Eclectic Spacewalk — 06/02/17
Here is a sampling of the best content I consumed this past week. Enjoy scratching your brain’s curiosity itch!
READING
BOOKS
Reviews:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/books/review/the-tyranny-of-experts-by-william-easterly.html
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-tyranny-of-experts-by-william-easterly-1394225259
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-the-tyranny-of-experts-by-william-easterly-on-global-developments-errors/2014/05/02/5e9c46d2-ca1e-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html
- https://ssir.org/book_reviews/entry/the_trouble_with_top_down
- I devoured this science fiction epic in under a week. The story draws you in each time you pick up the book. I would recommend to anyone.
Articles/Essays
My Favorites from NY Times, LA Times, New Republic, Fusion & The Economist: Social Media misinformation and amusement, Wealth and Health, and also Elitism with a dash of Oligarchy
“Finally, in a more pernicious way, bots give us an easy way to doubt everything we see online. In the same way that the rise of “fake news” gives the president cover to label everything “fake news,” the rise of bots might soon allow us to dismiss any online enthusiasm as driven by automation. Anyone you don’t like could be a bot; any highly retweeted post could be puffed up by bots.
“If you can make something trend, you can almost make it come true,” said Renee DiResta, a technologist who studies bots.
And if that’s the case, why believe anything?”
“In his 1985 classic, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” the media theorist Neil Postman wrote that society has long braced itself to fight against the kind of “spiritual devastations of tyranny” described by George Orwell — thought police, cameras, totalitarians. He warned of another threat to society and culture.
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us,” Postman wrote. “But who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?””
“After the blood-letting, when and if President Trump is overthrown, the State Security functionaries in their tidy dark suits will return to their nice offices to preside over their ‘normal’ tasks of spying on the citizens and launching clandestine operations abroad.
The media will blow out some charming tid-bits and ‘words of truth’ from the new occupant of the ‘Oval Office’.
The academic left will churn out some criticism against the newest ‘oligarch-in-chief’ or crow about how their heroic ‘resistance’ averted a national catastrophe.
The triumphant editorialists will claim that ‘our’ unique political system, despite the ‘recent turmoil’, has proven that democracy succeeds . . . only the people suffer!
Long live the Oligarchs!”
“I would go so far as to say that this chasm between elite liberals and middle America is liberalism’s biggest problem. It’s how we isolate ourselves. It’s one of the reasons a lot of middle Americans didn’t vote for Hillary. And bridging the gulf is on us, not them. It requires that we accept certain realities. A person can still be “on the team” even if they think the minimum wage should be raised only to $10, or don’t consider the placement of the crèche on the courthouse square for two weeks in December a constitutional crisis, or haven’t yet figured out how they feel about transgender bathrooms. If we don’t find a way to welcome them, they’ll go to the other side. That isn’t how majorities are built. Unfortunately, it’s how elections are lost.”
“The shrug works thanks to the existence of an alternate conservative media that speaks only to the GOP’s most dedicated supporters, obviously. But it also works thanks to the inability and unwillingness of the nonpartisan political press to assign collective responsibility to Republicans for the moral bankruptcy of their party, and the press’ refusal to make the obvious point that creating a political culture in which literally no bad deed is going to be met with opprobrium, so long as the deed-doer is in some way useful to the party politically, will lead — has led — to to an utterly dysfunctional politics in thrall to the worst elements of a tiny and extreme fringe.
The Cillizzas of the world keep letting conservatives get away with anything and then marveling that conservatives seem to be able to get away with anything.”
“But his observation that it is homeowners in particular — rather than rentiers generally — who are grabbing a larger share of the pie is important for policy. Mr Piketty used the historical evidence in his book to argue that a global tax of up to 2% a year on individual wealth should be introduced in order to prevent capital concentrating in the hands of the few. But if housing wealth is the biggest source of rising wealth then a more focused approach is called for. Policy-makers should deal with the planning regulations and NIMBYism that inhibit housebuilding and which allow homeowners to capture super-normal returns on their investments.
Just how inconvenient Mr Rognlie’s argument is for Mr Piketty’s overarching narrative is a matter of perspective. The latter certainly did not make housing wealth the central theme of his bestselling book. But a story in which a privileged elite uses its political power (albeit through the planning system) to create economic rents for the few fits Mr Piketty’s argument to a tee. Well-off homeowners may for the moment be more responsible for rising wealth inequality than top-hatted capitalists or famous hedge-fund managers.”
“President Trump’s 2018 budget contains the largest dollar cuts to programs for low- and moderate-income people proposed by any President’s budget in the modern era, reflecting a strikingly imbalanced approach to reducing the deficit or offsetting the cost of its proposed tax cuts. The plan would cut these programs by an estimated $2.5 trillion over the next decade. About three-fifths (59 percent) of the budget’s cuts would come from these programs that help low- and moderate-income families afford the basics or improve their upward mobility.”
“A UCLA neuroscientist named Keely Muscatell has published an interesting paper showing that wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy: if you show rich people and poor people pictures of kids with cancer, the poor people’s brains exhibit a great deal more activity than the rich people’s. “As you move up the class ladder,” says Keltner, “you are more likely to violate the rules of the road, to lie, to cheat, to take candy from kids, to shoplift, and to be tightfisted in giving to others. Straightforward economic analyses have trouble making sense of this pattern of results.”
