Daily Log Digest – Week 46, 2024
2024-11-17
Podcast Recap
- Live from Bali: How tourists, influencers, and nomads transform destinations (for good and for bad) – Rolf Potts - Nice interview with somebody who gives a sort of insider-outsider perspective on Bali from somebody who is an expat living in Bali, but being mindful of the overtourism and how it effects the local culture, society and ecology.
- Are run clubs like rehab for the chronically online? Daybreak joined one to find out - some great on the ground reporting about run clubs in Bengaluru. Ignore the part where some founder dude is spouting high falutin bullshit about "ChatGPT and Productivity" and "The Cultural Pendulum", rest all is good.
- Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory - Gwern is a writer I have enjoyed reading a lot. The podcast goes behind the scenes where Gwern gives an account of what got him into writing and researching. He also goes behind the scenes on his methodology and beliefs. Lots of good takeaways.
- Adam Tooze: Why Are Poor Americans Voting for the Party of the Rich? - From my initial impressions, this was some fresh analysis of the election from a materialist and class perspective. I plan to read the transcript and extract some quotes from it soon.
- Secrets of happiness: the happiness hacks backed up by science – podcast | Psychology | The Guardian - Debunks a bunch of claims about the things that make us happy, for which there is no real scientific evidence. It is careful to point out there may be many things that one can do increase happiness, and they might actually work, but the podcast is more interested in the scientific evidence currently available behind the claims.
- 'Say Nothing' is a valiant effort at adapting a complex history : Pop Culture Happy Hour : NPR - Started watching this show. This review is a bit mixed, but it just about recommends the show enough for me to persist watching this show. Let's see if I can actually finish.
2024-11-18
NYT Amplifier Playlist
The new NYT Amplifier playlist just landed and I have been listening to it: The Amplifier: 7 New Songs You Should Hear Now #music #playlist
Graucha Max by Darkside is one of my favs.
Walking in Japan
Walking Japan (again): From Fukuoka to Nagasaki #travel #japan
Yet another lovely read from Chris Arnade. Yet another antidote to the Japan slop hitting my timeline from folks visiting there from India, and just marking off places they found in a tourist guide.
Work as the central point of your life can sound empty and meaningless and not something you think I would admire given that I write about needing something spiritual that isn’t confined to this world, but also tries to make sense of what comes after death. Yet when you are a stakeholder in your job, that is when you are your own boss, which is one of the defining differences between craftsmanship and simple labor, then there can be a spiritual component, which while not as deep and complex as faith, can give someone a clear sense of purpose that extends beyond this life.
In Japan, partly due to permissive zoning laws, but also because of historical precedent, there are independently owned and run restaurants almost everywhere, although they tend to cluster next to train stations, which are also almost everywhere. These small businesses are the economic and meaning-making engine for almost everyone who works in them, which is often both parents, and a few of their children. That sense of ownership, coupled with a culture of thoughtfulness, means the food in them is almost always amazing, no matter the location.
Sex Strikes
Are sex strikes really the best response to the behaviours of men? | Dazed
Pretesting
The ‘secret strategy’ that could boost your ability to learn | Psyche Ideas #learning #hacks
Imagine you are planning to learn about the solar system but, before you start, your teacher gives you a multiple-choice quiz on the topic. You haven’t learned a single fact about the solar system yet, so the questions, such as ‘Which of our dwarf planets is not a plutoid?’ or ‘Which planet is the least dense in the solar system?’, leave you staring blankly. Naturally, you are bound to make mistakes. You might understandably feel that this guessing in the dark is a complete waste of time. In fact, it’s not – a growing body of research shows this early test can significantly enhance your later learning.
Researchers believe pretesting is beneficial because it improves the way that we process the to-be-learned material…
…
Increased attention to the to-be-learned material could be another factor. Pan and his colleagues have observed reduced mind-wandering after pretesting, and other researchers have shown that participants’ eyes focus more on sentences related to the questions they received in advance. Other potential mechanisms include an improved motivation to learn and that pretesting acts as a metacognitive ‘reality check’, highlighting what you do and do not know and encouraging you to fill in knowledge gaps.
Whatever the mechanism is, when you later need that information, you’re more likely to recall it after a pretest than if you had simply read it.
Mental Health Diagnosis
What a psychiatric diagnosis means – and what it doesn’t mean | Psyche Ideas #mentalhealth
A diagnosis is a prototype
In the official diagnostic manuals, categories such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or generalised anxiety disorder come with stringent criteria for applying the diagnosis. The view taken by clinicians is usually not so rigid. Instead, these categories are often understood as prototypical: they are based on the typical or illustrative example of a mental health problem from which real-world presentations will often deviate. From this perspective, a diagnosis is a ‘best fit’ match between someone’s experiences and a prototype, which represents the most specific or notable features of a condition.
