Internet Writings that you enjoy

Next up I want to continue the non-fiction reporting angle with a series from one of my favourite online magazines, The Atavist, which is known as The Mastermind. This is a 7 part (!) in depth report of a criminal mastermind known as Paul Le Roux, a South African 'nerd' who ended up running a global drug kingdom.

https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind

I came to Taytay that afternoon because I believed that the woman Jimena had found was a small thread in a much larger story. Somewhere between a pile of American legal documents and a two-paragraph story about Jimena’s discovery in a Philippine newspaper, I had noticed a hazy connection between the body and a man named Paul Le Roux, a South African who was reputed to be the most prolific international criminal of the 21st century. The scant information I could find on Le Roux suggested his involvement in weapons shipments, gold smuggling, and online prescription-drug sales. But he was also a kind of phantom, reportedly captured by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in 2012 and then disappeared to work as a valuable asset. My attempts to find out who Le Roux really was, and why the U.S. wanted so badly to keep him a secret, had led me from New York to Manila and then to this vacant lot, where I suspected that Le Roux’s ghostly influence had once been manifest.

Quite frankly this is too large for me to quote directly, but in any case I would recommend this series to anyone who has an interest in anything. More generally, The Atavist magazine is a pretty fantastic source of non-fiction reporting and if you do enjoy this series I hope you also take the time to look at their other articles and even donate.

The third source I will recommend is, like the first, concerned with Brexit, though in this case it is both directly about the Brexit vote and also not really about it at all. It is a blog post by Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, one of the pro-exit organizations. Though I understand this will put some off, I still urge you to take a look through the article, which in truth is scarcely concerned with Brexit and is much more about political realities and the complexity of why unexpected events happen. I've seen it called the most important thing written in 2017 and I would not disagree with that assessment at this point:

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/dominic-cummings-brexit-referendum-won/

I left my happy life away from SW1 and spent eight weeks biking around London persuading people to take what was likely to be a car crash career decision – to quit their jobs and join a low probability proposition: hacking the political system to win a referendum against almost every force with power and money in politics. In September we had an office, in October ‘Vote Leave’ went public, in April we were designated the official campaign, 10 weeks later we won.

Discussions about things like ‘why did X win/lose?’ are structured to be misleading and I could not face trying to untangle everything. There are strong psychological pressures that lead people to create post facto stories that seem to add up to ‘I always said X and X happened.’ Even if people do not think this at the start they rapidly construct psychologically appealing stories that overwrite memories. Many involved with this extraordinary episode feel the need to justify themselves and this means a lot of rewriting of history. I also kept no diary so I have no clear source for what I really thought other than some notes here and there. I already know from talking to people that my lousy memory has conflated episodes, tried to impose patterns that did not actually exist and so on – all the usual psychological issues. To counter all this in detail would require going through big databases of emails, printouts of appointment diaries, notebooks and so on, and even then I would rarely be able to reconstruct reliably what I thought. Life’s too short.

Reality has branching histories, not ‘a big why’

Much political analysis revolves around competing simple stories based on one big factor such that, in retrospect, ‘it was always clear that immigration would trump economic interest / Cameron’s negotiation was never going to be enough / there is an unstoppable populist tide’, and so on. Alternatives are quickly thought to have been impossible (even if X argued the exact opposite repeatedly). The big event must have had an equally big single cause. Confirmation bias kicks in and evidence seeming to suggest that what actually happened would happen looms larger. People who are quite wrong quickly persuade themselves they were ‘mostly right’ and ‘had a strong feeling’ unlike, of course, the blind fools around them. Soon our actual history seems like the only way things could have played out. Brexit had to happen. Trump had to win.

‘The big why?’ is psychologically appealing but it is a mistake. In general terms it is the wrong way to look at history and it is specifically wrong about the referendum. If it were accurate we would have won by much more than we did given millions who were not ‘happy with the way things are’ and would like to be out of the EU reluctantly voted IN out of fear. Such stories oversimplify and limit thinking about the much richer reality of branching histories.

The cold reality of the referendum is no clear story, no ‘one big causal factor’, and no inevitability – it was ‘men going at it blind’. The result was an emergent property of many individual actions playing out amid a combination of three big forces

Anybody who says ‘I always knew X would win’ is fooling themselves. What actually happened was one of many branching histories and in many other branches of this network – branches that almost happened and still seem almost real to me – we lost.

The closest approximation to the truth that we can get is that Leave won because of a combination of 1) three big, powerful forces with global impact: the immigration crisis, the financial crisis, and the euro crisis which created conditions in which the referendum could be competitive; 2) Vote Leave implemented some unrecognised simplicities in its operations that focused attention more effectively than the other side on a simple and psychologically compelling story, thus taking advantage of those three big forces; and 3) Cameron and Osborne operated with a flawed model of what constitutes effective political action and had bad judgement about key people (particularly his chief of staff and director of communications) therefore they made critical errors. Even if (1) and (2) had played out the same, I think that if that duo had made one of a few crucial decisions differently they would very likely have won.

Why is almost all political analysis and discussion so depressing and fruitless? I think much has to do with the delusions of better educated people. It is easier to spread memes in SW1, N1, and among Guardian readers than in Easington Colliery.

The more closely involved people are in the media and politics the more they are driven by fashion and the feeling, rarely acknowledged and almost always rationalised, that ‘this is my gang’. Look at all those in SW1 who tweet attacks on Dacre to each other then retweet the praise from their friends, then look at those who attack them. Look at Robert Peston tweeting pictures of the London Eye and Habermas quotes on election night and his opponents ranting about ‘elites’. Both sides are just like football team fans defending their in-group and attacking their out-group enemies. The more they think of themselves as original the more likely they are to be conformist – and conformist within very narrow parameters. We all fool ourselves but the more educated are particularly overconfident that they are not fooling themselves. They back their gang then fool themselves that they have reached their views by sensible, intelligent, reasoning.

(NB. Whoever leaked the Hilary email story was probably doing something similar. This played into the media obsession with scandal and process such that they spent a ridiculous amount of time on it despite probably 80% of them wanting Hilary to win. It shows how powerfully the media is in the grip of dynamics they rarely reflect on themselves. Putin’s communication maestro, Surkov, uses these sorts of tricks all the time. Cf. Peter Pomerantsev’s great book, a must read for any MP before they pontificate on Putin’s mafia government.)

One of the most misleading stories in politics is the story of ‘the centre ground’. In this story people’s views are distributed on an X-axis with ‘extreme left’ at one end, ‘extreme right’ at the other end, and ‘the centre ground’ in the middle. People in ‘the centre’ are ‘moderate’. ‘Extremists’ are always ‘lurching’ while ‘sensible moderates’ are urged to ‘occupy the centre’.

This story is one of the dominant features of political discussion and the basis for endless interviews, columns, and attempts at political ‘strategy’. The story is deeply flawed and where it is not trivially true it is deeply misleading.

Swing voters who decide elections – both those who swing between Conservative/Labour and those who swing between IN/OUT – do not think like this. They support much tougher policies on violent crime than most Tory MPs AND much higher taxes on the rich than Blair, Brown, and Miliband. They support much tougher anti-terrorism laws than most Tory MPs AND they support much tougher action on white collar criminals and executive pay than Blair, Brown, and Miliband.

