Friday Hodgepodge

Friday, April 16, 2021

Blog Roundup

1. Intrigued by Yaron Brook's discussion of the bad faith shown by the New York Times to the blogger Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex fame, I have been meaning to take at look at that blog for some time.

I haven't gotten to it yet, but I'll be ready when I do. That's because I came across a guide to Slate Star Codex (and its successor, Astral Codex Ten) by Jason Crawford, whose other blog, Roots of Progress, should be familiar to readers here.

Here is Crawford on the question What makes the blog so good?

"All the news personal information that's we see fit to print." (Image by Frieder Blickle, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)
Scott writes with a rare combination of insight, humor, incisive clarity, relentless questioning, and (often) exhaustive data analysis. He asks big questions across a wide variety of domains and doesn't rest until he has clear answers. No, he doesn't rest until he can explain those answers to you lucidly. No, wait, he doesn't rest until he can do that and also make you laugh out loud.

At his best, he hits some strange triple point, previously undiscovered by bloggers, where data, theory, and emotion can coexist in equilibrium. Most writing on topics as abstract and technical as his struggles just not to be dry; it takes effort to focus, and I need energy to read them. Scott's writing flows so well that it somehow generates its own energy, like some sort of perpetual motion machine.

I like to think that I'm pretty good at writing. I'm good enough that I convinced myself to quit my day job and to write instead of coding or managing (which I'm actually qualified for and which can definitely make you more money). But I'm not nearly as good a writer as Scott. [links omitted]
After this introduction, Crawford offers a short hit parade of posts that stood out to him, with links and short descriptions.

This list indeed knocks out the obvious problem the blog poses for newcomers: the intimidating number of existing posts and the very wide range of subject matter.

Incidentally, Crawford has begun writing a book on progress and is offering a paid lecture series on topics from the book. Information on that series, including prices and topic listings, is available here.

2. With summer around the corner and child care not completely back up to speed for us, I will have a few weeks scattered across my summer in which I'll be juggling child care with my intellectual pursuits. Some of this will be high quality time spent with my kids, but lots of it will be low quality time (not quite) spent with my thoughts.

A recent post at Thinking Directions will help: Within, Jean Moroney describes some strategies for overcoming common contributors to poor productivity during low-quality time.

For example, did you know that perfectionism can rob you of even achieving something during such times?
Perfectionism is part of the problem if you feel that you should be figuring out the best task to do during this in-between, low-quality time. But you don't have the quality time needed to do serious prioritizing. You probably don't know how much time you have. Instead of making a list of options, look at this as time for puttering through tasks on an ad hoc basis, seizing the opportunity because it's there.

In these situations you can benefit from adopting a (contextually) egalitarian attitude toward the tasks. Anything you might be able to do now is good enough. Taking time to choose is bad. It's more important to pick one and act on it than to discover the right one -- because that could use up all your time. This egalitarian attitude is not valid as a way of life, but it is a valid, important tactic to use in a situation where stopping to figure out the best thing to do would mean you wouldn't get anything much done.
She follows this with a few possible mantras that will help you remember the strategy.

The other obstacles discussed are: lack of planning, lack of commitment to a particular task, and failing to clean up before taking an interruption.

3. At the blog of the Texas Institute for Property Rights, Brian Phillips describes the onerous requirements for a housing voucher program he has decided not to participate in:
The voucher program requires each property to meet certain criteria, such as having an operable stove and refrigerator. I do not supply appliances because tenants have a tendency to abuse them. To be eligible to accept vouchers, I would have to spend about three months of profits to purchase appliances and then subject myself to future repairs and replacement.

When a property owner applies to enter the voucher program, each property must be inspected. While most of the requirements for passing inspection are reasonable, past experience has shown me that city inspectors have great discretion in interpreting the rules, and the inspectors are often arbitrary in their interpretations. If any violations are found, the property owner has a limited time to make repairs. And if the property fails a second inspection, the entire process must start anew.

Even if the property meets all of the requirements, the process to obtain approval can easily take two months. During that time, the property is vacant and generating no income while insurance and mortgage payments must be made and property taxes are accruing. In short, meeting the requirements of the program can easily wipe out a year of profit. [bold added]
You may ask: Who in his right mind would participate in such a program?

You may or may not be surprised to learn that Phillips is deemed a "racist" for declining to do so despite these facts and that, in addition, over three quarters of his tenants have been black.

4. A near-perfect follow-up to the above post comes from business professor Jaana Woiceshyn, who explains "Why CEOs go 'woke' -- and why they shouldn't" at How to Be Profitable and Moral.

