The Zvi on raising kids these days; Richard Hanania on Substack Notes; Jeff Eggers on leadership; Glenn Loury on Clarence Thomas; Martin Gurri's Commencement Address
On the Clarence Thomas front, it's a lot tougher for the left to accommodate his judicial views because it would not make any room for the way that the modern federal government works. I don't think it's necessarily correct to describe Thomas thought as "conservative" because if you had five Thomases on the Court, it would effect something like a revolution, at least domestically. See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/02/business/scotus-lochner-v-new-york.html
A lot of this controversy is more heat than light. The reality is that, internationally speaking, the revolution already happened. The post-New Deal era already died in the 1970s. The legal logic of the New Deal era was that interstate competition could be regulated and moderated through the Commerce Clause. Instead of a system that encouraged states to compete to keep wages & regulation down (Lochner era), the post-1937 legal philosophy was to limit interstate competition to keep wages up. The Larry Tribes of the world are trying to preserve a revolution that already died in the '70s.
The logic of the minimum wage and things like it is that Congress has the right to regulate interstate traffic of goods that were manufactured in factories etc. that did not observe federal minimum wage, safety laws etc. etc..
I go to Walmart today. I look at the shelves. Every single f*cking thing on the shelves barring some exceptions was not manufactured according to the legal logic of the New Deal era. Go to the clothing section. Like every t-shirt and yoga pant was made in Vietnam by workers earning $2 an hour and working 12 hour shifts. The New Deal logic says that every unit in that store should be seized by the feds, if it were made domestically under such conditions. It was manufactured overseas by producers who ignore those legal standards, so it does not get seized by the feds. How does this make sense? The magic of looking-the-other-way liberalism.
So, what I'm trying to get at here is that the liberals are in fact the conservatives of a legal system that has already been made ridiculous and antiquated by neoliberalism, which is a practical philosophy that says in effect that we should ignore many of our domestic economic regulations while pretending that they are still good because getting rid of them conventionally is politically impossible. Returning to the Lochner era or something like it, which is what Thomas is reaching towards, would be a recognition that the New Deal is in fact dead and has been dead for more than 50 years. Our reactionary liberal philosophers, tinged with Michael Moore type nostalgia, want to pretend really hard that their system is not dead and has not been dead for many decades now. Fortunately for them, moderates on the court are fine with this and don't want to upset the moronic apple cart.
That sounds a lot like ‘if you want to learn X, practice X and test X. I am using ChatGPT to generate tests in Spanish and they are quite good. In addition ChatGPT is quite good at producing scheduled curriculums. So, it can help you define your learning schedule, set goals and test. Nirvana.
Another Klingism to add to, "Markets fail; use markets" and "patterns of sustainable specialization and trade" and others I can't think of at the moment.
Hanania himself lobs dumb salacious culture war bombs in order to generate engagement.
But by higher IQ, he doesn't mean people who cannily take the low road only as part of broader high road strategy, like himself. That's the difference.
There's a cold, misanthropic distance between the likes of Hanania and the typical man on the ground. Arguments for markets, in my ~20 years of reading, have hitherto mostly had a humanistic and positive view of consumers. But Hanania's defense of such marks a departure from all this. For him the process is a way of identifying idiots who deserve to be separated from their money; or on the producer side, of identifying and celebrating bright CEOs who can be contrasted against envious irrational female BIPOCs.
"At the other end of the usefulness spectrum" now that is kinda brutal regarding RH - made me smile.
Not sure about the notes/gourmet vs twitter/fast-food. There have been attempts at tasty and fast. Yes, none took really off. I doubt notes will work for now. Filtering out the dumb on twitter is easy. And it is educational to see them in the wild, at times. Arnold Kling or Scott Alexander may be the most presentable of our species - but not be the most representative.
Arnold’s point concerned gourmet chefs opening fast food places. Shake Shack is an example of this. My apologies if it sounded like it was recommending the place. I have never availed myself of that opportunity.
Abundance isn't an end, but given the likely relationship(s) between the inability to create and the spiritual crisis, maybe addressing one indirectly helps the other. Plus a sense of scarcity is usually bad for politics.