A great deal more at the link regarding the vote, Cummings role in it, the issues that remain had, and more. Even if you are fully remain supporting, as I am, I think this is a vital analysis of events and should be read by anyone who intends to have a serious understanding of the world today.

Cummings has a blog where he posts more in this vein if you wish. He is considerably drier there though, and it should be noted that most people who work with him consider him to be some kind of psychopath, on the record.

Anyone who is remotely interested in intelligent writing on the internet will probably already be aware of my next link, which is Slate Star Codex. Even those only vaguely aware of quality internet discourse will likely have been linked to a one of Scott's more viral posts. In any case, I feel compelled to list the blog here, lest you have not read anything from there yet. I will not be giving one of the more prominent and famous blog posts, for the simple fact that anyone can go the site and just click on "About/Top Posts" to get the best of the lot - and I strongly recommend that you do so. To highlight a lesser known post, I'm going to use: SSC Gives a Graduation Speech

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/

It's a fairly simple post, mostly leading to proposals for a Basic Income, but I choose to highlight it for the sheer pleasantness of the scenario invoked, which is by far one of the best possible near futures I have read about (and could plausibly happen).

Is education worth it?

Another intriguing clue here is Louis Benezet’s experiment with mathematics instruction. Benezet, an early 20th century superintendent of schools, wondered whether cramming mathematics into kids at an early age had a detrimental effect. He decreed that in some of the schools in his district, there would be no math instruction until grade six. He found that within a year, these sixth graders had caught up with their peers in traditional schools, and furthermore that they were able to think much more logically about math problems – figure out what was going on rather than desperately trying to multiply and divide all the numbers in the problem by one another. If Benezet’s results hold true – and on careful reading they are hard to doubt – any math education before grade six is useless at best. And it’s hard to resist the urge to generalize to other subjects and children even older still.

So in contradiction to the claim that education is necessary to teach beautiful and elegant knowledge, I maintain first that nearly nobody in the educational system picks this up anyway, that people who don’t get any formal education at all pick it up nearly as much of it, and that people not exposed to it as children will, if they decide to learn it as adults, pick it up quickly and easily and without the heartbreak of trying to cram it into the underdeveloped head of a seven year old.

But here I cannot honestly disagree with the conventional assessment that going to school raises your earning power. As bad as you will have it, everyone who didn’t graduate college still has it much, much worse. All the economic indicators agree with the signs from the desolate wasteland that was once our industrial heartland: they are doomed. Their wages are not stagnating but actively declining, their unemployment rate is a positively Greek thirty-five percent, and prospects for changing that are few and far between. Some economists blame globalization, which makes it easy to outsource manufacturing and other manual labor to the Chinese. Others blame technology, noting that many of the old well-paying blue-collar jobs are done not by foreigners but by machines. Both trends are set to increase, turning even more factory workers, truck drivers, and warehouse-stockers into burger-flippers, Wal-Mart greeters, and hollow-eyed unemployed.

But don’t let your schadenfreude get the better of you. Twenty years from now that’s going to be you. Sure, right now machines can only do the easy stuff, and the world isn’t interconnected enough to let foreigners do anything really subtle for us. But lawyers are already feeling the pinch of software that auto-generates contracts, and programmers are already feeling the pinch of Indians who will work for half the pay and email their code to Silicon Valley the next morning. You don’t need to invent a robo-drafter to put engineers out of business, just drafting software so effective it allows one engineer to do the work of three. And although there are half-hearted efforts to stop it, it seems more and more like King Canute trying to turn back a tide made of hundred dollar bills.

And I calculate that the answer would be $15,000 a year, adjusted for interest. We can add the $5,800 basic income guarantee we could already afford onto that for about $20,000 a year, for everyone. Black, white, man, woman, employed, unemployed, abled, disabled, rich, poor. Welcome to the real world, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this. What, you thought we were going to throw you out to sink or swim in a world where if you die you die in real life? Come on, we’re not that cruel.

So when we ask whether your education is worth it, we have to compare what you got – an education that puts you one grade level above the uneducated and which has informed 3.3% of you who Euclid is – to what you could have gotten. 20,000 hours of your youth to play, study, learn to play the violin, whatever. And $20,000 a year, sweat-free.

Or consider your life on a $20,000 a year income guarantee. No longer tied down to a job, you can live wherever you want. I love the mountains. Let’s live in a cabin in Colorado, way up in the Rockies. You can find stunningly beautiful ones for $500 a month – freed from the mad rush to get into scarce urban or suburban areas with good school districts, housing is actually really cheap. So there you are in the Rockies, maybe with a used car to take you to Denver when you want to see people or go to a show, but otherwise all on your own except for the deer and squirrels. You wake up at nine, cook yourself a healthy breakfast, then take a long jog out in the forest. By the time you come back, you’ve got a lot of interesting thoughts, and you talk about them with the dozens of online friends you cultivate close relationships with and whom you can take a road trip and visit any time you feel like. Eventually you’re talked out, and you curl up with a good book – this week you’re trying to make it through Aristotle on aesthetics. The topic interests you since you’re learning to paint – you’ve always wanted to be an artist, and with all the time in the world and stunning views to inspire you, you’re making good progress. Freed from the need to appeal to customers or critics, you are able to develop your own original style, and you take heart in the words of the old Kipling poem:

And none but the Master will praise them
And none but the Master will blame
And no one will work for money
And no one will work for fame
But each for the joy of the working
Each on his separate star
To draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are

One of the fans of your work is a cute girl – this time I’m assuming you’re a man, I’m sure over the past four years you’ve learned some choice words for people who do that. You date and get married. She comes to live with you – she’s also getting $20,000 a year from the government in place of an education, so now you’re up to $40,000, which is actually very close to the US median household income. You have two point four kids. With both of you at home full time, you see their first steps, hear their first words, get to see them as they begin to develop their own personalities. They start seeming a little lonely for other kids their own age, so with a sad good-bye to your mountain, you move to a bigger house in a little town on the shores of a lake in Montana. There’s no schooling for them, but you teach them to read, first out of children’s books, later out of something a little harder like Harry Potter, and then finally you turn them loose in your library. Your oldest devours your collection of Aristotle and tells you she wants to be a philosopher when she grows up. Evenings they go swimming, or play stickball with the other kids in town.

Some of you will say yes, my education was worth it. I am the 3.3%! I know who Euclid was and I understand the sublime beauty of geometry. I don’t think I would have been exposed to it, or had the grit to keep studying it, if I hadn’t been here surrounded by equally curious peers, under the instruction of enthusiastic professors. This revelation was worth losing my cabin in Colorado, worth resigning myself to the daily grind and the constant lurking fear of failure. I claim it all.

And to you my advice is: if you’ve sacrificed everything for knowledge, don’t forget that. When you are a paralegal in Brooklyn, and you get home from work, and you are very tired, and you want to curl up in front of the TV and watch reality shows until you are numb, remind yourself that you value knowledge above everything else, that you will seek intellectual beauty though the world perish, and read a book or something. Or take a class at a community college. Anything other than declaring knowledge your supreme value but becoming a boob.

