouchers (redeemable by any school) and a laissez-faire approach to curricula would allow parents and schoolchildren to sort across a variety of curricula, instead of fighting over *the* (one-size-fits-all) curriculum. Competition is good, also for curricula. Exit empowers families more than voice does.
I hear you: Don't let the best be the enemy of the good. But I also fear a slippery slope of political centralization (and seesaw legislative battles) about curriculum. If memory serves me well, Arnold wrote a post, a while back, about anti-CRT bills at the state level.
Re: Privilege Walk
When I was in school most of this stuff was extremely foreign to the university BUT there was a required class for any students who were hired as Resident Assistants (RAs) in the dorms. This class was taught by licensed therapists and presented a lot of the material we now broadly recognize today as critical race theory (e.g. white privilege) along with related dogmas (toxic masculinity, body shaming, trans).
The discussions on these topics were extremely emotionally charged (in contrast to other topics which were more practical and matter of fact) which made it hard to question or object, even though within the university’s stated mission any objector would have stood on extremely solid ground. I was one of the few that pushed back during the sessions, if not the only one, though many agreed with me in private.
What troubled me the most was seeing how effectively these ideas gained a foothold in people who might have taken a different view if exposed to other ideas. Often when I expressed a few simple points in private conversations with others who had begun to buy into the program a look of realization would come to their face. After a conversation with the two most senior managers of the housing program it was relayed to me afterward (by a third party) that I had made “a lot of good points” they had never considered before.
Fortunately I was absent the day of the privilege walk. I think it would have made my position as a conscientious objector even more tenuous to take a step forward in response to items of privilege they read off their list.
Re: Wright and Michta on psychological dynamics of arms races in international relations. It is harder reliably to discern the intentions of a rival nation's statesmen than to ascertain the military capability of that nation. Moreover, intentions can change more quickly than capabilities; for example, when a change in leadership occurs. Therefore, it is prudent to have military capability sufficient to deter a potential attack, whatever the intentions of the current leadership of a rival nation seem to be. Rival nations can negotiate to reduce the resource burden of mutually credible deterrence. "Trust but verify." This approach, too, can fail if surveillance and intelligence cannot reliably ascertain a rival nation's military capability. (See WMD controversy.) But it seems more likely to work than would a quest for symmetrical, stable insight among rival nations. Am I missing something?
"... there is no reason why the Metaverse, or any web application for that matter, will be built on the blockchain. Why would you use the world’s slowest database when a centralized one is far more scalable and performant?"
'No reason' - come on. Ben Thompson moves in circles where the several compelling reasons have been discussed for over a decade and even implemented in actual platforms with lots of users. Explicating these reasons is a major and often-revisited theme of Balaji Srinivasan's work and writing, with which Thompson is clearly familiar. See also Urbit ( recent "town hall" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YSwt0vDPj0 )
It would be like saying "there is no need for anyone to use strong end-to-end encryption". Strong encryption is pretty inefficient and annoyingly slow sometimes, but the computational intensity is *the point* and the price one pays for security, privacy, and control and, well, take a look around, lots of people are using lots of encryption.
Sure, there is no reason to believe that *Facebook* in particular or Apple or other Big Tech companies would build their own particular walled gardens this way, because that would hurt the bottom line of their whole business model which vision relies upon network lock-in and monetizing the absolute control and surveillance that can only be achieved in a fully centralized scheme.
Is there really 'no reason' for anyone to prefer alternative systems that allocates more control, power, and ownership to the user?
On Munger, I was struck by this quote fragment: "all that is necessary is that citizens adopt a set of institutions..." that align with my priors. So easy to write, nearly impossible to execute. The battle, after all, is over institutions, because there is deep disagreement among the citizenry about their proper function.