Reading/thinking
OK, so I think posting a SV story fit with the "retro journaling" idea, but with the start of school I'm clearly not going to be posting every day. Still, here's some stuff I've seen around:
Via
giandujakiss, this is a great interview with the editor of Flowers in the Attic. I am also a big My Sweet Audrina fan, if that is the right word.
Kate Losse, The Unbearable Whiteness of Breaking Things:
I write this not just to make the point that “don’t ask for permission” is a starkly, unconsciously raced and classed (and also gendered, in the way that Lean In asks women not to break rules but to lean into them, or the way in which Stanford summer camp doesn’t seem to notice that “don’t ask for permission” is a dangerously rapey lesson to teach young men) motto for Silicon Valley, though there is that.
It’s also to note that a young man and his friends are being schooled in this privilege from boyhood by institutions that have all of the intellectual and financial resources available to widen the scope of instruction and teach them more than just how to successfully trespass the few boundaries they encounter. By teaching primarily young white men to unreflectively “break things” and reward them when they do, Stanford and other Silicon Valley institutions like YCombinator are incubators not for any kind of social change or “disruption” but for the assignment of privilege to the people who are most likely to already have it.
Joseph William Singer, Titles of Nobility: Poverty, Immigration & Property in a Free & Democratic Society:
My grandparents escaped the pogroms and brought my father to this country as a small child in 1922. My grandparents left their brothers and sisters behind. The Nazis came to power and my father's cousins - my cousins - all died in the Shoah, the Holocaust. I am lucky my grandparents passed through Ellis Island when they did.
A few years ago a politically conservative man in our synagogue was bemoaning taxes and regulations. He said, "what has the government ever done for me?" I was astonished to hear him say this. I asked him when his family came to United States. They came around the time my father came with all the other Jews escaping oppression and poverty in Europe. I thought of my cousins and I said to him, "well that's one thing the US government did for you - it let you in. You think the US government never did anything for you? It saved your life."
. . .
The hue and cry about so-called "illegal immigration" should lead us to a greater humility than we may yet have found. After all, if the forced seizure of land from Indian nations cannot be justified from a moral point of view, then illegal immigration is a greater problem than we have imagined. But it is not Mexican immigrants we should be worrying about; it is the ninety-eight percent of us who are non-Indians occupying tribal lands.
We do not like to think about this painful fact from our history. After all, the land seizures happened long ago. Well, how long does it take before a resident has the right to be treated like a citizen? This is a question that millions of undocumented persons would like to know. If time heals no wounds and confers no rights, then the entire country is in jeopardy. Our nation was founded on illegal immigration. The arguments against rewarding wrongdoing and law breaking are ones we should be hesitant to make; they may come back to haunt us.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow: Another behavioral economics book, this one by an academic who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the psychological quirks that make humans very different from the “rational” actors of classical economic theory. We like examples and don’t understand numbers; we make different choices depending on how the exact same situation is framed (loss versus gain); we don’t sum up our utility over time, but rather judge things and experiences by their peaks and depths, which can lead us to make choices that lead to less overall happiness.
I thought he gave a very good explanation for why we think stuff will make us happy and it doesn’t. There’s hedonic adaptation, which is that people don’t notice things once they’re familiar/return to their standard baselines pretty reliably after a shocking event, whether it’s winning the lottery or losing use of one’s legs in an accident. Loud noise and chronic pain aside-and it’s a pretty big aside-we tend to adapt. And therefore we overvalue things and undervalue experiences: most of the time, we aren’t actually thinking “damn, I love my sports car” even when we’re in the car-mostly, we’re thinking about something else, like “what the hell is that jerk in the BMW doing?” So if you ask a person “how much do you love your sports car?” they’ll focus on the car, give you their estimate of peak love, and mistakenly think that they feel like that most of the time, instead of actually putting the car out of their mind most of the time. By contrast, Kahneman suggests, experiences do have extended utility and we’re less likely to overvalue them.
One claim whose force I recognized from experience was that, if regression towards the mean comes up in a court case, the side that has to explain what it means is going to lose. I don’t remember seeing the issue put this way, but I liked it: regression and imperfect correlation are exactly the same thing. It seems surprising to us to say “highly intelligent women often marry less intelligent men,” so we produce causal explanations. But it’s not surprising to say “the correlation between spouses’ intelligence is less than one,” that is, spouses aren’t always matched or in some other lockstep relation in intelligence. But algebraically, the two statements are the same-if correlation is less than one, then outliers will tend to be married to people who aren’t quite as far from the mean as they are, which is to say regression towards the mean, which is to say that highly intelligent anyones will tend to be married to less intelligent spouses. It’s our search for causation that trips us up.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Via
giandujakiss, this is a great interview with the editor of Flowers in the Attic. I am also a big My Sweet Audrina fan, if that is the right word.
