BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-12 Tu
A read-around...
Very Briefly Noted:
Sandbox VR: Star Trek: Discovery Away Mission <https://sandboxvr.com/sanfrancisco/experience/startrek>
Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents Of Marxism <https://archive.org/details/MainCurrentsOfMarxismVol1TheFounders> <https://archive.org/details/maincurrentsofma00lesz> <https://archive.org/details/maincurrentsofma00kola>
Leon Trotsky (1932): Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg! <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/06/luxemberg.htm>
Joseph N. Walker: The Jolly Swagman Podcast <https://josephnoelwalker.com/>
Matt Levine: The Price of Not Buying Twitter: ‘At Musk’s $54.20 deal price, Twitter is worth about $44 billion; at $25 it would be worth about $20 billion. The difference is $24 billion, or $29.20 per share. Musk is paying $24 billion over Twitter’s stand-alone value. Or he isn’t… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-11/the-price-of-not-buying-twitter#xj4y7vzkg>
Johan Fourie: Home <https://www.johanfourie.com/>
Johan Fourie: Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom <https://www.johanfourie.com/ourlongwalk/>
Wayne Ma: Inside Apple’s Eight-Year Struggle to Build a Self-Driving Car: ‘A mistake… engineers waste precious time choreographing demonstrations along specific routes using technology that works there but almost nowhere else, a phenomenon known as demoware… <https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-apples-eight-year-struggle-to-build-a-self-driving-car?rc=b4kz7m>
Mark Leibovich: The Most Pathetic Men in America: ‘Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and so many other cowards in Congress are still doing Trump’s bidding…. Donald Trump… would swan in for dinner at the Trump International Hotel…. The guests who stood out for me most were Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy and the busybody senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham… <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/kevin-mccarthy-lindsey-graham-trump-devotion-2024-election/661508/>
Twitter & ‘Stack”
Guido Matias Cortes, Nir Jaimovich, & Henry E. Siu: The “End Of Men” & Rise of Women in the High-Skilled Labor Market: ‘Since 1980, conditional on being a college-educated man, the probability of working in a cognitive/high-wage occupation has fallen. This contrasts starkly with the experience for college-educated women…. This relative increase in the demand for female skills is due to an increasing importance of social skills within such occupations…
Aaron Rupar & Noah Berlatsky: Tyrants in Robes: ‘SCOTUS’s right-wing majority isn’t even bothering with trying to persuade you…
Alex Massie: Things Fall Apart: ‘Shed no tears for Boris Johnson and none for the Tory party either. They knew what they were doing and they did it anyway…
Claire Potter: The New Neo-Conservatives: ‘Weiss… uninterested in a Florida law… banning speech about race, gender, and sexuality in K–12 public schools and taxpayer-funded universities…. A movement that cares about free speech for me and not for thee is neither a free speech movement nor a campaign to promote truth…
Noah Smith: Why Sri Lanka Is Having an Economic Crisis: ‘But the most boneheaded, bizarre mistake that the Sri Lankan government made was a disastrous plan to shift the entire country to organic agriculture…. Production of tea… fell by 18% in a year. Production of rice… fell by even more…. The organic farming debacle was not the only trigger…
¶s:
Nullius in verba is a truly remarkable game changer. In nearly all human societies for nearly all of human history, “Look, Think, Test, Tell” is interrupted after the ”think“ part. First of all, the next stage is not ”test“ but, rather: ”Do the conclusions from thinking help reinforce the ability to do so of those who extract resources from the population as a hole so that they view can have enough?“ Second, ”test" is really hard to do right: the experimental method is time-consuming, when you can do it at all: the path of least resistance is to look for an authority who agrees with you, and then be satisfied. This is what modern science starting with the British Royal Society turns away from, and this is what makes it such an extraordinary success: Test everything. Believe nothing simply because someone earlier has written down the words without doing the experiments:
Chad Orzel: The Three Definitions of “Science”: ‘I) A process for generating reliable models of the world…. “Look, Think, Test, Tell”…. II) A body of verified knowledge about the world. One of the outcomes of the iterative process of Definition I is a collection… of models about the world that have been very thoroughly subjected to the scientific process…. Much of this knowledge is embodied in technology: we use our knowledge of orbital mechanics to launch satellites, our knowledge of light to make optical telecom networks, our knowledge of genetics to predict and treat diseases, etc. III) A collection of institutions and formal practices associated with the people who carry out the process of science…. Nearly all of the arguments about what “Science” is and isn’t involves blurring one or more of these together…. The iterative trial-and-error process of Definition I… is truly universal, practiced by basically every human culture at some level. At least for knowledge like “If you have these symptoms, you should eat these plants”…