And finally, some of you will say, wait a second, maybe my education wasn’t worth it. Or, maybe it was the best choice to make from within a bad paradigm, but I’m not content with that. And I wish someone had told me about all of this more than fifteen minutes before I graduate.

And to you I can offer a small amount of compensation. You have learned a very valuable lesson that you might not have been able to learn any other way.

You have learned that the system is Not Your Friend.

Please read the entire thing, and then read every other post in the archive.

At this point I'm tired and drunk, but tomorrow I'll be back with a 5 parter from Samz[]dat, and in the meantime please feel free to post your own interesting stuff

Oh damn you're killing it with this one. Gonna read some of these later.

I need to dig up this one New Yorker story I read last year that still sticks in my mind.

Will post in here later on.

Have some more.

I'll start with some more economics focused stuff. First is Put a Num on it:

https://putanumonit.com/2016/07/14/the-price-is-always-right/

Last night I dreamt that I lived in a world parallel to ours, in Old Cork City in the Stated Unions of Columbia. The Columbians are an affluent and enlightened lot, but they suffer from a very peculiar madness: they consider Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to be ethically unjust and refuse to abide by them. It is clear to every Columbian that light objects soar while heavy objects must crash to the ground. Yes, scientists at Old Cork College have repeatedly shown that feathers and a bowling ball fall at the same speed in the absence of air resistance, but Columbians figure that gravity works differently in a perfect academic setting than it does in real life.

Locke understood that when you come to a city with many buyers and sellers, and they all sell and buy wheat from each other at 10S, the only price you can sell (or buy) wheat at is 10S. Moved by some intuition of fairness you may want to sell it at last year’s price of 5S, but you can’t. Whoever buys it for 5S will immediately resell it for 10S to those who will actually consume it, you have simply given your profit away to an unproductive third party. You may want to sell your wheat for 20S because you’re greedy, but you can’t. No one will buy for 20S what they can get next door for 10S.

Without nitpicking, let’s say that there are 70,000 tradable tickets available for Burning Man. The price of $840 is the only one at which exactly 70,000 people want to buy a ticket. Without changing the capacity or desirability of the festival, the only thing Burning Man organizers do by moving the price is deciding how much money to donate to Stub Hub and the resellers. They could have donated that money to poor attendees by giving some of them non-transferrable free admission (they do a little of it). They could have donated that money to charity. Instead, they simply donate 70,000 * $400 = $28,000,000 to ticket resellers for no good reason whatsoever. Hamilton on Broadway is donating $12,500,000 a year.

Jumping off a cliff and hoping to fly.

A fairly short article which succinctly describes the law of one price in Economics, and exposes the seemingly sensible policy of price controls as complete irrationality.

Related to this is a classic article from Prof Dwight Lee on the difference between job creation and wealth creation.

https://fee.org/articles/creating-jobs-vs-creating-wealth/

Government policies are commonly evaluated in terms of how many jobs they create. Restricting imports is seen as a way to protect and create domestic jobs. Tax preferences and loopholes are commonly justified as ways of increasing employment in the favored activity. Presidents point with pride to the number of jobs created in the economy during their administrations. Supposedly the more jobs created the more successful the administration. There probably has never been a government spending program whose advocates failed to mention that it creates jobs. Even wars are seen as coming with the silver lining of job creation.

…But it is easy for people to forget that creating more wealth is what we really want to accomplish, and jobs are merely a means to that end. When that elementary fact is forgotten, people are easily duped by arguments that elevate creation of jobs to an end in itself.

…The problem is creating jobs in which people produce the most value. This is the point of the apocryphal story of an engineer who, while visiting China, came across a large crew of men building a dam with picks and shovels. When the engineer pointed out to the supervisor that the job could be completed in a few days, rather than many months, if the men were given motorized earthmoving equipment, the supervisor said that such equipment would destroy many jobs. “Oh,” the engineer responded, “I thought you were interested in building a dam. If it’s more jobs you want, why don’t you have your men use spoons instead of shovels.”

All economic progress results from being able to provide the same, or improved, goods and services with fewer workers, thus eliminating some jobs and freeing up labor to increase production in new, more productive jobs. The failure to understand this source of increasing prosperity explains the widespread sympathy with destructive public policies.

In the 1840s a French politician seriously advocated blowing up the tracks at Bordeaux on the railroad from Paris to Spain to create more jobs in Bordeaux. Freight would have to be moved from one train to another and passengers would require hotels, all of which would mean more jobs.

Both articles have something of a libertarian bent, and indeed the second link is from a noted libertarian think tank and author, but nonetheless I feel both do a good job of communicating some elementary economic principles, and neither really makes many political points. A useful reminder for anyone of the value that free markets can bring in certain situations.

For those put off even by the mere mention of the word 'libertarian', I've got you covered. Current Affairs is a hard left magazine which has been publishing for a few years now and has some good articles here and there.

My favourite is probably this somewhat peculiar, but also hilarious, takedown of the musical Hamilton.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/07/you-should-be-terrified-that-people-who-like-hamilton-run-our-country

One of the publications to enter swooning raptures over Hamilton was BuzzFeed, which called it the smash musical “that everyone you know has been quoting for months.” (Literally nobody has ever quoted Hamilton in my presence.) BuzzFeed’s workplace obsession with the musical led to the birthing of the phrase “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack.” That three-word monstrosity, incomprehensible to anyone outside the narrowest circle of listicle-churning media elites, describes a room on the corporate messaging platform “Slack” used exclusively by BuzzFeed employees to discuss Hamilton. J.R.R. Tolkien said that “cellar door” was the most beautiful phonetic phrase the English language could produce. “BuzzFeed Hamilton Slack,” by contrast, may be the most repellent arrangement of words in any tongue.

For those looking for something more serious, I would recommend this interview with Chris Arnade, a photojournalist who spent months post-election travelling through the American backwaters to get an idea of Trump country. That last sentence is probably enough to induce retching in certain people who have been exposed to far too many of that type of lazy article (also suggested reading: http://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2017/05/deep-macron-country) but trust me when I say this is an excellent interview and analysis.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/the-view-from-the-back-row

But when you go out in the country, you realize that we’re massively unequal, and we’re unequal beyond economics. We’re unequal in terms of the way we live, how we choose to live, unequal in our valuation framework, what we view as moral, what we view as right and wrong, what we view as the goals. And beyond the obvious racial differences, which are huge—I spent, as much time in poor minority neighborhoods as I did in poor white working class neighborhoods—the most salient division I see beyond race is education.

This group of people views their life as worse than their parents, and they think their children’s lives will be worse than theirs. And that’s rational, from their perspective. After all, they’ve lost. Their kind of worldview has been devalued, because it’s the front row kids that have been in charge: the globalized, rational meritocracy versus the more traditional concepts of morality.

