Eclectic Spacewalk — 06/16/17
Here is a sampling of the best content I consumed this past week. Enjoy scratching your brain’s curiosity itch!
Book(s) I am reading — “The Stranger” by Albert Camus & “The Trial” by Franz Kafka
Top 5 Favorite articles and essays: the SALT conference, Decentralization, the crisis or death of expertise, and how climate change disproportionately affects the poor, & Chelsea Manning —
“Here they are — The establishment! The elites! They’re all here! The specter of Donald Trump hung over the SALT Conference like a heavy cloud that threatened to burst open at any moment. This was simultaneously the crowd that Trump had campaigned against, and the crowd that held fundraisers for him, and the crowd that he was making it his business to help, and the crowd that his ineptitude and idiotic mistakes threatened to severely harm. Average people often think that this sort of high finance crowd is engaged in nuanced alchemy that surpasseth all understanding. But anyone can understand these people if you can grasp one thing: When the money gets big enough, finance and economics and politics are all the same thing. They are ways to measure risk. When you run five or ten or a hundred billion dollars, your overriding concern in life is that pile of money — growing it, yes, but, more fundamentally, preserving it. Geopolitics therefore become just another business risk to be measured alongside interest rates and consumer trends, and judged based on the threat it poses to your money. Climate change? A risk. War in North Korea? A risk. Donald Trump’s insanity? A risk. What normal people think of in moral or ideological terms, those who control all the world’s wealth think of simply in terms of risk. Almost anything can be tolerated, if it allows them to make more money with less risk. This is the logic of capitalism.”
“The Media is going crazy about Bitcoin, Ethereum and the rise of crypto markets. Entrepreneurs from the sector have kind of a Rockstar status raising millions of USD in seconds through ICOs. However, the crypto sector is much more than Bitcoin, fintech, trading and crypto currencies — it’s about building a better, decentralized, (digital) world.”
By using the term “decentralization” I refer to a process of redistributing functions, people, powers or things away from a central authority. The problem with centralized systems is that they lack transparency, allow for single points of failure, censorship, abuse of power and inefficiencies. The fundament of their existence often is missing trust within communities or networks, so they need a trust building intermediary to be organized. Paradigm shifts towards decentralized systems are enabled by new technological breakthroughs (i.e. blockchain, cryptography, consensus mechanisms), a rapidly growing developer community as well as new ways of raising capital.
— By Alexander Ruppert
“Overconfidence leads experts not only to get out of their own lane and make pronouncements on matters far afield of their expertise, but also to ‘over-claim’ wider expertise even within their own general area of competence. Experts and professionals, just as people in other endeavours, assume that their previous successes and achievements are evidence of their superior knowledge, and they push their boundaries rather than say the three words that every expert hates to say: ‘I don’t know.’ No one wants to appear to be uninformed or to be caught out on some ellipsis in their personal knowledge. Laypeople and experts alike will issue confident statements on things about which they know nothing, but experts are supposed to know better…Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert. Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves.”
“ Richer people and countries will be better equipped to adapt. And in a cruel twist, some of those nations, particularly in northern Europe, might actually get a boost in GDP as their cold climates get increasingly balmy (see “Hotter Days Will Drive Global Inequality”).
But around the world, the overwhelming story will look a lot like what India is already experiencing. An awful lot of people are going to be worse off and, unless drastic measures are taken, too many of them will lack the resources they need to do much about it.”
“She had been released only eight days earlier, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence. Her crime, even in hindsight, was an astonishing one: handing WikiLeaks approximately 250,000 American diplomatic cables and roughly 480,000 Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Collectively the largest leak of classified records in American history, the disclosures cleared a path for Edward Snowden and elevated the profile of Julian Assange, then little known outside hacker circles. “Without Chelsea Manning,” P.J. Crowley, an assistant secretary of state from 2009 to 2011, told me recently, “Julian Assange is just another fringe actor who resents what he sees as American hegemonic hubris.” To an extraordinary extent, Manning’s actions, in the words of Denver Nicks, the author of a book on her case, represented the “beginning of the information age exploding upon itself”: a new era in which leaks were a weapon, data security was of paramount importance and privacy felt illusory.”