Self Care and the Beauty Industry
Jessica DeFino is back again to eviscerate the beauty industry and their shenanigans: Post-Election, Beware 'Self-Care'
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” Audre Lorde wrote in her 1988 essay collection, A Burst of Light. “It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
If the activist were alive today, she would hardly recognize the concept of self-care, and we would hardly recognize her.
Consider: Her forehead would be wrinkle-free — a placid, paralytic approximation of youth — courtesy of Botox. Her frown lines would be filled with a smidge of injectable Juvéderm, and her eyes would appear wide and awake; perhaps from a blepharoplasty, perhaps from a syringe of filler to the tear troughs.
This time specifically, she is writing about the origins of the phenomena when "skin-care" got substituted by "self-care".
I can’t say what Lorde would make of the surface-level “self-care” the beauty and wellness industries promote today, since it only rose to popularity in 2016. Following the (first) election of U.S. President Donald Trump, activists circulated the above quote from Lorde to emphasize the importance of tending to one’s needs in times of political upheaval. Cosmetic companies slyly swapped the word “self” for “skin”. Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant collagen levels when she preached about preservation! — because people were tired, and applying eye cream is easier than engaging in political action.
Over the next year, skincare became the fastest growing market in beauty, amassing $5.6 billion in sales and totaling 45% of the industry’s growth. And over the next eight years, every failure of care by the government created another opportunity for Big Beauty to expand the reach of its narrowing standards, all under the banner of wellness.
Bihar's Daughters are Coding
Alice Evans looks at “the Honour-Income Trade-Off” in Bihar where girls are enrolling into programming schools and then going on to get coding jobs: Bollywood, Are You Watching? Bihar's Daughters Are Coding
2024-11-19
What are children for
Links in Progress: What are children for? - by Boom
In this one, Boom’s Phoebe Arslanagić-Little reviews the most important things happening in the world of pronatalism and family policy in the last month.
Conservative News Influencers
The majority of news influencers are conservative men, study finds
This morning, The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization, published a deep 122 page report that found that the news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative, creating a concerning imbalance in our online news landscape that could ultimately have profound political consequences.
…
In a media environment where about 4 in 10 adults under 30 regularly get news from news content creators, this imbalance isn’t just inequitable—it’s a systemic distortion of public discourse that ultimately undermines democratic values, entrenches conservative messaging, and accelerates polarization. I've written before about how desperately the left needs to build an infrastructure to amass online influence, these stats highlight just how urgent that mission is.
and a surprising tidbit about how TikTok is actually an exception in some ways
Politically, TikTok also bucks the trend: it’s the only platform where right-leaning news influencers (25%) do not outnumber left-leaning ones (28%). TikTok also has a higher concentration of news content creators who identify as LGBTQ+ or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights (13%), which is more than double the proportion on other platforms.
As I've written previously, TikTok remains a hub for progressive activism online. But unfortunately, this has made the app the target of right wing ire and directly fed efforts to shut it down.
Postgres Tips
What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres | ChallahScript #databases #tools
Great list of easy to understand tips for when I get around seriously using the Postgres database, hopefully in the not so distant future.
Don't Deceive Yourself
don't deceive yourself - by Celine Nguyen - personal canon
Started following Celine Nguyen on Substack only recently. Her essays contain detailed analysis and lovely references.
What disturbs me, what keeps me up at night, is how I lie to myself. “Self-deception,” Joan Didion wrote in 1961, “remains the most difficult deception”:
The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer…one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.
But how do you resist this kind of danger, when—by definition—the deceived self can’t even identify the lie? I’m trying to teach myself how to see what I don’t know about myself; to find the failures that my ego tries to ignore.
…
I used to be jealous of the people who seemed to just write more, do more, make more work than me! But lately I’ve realized that, while some are lucky to have an easier life (the prototypical trust fund kids, for example)…many of those people, in Didion’s words, knew the price of things. They wanted to make certain projects happen, and embraced the consequences.
The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires
The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires - by Brett Scott #money #anthropology
This is a powerful counter-narrative to the prevailing gospel which worships billionaires and their achievements. I will quote the intro in full, but the whole article is worth reading.