So let’s talk about NAFTA, you alluded to NAFTA and free trade. Mathematically it works, because the winners win more than the losers lose. So on a net basis, you say: “Hey look! The data says everybody wins.” There are three fundamental problems with that. One is that winners never share with the losers, that just doesn’t happen. Secondly, what you’re measuring is a very narrow framework of what’s valuable; you’re making the assumption that everybody wants more stuff, having more stuff is what meaning’s about. But the back row finds meaning through their connections, their community, through their structure. When they lose, they’ve lost everything. When the factories go, the town and community fall apart. Their churches hollow out. Their families start facing problems with drugs. So when your sense of meaning and place and valuation comes from your community, and your community gets eroded, that’s it. Game over.

Drugs don’t just go into a place because people are lazy; drugs go into a place because drugs work and help. They’re a get-meaning-quick scheme. So is fascism, so is populism. Both these things give a sense of meaning. People use drugs because they think their life is stuck. It’s a form of suicide, and for them, it’s a way of finding some relief from something that seems like it’s not working. That they’re humiliated and devalued, and they want to find a way to fight back against that. And drugs are just one way to do that, with another way being fascism and populism.

CA: At our core, everybody wants to feel valued as a part of something larger. And right now the front row has that. At least up until this election, they had that. They generally can look at their lives and say: “I’m an adjunct professor of Greek History at Bumblefuck University…” Uh, don’t use Bumblefuck.

NR: We can change it.

CA: At Cornell. Anyway, they have a source of pride. But that person has a lot more in common with a bond trader than a truck driver.

CA: Oh no, he doesn’t. I mean, this whole thing is just another scam. He’s been doing that all his life. But he’s certainly not helping the front row with his policies, and he has no intention of doing that. He may help his buddies, some front row people might be smart enough to glom onto him and sell out and be corrupt. But overall 8 years of a Trump administration is not going to do the front row well. It will do the back row better than the front row, I would speculate, if he wasn’t incompetent.

But I think ultimately the division we have is close to unsolvable. There’s no policy that’s going to address it, because I think it is so social and cultural. It requires almost a national kumbaya, the front row going back and living in different communities and opening their mind, and it requires the back row to drop a little bit of their anger. I just don’t see that happening in either case.

The rest of the magazine can be patchy, some good journalism and also some standard polemics against right and centrist targets. If you're a committed socialist then you'll probably get a lot out of it.

To stay on the left-wing theme, next up is an article from Freddie De Boer, a somewhat well known socialist educator. It's specifically from his blog The Anova, concerned with education and not so much politics. In any case, he's a clear headed writer tackling interesting stuff and I think it's worth a read even if you aren't much interested in education.

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education/

Imagine that you are a gubernatorial candidate who is making education and college preparedness a key facet of your campaign. Consider these two state average SAT scores.

Quantitative Verbal Total

Connecticut 450 480 930

Mississippi 530 550 1080

You believe that making your state’s high school graduates more competitive in college admissions is a key aspect of improving the economy of the state. You also note that Connecticut has powerful teacher unions which represent almost all of the public teachers in the state, while Mississippi’s public schools are largely free of public teacher unions. You resolve to make opposing teacher unions in your state a key aspect of your educational platform, out of a conviction that getting rid of the unions will ultimately benefit your students based on this data.

Is this a reasonable course of action?

…This means that almost everyone of appropriate age takes the SAT in Connecticut, including many students who are not prepared for college or are only marginally prepared. Most Mississippi students self-select themselves out of the sample. The top performing quintile (20%) of Connecticut students handily outperform the top performing quintile of Mississippi students…

In other words, what we might have perceived as a difference in education quality was really the product of systematic differences in how the considered populations were put together. The groups we considered had a hidden non-random distribution. This is selection bias.

People involved with the private high schools liked to brag about the high scores their students scored on standardized tests – without bothering to mention that you had to score well on such a test to get into them in the first place. This is, as I’ve said before, akin to having a height requirement for your school and then bragging about how tall your student body is.

Immigrant students in American schools outperform their domestic peers, and the reason is about culture and attitude, the immigrant’s willingness to strive and persevere, right? Nah. Selection bias. So-called alternative charters have helped struggling districts turn it around, right? Not really; they’ve just artificially created selection bias.

Selection bias hides everywhere in education. Sometimes, in fact, it is deliberately hidden in education. A few years ago, Reuters undertook an exhaustive investigation of the ways that charter schools deliberately exclude the hardest-to-educate students, despite the fact that most are ostensibly required to accept all kinds of students, as public schools are bound to. For all the talk of charters as some sort of revolution in effective public schooling, what we find is that charter administrators work feverishly to tip the scales, finding all kinds of crafty ways to ensure that they don’t have to educate the hardest students to educate. And even when we look past all of the dirty tricks they use – like, say, requiring parents to attend meetings held at specific times when most working parents can’t – there are all sorts of ways in which students are assigned to charter schools non-randomly and in ways that advantage those schools. Excluding students with cognitive and developmental disabilities is a notorious example.

I find it’s nearly impossible to get people to think about selection bias when they consider schools and their quality. Parents look at a private school and say, look, all these kids are doing so well, I’ll send my troubled child and he’ll do well, too. They look at the army of strivers marching out of Stanford with their diplomas held high and say, boy, that’s a great school. And they look at the Harlem Children’s Zone schools and celebrate their outcome metrics, without pausing to consider that it’s a lot easier to get those outcomes when you’re constantly expelling the students most predisposed to fail. But we need to look deeper and recognize these dynamics if we want to evaluate the use of scarce educational resources fairly and effectively.

He also blogs on medium about more general topics, which are also of a good quality, but there's plenty of that already so I felt the education angle made for a more unique read.

Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Some David Chapman now. He's been writing a hypertext book, which would probably be best summarized as a philosophical work, for several years now, which is called Meaningness. One of the better essays he's written is this one on the decline of subcultures due to their natural evolutions in popularity.

Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why?

One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.

Creators and fanatics are both geeks.2 They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it.

If the scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a strictly geek thing; a weird hobby, not a subculture.

If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops.3 Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.

Fanatics want to share their obsession, and mops initially validate it for them too. However, as mop numbers grow, they become a headache. Fanatics do all the organizational work, initially just on behalf of geeks: out of generosity, and to enjoy a geeky subsociety. They put on events, build websites, tape up publicity fliers, and deal with accountants. Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.

Mops also dilute the culture. The New Thing, although attractive, is more intense and weird and complicated than mops would prefer. Their favorite songs are the ones that are least the New Thing, and more like other, popular things. Some creators oblige with less radical, friendlier, simpler creations.

Fanatics may be generous, but they signed up to support geeks, not mops. At this point, they may all quit, and the subculture collapses.

Unless sociopaths5 show up. A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.

After a couple years, the cool is all used up: partly because the New Thing is no longer new, and partly because it was diluted into New Lite, which is inherently uncool. As the mops dwindle, the sociopaths loot whatever value is left, and move on to the next exploit. They leave behind only wreckage: devastated geeks who still have no idea what happened to their wonderful New Thing and the wonderful friendships they formed around it.

If you wondered what caused video games to start sucking, or who came up with the idea of microtransactions and season passes, here's your answer.

