Links to Consider

Scott Alexander on schooling vs. learning; Americans on weed; The American Economic Association goes full woke; Andrey Mir on digital media and empathy

Scott Alexander writes,

If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it. Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.

Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.

He relies on the theory that we learn best by spaced repetition. That is, you learn something today, and then you repeat it next month and next year and the following year.

School does some of that. Think of the math curriculum, where you use this year what you learned last year.

But I think that the larger point is that school is more about babysitting than learning (Null Hypothesis) is correct. It is very expensive babysitting at that.

Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys report,

At the nadir of modern marijuana use, in 1992, just 0.9 million Americans reported using marijuana daily or near daily. That number had grown twenty-fold to 17.7 million by the most recent survey in 2022. For the first time, more Americans report using marijuana daily or near daily than they do drinking that often (17.7 million vs. 14.7 million).

Pointer from Oliver Wiseman. And there is also this UPI story.

Teens who use cannabis face 11 times the odds for a psychotic episode compared to teens who abstain from the drug, new Canadian research contends.

I suspect that most regular uses of marijuana would be better off smoking regular cigarettes. I suspect the same thing about extremely obese people.

The Papers and Proceedings drawn from this year’s American Economic Association meetings.

Lots of stuff on race and gender. But don’t go looking for papers relevant to economic topics that are important these days, such as industrial policy, antitrust policy, the impact of AI, or tech in general.

I think it’s fine for economists to recognize the importance of sociology. I just wish that they could do it without turning into sociologists.

The old guard that held power in the American Economic Association was always too smug for my tastes. But they were not an ideological monoculture. The young generation is all social justice, all the time. I just let my membership in the AEA lapse.

Andrey Mir writes,

Reading isolates vision from the other senses and turns the sensory faculty of vision into the cognitive capacity of inner vision. Walter Ong, a scholar of literacy, called it the “inward turn.” Historically, the inward turn of literacy enabled individualism and thus destroyed the primeval tribal immersion of people. With the proliferation of writing, prehistoric tribal society came to an end.

Unlike the oral mind, the literate mind focuses on meaning and not on empathic synchronization with others. Written text is subject-matter-oriented, not relation-oriented. Empathy is not inherent in writing in the way that it is innate in both primary and digital orality.Reading isolates vision from the other senses and turns the sensory faculty of vision into the cognitive capacity of inner vision.

He argues that digital media immerses us in the lives of others.

We live in a world where there is more and more empathic involvement, and less and less real empathy.

I recently reviewed Mir’s latest book.

My take on the smart phone is that it has dissolved the distinction between the remote world (politicians, celebrities) and the intimate world (friends and co-workers). On the phone, our friends act like celebrities and celebrities act like our friends.

substacks referenced above: @

The Evils of Empathy

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Bill Maher: American Kids Are Way Too Confident. Plus. . .

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A Theoretical "Case Against Education"