Links to Consider, 7/27

Muhammed Tuncay on assortative mating; Dan Williams on the demand for bias; Razib Khan on immigrant assimilation; Ben Thompson on the ultimate cause of the Crowdstrike disaster

A commenter points to Muhammad Tuncay’s 2019 dissertation.

Individuals face a large degree of uncertainty about their permanent incomes early in their careers. If they marry early, as most individuals around 1970 did, this uncertainty leads to weak marital sorting along permanent income levels. But when marriage is delayed, as around 1990, the sorting becomes stronger as individuals are more able to predict their likely future incomes. … the increase in marriage age can explain almost 75 percent of the increase in the assortative mating.

Dan Williams writes,

In practice, the “marketplace of ideas” within liberal democracies often functions like a marketplace of rationalisations, an informational economy in which pundits, journalists, intellectuals, and media outlets compete to produce justifications of the claims, narratives, and decisions favoured by different political and cultural tribes in society.

Think of the process as follows:

1. We view certain people as having prestige. When we are young, these might be parents, teachers, or celebrities.

2. When people one treats as prestigious have a lot in common, one develops tribal affiliation. If they all seem to be Democrats, one becomes a Democrat.

3. Once one acquires a tribal affiliation, one becomes inclined to assign prestige to people and ideas that rationalize that tribal affiliation.

This third step creates a demand for biased punditry. Supply arises to meet the demand. Williams writes,

rationalisations rarely take the form of clear-cut misinformation and why they can be genuinely impactful—and harmful—even though, in some sense, they merely respond to “audience demand.”

…motivations to endorse controversial claims or decisions create a demand for rationalisations.

…rationalisations tend to be misleading. Their function is not to inform people of the truth but to justify conclusions favoured for reasons independent of their truth. Given this, rationalising information is often cherry-picked, framed, packaged, and organised in deceptive ways.

Williams wants to distinguish rationalizations from outright lies.

Lawyers do not just make things up. Instead, they are highly skilled at selecting, framing, packaging, and organising accurate information in extremely biased ways. The same applies to media outlets and commentators that perform a rationalising function.

I am not sure that the distinction between “rationalizations” and “misinformation” can be sustained. I think some subset of rationalizations amount to misinformation.

Razib Khan has an essay on how the Roman Empire assimilated non-Romans. He points out that the issues of immigration and assimilation are baked into current demographic trends.

In 2021, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia each recorded nearly as many births as the entirety of the European Union. The planet's demography one to three generations in our future is being written today in maternity wards across the globe. In the long term, a shriveling and ever more geriatric “Fortress Europe” doesn’t have a prayer of indefinitely turning away many-fold greater numbers of young Africans and Middle Easterners streaming across the Mediterranean.

He has a companion essay on the history of assimilation in America and in France. America:

Though the 19th century saw a period when the arrival of large numbers of Catholics worried America’s political class, in the end America did not change to suit Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholicism changed to suit America. Similarly, in due course, the vast numbers of Southern European Catholics and Eastern European Jews who arrived around 1900 assimilated to American norms and values, enriching American literature, music, intellectual life and cuisine and pushing society’s bounds of religious pluralism a little further. But not in the end fundamentally altering American values. 

France:

A recent survey from winter 2024 indicates that 17% of French Muslims “hate Jews,” while 39% have a bad or very bad opinion of them. Nearly half of French Muslims want the total destruction of Israel and agree that Hamas’ attacks on 10/7 were acts of resistance. Finally, over half of Muslims between the ages of 18 and 25 claim to respect Sharia Law above the laws of the French republic. A large minority of the French populace is now a nation within a nation. The early 20th-century Left’s fears are crystallizing into reality in the early 21st century, but life comes at you fast: ironically the modern French Left counts on French Muslims as part of their vote bank. 

Ben Thompson writes,

erroneous configuration files in userspace crash a program, but they don’t crash the computer; CrowdStrike, though, doesn’t run in userspace: it runs in kernel space, which means its bugs crash the entire computer — 8 million of them, according to Microsoft. Apple and Linux were not impacted, for a very obvious reason: both have long since locked out 3rd-party software from kernel space.

Microsoft, though, despite having tried to do just that in the 2000s, has its hands tied; from the Wall Street Journal:

A Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets.

Heckuva job, European tech regulators.

substacks referenced above:

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When in (the) America(n century), do as the Americans do

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You can’t beat us if you join us

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The marketplace of misleading ideas