The second part is directly relevant to that situation:
... If business didn't produce and trade material values, we would be reduced to subsistence agriculture of our ancestors -- and to their miserable poverty.

Producing and trading material values require the pursuit of profits as motivation. Without a potential to earn a return, there would be no shareholders willing to invest their capital in business. The legal fiduciary duty is therefore to the shareholders, and not stakeholders. Shareholders risk their capital without which the business could not exist and thus deserve to profit.
The post ends in part with a refreshing example of a high-profile investor who resisted today's destructive fashions by refusing to divest his fund from fossil fuels.

Regarding fiduciary duties to shareholders for corporations and following on thoughts by Alex Epstein, I think that certain large investors (of other people's money) who foist ESG on companies they own should be sued and otherwise held to account for their actions.

-- CAV

9 comments:

Dinwar said...

I read a fair number of Slate Star Codex articles. There are some fantastically good ones, and some of the concepts he addresses (motte and baille arguments, steel-manning [not his idea but he made a good case for it], and a few others) are ones I've made a conscious effort to including in my thinking. Unfortunately there are also a lot that are....bad. The author was deeply involved with the Less Wrong crowd, which is or became (not sure which) very cult-like. He also strongly advocates for altruism, to the point where he sometimes illustrates the dangers Rand wrote about in ways that would be considered straw manning altruism in a work of fiction. The use of the adjective "effective" in front of "altruism" doesn't make it any better.

Regarding mixing childcare with work: I get migraines, so sometimes have days where I simply can't function at even 25% my normal capacity. What I've found works best for me is to put aside some administrative tasks--stuff that doesn't require a lot of brain power, but still needs done--and do them on migraine days. It's still productive work, and it's work that's necessary, but it's work that I can do in spurts, and if it doesn't get done today it's not the end of the world. Works the same when caring for children. I can scan and upload documents to servers while my kids play outside, and if one of them gets stung or something I can drop it without any guilt. I think I got that from "Thinking Directions", but I honestly don't remember.

Gus Van Horn said...

Dinwar,

Thanks for the further comments on SSC, which jibe with what I've heard others of like mind say. For example, when he discussed the shenanigans by the Times, Brook mentioned that the author is pretty far-left economically, but had some interesting things to say.

Thanks also for the time use suggestions. I dislike interruptions enough that I am tempted to use the term migraine time as my way of conceptualizing this type of time and the tasks I can try to do with it.

Gus

Snedcat said...

Yeah, I like SSC on occasion. It's true about the humor, though it stands out for me because it's very much my line of humor. For example: The Spanish Inquisition had many faults, but whining about being unfairly persecuted by heretics was, as far as I know, not one of them.

Gus Van Horn said...

Good to hear about the type and calibre of the humor!

Snedcat said...

Yo, Gus, an amusing note: In the really weird music video department, here's a good ska song with a video that stands as a stern warning not to have too much of an FX budget. (I like the song better but the video less than the similarly themed "Sell Out" by Reel Big Fish.)

Gus Van Horn said...

Thanks for passing along the links to the videos.

Snedcat said...

Yo, Gus, speaking of SSC, I checked into this one, since it's all about one of my undergrad majors: Were there Dark Ages? It's a valiant effort, but yeah, like one of the commenters aptly said, that's pretty much all you can expect when you skim through Wikipedia. It's a good example of his style though and I quite enjoyed reading it even though I was shaking my head by the end. He's quite right that in any case the Dark Ages, if you care to use the term, apply only to the period roughly 500-1000, and that they were a grim era on the whole in Western Europe. The details are just off, however, and there's no interpretive framework offered, which is always a sign you have a lot of enjoyable discussion ahead of you.

So what should one say? Here beginneth the lesson. One good way of looking at it is this: The first barbarian invasions with truly long-lasting consequences in Western Europe were in 406, when Germanic tribes flooded over the Rhine when it froze over, and the Roman armies just weren't able to handle them. It was the beginning of the real end of unified, centralized Roman government in the West (which had already been split off from the East administratively because of the impossibility of one emperor administering all of it properly), but the West was already being barbarized outside Italy with all the taxation and other measures needed to support the armies. --While some people follow Henri Pirenne in saying the real destruction was due to Muslim conquests two and a half centuries later destroying unified control of the Mediterranean, which was what truly supported the economy of the Roman empire, that was just one of the most serious of a number of body blows the empire sustained, and control of the Mediterranean was significantly crippled earlier by the Vandals, for example, who ended up in North Africa (Augustine died as they were settling in), though control was eventually restored by Justinian, who really set the stage for the collapse a bit later.