Hanania on Twitter: I did not like Twitter before Musk and saw only a slight deterioration after Musk: my feed was suddenly full of toffs complaining about how horrible Andrew and Megan are. (I do wish Musk just concentrated on Space X.) I hope his hope for Notes pans out.
Lowery: I don’t feel particularly sympathetic to Thomas, but my guess is that his confirmation hearing pushed him in an “anti-progressive” direction. The way that Anita Hill’s allegations came to the Committee’s attention was irregular and even if true (I think they were) should not have been disqualifying, although lying about them was, as were Kavanaugh’s lies about Christine Blasey Ford. And it may be Liberals’ perception of illegitimacy of his confirmation (rather than race “betrayal”) that fuels the anger at Thomas’s reception of gifts from a Republican donor. Whether they are exceptional for Supreme Court Justices, I do not know. I hope they are.
Hill was more likely lying about Thomas - and CB Ford was almost certainly lying about Kavanaugh. (Telling untruths - maybe she really does believe her own fantasy.)
Kavanaugh kept a diary of where he was, when -- and it was never at a party where Ford was, despite her inability to recall where or even when the event she described, in very believable actress detail, allegedly occurred.
The Rolling Stone sex-rape hoax should show that many women do lie about being assaulted.
After Pres. Clinton's lie, perjury under oath in a sexual harassment suit (of another woman), his semen on a blue dress proved he was lying. But all Dems in the Senate said, in voting against impeachment, that Dem perjury is OK.
I was not there and anything is possible, but both women's accounts seem more plausible than the denials. Clinton lying under oath was no better, but the consequences, 2 more years' service in an office v not obtaining a lifetime appointment to an office are the significant factors.
But I appreciate your respectable statement of belief in Thomas/Kavanaugh as opposed to others with whom I've discussed the that insist on a beyond reasonable doubt standard.
"I’ve never figured out Tyler Cowen’s aphorism about context being scarce"
Isn't this pretty straightforward from his explanation that "context is that which is scarce" is dependent on the story, situation, and context in which it is invoked. Maybe this is too much tautologies are tautological, but it can mean there is local knowledge to the story, details known only to the participants, historical dependent placement of a piece of art or scholarship, key details from elsewhere that must be known to truly grasp and understand, etc. - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html
Notes might become interesting as more folks use it. But many are still on their first note. I suspect my limited Twitter watching will go down further as I do more s-Notes checking.
Hanania is ... interesting and attempting to avoid joining any one tribe; see:
Eggers & the leadership issue was quick and interesting, tho it only barely mentions the key issue for leadership - followers. While discussing the institutions and contacts, like Darwin having 240+ pen pals to correspond with (> Dunbar!), it and the links don't quite get to the need for followers to also be good.
I sincerely wish some bright econ PhD would become a great follower of Kling and create a school of "Specialization & Trade" economics. Which is maybe too close to, but not the same as, the Austrian School (that Bryan Caplan is NOT part of; and I'm no longer sure of what it is).
“And that's why I think the talk about authentic leadership is often off the mark. Because if you get that balance right, you're pretty inauthentic as a leader, because, on the one hand, you have to play the role of the unconstrained visionary who is breaking boundaries and taking that kind of maximalist position; on the other hand, you have to kind of dial it way back into the here-and-now. Finding individuals who can manage that tension in one person is really, really hard.“
"All I can figure is that some big executive or financial backer of Substack is so consumed by Musk-hatred that he is willing to throw resources at this idea."
I don't think that was the motivation. Musk is one of the only people in technology who talk about it, but online ad fraud and spam are major problems for every free website and all the online infrastructure that rests on the "free" concept. Substack and the new Twitter recognize this and are shifting towards paid models. LLMs and things like it dramatically shift the balance of power between spammers and anti-spam technology towards spammers and bot farms, so things like old Twitter are not long for this world.