Since I brought up video games, it's an easy segue to Reason's "Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. ". This was quite popular so a lot of people have probably already seen it, perhaps on gaf, but if you haven't it's worth a read.

http://reason.com/archives/2017/06/13/young-men-are-playing-video-ga

In 2000, just 35 percent of lower-skilled young men lived with family. Now a slight majority of lower-skilled young men reside with their parents, whether they're employed or not. For those who lack employment, the figure is 70 percent. The vast majority of low-skilled young men—roughly 90 percent—have not built families. "If you're not working, as a man in your 20s with less than a bachelor's degree, you're pretty much single and childless," Hurst said last year on the podcast EconTalk.

In follow-up interviews, the economist has stressed that his research is preliminary and ongoing, and the particulars are subject to revision. Working papers released in the fall of 2016 and the spring of 2017 told essentially the same story: Low-skilled men are working less and living at home more.

Instead of working, they are playing video games. About three quarters of the increase in leisure time among men since 2000 has gone to gaming. Total time spent on computers, including game consoles, has nearly doubled.

You might think that this would be demoralizing. A life spent unemployed, living at home, without romantic prospects, playing digital time wasters does not sound particularly appealing on its face.

Yet this group reports far higher levels of overall happiness than low-skilled young men from the turn of the 21st century. In contrast, self-reported happiness for older workers without college degrees fell during the same period. For low-skilled young women and men with college degrees, it stayed basically the same. A significant part of the difference comes down to what Hurst has called "innovations in leisure computer activities for young men."

I've seen the argument be summed up as video games being a basic income for the soul, which seemed accurate.

I'm gonna cheat for the next one by including a links post.

http://kottke.org/17/04/the-webs-funniest-stories

the funniest stories on the web, as collected by Kottke. Can vouch for some of them being pretty funny and/or interesting.

Whilst on the subject of more humourous stories, you'll probably enjoy this from legal blog Lawyers and Liquor. In an earlier blog post, the author had reported on a bizarre case between sovereign citizen furries (http://www.lawyersandliquor.com/2017/04/free-furry-of-the-land-when-sovcits-and-furries-collide/) which attracted the attention of the furry community. Subsequently, the lawyer was invited to a Furry Convention, he took them up on the offer, and described his actually rather pleasant experience:

http://www.lawyersandliquor.com/2017/05/fur-and-loathing-in-tysons-corner-boozy-goes-to-furthemore/

(in case you are concerned, the link is sfw and there are no pictures or anything)

Okay, so, I went to a furry convention. I took a little trip down to the nation’s capital to spend some time with 1,050 furries at Furthemore ’17 last weekend. And…well, let me just tell you how this shit happened:

I was looking for the depravity I had been told to expect. Surely there would be a flood of bodily fluids bursting forth from the elevators like that blood from The Shining. Maybe there was a special room I wasn’t aware of? Because all I saw were people…you know…having fun and not hurting anyone.

What I saw at Furthemore was people having fun. Maybe there was depravity behind closed doors, I don’t know…but if there was it was behind closed doors and therefore none of your fucking business. The public stuff I saw was people having fun. People just so happy to be with members of their community. People stoked to have three days to be around like-minded people and cut loose.

It's a nice wholesome piece, and later the blog started up a regular 'Furry mailbox' to deal with weird furry legal cases, in case you have anymore desire to read about furries.

Now onto something a bit more grim. Days of Rage is a recent book about extremely violent communist terror campaigns that were carried out in the 1970s in America, helpfully reviewed over at Status 451:

https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.

The Weathermen (technically, the name of the group was Weatherman, singular) came out of a group called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS was a college organization with a bunch of campus chapters. That meant existing machinery that worked, and membership numbers. A fantastic resource, if you want to mine it to build a guerilla movement.

SDS started radicalizing in ’66. By ’67, Burrough notes, an SDS leader is saying in the New York Times, “We are working to build a guerilla force in an urban environment.” He backed down quickly, but the genie was out. And then 1968 happened, and things went completely batshit.

You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution. We believed 3rd World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”

But Weatherman is locked in, and getting increasingly insular and cultish. Eventually, there are maybe 150 Weathermen left out of all of SDS. And now they turn to a new organization: the underground, which offered (among other things) a market for new identities. If you’re thinking “hey, I bet that market has something to do with Vietnam-era draft dodgers,” spot-on. They established covers.

And then they started bombing.

The last story I’ll share from Days of Rage is, I’m not gonna lie to you, the craziest of the lot. How crazy? Let me ask you this:

What if fanatics made a serious and nearly successful attempt on the life of the President of the United States?

What if those fanatics got into the Capitol building and committed a mass shooting on Congress while it was in session?

What if those fanatics conducted bombing sprees, for years, in multiple American cities?

And what if people really did do every one of those things, and you’d never heard of them? That’s the story of Puerto Rican separatists.

I’m not kidding.

The President they tried to kill was Harry Truman, in 1950, as told in the book American Gunfight. They shot up Congress in 1954, wounding five Congressmen (who recovered). They bombed American cities like mad in the 1970s.

The ’70s bombing campaign was done by a group called FALN. The FBI’s working theory is that the FALN was a creation of Cuban intelligence.

That said, FALN had an amazing set-up in the hard left. Not only were they trained in bomb-making by Weather Underground, they had possibly the best Institution any radical group has ever had: the Episcopal Church.

I’m still not kidding.

FALN started bombing in ’74. Their demands were 1) Puerto Rican independence 2) release of PR separatist prisoners. Their deeds were nasty. FALN targeted cops with a fake call and a boobytrap, disfiguring one. They bombed a restaurant on Wall Street, killing 4, injuring over 40. Outrage at the deaths changed their approach. They started bombing at night, setting off department store fires — nonlethal, but harrowing. More harrowing: FALN opened new fronts in Chicago and in Washington, D.C. Bombing in three cities demonstrates serious logistics.

You would think the Episcopal Church would be outraged. Horrified to be dragged into the legal proceedings. You’d be wrong. Liberal Episcopal bishops were enraged — with the FBI! Claimed govt was out to stop the church from funding progressive Hispanic groups! The institution the FALN had compromised went full-force to defend them and mobilized mainstream institutions on FALN’s behalf!

Wait, what? Yeah. In 1980, the FALN attacked the NYC campaign HQ of George H.W. Bush in an effort to destroy voter-registration lists. Another team smashed up the Carter-Mondale HQ in Chicago. The FALN even threatened delegates to the party conventions. Nobody remembers!

It's a super long post and there's loads more stuff at the link, in fact it was difficult to excerpt without just quoting most of the first half.

however, a slight word of warning: Status 451 is a 'free speech' blog set up by former Popehat contributor Clarkhat. He was kicked out of Popehat basically for being too radically right wing. As such, the article features continual asides worrying about modern leftists, and at some point the author just stops writing about Days of Rage and goes off into a fever dream about a new civil war led by violent left wingers destroying republicans everywhere. So, might want to try and ignore that stuff and stop reading about half way through, since the rest of it is really interesting. And if you want to learn about the delusions of the hard right, then at least it's informative.

http://slaent.com/thread/1077767/page/396/post/1108857/

Best thing I have ever read on the internet.

One boys discovery of God.

Whilst we're on the subject of God, here is jaibot on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, a morality tale:

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

In 2010, New York randomly chose homeless applicants to participate in its Homebase program, and tracked those who were not allowed into the program as a control group. The program was helping as many people as it could, the only change was explicitly labeling a number of people it wasn’t helping as a “control group”. The response?