Like Italy. It was scoured clean and deeply crippled by Justinian's reconquests from 535 on--he wanted to restore unitary control of the whole empire from Constantinople, and the Ostrogoths who were in the position of subsidiary kings in Italy didn't give up control so easily; you saw such things as the senatorial aristocracy in Italy being taken hostage and slaughtered by the hundreds, and many of the surviving class transplanted to Constantinople, and then after restoring the empire, Justinian imposed the crippling taxes needed to pay for it all. It was all quite Pyrrhic, and it contributed greatly to the successes of the next waves of incursions--the Arabs, other Germanic peoples like the Langobards that Lombardy is named after because that is part of where they settled, and later the Hungarians and the Vikings; it was when these invasions ended around 1000 that the more accepted period of the Dark Ages also ended. Of course, you also saw the rise of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the empire of Charlemagne, among other developments more positive than the uniform darkness some people picture.

Snedcat said...

And after the class biobreak, as it were:

After that you saw a long period of substantial recovery, the High Middle Ages, in which technological advancements in agriculture sustained population recovery, economic growth, and a high culture that was of course fairly limited, being created largely for the Church by or at the behest of the Church, and a long process of rediscovery of the culture of antiquity. If you look at the great lights of the Dark Ages, you see some last gasps of late antiquity like Boethius (put to death by those Ostrogoths), but also the beginnings of medieval culture in places like Britain (Bede and many others), France (Alcuin and many others), and Germany, all due especially to the expansion of literacy and access to whatever survived of antiquity in the Church. (And yes, the Church preserved some parts of antiquity--it was the official religion of the empire defended by and supporting secular rulers from Theodosius I on, after all, and you have to remember regarding the spherical earth that the whole debate over Jerusalem vs. Athens was already well settled by Augustine's time--while some Church fathers like Lactantius opposed the scientific knowledge of late antiquity, especially the flatness of the earth, on doctrinal grounds, Augustine himself argued that that policy was wicked because it opened the Church to ridicule by the educated, which was a Bad Thing, a view that the Church has followed since, except for the wine lover's altar-boy wanna-be and his truly ilky ilk.)

Generally speaking, the classical heritage that fed the Renaissance had three sources, after all, that preserved by Islamic scholars, that preserved by the Church, and that imported straight from its preservators in Constantinople with the Crusades and the Ottoman conquest, and all three sources were important, and their timing shaped the whole process in fascinating ways (the Renaissance as we know it was fed in important ways by the rediscovery of Plato, whom Galileo for example greatly admired, as much as by Aristotle)--the best way of looking at the intellectual history of Western Europe from 800 on was the spread of seeds with Christianization of the Germanic barbarians and rediscovery of ever newer sources from the Carolingian Renaissance on: The Renaissance of the 12th Century in Paris especially, which spread; the Renaissance proper in Italy, which spread; and later the Enlightenment. Intellectually these are just periodizations of a long period of rediscovery and independent creation based on it; politically, a whole bunch of stuff tied up with the spread of Roman law (and the associated ideas of autocracy) through the Church (canon law) versus the kings (who really liked the legal ideas in the law schools of Paris and Bologna that drew from Justinian's Codex and earlier sources because Justinian was nothing if not a devotee of autocracy), with the admixture of some forms of popular say in government through aristocratic and folk democratic ideas. Economically, however, you had vaguely Malthusian growth until the Scientific Revolution, which truly changed the game. And here endeth the lesson.

So if you want the Dark Ages in a very small nutshell, there ya go. It's a fascinating topic; unfortunately, most of the people discussing it are only interested in its uses for much larger very ulterior motives--Christianity killed antiquity (it's better to say non-Romans did, and the Church embalmed the corpse), or Christianity is the source of all that is great in the West (the Church Fathers themselves knew exactly what was Jerusalem and what was Athens, and they finally worked out a compromise on what was acceptable from Athens under the need to support secular power that allowed some parts of Athens to continue, but that was not a body of Christian accomplishments for the most part and the Church itself recognized that). SSC is fun because it usually doesn't go in for that sort of popular balderdash, and it does what it does in intelligent and entertaining fashion.

Gus Van Horn said...

Snedcat,

Your comment was an entertaining read. Thanks as always. Just got to it now, after a couple of overscheduled days.

Gus