Monthly Shorts 11/21
Social Sciences
The best thing I’ve read this month is from the CIA’s Getting to Know the President. The interesting bits are a fun analysis of the interagency process.
D-PLACE is amazing. Have you wanted to learn what the relationship between dowry usage (fairly uncommon) and food source is? Of course you have, you’re an interesting human being. And here we have just the dataset to do it with!
“Personal”
Willingness to look stupid is something I am working on cultivating. I’m not where I need to be, yet. But I want to get better at it.
Greater Los Angeles is very wrong, but very well-written, and pretty. I found it from Notes on Living in Los Angeles, which effectively sums up part of what is intolerable to me about the city.
Flakiness
The East Coast cliche about the SoCal person is that we’re vapid and care mostly for our well-being and whatever spiritual thing we’ve got going on. This is basically right on the facts, but I’d reframe the value judgements. Here, neuroticism is not a valued cultural norm and we enjoy taking care of ourselves. At first, coming from an East Coast background, this filled me with suspicion. Now that I’ve adjusted I feel like I just unplugged from the Matrix. How did I ever possibly give a shit about all of those other things? The deal is that this is the most Epicurean place I’ve ever been in North America, a continent known for having fun in fits and starts while feeling quite bad about it.
I have a running disagreement with Firinn wherein he tries to convince me that I should prioritize joy, and I don’t see why. I think he will enjoy Los Angeles.
invidious is a non-tracked front-end for Youtube that is happily in violation of any and all imaginable reasonable policies. Plausibly of interest.
Money Money
There is a simplistic model of retail in which the goal is to sell things at high prices that you buy at low prices. There is an equally simplistic model of retail, though admittedly much less common, in which the goal is to sell as much stuff as possible per hour per square foot. Obviously neither is wholly adequate, but they do inform different business models. The New England Mobile Book Fair, a treasure of my childhood since closed by the pandemic, represented one extreme. A literal commercial warehouse in a nondescript suburb filled to the brim with books. They had a few people at the checkout, and then people went in and found books and came out and paid them money, and the books moved agonizingly slowly but the margins were good and the land was cheap. One review said that it was “a great place to go if you don't really know what you are looking for, because you're sure to find it in the stacks somewhere.” The flip side would be a movie theatre: they manage to turn over their inventory (chairs) in a matter of hours! Unfortunately, the margins are a little tight. US theaters rely heavily on concessions, while UK ones spread it more broadly.
The locations of those businesses are not accidental: an urban movie theatre pays through the nose to be near foot traffic and gets excess profit sucked out by Hollywood. And you know what else is reliant on foot traffic? Corner retail shops and street vendors, which sell tobacco. How much tobacco? So much, and it is extremely profitable per square foot, according to How Profitable Was/Is Tobacco, a fascinating blog post. Though it fails to include the tremendous profitability of taxing tobacco, on which Anton Howes has more.
Will Wilkinson argues that crypto isn’t bullshit, because it promises genuine decentralization (though sometimes that promise is less than entirely fulfilled). I’m a little more skeptical: if crypto succeeds, I think it will be simple evidence that the value of a reboot to the international financial system, for at least some users, is extremely high. But I’ve been wrong about crypto since Hacker News was calling it a pyramid scheme almost a decade ago, and at a certain point I feel obligated to at least come up with a post-hoc explanation.
Philosophy
The Anglo-American Analytic Left is a description of exactly what it promises, broken down into three groups, and with some consideration for what the breakdown implies. Mostly I’m sharing because I think the recommendations for the philosophical strands are going to be good reading for many of my followers.
The leading light in this tendency is almost certainly Hilary Greaves. Her work has been agenda setting, and through her directorship of the Oxford Global Priorities Institute she has considerable sway over what work is considered important and who is seen as up and coming. The core theoretical debates in this group concern how to best formulate consequentialism and other core normative concepts, while rationally responding to uncertainty. Core applied issues are typically animal rights (members of this group are very likely to be vegetarian), and greater leniency towards immigrants and refugees. Somewhat infamously, yet typically of the utilitarian tradition, they have a tendency to have galaxy brained takes on how to allocate our attention. But the plus side of this is one sometimes gets really creative and fascinating work from quite unexpected angles. There's a tendency here to be mistake rather than conflict theorists, and one thus gets pretty fascinating work on how it is that political conflict none the less seems persistent.
Disclaimer: I have a personal fondness for Hilary Greaves because she is good at lecturing to undergrads and was willing to chat with me after lectures, kindly walking her bike back as we talked. She’s the person who convinced me that psychological egoism is false.
P.S. If you, like me, wondered who wrote the free speech argument against mass incarceration, it was Tena Thau, previously seen on the EA Forum defending high school debate.
The brilliant Firinn made something I just have to share with you.
The Gyrish gnomes have a rather different relationship with their gods than most. Gods are not supposed to be worshipped, loved, or prayed to; gods simply are, whether you like them or not. In fact, the Gyrish don’t like most of their gods; they fear them or even hate them. The gods set challenges and it is the sacred responsibility of a Gyrish gnome to overcome those challenges. Gyr’s gods are rarely pleased with their people and their rage can rarely be appeased, but they can sometimes be impressed.
See if you can guess the pattern from just one instance.
The third god - often called Zeebrettin, Frostgears or Nax - is the god of winter, endings, loss, grief and stillness. She is the bringer of death. Her law is that all things must end, and must end the same way; in inescapable ice and cold. Gnomes hate and fear her. In defiance, they live with as much warmth and vivacity as they possibly can.