“They should immediately stop this experiment,” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”

On March 11th, 2012, the vast majority of people did nothing to help homeless people. They were busy doing other things, many of them good and important things, but by and large not improving the well-being of homeless humans in any way

There wouldn’t be any scathing editorials if BBH Labs had just chosen to do nothing – but they did something helpful-but-not-maximally-helpful, and thus are open to judgment.

I think this might be where a lot of the discomfort with talking about things we can do to alleviate suffering comes from. If you implicitly believe in the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, then to confront the scope of suffering in the world is to make it your fault, and then if you don’t throw everything you have at the problem you’re as “bad” as PETA or Mr. Thornley or Uber or BBH Labs.

But what if – what if noticing a problem didn’t make it any worse? What if we could act on a problem and not feel horrible for making it just a little better, even if it was an action that benefited ourselves as well? What if we said that in these instances, these groups weren’t evil – it’s okay to notice a problem and only make it a little bit better. If everyone did that, the world would be a vastly better place. If everyone “exploited” opportunities where they could benefit and alleviate people’s suffering at the same time, we’d all be better off.

It's a short blog, but one of the more important ones, I feel. I agree with jaibot that if everyone was aware of the Copenhagen interpretation, and thus took some small steps to make the world better, then the end result would be a much better world.

You may have noticed thus far that there is an attempt to give some kind of cognitive diversity with these links. The importance of this concept has been stressed repeatedly in recent times - with more and more information becoming polarized, it is vital to sometimes read people you disagree with, just to expand your horizons. Hence the inclusion of both hard left and hard right links above.

Continuing that, we have an article from army veteran magazine Task and Purpose, about the NRA convention:

http://taskandpurpose.com/nra-annual-meeting-atlanta-trump/

The first thought I have, passing through the main entrance of the Georgia World Convention Center for the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta, is that I must be crazy, because I’m hearing voices. Well, a voice — a drawled, gravy-dipped bass that sounds distinctly like an enticement… or a threat.

What it says is: “THE WALL OF GUNS.”

I’m still on a cloud as I run back in the direction of Trump’s upcoming speech. After a Secret Service check, we credentialed media types stride single-file toward the empty arena, past a buzzing queue of eager audience-goers. One guy in a homemade Trump shirt yells, “YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE!” toward me and Nicole Borrero, my camerawoman. A chorus of raspberries and huzzahs ripples through the crowd at the journalists.

The reporters I’ve met here are pro-gun, pro-vet, or right-leaning; most mainstream news organizations either didn’t get cleared by the NRA to attend or didn’t bother coming. But down here in this hallway, we’re not Adam and Nicole from T&P, and we’re certainly not gun people; we’re The Media, and we’re the enemy.

That’s certainly how I was raised. The feeling I get at this NRA annual meeting, very acutely and consistently, is home. I am an ammosexual. I don’t just love guns. They are an indelible part of me. I floundered at tee-ball and virtually every other sport, but from the first time my father slipped a Ruger 10/22 into my arms, shooting — and being around other shooters — just felt like things my brain had been preprogrammed to do.

In this other meeting, dark forces still lurk around every corner, ready to roll our country into tyranny and bloody chaos. “These are dangerous times,” Trump is telling a fiery audience here. “These are horrible times for certain obvious reasons.” He has a conversation with a member of the crowd about border security:

In this meeting, LaPierre is on a roll of his own: “As you know, there’s an intense war that’s being waged by leftist zealots to destroy President Trump and destroy his administration,” he tells the crowd. “They’ll seemingly stop at nothing, including tearing apart our country… If we don’t stand up to them, and I mean now, an entire generation of Americans could be lost. And our nation along with them.

“It’s up to us to speak up against the three most dangerous voices in America: academic elites, political elites, and media elites,” LaPierre concludes. “These are America’s greatest domestic threats.”

But, look: No bullshit, the NRA has also evolved into the bully pulpit for a special kind of alt-fact-based Second Amendment conservatism. My pop gave up on the group in the mid-90s, about the same time LaPierre, the lobby’s main voice, first complained of a Democrat giving “jackbooted Government thugs more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure and kill us.” I was just about to join the Navy, and as much of a civil libertarian as I was, it seemed pretty weird to me that a gun lobby whose membership is so vet and law enforcement-heavy would poop so publicly on its own kind.

So it’s been for my adult life. The NRA argues that the freedom to bear arms is “America’s 1st Freedom,” the one from which all others flow. It makes the case to gun owners that if they really care about firearms and freedom, they should agree that liberalism is a disease, that rioters and socialists and criminals and jihadis and dishonest reporters lurk around every corner, and that every election represents an historic threat to our 226-year-old right to self-armament. Hurricane Katrina? An excuse for the gun-grabbers. The United Nations? A plot by the gun-grabbers. Barack Hussein Obama? The worst gun-grabber of all, natch. The NRA, for whatever good it’s done, has become pretty adept at deploying bullshit to scare gun folks and jam up the government works.

So, which NRA meeting are we really attending? Is it the one where we’re all empowered and cordial and tickled that we’re racking weapons, or the one where we’re scared shitless of all the unarmed forces of leftism that control zero branches of federal government and a mere quarter of the state houses in America? Am I at home here, or an enemy of American freedom?

There’s the joy, and then there’s the terror: LaPierre and the NRA continue to seek ways to scare their membership into action with half-truths and stereotypes. That’s not a new tactic for the Trump era; when George W. Bush was elected, a reporter asked LaPierre how he’d manage to whip up members without a gun-banning Democrat in the White House. LaPierre responded: “Thank God for the United Nations.” All that fear, all that resentment, it has to go somewhere. Doesn’t it?Maybe not; maybe it’ll dissipate amid the satisfaction of victory. My experience this weekend is that a lot of people just enjoy guns, and rightly or wrongly, they feel like it’s a little easier to do that now. They won. Their hated enemies lost. Let’s just take a damn breath.

An articulate description of guns can mean to people, whilst still having an understanding of the batshit politics stirred up in their name.

Interesting idea for a thread. I think this belongs here because it has to do with so much more than football.

For Teammates in Love, an Island Oasis

AKUREYRI, Iceland — From the kitchen window of their small cottage, Bianca Sierra and Stephany Mayor can see the soccer stadium where they practice every day. Mayor says she is living the dream here, playing first division soccer in Iceland’s top division and sleeping so close to the field.

“It’s like being in La Masia,” she said, invoking Barcelona’s famous clubhouse, which sits in the shadow of the team’s Camp Nou stadium.

But Mayor and Sierra had a different dream when they moved to this isolated fishing city at the mouth of a fjord: They simply wanted to play on the same team while living openly as a couple.

In Mexico, they said, they faced a powerful coach who ordered them to hide their relationship from the public, and a culture in which fans routinely shouted a homophobic chant at matches. When Sierra and Mayor did finally come out last summer, by posting photos on social media professing their love, they were subjected to vicious online harassment.

