Links to Consider, 4/30
Joseph Holmes on Haidt; Elle Griffin on the book industry; Matt Yglesias hypes driverless cars; Virginia Postrel on pluralistic ignorance
In the ’80s and ’90s, the rise of dual-income households and greater family mobility meant that most family units did not know their neighbors sufficiently to trust their kids to explore and go on adventures without adult supervision.
A lot of long-term trends have people spending less time in their immediate world (family, neighbors, co-workers) and more time in the remote world. You can go back to the development of ocean-going sailing ships and the printing press as the beginning of these trends (or if you wish, you can go back to the invention of agriculture). I think that Haidt is putting too much emphasis on smart phones and social media.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify?
The problem is that the largest book publishers refuse to participate. But I agree that the club is superior to the silo.
Griffin goes on,
and my money is on Substack for eventually publishing written books!
My money is on people shifting their reading away from books and toward Substack essays.
If it’s cheap enough to take driverless cabs basically everywhere you go rather than owning a car, then you don’t need a parking space. And if a critical mass of people start going the robotaxi route, then your destination doesn’t need a parking space either.
I think that what people don’t like about driverless cars is the loss of agency. We like the feeling of being the driver. But we put up with not being the driver on airplanes.
My friend and former Chapman University colleague John Thrasher recently introduced me to the concept of pluralistic ignorance. This is a social science term describing situations in which individuals know their own thoughts and behaviors but assume most people are different, when in fact they aren’t. The classic example is college students who don’t drink that much themselves but assume their classmates are always getting drunk, when those others also drink moderately.
Or you think everyone is having more sex than you are.
Thrasher’s variation on this idea is that people now over-estimate the awfulness of other people.
people now know that elites don’t live up to presumed standards of competence and conduct. It’s that everyone seems to be awful—or at least enough people do that you can feel permitted to be awful yourself. I’m not sure that’s true in general, but it certainly feels true on Twitter.
substacks referenced above:
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"I think that what people don’t like about driverless cars is the loss of agency. We like the feeling of being the driver. But we put up with not being the driver on airplanes."
We put up with not being the driver in lots of situations where driving our personal car is impractical. What we like isn't agency per se but flexibility to add and delete stops as necessary.
I think it was Glenn Reynolds (or at least a posting on Instapundit) many years ago now that identified the primary obstacle to driverless car adoption as the liability for accidents, and I don't think that has changed. No auto manufacturing company is going to offer fully autonomous vehicles if the company is going to have to defend the operation of their vehicle every time one is involved in an accident, much less face the possibility of catastrophic judgements. No manufacturer wants to be the test case, and neither individual states nor the federal government are going to give them the kind of immunity (only liable if known but uncorrected defects are proven to be the cause) that has been adopted at common law from the time cars developed in a much less litigious environment.
> Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want?
So a library?