In recent years there’s been a strong outbreak of the Great Man Theory of History. This is the idea that single powerful or inspired men - literally men - create history and should be adored, or, on the flip side, reviled. Trump is obviously one of these people, but so too is Musk, Bezos, Putin, and so on. Regardless of whether they’re imagined as superheroes or supervillains, it’s assumed that the future somehow springs fully-formed out of them.
When you imagine that the course of history uniquely resides in single individuals like this, you also imagine that slight shifts in their decisions affect everything for the rest of time. They’re like the star characters in a great global soap opera, but one in which nobody else has any role but to watch them, and either praise or condemn their actions.
This same style of thinking is often applied to their wealth. The Great Man Theory of Wealth assumes that extreme riches are the result of inspired work that the person undertakes. If Bezos had not got up one morning in 1994 and had an idea for Amazon.com, we’d never have a global e-commerce platform. I mean, there are only 8.2 billion of us on the planet. Surely, the chances of a second person working out that you could match buyers and sellers on the Internet is incredibly small!
It’s always imagined that the Great Man builds something. He built a nation. He built a company. This isn’t the full reality. Here’s what actually happens: other people mostly build the thing, and the role of the Great Man is simply to be the focal point around which it’s built. To understand this, let’s turn to the parable of the Stone Soup.
He further goes on to break down and rebut several arguments that support the idea that somehow these billionaires deserve the wealth that they have acquired.
Professional Managerial Class
A two-part exploration of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) on Bill Mitchell's blog triggered memories of my own path down exploring this phenomenon a couple of years ago.
- The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class – Part 1 – William Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory
- The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class – Part 2 – William Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory
The work of author – Barbara Ehrenreich and her then husband – John Ehrenreich – in the 1970s, first introduced the term – Professional–managerial class.
The PMC according the Ehrenreichs were a “social class within capitalism that by controlling production processes through occupying a superior management position, is neither proletarian nor bourgoeisie”.
The PMC was occupied by “scientists, lawyers, academics, artists, and journalists”.
While the Ehrenreichs focused on the mechanisms whereby this class, through their education and networks, advanced the interests of capital, Catherine Liu focused more on the disdain that the PMC have for the lower-paid occupations – the sense of superiority and virtue.
Time to dust off the paper copy of the book lying in my shelf and attempt to re-read it.
We Have Never Been Woke
Found references to this book in some of the PMC stuff I was reading because it articulates some similar ideas: We Have Never Been Woke | Princeton University Press
From a review in The Guardian:
“Woke” is not a particularly useful term, more often used in disparagement than in analysis. Al-Gharbi recognises this, disavowing it as a slur, refusing even to define it. What matters to him is how the concept is deployed in practice both by supporters and detractors.
The key to understanding wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.
This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.
A Materialist Analysis of US Election Results
Why Are Poor Americans Voting for the Party of the Rich? | Ones and Tooze Podcast #materialism
Adam Tooze gave, from all that I have read, a really fresh analysis of the US election results from a materialist theory perspective. It's a long quote I picked out from the full transcript, but it's really worth reading. I really like the middle school analogy at the end between Kamala as a "spelling-bee girl" and Trump as a "high-living frat boy", both throwing a party and where the "academically unambitious high-school girls" (an analogy for white non-college educated women) would go.
The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as an analytical category that I covered in the sections above also make an appearance.
Yeah, this is a great question. And I mean, I think at the most general level, the issue with materialism and the critics of materialism—materialism being the big, grand, metaphysical, almost philosophical idea that it's what we eat that determines who we are more than what we think. It's realities, it's the means through which and the way in which we reproduce our lives that shapes identities and assumptions about the world, right? That basic premise.
The thing about it is that it's so often applied as a means of rather coarse—not to say crude—simplification. You know, this for workers, that for capitalists. And then, surprise, surprise, the world doesn't make that much sense if you're trying to apply that. And in this particular case, as you're saying, what are we to make of the fact that better-off people seem to be voting for redistribution? It's turkeys voting for Thanksgiving, you might say. Conversely, you have working-class voters voting for a business party that's promising to produce huge tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.
To my mind, the thing here is that materialism is misunderstood. And if you take it seriously, it's the precise opposite of simplification. It requires an almost infinitely painstaking attention to detail. It's, you know, almost like a novelist's attention to detail. And in this particular case, I think we need to just start by recognizing that the very minimum class schema we need to understand American politics right now is a three-class rather than a two-class model.
I mean, like, one element is an idea of the working class. Let's define that in terms of dependent employment—being working for somebody else, relatively low incomes (so, by all means, earning less than the average, so $50,000 or less), and a lack of control at work that goes hand in hand with relatively less credentials, less education.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are what you might call the rich people, the upper class, who have not just higher incomes but wealth and power and the security that goes with that. In the Marxist sense, they may actually literally control the means of production—a big hotel, a factory, a business, or whatever.