While gay athletes have felt increasingly comfortable coming out in American sports leagues over the past decade, and hardly raise an eyebrow on the women’s national teams of many countries, lesbians are often less visible in Mexican society because of the country’s macho culture. Consequently, when they go public with their sexuality, they can face more opposition, said Claudia Pedraza, who specializes in studying gender and sports at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

“For a woman to come out as a lesbian in Mexico is even more complicated because she faces double discrimination,” Pedraza said. “First, because she is a woman. And then, second, because she is assuming a homosexual identity.”

Thor-KA’s coach, Halldor Jon Sigurdsson, said the Mexican players brought an innovative approach to the field. He described Sierra as a “machine,” and said Mayor had an “unbelievable football mind.”

“And if Fany is with the person she loves,” he said, using Mayor’s nickname, “she’s obviously going to feel absolutely fantastic.”

Jon Bois wrote... something again. If you remember his Tebow Chronicles, it's got the same weirdness thing.

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/chapter-1

Just a quick link for today, as I'm a bit busy. It's another Atavist article, quite possibly their best singular piece.

The title is American Hippopotamus

https://magazine.atavist.com/american-hippopotamus

This is a story about hippopotamuses, as advertised, but it’s also a story about two very complicated and exceptional men. These men were spies. They were also bitter enemies. Each wanted to kill the other and fully expected to feel really good about himself afterward. Eccentric circumstances—circumstances having to do with hippopotamuses—would join these men together as allies and even dear friends. But then, eventually, they’d be driven into opposition again.

These two men will seem larger than life, but they lived at a time, a hundred years ago, when, I would argue, life in America seemed larger than life—when what was unimaginable still felt feasible and ideas that looked ridiculous could still come true.

That said, this is the story of one idea that looked ridiculous and didn’t come true. The idea was ridiculous. But it was completely reasonable, too.

All I can say is, try to keep that in mind.

Atavist articles aren't really suited to long excerpts, so I'll try and describe the article. As said, in one sense it's a history of the attempt to bring Hippos over to Louisiana swamps and use them as a new food source, which occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. But in another sense it's about the intertwining lives of Frederick Russell Burnham and Fritz Duquesne. Burnham was some kind of impossibly badass scout who fought for Britain during the Boer wars, whilst Duquesne was his arch nemesis on the Boer side, a man known as the Black Panther. The two never met in battle but somehow ended up on the same, pro-Hippo side in America about 10 years after the war. The story traces how their lives continued to interact, and the vastly different routes they ended up following after the failure of the Hippo option (?Spoiler? I don't think anyone would be surprised that there are no hippos to be found in the wild in the US).

The article is also available in audiobook format, on the same page and free if you'd rather not read, though it comes in at 2 and a half hours.

Highly Recommended.

I saw this going around a lot when it came out, but just got around to reading it yesterday. Fascinating insight on the private prison industry.

My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard

People say a lot of negative things about CCA,” the head of training, Miss Blanchard, tells us. “That we’ll hire anybody. That we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Which is not really true, but if you come here and you breathing and you got a valid driver’s license and you willing to work, then we’re willing to hire you.” She warns us repeatedly, however, that to become corrections officers, we’ll need to pass a test at the end of our four weeks of training. We will need to know the name of the CEO, the names of the company’s founders, and their reason for establishing the first private prison more than 30 years ago. (Correct answer: “to alleviate the overcrowding in the world market.”)

I'm back to drop some more mildly interesting and/or useful knowledge. Today's articles swing more towards current events than the other links I've posted, but since it's an area most will likely never have even heard of I think you'll find it interesting to read about.

https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/high-noon-in-the-himalayas-behind-the-china-india-standoff-at-doka-la/

High Noon in the Himalayas: Behind the China-India Standoff at Doka La

The showdown at Doka La is the product of a multi-layered, multi-party dispute steeped in centuries-old treaties and ambiguous territorial claims. Only recently have sufficient details emerged to piece together a coherent picture of the crisis and we’re still left with more questions than answers. However, one thing is clear: While stare-downs at the disputed China-India border are a common affair, the episode now underway is an altogether different, potentially far more dangerous, beast.

This crisis began in mid-June when Chinese forces were spotted constructing a road near the disputed tri-border linking India, China, and Bhutan, prompting an intervention by Indian troops in nearby Sikkim. Nearly a fortnight later, over 100 soldiers from each side are eyeball-to-eyeball, with India moving thousands more into supporting areas. Each passing week has seen a further hardening of each side’s position.

…

Unsurprisingly, there is more at stake in the Doka La standoff than a few dozen square miles of desolate Himalayan frontier. There are grander geopolitical dynamics and ambitions driving the dispute related to the balance of power at the LAC, the broader Sino-Indian rivalry, a struggle for Bhutan’s loyalties, and the strategic vulnerability of India’s “Chicken’s Neck.”

A Chinese offensive into this “Chicken’s Neck” could sever India’s connection to the northeast, where China still claims up to 90,000 square kilometers in Arunachal Pradesh. China’s Global Times seemed to acknowledge as much, and further stoke Indian anxieties by arguing “northeast India might take the opportunity to become independent” if Delhi’s fears were realized and China launched an operation to “quickly separate mainland India from the northeast.”

For over a month now there has been an escalating dispute between two nuclear armed nations, China and India, and I would bet that no one who posts here was even aware of it. As with most border disputes, the whole thing comes off as incomparably stupid to anyone not involved in the governments themselves, but that doesn't change the fact that the stakes are very high indeed.

For more on the precise geographical claims of the dispute, The Diplomat goes into more details (with satellite maps):

http://thediplomat.com/2017/07/the-political-geography-of-the-india-china-crisis-at-doklam/

Though I’ll elaborate in successive articles, the dispute began in early June when Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) engineers began constructing a road near the Indian border on a piece of territory disputed between China and Bhutan. India, perceiving this as an unacceptable change to the status quo with potentially serious strategic ramifications, crossed a settled and undisputed international border with its troops to block the PLA contingent from proceeding. The Chinese government was apoplectic about what it saw as an Indian incursion across a settled border into Chinese territory (in reality, disputed with Bhutan) and has given an ultimatum to New Delhi that no diplomatic solution can be found until Indian troops unilaterally withdraw from what Beijing sees as Chinese territory. India, in the meantime, is not budging. Both sides are gridlocked and tensions are rising.

It's August now, so what better time to read some sweet internet stuff? A variety of different pieces today, so I'll put them all in this post rather than spread them out.

Up first, a neat little history lesson on Blind Tom, an African American musical savant during the 19th century who was largely forgotten since.

http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/confounded-enigma-blind-tom-wiggins

"I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can. No one understands it," a St Louis man uttered after watching Blind Tom perform in concert in 1866. His mystification was by no means isolated. Few other performers on the nineteenth century stage aroused as much curiosity as "Blind Tom" Wiggins. Born a slave in Georgia in 1848, by the time he died Hoboken in 1908, he was an international celebrity and his name was a byword for inexplicable genius.

Yet today this remarkable pianist is virtually forgotten. His story comes as a surprise to many who consider themselves well versed in African American history. "How is it I've never heard of him before?" is a question often put to me.