On the Clarence Thomas front, it's a lot tougher for the left to accommodate his judicial views because it would not make any room for the way that the modern federal government works. I don't think it's necessarily correct to describe Thomas thought as "conservative" because if you had five Thomases on the Court, it would effect something like a revolution, at least domestically. See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/02/business/scotus-lochner-v-new-york.html
A lot of this controversy is more heat than light. The reality is that, internationally speaking, the revolution already happened. The post-New Deal era already died in the 1970s. The legal logic of the New Deal era was that interstate competition could be regulated and moderated through the Commerce Clause. Instead of a system that encouraged states to compete to keep wages & regulation down (Lochner era), the post-1937 legal philosophy was to limit interstate competition to keep wages up. The Larry Tribes of the world are trying to preserve a revolution that already died in the '70s.
The logic of the minimum wage and things like it is that Congress has the right to regulate interstate traffic of goods that were manufactured in factories etc. that did not observe federal minimum wage, safety laws etc. etc..
I go to Walmart today. I look at the shelves. Every single f*cking thing on the shelves barring some exceptions was not manufactured according to the legal logic of the New Deal era. Go to the clothing section. Like every t-shirt and yoga pant was made in Vietnam by workers earning $2 an hour and working 12 hour shifts. The New Deal logic says that every unit in that store should be seized by the feds, if it were made domestically under such conditions. It was manufactured overseas by producers who ignore those legal standards, so it does not get seized by the feds. How does this make sense? The magic of looking-the-other-way liberalism.
So, what I'm trying to get at here is that the liberals are in fact the conservatives of a legal system that has already been made ridiculous and antiquated by neoliberalism, which is a practical philosophy that says in effect that we should ignore many of our domestic economic regulations while pretending that they are still good because getting rid of them conventionally is politically impossible. Returning to the Lochner era or something like it, which is what Thomas is reaching towards, would be a recognition that the New Deal is in fact dead and has been dead for more than 50 years. Our reactionary liberal philosophers, tinged with Michael Moore type nostalgia, want to pretend really hard that their system is not dead and has not been dead for many decades now. Fortunately for them, moderates on the court are fine with this and don't want to upset the moronic apple cart.
The magic of looking-the-other-way liberalism.
+1
That sounds a lot like ‘if you want to learn X, practice X and test X. I am using ChatGPT to generate tests in Spanish and they are quite good. In addition ChatGPT is quite good at producing scheduled curriculums. So, it can help you define your learning schedule, set goals and test. Nirvana.
My wife, now in her 5th decade as an RN, continues to follow this learning rubric: Watch it, do it, teach it.
Another Klingism to add to, "Markets fail; use markets" and "patterns of sustainable specialization and trade" and others I can't think of at the moment.
Hanania himself lobs dumb salacious culture war bombs in order to generate engagement.
But by higher IQ, he doesn't mean people who cannily take the low road only as part of broader high road strategy, like himself. That's the difference.
There's a cold, misanthropic distance between the likes of Hanania and the typical man on the ground. Arguments for markets, in my ~20 years of reading, have hitherto mostly had a humanistic and positive view of consumers. But Hanania's defense of such marks a departure from all this. For him the process is a way of identifying idiots who deserve to be separated from their money; or on the producer side, of identifying and celebrating bright CEOs who can be contrasted against envious irrational female BIPOCs.
"At the other end of the usefulness spectrum" now that is kinda brutal regarding RH - made me smile.
Not sure about the notes/gourmet vs twitter/fast-food. There have been attempts at tasty and fast. Yes, none took really off. I doubt notes will work for now. Filtering out the dumb on twitter is easy. And it is educational to see them in the wild, at times. Arnold Kling or Scott Alexander may be the most presentable of our species - but not be the most representative.
RH sure does have a high opinion of his own intelligence!
Only positive example I can think of is Danny Meyer and Shake Shack. Mike Solomonov in Phila has some fast food outlets but has never scaled them.
Arnold’s point concerned gourmet chefs opening fast food places. Shake Shack is an example of this. My apologies if it sounded like it was recommending the place. I have never availed myself of that opportunity.
Abundance isn't an end, but given the likely relationship(s) between the inability to create and the spiritual crisis, maybe addressing one indirectly helps the other. Plus a sense of scarcity is usually bad for politics.