But you can't understand the politics of the US right now unless you've acknowledged that there's a third social class. Let's call it the professional-managerial class, who are credentialed by the education system, occupy positions of authority within the economy and society at large, and they exercise control directly, often over working-class Americans. And that starts literally at the beginning in kindergarten or elementary school, where you have a college-educated person taking charge of your kid and their kid's education, or taking charge of you yourself and subjecting you to education.
And it goes all the way through to the hospitals where your kids are born and your parents die, and the folks that regulate what you can build in your front yard and everything else, right? The entire apparatus of managerialism. And you can see where I'm going with this. Once you've got that three-part schema in place, which is thoroughly materialistic, you can, I think, easily understand the dynamics which are in play here.
The stereotypical working-class Trump voter admires the man himself, right? He admires—or she admires—the billionaire businessperson and his cronies. They've done well, and they exercise the privileges of having done well because they're allowed to speak their mind and do their own thing. And above all, what they're allowed to do is flaunt and show disrespect and scorn for the values of the professional middle class, which the rich folks can afford to just spit on, and working-class people have to suffer, right?
Trump and co. can say out loud what many ordinary Americans think, which is that they simply can't get with the highfalutin ideas of everyone from the schoolteacher to the librarian, all the way up to the fancy Ivy League professor and the folks on television who want to talk about complex norms of transgender identities or structural racism or climate change—these big abstractions, difficult concepts. And yet, what the working-class observer will point out is that it's not actually those people, in the final analysis, who call the shots. The people who do are the people like Trump. And those are the people that you kind of admire. And if somebody like that is willing to just shoot their mouth and speak their mind and say whatever they like, and it turns out to be a relatively conservative message, then this plays extremely well with that working-class constituency.
And this is not anti-materialist or a refusal of materialism. It's a very specific set of resentments, deeply embedded in the existence of many working-class Americans every day of the week. And as you start from there, what is difficult to understand about the fact that working-class men are not keen to vote for fancy, high-powered lawyer ladies as candidates of the Democratic Party? There's just nothing to my mind that strikes me as surprising about this at all, right?
And the appeal—or rather the distaste—is compounded by the fact that that fancy lawyer lady is treating Trump as though he's a buffoon. And one of her most successful punchlines in the campaign to the New York Times-reading class is, "I'm speaking now," right? Which is this sort of maternal assertion of power towards whoever it is who's supposed to shut up at that point. In this case, it was a heckler, but it expresses something that working-class Americans will find easy to relate to in a negative way.
I mean, is it really surprising that white women without college degrees preferred Trump over Hillary and then Harris by a margin of 25 to 28%? I struggle to understand why anyone finds this surprising. Like, you know, imagine a middle school class, and imagine there's two people throwing a party, and one of them is like the state champion spelling bee girl, and the other one is a high-living frat boy who appears to know how to have a good time. Where would you expect the less academically ambitious girls in the class— which side, which party do you expect them to go to, right?
So the very fact that American liberals find this so hard to digest to the point at which they begin to question their own metaphysical assumptions, you know, to my mind, is an expression of the extraordinary material—profoundly material—divides there are in US society that literally render the behavior of one group almost incomprehensible to the people who supposedly understand everything, right? The liberal educated group.
And one of the reasons why we can't see this incredibly obvious, incredibly powerful three-way split is that it's very badly captured by the statistics that we have to rely on. It's really appalling how inadequate the sociological data are on American elections. Basically, what do we have to do? We have to rely on two categories to do almost all the work. One is college versus non-college, and the other one is $50k, $50k to $100k, $100k plus.
As though these were adequate categories for describing the complex reality of American society. I mean, it's telling that even if you just combine those two elements, you end up with something quite informative, which is that amongst men without college degrees, there is a huge propensity to vote Trump amongst those with over $100k in income. Because, you know, just imagine the novelistic character here: this is the small business owner who didn't go to college and nevertheless has made good, and therefore knows very well that folks like Harris or Clinton are just a huge pain-in-the-ass lawyer lady that they want to have absolutely nothing to do with, right?
And so there's this scornful rejection of those values, firmly rooted in materialism, translated into a cultural politics of mutual scorn and contempt, you know, which have very, very deep roots in American society in this current moment. So I think materialism is all the way. It gives us all the juice that we need, but we need a more refined, complex, richer understanding of these social, economic, and cultural hierarchies.
