Links to Consider, 2/6

Mark Mills has doubts about the EV future; The Zvi on skipping a grade; Peter Gray on skipping school altogether; Dan Williams' syllabus on philosophy of science;; my latest book review

Mark Mills writes,

That half-ton battery is made from a wide range of minerals, including copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, and lithium. Accessing those minerals requires digging up and processing some 250 tons of earth per vehicle. All that mining, processing, and refining uses hydrocarbons and emits CO₂. The critical fact found in the technical literature is that those upstream emissions vary by 300 percent or more, depending on where and when materials are mined and processed. At the higher end of known ranges, upstream battery emissions can wipe out emissions avoided by not driving a gasoline car.

Mills says that there is plenty of copper in the earth, but he warns that you still need infrastructure to mine the stuff.

one major mining CEO observed that the coming chasm between demand and supply could trigger a ten-fold copper price hike. That alone would add about $15,000 to the cost of building an EV.

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

My anecdata is that everyone I know who skipped grades came out far the better for it, and we should do vastly more of this. The whole ‘emotional development’ form of argument seems crazy to me. Why would you want to take such a child and force them to ‘emotionally develop’ with dumber children their own age?

I skipped first grade, because my parents taught me/I taught myself to read when I was four. Because I also was a young Kindergartener, it was more like skipping a grade and a half. Given my short stature and late puberty, by the time I was a freshman in high school I might as well have skipped three grades. I was typecast as a 10-year-old genius when I was 13, and I certainly looked the part. I can tell you that when my classmates were driving cars as juniors while I had to wait until almost the end of my senior year to get a license, I was frustrated.

I was lucky socially in that the elementary school class I skipped into happened to be especially nice and cohesive, what I call a magic cohort (I observed one or two equivalent cohorts in the 15 years that I taught high school).

When we moved to a different school district, I spent grades 7-10 in a social wilderness. Then I got lucky again my junior year, when the editor of the school newspaper connected me with her friends.

Without the good luck, I think that grade-skipping for me would have caused a lot of misery. If it were to come up with any of my grandchildren, I would lean against it.

Peter Gray writes,

if we want our children to grow up with passionate interests, we must find alternatives to coercive schooling. Or, at least, we must reduce the role of schooling and school-like activities in their lives and increase greatly their opportunities to discover and do what they like to do—that is, to play.

His essay gives examples of successful unschoolers. But I long to see the controlled experiment, in which children are randomly assigned to not attend school, rather than unschoolers as a selected sample.

Dan Williams writes,

Historically, many philosophers of science thought of science in highly abstract terms concerning relationships between theories, hypotheses, evidence, and so on. Insofar as people entered into the picture, the analysis was highly individualistic, focusing on individual minds engaged in reasoning and hypothesis evaluation. In the latter half of the twentieth century (beginning especially with Thomas Kuhn’s work), it became clear to many philosophers of science that this highly abstract, individualistic focus is extremely misguided. Science is constituted by distinctive social practices and institutions and influenced in profound ways by broader social, political, and economic conditions. For many sociologists and historians of science, these facts cast doubt on science’s objectivity. In this brilliant book, Longino argues that this inference gets things backwards. It is the social nature of science, she argues, that makes science objective. I disagree with lots in the book but still think it’s one of the most insightful attempts to integrate the epistemic and social features of science, and it’s extremely informative.

He also offers a syllabus that includes this:

Science as a social phenomenon

• Merton, Priorities in Scientific Discovery

I review Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies. It is a reminder of how different our modern world is from the one that preceded it. Here is an excerpt of my review.

Crone says that people conceived of society in hierarchical and holistic terms. For the whole to function, each individual had to remain in his or her proper place.

• Society was holistic rather than individualistic (as sociologists put it): the individual existed for the benefit of the overall group, not the other way round. (p. 128)

Pre-modern societies had very different marriage patterns than what we are used to.

• If girls were not married off as children, they were usually provided with husbands as soon as they reached physical maturity. (p. 132)

substacks referenced above:

@

Hawking was wrong: Philosophy is not dead, and it has kept up with modern science

@

Childhood and Education Roundup #4

@

#29. Childhood Freedom, Play, and the Development of Passionate Interests