BRIEFLY NOTED: 2023-06-25 Su
Taking offense inappropriately in academia; Palmer Luckey on Apple Vision Pro; Allegory of Good Government; & Gurri, Zadeh, Yglesias, & Chen on "equity", charisma, "overcrowding", & upward mobility...
MUST-READ: Hermaneutics of Suspicion at Work in Academia:
I would point out that these student-affairs professionals are, by and large, not nearly as precarious as contingent faculty. They are, rather, people of moderately low academic status who see themselves as advocates for students who are in so many ways being ground fine between the millstones of the soulless multiversity. They perceive their mission, I think, as helping students successfully navigate through a bureaucratic obstacle course without being harmed—rather than help students learn:
Tim Burke: Academia: Harm, Unquestioned: ‘[A] student complaining that they felt insulted by a faculty member who had previously embraced their ambitions to break into film and TV production saying “Well, get used to waiting tables”. That student desperately needed someone to tell them, “This is the conventional wisdom about what a person trying to make a go of it in theater, TV or film ends up doing while waiting for the big opportunity, there’s no discriminatory malice here.”... Sometimes people… interpret… as a deliberately harmful communication… [what is] a measure of who is inside a large space of common meaning…. I don’t know that many devout Muslims between 18-22 know that Muslim artists who were regarded as devout made images of Muhammed… but if they’re in college they should be prepared to come to know that…. Two classes of precarious professionals—student affairs professionals and contingent faculty…. I honestly think that thirty years ago they would have stood together, aligned behind the same instructional project. I don’t fault people in precarious positions trying to get the other person in trouble first, but I do fault the institutions for letting that go on at all. (It starts when the leadership stops having anyone’s back—or having any commitment to a deeper mission)…
ONE AUDIO: Oculus Founder On Apple Vision Pro w/ Palmer Luckey:
<https://overcast.fm/+8sorp-9Mk>
ONE IMAGE: Allegory of Good Government:
Very Briefly Noted:
Natalie Wong & al.: The World’s Empty Office Buildings Have Become a Debt Time Bomb: ‘From San Francisco to Hong Kong, higher interest rates and falling property values are bringing the commercial real estate market to a perilous precipice…
Adam Posen: It is time for the UK to think like an emerging market: ‘For the situation to improve, policymakers must act as if they are under a stabilisation programme…. A multiyear plan, the redistribution of economic burdens and a decrease in inflation. Some false debates should be put aside. Brexit did not cause all of the UK’s economic problems, but it made almost all of them worse…
Anton Hoews: Freight Expectations: ‘In 1600, England and Wales had only about 950 miles of river that were navigable by boat…. The overwhelming use of this infrastructure, instead, was to do with transporting goods and energy — especially grain, for muscle energy, and coal…
Rob Lee: ‘I wouldn't call this a coup because the purpose was not to replace Putin. It was an attempt to prevent Wagner from being subordinated to the MoD and Prigozhin from losing his position of power. It was a means of forcing Putin to cave on this issue and to get his attention…
Noah Smith: Why it's so hard to fix the information ecosystem: ‘Misinformation is a job; correcting misinformation is a hobby…
Simon Owens: The valley of churn: ‘The biggest weakness of Substack is… once a newsletter reaches a certain size… move off… to avoid the 10% fee. With Wordpress, users will simply be able to upgrade...
Scott Cunningham: Which one are the compliers?: ‘Instrumental variables when cast in potential outcomes and allowing for heterogenous treatment effects… identifies… the LATE… the average treatment effect for a mostly invisible and unknown subpopulation called “compliers”. And who are they? Well that’s interesting…. Compliers are endogenous to an instrument, in other words. Choose a different instrument, you get a different group of compliers, you get a different LATE…
Doug Jones: Blood and brains: ‘Two grades of brain evolution… Early hominins and modern apes… a gradual increase over millions of years…. And then there is a big leap up to a higher grade with early Homo erectus, and a rapid increase after that… either… improvements in food supply making brains more affordable… [or] a greater fitness payoff to a high energy brain—or both…
Edward Luce: Trump would burn America before facing justice: ‘The question is whether US voters will be vigilant enough to stop him…
Nilay Patel: I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever: ‘Apple’s new don’t-call-it-a-VR-headset is the best riff on some very familiar ideas, but still searching for a purpose…
¶s:
I would say that “equity” means much more that we should very carefully scrutinize patterns of outcomes that seem grossly inconsistent with any reasonable approximation of what we would expect if there truly were equal opportunity—and think very hard about the processes that produce such patterns of outcomes:
Martin Gurri: How the identity cult captured America: ‘Equity was born in an ideological graveyard…. Identity is the ruling orthodoxy of the day. Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, but it is less an ideology than a cockpit of grinding, wounding grievances contradicting one another: a perpetual conflict machine. Any piece of it, such as racial justice, can make perfect sense, but the whole dissolves into incoherence when it becomes clear that the highest ideal, equity, is a weasel word used to mask an inability to reconcile opposites…. Equity, in practice, means absolute equality of outcomes in all transactions, measured not in the liberal tradition, between individuals, but harking back to a more primitive outlook: between castes to which we have been assigned by birth and fate.…. Dead options and failed ideologies twitch, moan and clutch at us zombie-like, stopping us in our tracks. We haven’t broken free from the past: just the opposite, we are overwhelmed by memory, so that our best thoughts have been thought before, and thought more brilliantly, and tested and exposed in their inadequacies. We seem to lie at the bottom of a century-deep well crushed by the weight and inertia of dead time, where we can accuse one another of being Nazis or fascists or communists, revolution lingers with its impossible promises, Ronald Reagan smiles over America, Jim Crow persecutes forever, and the Beatles perpetually top the charts. We aren’t empty but overfull. The Tower of Babel isn’t a silence but an unbearable noise…
Dominance, prestige, and… “charisma”???? as modes of hierarchical human organization? What is this “charisma” anyway?:
Joe Zadeh: The Secret History and Strange Future of Charisma: ‘Stefan George…. Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology, met Stefan George in 1910 and immediately became curious. He didn’t buy George’s message—he felt he served “other gods”—but was fascinated by the bizarre hold he seemed to have over his followers…. The George Circle…. Their not-so-secret intention was to sculpt the future by peddling a revision of Germany’s history as one in which salvation and meaning were delivered to the people by the actions of heroic individuals…. Walter Benjamin, now a critic of George, had fled to the Spanish island of Ibiza, from where he wrote in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem: “If ever God has punished a prophet by fulfilling his prophecy, then that is the case with George”…
Somebody’s book “One Billion Americans” did not get nearly the attention it deserved:
Matthew Yglesias: I'm skeptical that powerful AI will solve major human problems: ‘It’s pretty easy to see why Los Angeles has spawned the most vicious NIMBYism in California state and local government—the traffic jam situation is really dire. The most prominent criticism that “One Billion Americans” received was Bill Maher saying my ideas would make traffic jams worse, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s based in Los Angeles…. Why can’t patriotic centrists get behind an agenda of expanded national immigration and economic growth? Traffic jams….
The smart play would be to concentrate the upzoning around the area’s existing and planned Metro stations and in and near its many existing islands of locally walkable neighborhoods. The tax revenue spawned by more housebuilding would lay the groundwork for a more rapid buildout of Metro, and it’s entirely plausible that a YIMBYfied version of Los Angeles would have many fewer vehicle miles traveled per capita than the current version of the city. But in congestion terms, what matters is aggregate VMT, not VMT per capita, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Maher is right: many more people would mean more cars on the road and worse traffic jams.
The good news is that a well-understood solution exists in the form of congestion pricing: charging people for using the roads at crowded times reduces crowding…
Bittersweet regrets about upward mobility under the Imperial Tang:
Chen Zi’ang 陈子昂 ( 661-702): Farewell to my friends in the spring:
The bright lit candle is spitting out light green smoke
as I hold the golden wine cups to my farewell banquet.
I will depart my home leaving family and dear friends behind
soon to be on a long journey beyond the mountains and the rivers.
The banquet keeps going on until the bright moon is hanging behind the tall trees
and the Milky Way disappears in the dawn.
In the morning, I begin my long trip to Luoyang capital.
Who knows when we will ever meet again.
re: Noah Smith: "‘Misinformation is a job; correcting misinformation is a hobby…"
What about the paid "Trust and Safety" staff on social media? They can choke off disinformation reducing the need of the "hobbyist" to debunk mis/disinformation. While misinformation propagandists do have paid shills, there is an awful lot of unpaid misinformation by people with agendas, and just plain ignorance. [I accept that they may be parroting the output of paid misinformation providers.]
While AI/ML can never keep up with similarly AI produced misinformation, it certainly can reduce the cognitive load on the unpaid debunker. It would be really nice for a browser extension to flag misinformation whenever it is presented, providing a more truthful link with a text snippet to counter the flagged misinformation. It will require non-poisoned data, but that is the task of either governments or reliable corporations. While we can argue over the interpretation of facts, those facts should be unviolated and uncorrupted.
I agree with Gurri on identity. It is a a "perpetual conflict machine" Class, however is not a perpetual conflict machine. The media demonstrates that daily, and recently exemplified by the massive amount of attention paid to a few billionaires drowning on a submarine while daily not reporting on the deaths of despair witnessed as rural America or deaths of misery from our homeless population.
This media was able to unite Americans to fight wars in Vietnam and Iraq and fund a proxy war in Ukraine. But it can't seem to unite Americans over providing FREE health care to an aging and increasingly obese and unhealthy population.
I am reading Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnsons book Power and Progress where they look at why societies care about the plight of the lower classes or sometimes simply do not. Unlike "identity" class wont go away. Century to century, nation to nation, economic system to economic system it wont go away. Identity will die because as Gurri points out, it is pointless. Class is not pointless.