2024-11-20
A bizarre love triangle playlist
Latest NYT Amplifier playlist just dropped: The Amplifier: A Bizarre Love Triangle Playlist #music #playlist
Jolene from Beyonce is one of my all-time fav, and I had already heard the song before. Apart from that my fav on that list was Taste by Sabrina Carpenter, followed by Wildflower by Billie Eilish.
Frames
frames - by Ava - bookbear express
The “frame” of particular friendship might be something like: we text each other fairly regularly, we get dinner at restaurants or we go on walks, we split the bill, we talk about feelings, we do not have physical contact with each outside of hugs. And obviously with a category as ill-defined as friendship frames can vary hugely between people, but I think that’s a pretty standard one that holds true for a lot of male-female friendships. Basically, we have a contract for how we behave with each other, and we both honor it unless/until it needs to be renegotiated. The failure case, of course, is that you simply can’t be friends with someone who isn’t interested in maintaining the frame. One particular behavior that really annoys me (a “red flag,” as they call it) is when someone verbally says one thing and then acts in a very different way. Like, they say, Let’s be friends, I understand you’re not looking to date anyone, and then they take you to a very romantic restaurant and pay for dinner. And then suggest sitting on a park bench and try to place a hand on your thigh. It’s like—hey, I can’t maintain this frame all by myself.
I generally see “relationship types” as frames. Friendship is a frame, boyfriend/girlfriend is a frame, marriage is a frame: a set of agreements between two people on how they act towards each other. Of course there are people who are anti-frame (I believe this is called relationship anarchy). I think it’s generally really difficult to forgo social frames because most people expect and need consistency. For instance, it would probably really upset most people if a close friend talked to you really intensely every day for two months and then suddenly switched to talking to you once a month without warning. Frames are functionally how you’ve agreed (either with yourself or with another person) to operate in society.
2024-11-21
Landman
Watched the first two shows of Landman: Landman (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb
It was pretty decent. Punchy one-liners, excellent visuals of the arid Texan landscape and a subject matter (the oil business) that I wasn't too familiar with before watching the show.
2024-11-22
The Cult of Jordan Peterson
The cult of Jordan Peterson | The Economist
This is a good bio of the man, with some funny one-liners.
Sex Lives of College Girls
The Sex Lives of College Girls (TV Series 2021– ) - IMDb #tv
S3 has landed and it is pretty much the same as the last two seasons in its occasionally crude humor and fast-paced dialogue. I can't say it's the best thing in TV right now, but I keep going back for some reason.
The Two Types of Human Laugh
The two types of human laugh | The Economist
The findings, published this week in Biology Letters, are more than light entertainment. They could, instead, point scientists towards the evolutionary roots of laughter. After all, many mammals including dogs, squirrel monkeys, Barbary macaques and chimpanzees produce vocalisations during play that sound remarkably like laughter. One of the first things that infants do early in life is laugh. Even babies born deaf spontaneously produce laughter. Humans are not the only animals that tickle either. Macaques and chimpanzees both engage in the activity too.
All this suggests that laughter from tickling evolved over 10m years ago with the common ancestor that humans shared with these other primates. Dr Kamiloglu suspects that this early sort of laughter probably evolved to help primates build friendly relations, especially during play. With this in mind, she is now keen to study how infectious different sorts of laughs are. If the tickling laugh is one that truly evolved to bring primates together, it ought to be particularly infectious—but nobody has yet tested if it is.
As for all the other forms of laughter that only people produce, these probably evolved millions of years after tickling came along, when the human brain became complex enough to understand irony, slapstick and puns. But he who laughs last, it would seem, laughs longest.
Neurodiversity
Somebody wrote in a nice response to the Economist article on ADHD in the Nov 2 2024 issue: Letters to the editor | Nov 23rd 2024 Edition.
Researching ADHD
I read your article on research that questions whether attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder should in fact be seen as a disorder (“Coming into focus”, November 2nd). The use of the term “neurodiversity” is misleading. An individual does not “have” a neurodiversity, any more than he or she can “have” any other kind of human diversity. Diversity in, say, the ability to control one’s attention or susceptibility to distraction is a description of a statistical fact, not a condition that one catches, inherits or develops. It arises from innate differences in the biology of individuals as well as the accuracy of measurements used to describe those differences.
We might add a third kind of diversity based purely on differences in social constructions about individuals made at different times or in different places by different families, communities, cultural groups, professional organisations and so forth. Divergent conclusions are often reached depending on who is observing one’s manifestations of self-control and attention.
2024-11-23
Birthday today 🎉, so was out all day.