Links to Consider, 10/23

Google on Passkeys; The Zvi on fertility; Jean Twenge on teenage mental health; Lorenzo Warby on Critical Theory

Google’s Christian Brand says,

Yes, passkeys will replace passwords. It’s even broader than that. I’d say our vision for passkeys is to not only get rid of passwords, but also eliminate all the Band-Aids the industry has designed to make up for the fact that passwords are so vulnerable.

…the website can confirm that the user’s device — which biometrics confirm is in their possession — has the passkey. Because of the cryptography the server never actually learns what the user’s passkey actually is. That’s the magic of public key cryptography. It can validate you without knowing anything about you. It just confirms you are who you say you are.

Pointer from Alexander Kruel This makes me nervous. For example, if a criminal has my finger, or can use a tool that creates a facsimile of my finger, the criminal can access everything of mine. Right?

Instinctively, I would rather see a bunch of sub-optimal security systems in the ecosystem than for everyone to depend on one supposedly unbreakable security system. If we come to rely on a single security method (as opposed to “all the Band-Aids”), that seems like a brittle system. Once someone figures out how to break the supposedly perfect system, it’s game over for security. Whereas if there are multiple security methods out there, then being able to break one does not ensure that you can break others.

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

there will always be a substantial number of people who are below threshold in relative social status, which will trigger them to consider delaying fertility, which is now feasible for them to do. If those above threshold do not then have large families to compensate, we won’t get back to replacement levels, but it is now very expensive and rare to have such very large (4+ child) families.

I think that most theories of fertility decline concentrate on a supposed increase in childless or one-child women. But I wonder to what extent it is mainly a decrease in the number of 4+child families. If so, then that would suggest a very different path for turning around the decline in population. Getting back to having some people with large families would require some combination of raising the status of large families, encouraging people to marry younger, reducing the effort that parents must put into caring for children, and enhancing fertility of women in their late 30s and beyond.

Jean Twenge writes,

teen depression did not increase suddenly when teens became less independent, a trend that began in the 1990s to early 2000s. Figure 3, made just for this post, zooms in on the period 1989-2011. Even though fewer 12^th graders got their driver’s license, dated, or went out with friends – and thus teen independence was on the wane — depressive symptoms did not change much (especially compared to the rise after 2011

…Teen depression only began to skyrocket after smartphones and social media entered the scene in the early 2010s, with teen independence continuing its slide in that era. If the party is on Snapchat, who needs a driver’s license or to go out? The two trends are likely reinforcing each other.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

To make things work requires an epistemic humility — a deference to the reality of structure, to the wants, wishes and perspectives of others — that is incompatible with the grandiose moral narcissism that the politics of the transformational future generates. In terms of genuine understanding — and of human flourishing — it’s a toxically useless philosophy that appeals and empowers toxically useless people: folk that modern academe, bureaucracies and non-profits give employ, thereby inflicting their toxic uselessness on the rest of us.

These people are prone to the curdled envy that Nietzsche labelled ressentiment. Or, as Peter Boghossian says, they’re under-accomplished and dyspeptic malcontents.

Or as Brian Chau says, Midwits. Maybe the top 200 colleges and universities need to be fumigated and purged of Midwits among their students, faculty, and bureaucracies.

substacks referenced above:

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Trapped by Philosophy's worst features

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Yes, it’s the phones (and social media)

@ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/17/fertility-roundup-2/

Links for 2023-10-16