Links for October 10, 2020
Fires, elections, and punk. And Amazon.
First, some thoughts on this newsletter 5 months in:
Near the end of A Month in Siena the author, Hisham Matar, wonders:
Perhaps each one of us carries, along with everything that has happened, a private geneology of rooms. Somewhere there is a collection of dining tables, a long line of beds, an assembly of chairs, countless doors we have opened and shut, a library of drawers into which we have placed the mundane as well as the valuable. Gathered in some imaginary museum, such a personal architectural inventory might be a compelling portrait of a life […]
I’ve thought a similar thing about newsletters, and how useful it might be if everyone you met had a newsletter you could look up with a list of links and references to everything that had shaped their opinions. Maybe you could understand a little better where they were coming from.
The obvious problem is that most people's opinions aren't shaped even mostly by the things they read but by idiosyncratic experiences, dispositions, and tastes that aren't easily captured in a weekly newsletter of links. Also, not everyone's opinions are interesting. See, Facebook. See, how many people actually read this newsletter.
Other feedback I’ve received about this newsletter:
Some people find the articles too long and don't finish them.
By virtue of being at the end of my last newsletter, many failed to see my book review. For those that did, see (1).
Not everyone cares about what you find interesting. Ideally, it should be something they're interested in as well. But again, see (1).
Good things I've noticed:
Writing blurbs for some of the links helps clarify my own thinking. I read a lot and don't always retain that much, so this is helpful.
When I have conversations with people, I can more easily refer them to particular articles or stories.
People I don't talk to frequently know I'm still alive and (kind of) what I'm up to.
Another friend described this newsletter as the random six-pack of beer you pick up on your way out of the store. You weren’t planning to buy beer, but it’s right there, so you may as well. I think that's probably the best I can hope for.
Links:
History of Punk (SNL, Youtube) An 80s British punk-band disintegrates when its lead singer comes out in support of Margaret Thatcher.
They know how to prevent megafires. Why won’t anybody listen? (ProPublica) Not the angle I expected from this outlet.
How to make biomass energy sustainable again (Low-tech Magazine) Everyone’s favorite solar powered website with an article on coppicing, pollarding, and ways to grow sustainable firewood
David Shor’s unified theory of American politics (NY Magazine) I’m not as upset and worried as this guy, but his theories on voters were interesting. Some commentary here (Scholar’s Stage)
Information, incentives, and goals in election forecasts (Andrew Gelman, pdf) A little dry, but a good overview of how election forecasting works, including incentives for pollsters and forecasters, how vote shares differ from a probability of winning (for instance, how forecasts of Biden winning 54% of the popular vote translates to an 87% chance of winning the election). Also answered the question I had about why election forecasts change much at all during the course of a campaign. For instance, election races usually narrow as the election date draws closer. Shouldn’t a forecast account for this, and why even bother talking about who's leading in the polls by 8 points in June when we know it's going to get tight by November.
Why Jeff Bezos is worth 200 billion (Matt Stoller) A good example of how regulation intended to police a large firm—here, Amazon—can actually make them more entrenched by creating costly regulatory hurdles that only the biggest businesses can afford to comply with. To me this is less because Amazon is big and problematic and more because legislators have a problem predicting the consequences of their own legislation.
Books I’ve Recently Finished:
Power without knowledge: a critique of technocracy (Jeffrey Friedman) I’ve become interested in the claim that humans have made society too complex and complicated to manage effectively. Robert Kegan’s book, which I mentioned earlier, dealt with it at the level of individual psychology. Friedman, a political scientist, deals with it at the level of government. How can we maintain democracy when voters appear so underinformed? Do the experts and other very serious people in government actually understand the world any better than the ignorant voters? The book is good and a bit depressing—Friedman makes a decent case that the very serious people in government really aren’t that much better at predicting the effects of policies than the ignorant voters—but the author repeats himself a lot, and the book could have been half as long. Maybe I’ll write a review or just repost some of the highlights.
A Month in Siena (Hisham Matar): Not bad. I didn’t know anything about pre-Renaissance Sienese art. Now I know…something. I’ve also started to become wary whenever an author of literary fiction or non-fiction starts a sentence with the word, “Perhaps…” (see top of newsletter). This usually happens when they start to run out of beautiful, literary things to say about the world around them but want to keep writing beautiful, literary things. It’s not analysis per se, but often shallow metaphysics wrapped in nice language (“Perhaps life/love/meaning is really just…”) or a cheap way to smuggle in a more interesting reality than the one the author is presented with (“Perhaps this room once housed….”).
Books I’m Currently Reading:
For and against method (Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend) Compiled lectures and correspondence between two important philosophers of science in the second-half of the 20th century. My interest in this book is the same interest that motivated me to read the Jeffrey Friedman book above. There’s a lot of public discourse about people who do or do not “Listen to the Science,” when making decisions in their own lives or that affect the lives of millions of others through policies and laws. This seems to take for granted that “the Science” is unified, well-established, and that there are systematic ways of “doing Science” that lead to clear truths. Friedman would call the people who have this view naïve technocratic realists. Paul Feyeraband argues that there really is no such thing as scientific method that a number of bold, scientific advances were initially considered the ramblings of crackpots and heretics, and that the “procedures and results that constitute the sciences have no common structure.” Given the incentives in academia, we should probably be pretty skeptical about “the science,” (See Why Most Published Research Findings are False by John Ioannidis or this more recent, more entertaining read on replication problems in the social sciences).