Links to Consider, 4/21
Ronald Bailey on the Progress Movement; Peter Gray on schools' 20-minute lunch hour; Ben Thompson on AI; Rod Dreher on how the Natcons were treated in Brussels
he IFP's chief aim is to pick that low-hanging fruit by cutting down the overburden of regulation and reforming the stodgy processes that encrust science funding. So the group is working to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act so that it no longer blocks for years the building of critically needed infrastructure: roads, pipelines, electrical lines, and nuclear, renewable, and geothermal energy projects. The institute also wants to speed up the approval processes at the Food and Drug Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—in the first case to get new treatments to patients more quickly, and in the second to deploy modern nuclear reactors faster. It is pushing to reform the science funding programs at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation. For example, researchers associated with the IFP note that NIH peer review grant evaluations now tend to focus on the probability that research proposals will achieve their primary outcomes. Thus this evaluation process generally steers funding away from high-risk, high-reward research. One IFP proposal to overcome this conservative bias is to have peer reviewers first assess how valuable the new cures and treatments stemming from the proposed research would be should it prove successful in developing new fundamental knowledge.
My model of nonprofits says that they please donors without necessarily accomplishing anything. One can hope that these organizations invalidate the model.
In one study, researchers measured the time children with 20-minute lunch periods had to eat (Sparks & Porthero, 2023). Here is part of that report: “We’ve stood at the lunch line with stopwatches. For students who are at the end of the lunch line, we’ve measured kids with as few as five minutes to actually eat their meals.”
When I was in elementary school, I walked home to eat lunch.
How many apps or services are there that haven’t been built, not because one person can’t imagine them or create them in their mind, but because they haven’t had the resources or team or coordination capabilities to actually ship them?
This gets at the vector through which AI impacts the world above and beyond cost savings in customer support, or whatever other obvious low-hanging fruit there may be: as the ability of large language models to understand and execute complex commands — with deterministic computing as needed — increases, so too does the potential power of the sovereign individual telling AI what to do. The Internet removed the necessity — and inherent defensibility — of complex cost structures for media; AI has the potential to do the same for a far greater host of industries.
Suppose I wanted to write a textbook for AP statistics, which I taught for 15 years. I have made up enough sample problems and tests to more than fill out that part of a textbook. I say textbook, but it really should be an online, interactive teacher.
It would be a really arduous task without AI. All of the diagrams to draw! The challenge of setting up interactive calculators and problem sets.
With the help of AI, it might be a one-month project, or less.
It would also be easy to write an AP econ textbook. But I would not want to teach that garbage, especially AP macro. When I taught AP econ, I spent as little time as possible on AP prep. I taught what I wanted to teach. If you want something like that, you can read Specialization and Trade.
I never imagined that I would witness the banning of a peaceful political meeting in a supposedly free and democratic country. But that’s what nearly happened today in Belgium — in Brussels, the capital of the European Union.
…police entered the Claridge event space with the intention of shutting the meeting down.
They were greeted by a wall of TV cameras from press covering the event, and apparently thought better of it. What they did was to station themselves outside the doors (see photo above), and to refuse to let people enter. If you left the building for any reason at all, you were not allowed back in. They were clearly hoping to choke off the event without staging a spectacle that would be beamed around the world by the gathered media.
Eric Zemmour, who ran for president of France, was refused entrance.
This is the sort of story that the mainstream media will not touch. Or if they mention it, they will emphasize the “controversial conference,” not the rights that were trampled upon.
substacks referenced above:
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"Or if they mention it, they will emphasize the “controversial conference,” not the rights that were trampled upon."
One thing I've noticed about a lot of mainstream / respectable anti-left commentary in the past few years is an interesting psychological tendency to fail to update their worldview or adjust their priorities and approaches when observing a steady stream of such incidents, preferring to mentally doing to the increasingly untenable delusion that things are more or less what was thought to be 'normal' 25 years ago and that they can carry on debating and discussing and advocating for things in what was a "business as usual" manner as if it was still safe to assume the continuation of many features about institutions in terms of ethics, values, fairness, public spiritedness, tolerance for disagreement, etc. which disappeared by means of ideological convergence, capture, corruption, and degeneration a long time ago, for example, that they would be fair, neutral, trustworthy, politically non-weaponized, etc.
So, for example, you have non-progressive lawyers arguing the legal merits of political show trials in conditions of rampant abuse of discretion, selective prosecution and favoritism-based non-prosecution. It is frankly embarrassing as a mockery of a genuinely legal framework to take the law seriously as if one was operating in a system where rule of law still matters when it no longer does matter. One might as well argue that Stalin's lawyers made some valid arguments when dispatching some poor dissidents to the gulag.
In Europe there are several famous old bridges that because of all the foot traffic became attractive spots for merchants who literally set up shop on top of them. Examples are the Ponte Vecchio in Venice and the Kramerbrucke in Erfurt. Imagine being a merchant on that bridge and watching another merchant's shop drop into the river because the bridge gave way underneath him, then overhearing the city inspectors say that the the stone in that place was poor quality and also the barge shippers who are prohibited from operating downriver kept intentionally ramming into the piers to try to bring the bridge down despite its public benefit because it literally stood in the way if where they wanted to go. And then, instead of prudently panicking, evacuating the site, and at the very least examining the durability of the stone under one's own store and considering a collective defense plan against the barge operators, one just went about negotiating prices with vendors and customers and carrying on business as usual, because, well, the bad thing happened over there, not here, and to that jerk cheater who had it coming, not to good and decent me, and after all the barge owners were rich and powerful and ruthless and one needed their shipments and ought not make an enemy out of them.
You would snap your fingers in front of the face of that person to try to break his self-hynosis of rationalized deep denial, "Wake up! Do you not see what is happening? That it is ridiculous to discuss business as usual when business is not usual?"
I do get that respectable public intellectuals have a hard time internalizing and integrating these facts because it is considered kind of rude and the position of a conspiracy-theorist kook or crank to announce that the whole system they specialize in is fundamentally broken and compromised, one is supposed to publicly keep up the pretense that the system is fine and the people who work in it are good and fair and that one ought not to throw around such accusations or undermine public trust without the strongest of evidence at a standard of rigor impossible to meet, that these instances are all just rare anecdotes that don't reflect any trend, that those people had it coming, that the """laws""" - which are loose enough and intentionally misinterpreted enough to not qualify as law at all - are arguably being followed in a technical sense, yadda, yadda, yadda.
This is kind of like the story (I don't know if true) of Saddam Hussein refusing to believe until the last minute, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the US wasn't just elaborately sabre-rattling and regime-replacing invasion and occupation of the whole country for no good reason was imminent. Imagine him having a serious and well- argued discussion about the best way to renovate the landscaping of the presidential palace when a month later that whole area would be reduced to mud and rubble tread tracks.
"Many elementary schools allot only 20 minutes for lunch"
As a non-American I have to ask. Is this real?
How common is "many"? 10%? 90%?