Links to Consider, 6/23
Martin Gurri on epistemology; Simon Cooke is wary of YIMBY; Perception and reality about the ability to have a baby; Ed West is pessimistic about conservatism
Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding, which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition.
What do you do when someone does not accept your version of truth? One instinctive response is to exercise power. But this ultimately is counterproductive.
Gurri writes,
At the individual level, we should remember that the function of moral judgment isn’t to represent reality but to shape it. We should engage with the assumptions, not the conclusions. The most fruitful response to “Trump is an authoritarian” and other such affirmations of doctrine is “What do you mean by that, exactly?”
I read him as saying that moral judgments are used to exercise power. That makes their truth status suspect.
I like to say that we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. For that to work well, the process for climbing the ladder of prestige in various areas has to elevate the best thinkers. Instead, it can promote individuals and coalitions that come up with ways to game the system.
If the people who rise to the top in epidemiology are the ones who know the most and are best able to deal with the uncertainty, then our response to a pandemic is likely to be as good as we can hope for. But if the people who rise to the top are the ones who build a protective empire around themselves and stifle others who may have good ideas, then the pandemic response will be dysfunctional. Gurri and I would say that we suffered from the latter.
I stopped being a YIMBY because the advocates of building new homes don’t want to allow the building of homes according to what people want but rather according to their grandiose vision of future urbanism.
…The new urbanism stopped being about how you dropped house prices and reduced rents by building houses and began to embrace elements of trendy urbanism: a shift to talk about affordable homes not simply homes per se; an obsession with urban densification; and the embrace of environmentalism especially in the form of public transport. As a result YIMBYs stopped simply campaigning for more land supply and more homes, and instead began to talk about planned urban environments, agglomeration theory and using development to make public transport systems economically viable.
Bethany S. Mandel writes (passing along a friend’s wisdom),
You’re not as young as you think you are, she told us. Many of your peers will waste their 20s dating and partying; but you should be married with at least one kid by the time you’re 30. You’ll likely want more kids than you think you do now, and you should give yourself the opportunity to keep going while you still are well within a window of relatively high fertility.
In an abstract of an NBER working paper, Nifon Gong and others write,
Individuals who are unmarried and not in relationships at age 24 are extremely optimistic about the probability of having children, while married individuals have very accurate beliefs.
It sounds like a division between the women who didn’t listen to Mandel’s mentor and those who did. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Historically, religions that attract large numbers of women tend to predominate, the most obvious being Christianity, where females heavily outnumbered males in the early centuries, in some areas by six to one. This was also true of Methodism in 18th century England and Evangelical Christianity in Latin America, and in each case the role of men as ‘secondary converts’ was a key driver of growth (the first Christian kings of Anglo-Saxon England and post-Roman France both converted at the behest of their wives). So the fact that young women backed Labour over the Tories by 73 points to 18 at the 2017 election should have been a cause for alarm.
I remember the joke in the 1960s that radicalism was a great way to meet chicks.
Seriously, do not under-estimate this as a force. Men want to be heroic allies, not pariahs.
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“Many of your peers will waste their 20s dating and partying; but you should be married with at least one kid by the time you’re 30.”
We were very atypical millennials amongst our peers who got to three by thirty, and are now nearly at six. There were a lot of late nights wondering about the choices that led to being up in the middle of the night changing diapers and bottle feeding, sacrificing career advances, etc., when colleagues and old classmates were getting that next promotion and circling the globe on the next adventure.
Many people waste their 20s partying and dating precisely because most of their peers do so. It’s pretty difficult and requires a peculiar contrarianism to break away when your entire work and social circles are doing the exact same thing.
And there’s very little near-term validation of the choice to step off the party bus and buckle down and start a family early. It takes a long time, if ever, to see the return on that investment.
"You are not as young as you think you are"
Good advice that has, of course, been handed down through the ages but ignored by 99% of the people under the age of 30 that entire time, including me. I will be 58 next week and stand in astonishment at just how fast the last 40 years have passed since I graduated from high school. I would do it all differently if I could go back in time.