Kate Losse, The Unbearable Whiteness of Breaking Things:
I write this not just to make the point that “don’t ask for permission” is a starkly, unconsciously raced and classed (and also gendered, in the way that Lean In asks women not to break rules but to lean into them, or the way in which Stanford summer camp doesn’t seem to notice that “don’t ask for permission” is a dangerously rapey lesson to teach young men) motto for Silicon Valley, though there is that.
It’s also to note that a young man and his friends are being schooled in this privilege from boyhood by institutions that have all of the intellectual and financial resources available to widen the scope of instruction and teach them more than just how to successfully trespass the few boundaries they encounter. By teaching primarily young white men to unreflectively “break things” and reward them when they do, Stanford and other Silicon Valley institutions like YCombinator are incubators not for any kind of social change or “disruption” but for the assignment of privilege to the people who are most likely to already have it.
Joseph William Singer, Titles of Nobility: Poverty, Immigration & Property in a Free & Democratic Society:
My grandparents escaped the pogroms and brought my father to this country as a small child in 1922. My grandparents left their brothers and sisters behind. The Nazis came to power and my father's cousins - my cousins - all died in the Shoah, the Holocaust. I am lucky my grandparents passed through Ellis Island when they did.
A few years ago a politically conservative man in our synagogue was bemoaning taxes and regulations. He said, "what has the government ever done for me?" I was astonished to hear him say this. I asked him when his family came to United States. They came around the time my father came with all the other Jews escaping oppression and poverty in Europe. I thought of my cousins and I said to him, "well that's one thing the US government did for you - it let you in. You think the US government never did anything for you? It saved your life."
. . .
The hue and cry about so-called "illegal immigration" should lead us to a greater humility than we may yet have found. After all, if the forced seizure of land from Indian nations cannot be justified from a moral point of view, then illegal immigration is a greater problem than we have imagined. But it is not Mexican immigrants we should be worrying about; it is the ninety-eight percent of us who are non-Indians occupying tribal lands.
We do not like to think about this painful fact from our history. After all, the land seizures happened long ago. Well, how long does it take before a resident has the right to be treated like a citizen? This is a question that millions of undocumented persons would like to know. If time heals no wounds and confers no rights, then the entire country is in jeopardy. Our nation was founded on illegal immigration. The arguments against rewarding wrongdoing and law breaking are ones we should be hesitant to make; they may come back to haunt us.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow: Another behavioral economics book, this one by an academic who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the psychological quirks that make humans very different from the “rational” actors of classical economic theory. We like examples and don’t understand numbers; we make different choices depending on how the exact same situation is framed (loss versus gain); we don’t sum up our utility over time, but rather judge things and experiences by their peaks and depths, which can lead us to make choices that lead to less overall happiness.
I thought he gave a very good explanation for why we think stuff will make us happy and it doesn’t. There’s hedonic adaptation, which is that people don’t notice things once they’re familiar/return to their standard baselines pretty reliably after a shocking event, whether it’s winning the lottery or losing use of one’s legs in an accident. Loud noise and chronic pain aside-and it’s a pretty big aside-we tend to adapt. And therefore we overvalue things and undervalue experiences: most of the time, we aren’t actually thinking “damn, I love my sports car” even when we’re in the car-mostly, we’re thinking about something else, like “what the hell is that jerk in the BMW doing?” So if you ask a person “how much do you love your sports car?” they’ll focus on the car, give you their estimate of peak love, and mistakenly think that they feel like that most of the time, instead of actually putting the car out of their mind most of the time. By contrast, Kahneman suggests, experiences do have extended utility and we’re less likely to overvalue them.
One claim whose force I recognized from experience was that, if regression towards the mean comes up in a court case, the side that has to explain what it means is going to lose. I don’t remember seeing the issue put this way, but I liked it: regression and imperfect correlation are exactly the same thing. It seems surprising to us to say “highly intelligent women often marry less intelligent men,” so we produce causal explanations. But it’s not surprising to say “the correlation between spouses’ intelligence is less than one,” that is, spouses aren’t always matched or in some other lockstep relation in intelligence. But algebraically, the two statements are the same-if correlation is less than one, then outliers will tend to be married to people who aren’t quite as far from the mean as they are, which is to say regression towards the mean, which is to say that highly intelligent anyones will tend to be married to less intelligent spouses. It’s our search for causation that trips us up.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.