The United States just has no clue: from a systemic political crisis buttressed with ballooning inequality to flawed moral reasoning to execute the wishes of the dead even if it is at ends with the best interests of the living; but also from negotiating healthcare bills in secret to ideological differences; and from how our country’s failed drug way creates massacres south of our border to deregulating Wall Street. We are royally fucking up!
“What I am trying to do with this book is point out that Trump is not the crisis. He is a symptom of the crisis. If we don’t get at the underlying trends that made his rise possible, there are worse versions of Trump out there. There are more racist versions of Trump out there. There are even more violent versions of Trump out there. This idea of treating him as this alien intervention in the American political psyche — look, I want the Russia connections to be investigated, but there is a way in which it is reinforcing this idea of him as a foreign agent, somehow other. I can tell you Donald Trump’s products may not be made in America, but Donald Trump was made in America. He is not an alien. He is the culmination of a great many dangerous ideas that were fostered in this country and there has to be some ownership over that.”
“Incomes for the top 0.001% richest Americans surged 636% during the 34-year period. Wow.
There’s more. “The average pretax income of the bottom 50% of US adults has stagnated since 1980, while the share of income of US adults in the bottom half of the distribution collapsed from 20% in 1980 to 12% in 2014,” writes Howard Gold, founder and editor of GoldenEgg Investing, in the Chicago Booth blog.
“In a mirror-image move, the top 1% commanded 12% of income in 1980 but 20% in 2014. The top 1% of US adults now earns on average 81 times more than the bottom 50% of adults; in 1981, they earned 27 times what the lower half earned.”
“Imagine what a country would be like if every person could secure a vote in elections that happened after their death. If you stated your preferences in your will, you could execute a vote for the conservative, liberal, Asian, or White Separatist candidate, in every election, in perpetuity, and your vote would compete with the votes of the living. Imagine that a legal structure were erected to execute the wishes of the dead, and that the law would side with the dead even when their wishes conflicted with the needs of the living, or with the wellbeing of future generations.
We have overwhelmingly good moral reasons to reject such a society. We believe that with death comes the loss of the right to influence the political institutions of the living. Yet this kind of moral clarity disappears as soon as we move from politics to wealth. There is a huge industry dedicated to executing the wishes of human beings after their death.”
“The bill, sponsored by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), takes aim at some of Dodd-Frank’s main achievements: It guts rules intended to protect mortgage borrowers and military veterans, and restrict predatory lenders. It also weakens the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s ability to oversee and enforce consumer protection laws against banks around the country — upending a mix of powers that have helped the CFPB recover nearly $12 billion for 29 million individuals since opening its doors in July 2011. The bill also weakens or outright cuts a number of bank regulations enacted through Dodd-Frank to keep risky investing behavior in check in order to avoid the economic devastation of another financial crisis or taxpayer-funded bailout.”
“It is difficult to think of an example of a law in the history of the United States that would have such a deep impact on so many people — millions would find insurance no longer affordable — drafted with so little public input. No hearings, no public examination of the details. Republican senators can claim the secret law is better than the deeply hated House version, but without laying out the trade-offs that allegedly make it so.
In a normal political environment, a scandal is a distraction from a major bill, because major bills get passed by building public consensus. In this case, avoiding the public is the entire strategy. And the crafting of the bill is itself a scandal.”
“And, of course, in the U.S. as in Canada, some campaigners get less than that, or nothing at all. Slightly more than one in 10 health-related online campaigns reached their goal in the NerdWallet report. The Bothell study found that 90 percent of the 200 GoFundMe campaigns didn’t reach their goal, and that, on average, fundraisers got 40 percent of what they asked for. That doesn’t sound like much of a fix to Snyder.
“Is this something that is going to be a solution to a lack of health insurance?” he said. “Absolutely not.””
