Newsletter
Men and women are from earth, fool pt. III and other things
September 27, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Some renovations around here. As usual, you will see little of them, but they make my life easier. You’ll mostly notice the new Analects page: less cluttered and more straightforward to navigate and filter. Bit more app-like. Also, click on any marginalium. No more page of endless marginalia. Lastly, you can go to any missive and use the buttons at the top to scroll to the next or previous missives.
Men and women are from earth, fool pt. III
Excerpt: I’m going to shit all over this ridiculous 30-year old pseudo-psychology book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus that people keep trying to talk to me about now that gender essentialism is getting trendy again. Here I cover Gray’s astonishment that ‘women’ might have ordinary needs. It is the most amusing, and infuriating, aspect of the book.
Main idea: This book is basically, “men are terribly emotionally fragile, and they can make small steps to be better, but women need to just stop bothering them with all their pedantry and just let them be who they are.”
We Are Not Adapting to Climate Change:
We study whether the sensitivity of economic, health, and livelihood outcomes to climate extremes has declined over the last half century, consistent with adaptation. Understanding whether such adaptation is already occurring is central to anticipating future climate damages, to calibrating the level of ambition needed for emissions mitigation efforts, and to understanding additional investments in adaptation that could be required to avoid additional damages. Using comprehensive panel data across diverse geographies and outcomes, including data on mortality, agricultural productivity, crime, conflict, economic output, and damages from flooding and tropical cyclones, we find limited systematic evidence of adaptation to date. Across 21 outcomes we study, six show a statistically significant declining sensitivity to a changing climate, five show an increasing sensitivity, and the remainder show no statistically significant change. Our results do not imply that specific documented adaptation efforts are ineffective or certain locations have not adapted, but instead that the net effects of existing actions have largely not been successful in meaningfully reducing climate impacts in aggregate. To avoid ongoing and future damages from warming, our results suggest a need to identify promising adaptation strategies and understand how they can be scaled.
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Bad Service Is A Sign Of A Better World. I’m not so sure I agree? :
These entitled complainers that you absolutely cannot empathize with? The mechanism behind their comtemptible behavior is the same that leads you to tip 18% before leaving the Cheesecake Factory in a huff. The world has moved on, gotten better, and brought Baumol’s inescapable cost disease with it. The time and attention of humans is more expensive than ever. The pandemic brought with it a shock to the hospitality labor market that is still rippling today. A lot of people learned about the market value of their labor and those that got out first have reported that life is often better on the other side, that the pay was better than expected and their work involved immeasurably fewer misogynistic sad dads and spiraling white wine Karens. Wages have of course adjusted, but so has employment. I don’t have the data in front me, but anecdotally I’m seeing fewer hosts and table bussers, more tops per server, more lunch shifts stretched across a single assistant manager and server duo. That means less service on average with a higher variance in quality.
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The Other British Invasion. How many colloquialisms come from British English.
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Great article about the varieties of ways we are bad at thinking. Lots of examples, but mostly to do with how bad we are at time. Good throughout. One nice bit on particular on how technology starts as an option, then becomes an obligation:
I’m not making this up—people actually said, “Imagine how much leisure we’ll have if we can get to San Francisco in two and a half days rather than two weeks.” They imagined that your clients wouldn’t know that the railway existed, so you could pretend you’d gone by ship, spend 10 days playing golf, and then turn up by train
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Unfortunately, that information became widely known, and you were expected to turn up in two days. And this leads to a problem, I think, which bedevils many technologies and many behaviors. It starts as an option, then it becomes an obligation. We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology, and we suddenly realize we’re worse off than we were when we started
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How to Think About Politics:
Untangling this ethical knot is, I think, a matter of perspective. It comes down to the way that you think of what politics is. For the most part, it is wrong to think of elections as contests between “good” and “bad” candidates. With few exceptions, it is more accurate to divide most politicians into two broad categories: Enemies, and Cowards. The enemies are those politicians who are legitimately opposed to your policy goals. The cowards are those politicians who may agree with your policy goals, but will sell you out if they must in order to protect their own interests.
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Under this framework, you can set aside the tedious feelings of disappointment that come with holding moral views while also supporting any politician. Will your favorite candidate do something bad? Almost certainly. After all, they are cowards. The onus is on us to give the cowards a soft path to the moral choice. The education necessary to equip citizens with the facts; the persuasion necessary to move public opinion to the right place; the organizing necessary to mobilize people to fight for the right thing. These things are the substance of “politics.”
And so on. Not new, but fun.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,