LINK:
The reasons why the UK economy is stagnant seem to me to be relatively shallow. They seem to me to be: Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, May, and Johnson. You can throw in Corbyn if you like. Perhaps you can say that there is something structural about British politics that such horrible, cynical, destructive, and incompetent-at-policy leaders have commanded parliamentary majorities in the past fifteen years. But I tend to attribute the disaster to sheer contingency:
Martin Wolf: The UK Economy Is Stagnant—& the Reasons Run Deep: ‘Boris Johnson’s… has… been an immensely significant political leader, albeit a disastrous one. He has shifted the debate on core issues from solutions to symbols. This is true, above all, of Brexit, his enduring legacy…. [But] Brexit is not the most important challenge confronting British policymakers…. The 15 years between 2004 and 2019—pre-Covid and pre-Brexit—were the weakest for growth in gross domestic product per head since the years between 1919 and 1934…. The UK’s relative GDP per head has… fallen, from 92 per cent of German levels in 2007, to 87 per cent in 2015 and 82 per cent in 2021…. The big question in UK economic policy is how to end the stagnation. The answer will not be tax cuts…. Nor will it be deregulation…. It will depend on higher investment… bringing lagging firms and regions to the frontier… improvements in corporate governance and capital markets… exploiting the energy revolution, to accelerate growth and lower emissions. Candidates for the highest office must offer serious answers to these big challenges. And they must make those answers credible, despite the folly of Brexit. Will they do so? I doubt it…
LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/e48882ab-e519-4d20-a332-41ec2ecb0d51>
If you are interested in Malthusian economies, you should be interested in Lemin’s work:
Lemin Wu (2015): If Not Malthusian, Then Why?: ’The Malthusian mechanism cannot explain… pre-industrial stagnation…. Technological improvement in luxury production…, would have kept living standards growing. The Malthusian trap is essentially a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector… [probably] caused by group selection in the form of biased migration…. A tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong tendency of growth. The theory reexplains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient market economies such as Rome and Song. It also suggests a new set of triggering factors of modern economic growth…
LINK: <https://web.archive.org/web/20150908151328/http://behl.berkeley.edu/files/2015/02/WP2015-01_Wu.pdf>
Let me strongly second Cosma here:
Cosma Shalizi (2014): Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: ‘This is and deserves to be a modern classic…. Eisenstein’s fundamental point, which I think is entirely sound, is that you cannot understand anything about the transition from ancient or medieval intellectual life to the modern life of the mind without grasping the importance of being able to quickly, cheaply make large numbers of very accurate copies of a text, and distribute them widely…. The anthropologist Dan Sperber once wrote that “culture is the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population”. Even with my quibbles, this is the best examination I’ve ever seen about how changing the means of communication changed the culture of a human population. That transformation is still reshaping the world, and I think this book is essential reading for coming to grips with it…
LINK: <http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2014-01.html#eisenstein>
"Eisenstein’s fundamental point, which I think is entirely sound, is that you cannot understand anything about the transition from ancient or medieval intellectual life to the modern life of the mind without grasping the importance of being able to quickly, cheaply make large numbers of very accurate copies of a text, and distribute them widely…."
That's where classical civilization stalled out - there were millimetres away from the printing press (they could make the Antikytheira mechanism), even if they had to use papyrus. Paper was further away but reachable - but it didn't occur to anyone to do that.
Give me the printing press and paper in Alexandria in 250 BC, and a classical industrial revolution is 2-300 years away.
elm
annoying contingencies
Eminent scientists do not automatically make good historians or philosophers of science - although I confess to admiring Weinberg's To Explain the World.
In the matter of history I found David Wootton's The Invention of Science to be extremely persuasive. He can really only be refuted by someone with a similarly detailed knowledge of the relevant books and manuscripts. That's too high a bar to be cleared by someone who isn't a specialist.
In the matter of epistemology, I don't find Michael Strevens to be quite as persuasive, but that is natural; his findings are more theoretical and less empirical. But he still the best we have so far.