Cultural Values and Productivity. “When I investigate which country-of-origin characteristics most closely correlate with human capital, cultural values are the only robust predictor. This relationship persists among children of migrants. Consistent with a plausible cultural mechanism, individuals whose origin places a high value on autonomy hold a comparative advantage in positions characterized by a low degree of routinization.” This ties in with Garrett Jones’ book The Culture Transplant, which I mentioned in my 2023 book roundup a few days ago.
Ruxandra argues that elite thought in our society has shifted toward excessive caution (safetyism), skepticism of technology, and zero-sum thinking and goes on to say ‘This shift poses what I believe to be the defining ideological challenge of our time.’ Also a continuation post, including an interesting chart showing the incidence of words related to progress versus those related to caution, in English, French, and German books.
Anna Mitchell suggests that “Westerners aren’t good at love because we’re unsuccessfully trying to reconcile two opposing love traditions. The first is a “passionate love” inherited from the Medieval courtly tradition that gives us a sense of spiritual transcendence that we’re desperately lacking in our secular age. The second is the Christian ideal of committed love in marriage, that makes us feel known as individuals. Retrofitting life-altering passion into the structure of marriage hasn’t worked well – as witnessed in sky-high divorce rates and a flood of negativity about dating”…”However, as social technologies have emerged over the past ~15 years, it also feels like “passionate love” of the 90s romcoms – where you meet someone in real life and get swept away – doesn’t hold the same cultural power. It’s not our only route to transcendence in a secular age. We already HAVE a reality-replacing option on a small screen.”
And from Justin Murphy: “I think dating and marriage are broken because people simply have too many ideas in their heads. Many of them are correct in certain contexts, but none of them is universally true. The calculation overdetermines the encounter and love simply cannot bloom. My evidence is simply that every man and every woman I know who is dating and looking for marriage has so many notions—what they’re looking for, what they’re trying to avoid, what is a deal-breaker, what is essential, but also rigid interpretations of what various behaviors mean, what certain body language means, and so on.” Reminds me of my old post about The Hunt for the Five-Pound Butterfly.
The personality and politics of 263 occupations.
A mental model megathread. Some samples…
Example #13: “Licensing Effect: Believing you’re good can make you behave bad. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality”…and Example #14: “Preference Falsification: If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship is ultimately a request to be deceived.”
Digital Logic, Implemented Mechanically…atomic scale, smaller than the smallest conventional logic gates. Conceptually similar to classical railroad switch and signal interlocking; can apparently operate at speeds up to 500 MHz.
The history of videogame revenue. Shown as $185B in 2023.
From Samizdata: “The shift from “it’s immoral to tell another culture’s story” to “it’s impossible to tell another culture’s story, but in any case, one shouldn’t try for moral reasons” is part of a process Pluckrose and Lindsay describe as “reification”, which emerged after I’d left the ivory tower and commenced moving companies around and drafting commercial leases for a living. Once reified, postmodern abstractions about the world are treated as though they are real things, and accorded the status of empirical truth. Contemporary social justice activism thus sees theory as reality, as though it were gravity or cell division or the atomic structure of uranium.”
Ilya Bratman, a linguist and Hillel leader (originally from the Soviet Union) reports on what he sees among students at NYC public colleges.
Perhaps the passionate love inside a committed marriage not working so well is due to a lack of teaching out of Song of Solomon, along with the relevant verses scattered around scripture. If people who claim to follow the Word aren’t teaching life lessons from the Word, how can they claim to be following the Word.
One of the first things I read in “Personality and politics of 263 occupations” was that ship’s engineers rated highest in conscientiousness. While conscientiousness is a laudable, indeed necessary, attribute of a ship’s engineer, ship’s engineers form a minuscule proportion of the American work force since about the time I entered junior high. I’d be more interested in airline pilots or maybe physicians.
The next was the explication of the numbers. For the trait of conscientiousness, the span from highest to lowest was less than 1 standard deviation. In fact, the range of all five traits is right around 1 SD. In the real world, this would be a remarkably low range, in other words, there just isn’t much difference between any of the groups, at least as far as the measure they were using. My judgement would be that none of their conclusions were justified by the data and that no conclusion would be possible.
Finally, look at the N numbers. They range from the low dozens to 1,000 for a few occupations. Moreover, the descriptions of some of the most over represented occupations are very vague. Things like “Managers” or “Unspecified Professionals”.
My conclusion, is that rather than there being meaningful differences between how different occupations scored on whatever test was used is that the difference between occupations is insignificant, at least by this measure, but then I don’t have to try to get my grant renewed.
A disturbing report from MIT:
https://www.thefp.com/p/resigned-mit-october-7-antisemitism