“For years state and federal authorities in Mexico didn’t appear to make a real effort to delve into the attack. Mexican federal authorities said their predecessors didn’t investigate because the killings couldn’t be linked to organized crime, but acknowledged that they also have not investigated.
Estimates of the number of dead and missing vary wildly between the official count, 28, and the one from victims associations, about 300. ProPublica and National Geographic have identified about 60 people whose deaths or disappearances have been linked by relatives, friends, victims’ support groups, court files or news reports to the Zetas siege that year.”
“To explore whether and why people sometimes reject environmental policies that improve individual and collective outcomes, we create an experimental market in which transactions generate a negative externality. Market participants endogenously determine whether to implement corrective policies. We consider three policy instruments (Pigouvian taxes and subsidies, and quantity regulation) and two levels of policy efficiency (full and half). We then explore how individual cultural worldviews might contribute to the rejection of policies that correct the market failure. Our results indicate that people often oppose policies that improve their material outcomes, and we find that such opposition is significantly explained by cultural worldviews. Interesting connections emerge between individual worldviews and specific policy instruments.”
“To a certain extent, this is all performance art. We want to signal to our in-groups (in Chait’s case, the cosmopolitan Left) that we’re on their side and that the outgroup (conservatives in general here) should be ashamed of themselves. It might turn out that Chait’s Republican son-in-law effectively feels no different treatment from Chait than would a progressive son-in-law and Chait merely quietly judges him from afar. It’s a coherent and cohesive stance to take. But if we take seriously that ideological polarization is accelerating in America and that might be a bad thing, the attitude that Chait lays out here — that our partisan opposition should be treated differently as human beings — is going to make it worse.”
Neither does Britian —
“In electoral terms, of course, the two forces have pretty much canceled each other out. May will form a government with the support of the Protestant fundamentalist Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland. That government will be weak and unstable and it will have no real authority to negotiate a potentially momentous agreement with the European Union. Brexit is thus far from being a done deal: it can’t be done without a reliable partner for the EU to negotiate with. There isn’t one now and there may not be one for quite some time — at least until after another election, but quite probably not even then. The reliance on a spurious notion of the “popular will” has left Britain with no clear notion of who “the people” are and what they really want.”
Other interesting articles/essays —
“Many of us in journalism talk a lot about creative storytelling. We turn to GIFs and charts, vertical video and embedded tweets.
I laud these efforts to break up the traditional 750-word, inverted pyramid that has defined “the article” for so long. But, while we’re getting more creative, I worry we’re not actually being more inventive. We’re making our work look better and feel better, but not necessarily be better.”
“You don’t have to wait long to see a headline proclaiming that some food or behaviour is associated with either an increased or a decreased health risk, or often both. How can it be that seemingly rigorous scientific studies can produce opposite conclusions?
Nowadays, researchers can access a wealth of software packages that can readily analyse data and output the results of complex statistical tests. While these are powerful resources, they also open the door to people without a full statistical understanding to misunderstand some of the subtleties within a dataset and to draw wildly incorrect conclusions.”
“Rather than pitting individuals against each other, society needs to stress mutual dependencies. This could be seen in the recent healthcare debate in the United States, where politicians played the shared-interest card by pointing out how much everybody (including the well-to-do) would lose if the nation failed to change the system, and where President Obama played the social responsibility card by calling the need for change “a core ethical and moral obligation”. Money-making cannot be allowed to become the be-all and end-all of society.”
“Nature can seem as inspiring, beautiful, strong and nurturing as a mother, but it would be foolish to believe that this ‘mother’ loves us. There’s no reason we can’t celebrate her glorious natural gifts while also appreciating the important ‘unnatural’ improvements our fellow humans have created. I wouldn’t — and couldn’t — have it any other way. Would you?”
“They don’t call him the “King of Clay” for nothing. Rafael Nadal claimed his 10th French Open title on Sunday at the age of 31. To celebrate, here are four profiles of Rafa looking back at his career.”
Short films —
Documentary —
Info-graphic to contemplate: How to Grow Human Organs in a Pig from Scientific American —
