It is now on substack (In My Tribe). There is still no charge to read it.
I am trying to maintain the feel of this blog, including the daily scheduled posts and the comments section. Substack makes it easier for people to receive email notifications and for me to tweet my posts.
I will shift the blog back here if unexpected problems arise.
It’s clear enough how it works when a marauding horde of horse-archers or even a gang of street toughs wins by intimidation; but even this is only possible under certain certain conditions.
But when that strategy works for crybabies complaining to teacher, then you have to ask what peculiar conditions did teacher create?
John McWhorter would say that the threat of being called a racist puts as much fear into people as the threat of being attacked by a marauding horde of horse-archers. But it seems that we could overcome the former fear by a simple act of will.
I’m considering doing that. The way my hosting provider works and the way WordPress works, it’s easier to send out email notifications and to tweet out my material on substack than it is on the blog. And I find it more work to maintain both the blog and the substack series.
If I do move to substack, I will stop the once-a-day posting habit and instead go with consolidated posts, probably a couple of days a week. My sense is that this would fit in more with the substack culture than small daily blog posts. Although I won’t adopt all forms of substack culture. I won’t turn into a frequent user of the exclamation point!
I will try to foster a good commenting environment on my substack pieces. I will keep the writing free and only charge for the in-person seminar (or whatever follows that in terms of in-person).
Reactions welcome.
Michael Bang Petersen and Alexander Bor write,
our study, however, suggest that it’s not the Internet that transforms otherwise nice people into angry trolls. People who are jerks online are jerks offline, too. We do find that the kind of people who are obsessed with politics are often frustrated, angry and offensive. But they tend to rant about politics in offline interactions as well.
Who are these people? We find that the biggest factor associated with political hostility — online and offline — is status-seeking. Some people crave higher social status and try to intimidate others into recognizing them.
Are these people angry because of what society has done to them, or because they are just intrinsically angry? The authors seem to lean toward the former explanation, but I lean toward the latter.
Today, I would argue, there is an immense and growing popular thirst for a return to and reconnection with reality. And our leaders and would-be leaders should recognize this and understand that it is (I am convinced) an immense latent political force, of which we have only seen the first stirrings.
He links to Mary Harrington, who writes,
And even as tech and media elites sing the praises of luxury Gnosticism for the rest of us, they’re reserving unconstrained, in-person human interaction as a privilege for themselves.
They describe gnosticism as a movement to escape the physical world and live in an alternate reality. Metaverse, anyone? With Bitcoin as currency?
The post is here. I express my (possibly unfounded) worries about polygenic scores for outcomes like educational attainment.
I can’t help thinking that the “genes” for educational attainment, after you control for the genes for intelligence, might not be causal factors. I worry about culture as a confounding factor. For example, suppose that Asian parents successfully encourage their children to do well in school, and this accounts for all of the educational attainment of Asians over and above what you would expect based on their intelligence. Then you would find that genes that are associated with Asian-ness help to “explain” school attainment, even though the causal factor is actually cultural. (Note that if you are one of those people who insists that IQ itself is culturally determined, then this would lead you to question the interpretation of polygenic scores for IQ. I myself am willing to believe that psychometricians have figured out a way to measure IQ so that it picks up genetic causes rather than cultural causes. But I really don’t believe that one can do that with educational attainment or with income.)
The post is here. Among other items, it mentions an essay by Richard Hanania.
Richard Hanania argues that the left is ideological while conservatives are tribal. Thus, when Democrats are in power they enact their agenda, while Republicans, whether in power or not, merely emit war whoops.
…Hanania’s thesis came up during the first meeting of our seminar, when we talked about contemporary political engagement. I plan to include my notes from the seminar in a separate essay.
My review of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century is here. Again, I conclude on a quibbling note.
In short, almost every reference to “market” is pejorative. But one could easily argue that the market is an expensive, long-lasting trait and thus should be presumed to be adaptive. Unfortunately, WH seem to see no reason to investigate what positive functions it serves and what trade-offs might exist in attempting to do away with it or regulate it.
In general, although I found the sermons in WH interesting and worthwhile, I felt that the book suffered from a framework in which the individual engages in a lonely battle with the natural and social environment.
I review The Money Illusion. I conclude on a skeptical note:
Would an NGDP futures market provide a reliable guide for discretionary monetary policy? That seems like an empirical question. But my guess is that if NGDP can be accurately forecast by speculators, then the market NGDP forecast can already be extracted from the above-mentioned indicators.
An assertion that you made a better forecast of NGDP than the Fed did in 2007, even if that assertion is true, does not prove your case. If I were a market monetarist, articulating an NGDP forecasting algorithm derived from market indicators, and demonstrating its reliability through a variety of historical episodes, would be high on my research agenda.