Hanania on Twitter: I did not like Twitter before Musk and saw only a slight deterioration after Musk: my feed was suddenly full of toffs complaining about how horrible Andrew and Megan are. (I do wish Musk just concentrated on Space X.) I hope his hope for Notes pans out.
"I do wish Musk just concentrated on Space X."
I'll second that...
Lowery: I don’t feel particularly sympathetic to Thomas, but my guess is that his confirmation hearing pushed him in an “anti-progressive” direction. The way that Anita Hill’s allegations came to the Committee’s attention was irregular and even if true (I think they were) should not have been disqualifying, although lying about them was, as were Kavanaugh’s lies about Christine Blasey Ford. And it may be Liberals’ perception of illegitimacy of his confirmation (rather than race “betrayal”) that fuels the anger at Thomas’s reception of gifts from a Republican donor. Whether they are exceptional for Supreme Court Justices, I do not know. I hope they are.
Hill was more likely lying about Thomas - and CB Ford was almost certainly lying about Kavanaugh. (Telling untruths - maybe she really does believe her own fantasy.)
Kavanaugh kept a diary of where he was, when -- and it was never at a party where Ford was, despite her inability to recall where or even when the event she described, in very believable actress detail, allegedly occurred.
The Rolling Stone sex-rape hoax should show that many women do lie about being assaulted.
After Pres. Clinton's lie, perjury under oath in a sexual harassment suit (of another woman), his semen on a blue dress proved he was lying. But all Dems in the Senate said, in voting against impeachment, that Dem perjury is OK.
I was not there and anything is possible, but both women's accounts seem more plausible than the denials. Clinton lying under oath was no better, but the consequences, 2 more years' service in an office v not obtaining a lifetime appointment to an office are the significant factors.
But I appreciate your respectable statement of belief in Thomas/Kavanaugh as opposed to others with whom I've discussed the that insist on a beyond reasonable doubt standard.
"I’ve never figured out Tyler Cowen’s aphorism about context being scarce"
Isn't this pretty straightforward from his explanation that "context is that which is scarce" is dependent on the story, situation, and context in which it is invoked. Maybe this is too much tautologies are tautological, but it can mean there is local knowledge to the story, details known only to the participants, historical dependent placement of a piece of art or scholarship, key details from elsewhere that must be known to truly grasp and understand, etc. - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html
Notes might become interesting as more folks use it. But many are still on their first note. I suspect my limited Twitter watching will go down further as I do more s-Notes checking.
Hanania is ... interesting and attempting to avoid joining any one tribe; see:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/how-to-be-an-intellectual
Eggers & the leadership issue was quick and interesting, tho it only barely mentions the key issue for leadership - followers. While discussing the institutions and contacts, like Darwin having 240+ pen pals to correspond with (> Dunbar!), it and the links don't quite get to the need for followers to also be good.
I sincerely wish some bright econ PhD would become a great follower of Kling and create a school of "Specialization & Trade" economics. Which is maybe too close to, but not the same as, the Austrian School (that Bryan Caplan is NOT part of; and I'm no longer sure of what it is).
The Epstein interview was excellent throughout.
This part evoked some of Thiel’s ideas for me:
“And that's why I think the talk about authentic leadership is often off the mark. Because if you get that balance right, you're pretty inauthentic as a leader, because, on the one hand, you have to play the role of the unconstrained visionary who is breaking boundaries and taking that kind of maximalist position; on the other hand, you have to kind of dial it way back into the here-and-now. Finding individuals who can manage that tension in one person is really, really hard.“
"All I can figure is that some big executive or financial backer of Substack is so consumed by Musk-hatred that he is willing to throw resources at this idea."
Now it all makes sense...
I don't think that was the motivation. Musk is one of the only people in technology who talk about it, but online ad fraud and spam are major problems for every free website and all the online infrastructure that rests on the "free" concept. Substack and the new Twitter recognize this and are shifting towards paid models. LLMs and things like it dramatically shift the balance of power between spammers and anti-spam technology towards spammers and bot farms, so things like old Twitter are not long for this world.