There is an obvious chicken-and-egg question to ask here. But it is beginning to seem that the problem isn’t that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: it triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains. It causes them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.”
Honorable Mentions
“No. My main defence of cash will be simple and intuitive. As unsexy and analogue as cash is, it is resilient. It is easy to use. It requires little fancy infrastructure. It is not subject to arbitrary algorithmic glitches from incompetent programmers. And, yes, it leaves no data trail that will be used to project the aspirations and neuroses of faceless technocrats and business analysts into my daily existence. It comes with criminals, but hey, it’s good old friendly normal capitalism rather than predictive Minority Report surveillance-capitalism. And ask yourself this: do you really want to live in the latter society without the ability to buy drugs? Believe me, you’ll need something to dull the existential pain.”
“The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.”
“There’s no overlooking the fact that the genuine problems the Internet faces today — the plodding pace of innovation, safety, security, privacy, and the consolidation of services — cannot be resolved by open Internet regulation. Internet engineers need the freedom to tinker with ways of making the Internet better by departing from tradition.
A rulebook of ever-increasing complexity does not take us where we need to go, and neither does an unenforceable “simple rule” that gives rise to nothing but endless litigation and ever more dubious regulations.
Let’s accept the fact that net neutrality will never be anything more than a vague aspiration that will always escape regulatory definition.”
“People like to say Washington is broken. But sometimes policymakers on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum can find common ground and reach an agreement that not only satisfies their goals but gets something important done for the American people. And then the businesses whose profits might be imperiled by such progress get to work. It’s not that Washington is broken, then, so much as there are lots of people interested in breaking it.”
“Such tragic events inevitably make us question how terrorists can carry out these atrocities. A new study published today in Nature Human Behavior may offer some insights: Their moral reasoning is fundamentally different from the rest of ours.”
“Terrorism and radicalization are … molded by group dynamics, biological predispositions, cultural constraints, and socio-psychological factors,” Ibáñez and García write. “It may even be the case that this abnormal form of moral cognition is the result of participating in terrorist practices.””
“As the controversy over EpiPens unfolded, Ms. Bresch shifted criticism toward what she called the “broken system” of brokers, distributors and pharmacists who take a cut of the price, too.
“We have moved from ‘There is no problem’ to ‘It’s not my fault,’ ” he said. “It begins to focus attention on what so many of my constituents already know the problem is, which is price gouging.””
“Some 894 climate change cases have now been filed in 24 countries, according to a report published last week by the United Nations Environment Programme and Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in New York.
The growth of such litigation worldwide shows that many citizens hope courts can force governments and corporations to act on climate change, says Sydes. “People are increasingly turning to the courts to find duties and obligations of governments and corporations who are currently not acting sufficiently on climate change,” he says. “This trend is likely to continue.””
“Sara Ahmed has suggested that “to speak out is to become a leak.” This is a fitting way to imagine the task at hand. We must recruit the language of biological ambiguity to make space for those who have been violated by medical and legal systems. For ourselves and for others, we need to make messes in these institutions — or, perhaps, make messes of these institutions.”
“It is entirely possible that we now find ourselves in a situation where such defence will not work. The liberal social contract is breaking and too many people are disinterested in the truth. We can blame those who disseminate lies on social networks; we can blame conspiracy websites and Russian propaganda. But, ultimately, we have to inquire whether their malice would be so effective corresponding demand for it.
To me, it feels like a déja vu, only in reverse. Just before the demise of communism, I saw people enthusiastically shedding lies in which they had lives for decades. Today, I see people shedding truth with the same enthusiasm. In both cases, it speaks to their exhaustion from living in a world with no alternative.”
OH, CANADA — Oh wait, the USA is FAR FAR worse…
“Ex-convicts who find a job and a place to stay are less likely to return to crime. In Norway prisoners can start their new jobs 18 months before they are released. In America there are 27,000 state licensing rules keeping felons out of jobs such as barber and roofer. Norway has a lower recidivism rate than America, despite locking up only its worst criminals, who are more likely to reoffend. Some American states, meanwhile, do much better than others. Oregon, which insists that programmes to reform felons are measured for effectiveness, has a recidivism rate less than half as high as California’s. Appeals to make prisons more humane often fall on deaf ears; voters detest criminals. But they detest crime more, so politicians should not be afraid to embrace proven ways to make prison less of a school of crime and more of a path back to productive citizenship.”
LISTENING
Audiobook
Podcasts
“And the reason why institutions are so important is that they’re what prevent us from being those atomized individuals who are alone against the overpowering state. That’s a very romantic image, but the isolated individual is always going to lose. We need the constitutional institutions as much as we can get them going. It’s a real problem now, especially with the legislature. We also need the professions, whether it’s law or medicine or civil servants, to act according to rules that are not the same thing as just following orders. And we need to be able to form ourselves up into nongovernmental organizations, because it’s not just that we have freedom of association. It’s that freedom itself requires association. We need association to have our own ideas confirmed, to have our confidence raised, to be in a position to actually act as individuals. Some of that is actually happening, which is a good sign.”
To Contemplate/ MISC —
Bold unsubstantiated claims thread
Interpersonal trust attitudes, 2014 — Share of people agreeing with the statement “most people can be trusted
New study: Tax Evasion and Inequality
A cautionary thread on IOT or the “Internet of Things”:
