BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-06-16 We
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember...
First:
I disagree with Tom Levenson here: (a) Amy Qin and Chu Bailiang are not good reporters. (b) The New York Times has not “fallen into a trap”. It is aggressively misinforming its readers in pursuit of clickbait.
Moral fault attaches to anyone who supports it:
Thomas Levenson: ’I may teach this New York Times article in my science journalism class next year as a model of how to do it wrong. Amy Qin and Chu Bailiang are expert and knowledgable China reporters. They seem in this piece out of their depth on the science. I don’t have time right now (deadlines of my own) to fisk the problems in this piece fully… so I’ll just point to two problems very quickly. They are clearly drawing on others’ work to describe each of the alleged scenarios for a lab escape origin for the COVID pandemic… Their account follows closely the arguments from Nicholas Wade, who lost his connection to New York Times Science because of his commitment to motivated reasoning on race and genetics….
In repeating very similar claims without scrutiny, the writers (and their editors) fall into one of the most annoying and damaging habits of herd journalism: amplifying a story because others are touting it, and not because they’ve subjected the details of the story itself to anything like rigorous tests. (An aside: Even though I think Wade & Baker made claims well beyond the evidence, they’ve suffered the same fate of a lot of freelancers: seeing what they’ve written taken up in the Gray Lady without any hint that someone got their first. It was ever thus.)
Back to the point (I do have one. Or two.) By accepting the lab-escape framework as the premise of their story, Amy Qin and Chu Bailiang have fallen into the same trap their politics desk colleagues did in, say, the Clinton emails story… taking the bait on a loud story that repeatedly holds up poorly as each aspect of it is examined carefully. Given the evidence that pushing the idea that China foisted this disaster on the world has clear political motives behind it and aims before it, some caution would be indicated. And yet, despite bitter experience (never fully acknowledged within the New York Times newsroom) here we are again….
When I show this piece to my students this fall, I’ll ask them to see who is quoted, & how support for the two options–lab escape or natural origin–are described. They’ll find that only lab-escape proponents are quoted (except for the Chinese scientist under indictment), and that in the abstract, the lab-escape partisans are treated as equivalent in expertise and especially number or weight to the those pursuing evidence of a zoonotic origin for the virus. Is that true? No, gentle reader. It is not…
LINK: <https://twitter.com/TomLevenson/status/1404834728793026563>
Plus: A Snippet from a Dialogue:
Joe Weisenthal: WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT INFLATION SO MUCH? For today’s Markets newsletter, I wrote about inflation, the Fed, and why Treasury yields have been going down lately, despite some high and hot CPI prints…
Max Kennerly: Kind of a good reminder why PCE is a better measurement. We don’t need to fiddle with inclusions and exclusions for spikes or drops in particular sectors, it does that automatically…
Brad DeLong: We shouldn’t be talking about inflation at all right now: we have much bigger fish to fry. We should be talking about how we get 10M more workers back to work in þe right jobs as fast as possible, accepting þt we are leaving rubber on þe road as we do so…
Larissa: Exactly. Especially since JPMorgan is using inflation panic as an excuse to hoard cash–even though inflationary fears should result in spending cash immediately because its buying power would diminish over time…·
Brad DeLong: We should be postponing worrying about inflation until 2023, when we will see where we are. Why? Because þe Fed has a straightforward way of reducing demand & cooling off inflation if it turns out þt demand is too high, but we have no good way of boosting demand if it turns out it is too low. Given þe enormous uncertainty, þe asymmetries þt emerge when you walk down þe strategy tree dominate. Until þose uncertainties resolve, no reasonable case for tightening immediately can be made.
LINK: <https://twitter.com/delong/status/1404848286171746308>
One Video:
Rene Ritchie: Apple VP Answers YOUR Watch & Health Questions!: ‘Apple’s Kevin Lynch, VP of Technology, and Deidre Caldbeck, Product Marketing, chat with us about their histories with Apple Watch and Health, new features like ID cards and keys, how they decide on new features, how they made Assistive Touch for Watch, bringing Mobility to iPhone, the visual representation and security of Health information, security vs sharing, and the future of Apple Health!… LINK: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEi0wlWYW_M>:
Very Briefly Noted:
John F. Kennedy (1960): “The New Frontier”: Liberal Party Nomination Acceptance Speech <https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/liberal-party-nomination-nyc-19600914>
William H. Kilpatrick & al. (1933): The Educational Frontier <https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/705648?journalCode=schools>
Perry Miller (1956): Errand into the Wilderness<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Errand_Into_the_Wilderness/oKfCbW3B1xkC>
Mancur Olson (1982): The Rise & Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, & Social Rigidities <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rise_and_Decline_of_Nations/vKxxtjJz--wC>
Rick Perlstein (2001): Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater & the Unmaking of the American Consensus<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Before_the_Storm/6jb9AgAAQBAJ>
Rick Perlstein (2008): Nixonland: The Rise of a President & the Fracturing of America<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Nixonland/dM_enWzoghoC>
Noah Smith: America's Scarcity Mindset: Is Our Society Turning into a Zero-Sum Competition for Survival?<https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-scarcity-mindset>
Lester Thurow (1980): The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution & the Possibilities for Change<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Zero_Sum_Society/V5uBbTOzYOAC>
Frederick Jackson Turner (1893): The Significance of the Frontier in American History <https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history-(1893)>
Robert Allen: Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Global-Economic-History-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B005JC0QNA/>
Manfred Steger & Ravi Roy: Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Neoliberalism-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions-dp-0198849672/>
Manfred Steger: Globalization: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Globalization-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B0851PBT5X/>
Mark Dodgson & David Gann: Innovation: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0198825048/>
Ian Goldin: Development: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Development-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B077TNZM12/>
Partha Dasgupta: Economics: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B000SEI7Q2/>
Milton Friedman & Rose Director Friedman: Free to Choose: A Personal Statement <https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Statement-Milton-Friedman-ebook/dp/B004MYFLBS/>
Robert Skidelsky: Keynes: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Keynes-Short-Introduction-Robert-Skidelsky/dp/0199591644/>
Gareth Dale: Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market <https://www.amazon.com/Karl-Polanyi-Limits-Gareth-Dale/dp/0745640729/>
James Fulcher: Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B00WHMUMLG/>
Sheri Berman: The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century<https://www.amazon.com/Primacy-Politics-Democracy-Europes-Twentieth-ebook/dp/B0014CBUPM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1623861165&sr=8-13>
Robert C. Allen: The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Industrial-Revolution-Short-Introduction-Introductions-ebook/dp/B06VWNMPN5/>
David Blockley: Engineering: A Very Short Introduction <https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Short-Introduction-David-Blockley/dp/0199578699/>
Barra: United States Equity Version 3 (E3) <http://www.alacra.com/alacra/help/barra_handbook_US.pdf>
Alex Williams: Center for Veb Account Research Newsletter <https://vebaccount.substack.com/people/3060068-alex>
A16Z: Future—Understand the Future, How Tech Shapes It, and How We Build It <https://future.a16z.com/?mkt_tok=MzgyLUpaQi03OTgAAAF9rvBEiElpyS02JPLfvLJBoJpdIaMJL3pfEk34MnCWQHXBwXqs71-5xhPsnP-bR0K2MwrC_wZj1n6-abRg_I5nqZG-5NCDgW3r4oPbS48>
Jason Forrest: Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations<https://medium.com/nightingale/exploring-the-craft-and-design-of-w-e-b-du-bois-data-visualizations-part-3-b110d034fd36>
Paragraphs:
As Perry Miller wrote, the New England Puritan settlement had two ideological modes: “God has saved us” and “God has guided us here to do his work”. Here we have my ancestor William Bradford very much pushing the first:
William Bradford: History of Plymouth Plantation (1647): ‘May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our fathers were English men which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this willdernes, but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice, and looked on their adversity, etc. Let them therefore praise the Lord, because he is good, and his mercies endure for ever. Yea, let them which have been redeemed of the Lord, show how he hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor. When they wandered in the deserte [and] willdernes out of the way, and found no citie to dwell in, both hungrie, and thirstie, their soul was overwhelmed in them. Let them confess before the Lord his loving kindnes, and his wonderfull works before the sons of men…
LINK: <http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/14-bra.html>
A nice leaning-in from the very sharp Jennifer Doleac:
Noah Smith: The Terrific Triviality of Twitter: ‘Twitter strikes fear into the heart of millions. But how much real power does it have?… Jennifer Doleac: "I have now been cancelled several times and if anything gained followers in the process—so for better or worse am not afraid to share my thoughts with y’all…
LINK: <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-terrific-triviality-of-twitter>
MOAR chemistry phase-change analogies, metaphors, and models for economics, please!
Anton Howes: Honours for Innovators: ‘As regular readers will know, my main thesis about the causes of Britain’s acceleration of innovation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that its inventors did so much to evangelise for innovation, to spread it further. Innovation is a mentality, of constantly perfecting and optimising everything and anything around us, and it spreads from person to person. But there was nothing special about Britain in having people with the improving mentality. There was no uniquely British disposition, or national culture of innovation, whatever that is (bizarrely, I’m occasionally cited as saying as much). Far from it. A disproportionate number of the inventors of the period were immigrants, and I think the improving mentality arrived from abroad anyway, in the mid-sixteenth century. What made Britain special was that the improving mentality became especially viral there. Inventors in Britain, initially by accident, and increasingly on purpose, were especially good at organising themselves into innovation-promoting societies, creating norms for the sharing of inventions, lobbying elites for funding, or to pass laws that favoured innovation, and finding ways to raise the social status of being an inventor. The cause of Britain’s acceleration of innovation was the success of its innovation evangelists — usually inventors themselves, with a fair few non-inventors cheering from the side-lines too…
LINK: <https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-honours-for-innovators>
Time to start heavily penalizing and surtaxing states that are NIMBYist, IMHO:
Will Wilkinson: NIMBYism & the Externalities of Non-Development: ’It’s conventional wisdom that land use regulation, like zoning, is a “local issue.” It isn’t, really…. Crazy regional variation in housing costs undermines the effectiveness of federal monetary and fiscal policy, compounding the massive macroeconomic cost of our systemic, zoning-driven misallocation of labor. Moreover, restrictive zoning in America’s superstar cities effectively subsidizes the growth of hotter, more sprawling (but less productive) runner-up cities, such as Phoenix and Austin, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and climate risk thanks to their heavy reliance on air conditioners and cars. All of which is to say, the fact that zoning’s locus of control tends to be local doesn’t mean that it’s a “local issue.” This is important to emphasize because the most promising path to the amelioration of our deepening housing affordability crisis involves a rebalancing of authority over land use regulation in the direction of state and even federal government…
LINK: <https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/nimbyism-and-the-externalities-of>
Very funny. & very true:
Ed Zitron: The Remote Debate Shows The Brittle State of Modern Management: ’A fairly large cadre of people that take deep, painful offense at the suggestion that middle management isn’t necessary…. The problem is that (as I previously reflected upon) modern corporations have tied management to career progression without judging leaders based on the success of their team. In a functional management system, if a team is failing the manager is the one whose ass is on the line… There are many managers who can’t manage, and there are many jobs that don’t require managers at all…. The irony of many executives banging on about how we “must return to the office” is that they’re definitely people who’ve talked about how you need to be a “self-starter.”… The reason that shitty managers are so common is that they… do not have enough shit to do—management that actually needs to exist generally has enough on their plate that they can’t micro-manage, and indeed won’t do so because they trust the people they’re managing. And when there’s a mistake? They own that mistake, as the buck stops with them…. Workplace culture has grown into a monster that creates servitude over loyalty, and that’s why so many companies are terrified to let people stay remote…
LINK: <https://ez.substack.com/p/the-remote-debate-shows-the-brittle>
Ah. So that is where this comes from. But when and how does “Before Time” shift to “Before Times”?:
Ben Zimmer: ‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life: ‘We likely owe the “Before Time” label to an episode of the original “Star Trek” series broadcast in 1966, in which the crew of the Enterprise encounter a planet populated by children who survived a man-made plague. A young girl name Miri (whose name also serves as the title of the episode) explains how the planet’s grown-ups, known as “Grups,” disappeared: “That was when they started to get sick in the Before Time. We hid, then they were gone.” In 2000, an episode of “South Park” parodying “Star Trek” repopularized the expression, with lines like, “That was in the Before Time, in the Long Long Ago.”… The… trope makes it feel like we’re living through our own post-apocalyptic science-fiction plotline…
I hope I have time to make one of these this summer for my fall course:
Chris Holdgraf: Announcing the New Jupyter Book: ‘Jupyter Book is an open source project for building beautiful, publication-quality books, websites, and documents from source material that contains computational content. With this post, we’re happy to announce that Jupyter Book has been re-written from the ground up, making it easier to install, faster to use, and able to create more complex publishing content in your books. It is now supported by the Executable Book Project, an open community that builds open source tools for interactive and executable documents in the Jupyter ecosystem and beyond…
LINK: <https://blog.jupyter.org/announcing-the-new-jupyter-book-cbf7aa8bc72e>
(Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here:
There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)
It certainly seems inescapable that local zoning laws which are for the purpose of NIMBYism have regressive, racist and environmentally disastrous consequences. But how do we keep from throwing out the baby with the bathwater? We need isolation of industrial hazards, walkable neighborhoods, SOME caps on density relative to available resources, and the like.
Re: Ed Zitron: The Remote Debate Shows The Brittle State of Modern Management
Spot on. You can see it in the panic in managers when staff wants to stay working remotely. Their sociopathic power-tripping is stymied. What are they to do now?
There was a brief period in the 1980s when hands-off managing was in vogue with Blanchard's "One-Minute Manager". This approach would have been ideal in remote work environments. But by the early 1990s, we had a slew of biz books about sociopathic management techniques that were more about wielding sticks than carrots. Coupled with corporate politicking and brown-nosing and almost corrupting fads like performance reviews of managers and the idea of actual managing went out the window. IMO, the accounting mentality resulted in staff cutting to boost profits rather than increasing performance, reinforcing the trend. The managers seemed better suited to being slave drivers on plantations than facilitating the performance of human resources.