But was Blind Tom really a Confederate stooge or, like the St Louis man, was there something about him that American society did not understand? Drawing from the wealth of scientific research over the last fifty years, it is highly likely that "Blind Tom" Wiggins was a savant, most likely an autistic one. His brain was wired in a profoundly different way than most people.

Next is some sports writing. This article is probably more suitable for the boxing or MMA threads on here, but it's such a well written, interesting piece i think people who have no interest in those sports will still really like it. The article discusses Mayweather-McGregor, and the ridiculousness of it, the drive behind it, as well as a lengthy detour into other fights that basically functioned as 'free money' for bettors in the know due to how one sided they were.

http://deadspin.com/floyd-mayweather-vs-conor-mcgregor-is-the-second-bigge-1797272009/amp

I’ve watched some videos of McGregor training and sparring in preparation for his upcoming fight against Floyd Mayweather, Jr. They baffle me. I can’t figure out whether McGregor is a deluded megalomaniac who actually believes he can box, a total beginner who doesn’t care that he can’t box, or a performance artist with an agenda, deliberately presenting himself as the least gifted, most buffoonish prizefighter imaginable as a way to fuck with Mayweather’s followers. It’s not just that he’s a novice; it’s that he’s a talentless novice. No one could have taught him to be a good fighter, no matter how early in his life they’d gotten him started.

Who’s Bringing These Odds Down?

That’s nowhere near the only reason, however. This is one of those rare, emotionally charged fights where the underdog’s followers are nearly messianic in their fervor.

This hopeful statement is characteristic of how many of McGregor’s fans see him and his chances. “I believe in my gut.” I’m not dismissing the value of intuition, even as it applies to boxing matches. I’ll suggest, though, that it probably applies more reasonably to a fight like Marvin Hagler vs. Thomas Hearns than to one between an elite, undefeated boxer with genius-level matchmaking skills and a debuting opponent.

Insane misperceptions that impact the betting line almost always center on either the sentimentalization of an icon or an intense identification with a fighter based on nationalistic, cultural, or racial grounds. When both factors come into play simultaneously, fortunes are there to be had for the taking.

Here are some noteworthy fights where the odds were way out of proportion to what they should have been. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of boxing would have known how to bet them.

In the United States, MMA is a young white man’s sport. It doesn’t too much matter where its practitioners are from; the zeitgeist remains white, male, and aggressive. A lot of the money is going to be spent wagering on Conor McGregor to beat Floyd Mayweather, Jr., and it will be inspired by white longing. While identification is often a main ingredient in impossible-odds betting, adding the MMA component brings in an increased element of transference, a sense of “That’s me in the ring with him.” The fighter doesn’t only represent the spectator; he is the spectator. “I’m the same size as Conor McGregor. I’ve studied martial arts, I can strike, I know some Brazilian jiu-jitsu, I do cardio. Mayweather’s an old man, and I’m 23. I kicked Jeffy Gilford’s ass in middle school, and he was a little, mouthy black dude.”

And to round us off, an essay on medium about the metrics driving the destruction of quality journalism and the news industry in general:

https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de

…This did not stop a media explosion declaring an imminent apocalypse. A frenzy of clickbait and terrifying narratives emerged as every major news entity raced to capitalize on the collective Ebola panic.

The physical damage done by the disease itself was small. The hysteria, however — traveling instantly across the internet — shuttered schools, grounded flights, and terrified the nation.

Those billions were parlayed directly into advertising revenue. Before the hysteria had ended, millions of dollars worth of advertising real-estate attached to Ebola-related media had been bought and sold algorithmically to companies.

The terror was far more contagious than the virus itself, and had the perfect network through which to propagate — a digital ecosystem built to spread emotional fear far and wide.

They do this by focusing on one over-simplified metric, one that supports advertising as its primary source of revenue. This metric is called engagement, and emphasizing it — above all else — has subtly and steadily changed the way we look at the news, our politics, and each other.

Today the news needs to compete with everything else in our digital life — thousands of apps and millions of websites. More than anything, it now competes with Social Media — one of the most successful attention-capturing machines ever created.

Social Media is one of the primary reasons there has been a double-digit drop in newspaper revenues, and why journalism as an industry is in steep decline. It is now how a majority of Americans get news.

The News Feed Editor has literally changed the way news is written. It has become the number one driver of traffic to news sites globally, and that has shifted the behavior of content creators. To get a story picked up by the News Feed Editor, news producers (and human editors) have changed their strategies to stay relevant and stem losses. To do this, many news organizations have adopted a traffic-at-all-costs mentality, pushing for more engagement at the expense of what we would traditionally call editorial accuracy.

enjoy

What a lad

Just read the boxing piece. Was quality.

i stumbled across a review in the LRB that I thought some might enjoy:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n22/thomas-chatterton-williams/fried-fish

It's ostensibly about the book The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead but more generally muses on the productions of black culture in the age of woke.

Inspired by the disproportionate impact of the economic collapse of 2008 and by growing awareness of the failure of the policy of mass incarceration as well as scores of high-profile travesties of justice – notably the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, which gave birth to the #BlackLivesMatter movement – alongside many more ambiguous affronts (such as the lack of nominees of colour at the 2015 Academy Awards, which gave birth to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign), the rapturous, impossibly short-lived post-raciality of the first black presidency has been usurped by a backward-looking social consciousness best expressed by the internet neologism ‘wokeness’.
…
This sentiment, virtually unspeakable eight years ago, now permeates black cultural output, taking in everything from popular music like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Beyoncé’s Lemonade, as well as her sister Solange’s A Seat at the Table, to films like Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Ava Duvernay’s 13th and Nate Parker’s much hyped The Birth of a Nation, to books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and the poet Claudia Rankine’s award-winning Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To me, the getting of this honour is … the culture saying: “We have an investment in dismantling white dominance in our culture. If you’re trying to do that, we’re going to help you” … The MacArthur is given to my subject through me.’ The moral of the story is clear: if you are a serious black artist working today, whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to wake up.

At the height of black rapture over Obama’s election, Whitehead published an irreverent, almost flippant op-ed in the New York Times entitled ‘Finally, a Thin President’, which made a mockery of the notion that an earth-shattering symbolic power was attached to the historic achievement. The next year, he published another satirical op-ed in the New York Times, this one a guide for blocked novelists in search of fresh material. One of his more eyebrow-raising suggestions was what he called the Southern Novel of Black Misery. ‘Africans in America,’ he wrote,

cut your teeth on this literary staple. Slip on your sepia-tinted goggles and investigate the legacy of slavery that still reverberates to this day, the legacy of Reconstruction that still reverberates to this day, and crackers. Invent nutty transliterations of what you think slaves talked like. But hurry up – the hounds are a-gittin’ closer! Sample titles: ‘I’ll Love You Till the Gravy Runs Out and Then I’m Gonna Lick Out the Skillet’; ‘Sore Bunions on a Dusty Road’.

That Whitehead came, this year, to publish the Southern Novel of Black Misery he had lampooned in the New York Times and transcended in Sag Harbor is rather incredible. That he was immediately received as a prodigal son who had at long last come home – Oprah selected The Underground Railroad for her extremely lucrative book club, and it has been shortlisted for the National Book Award – is less surprising. That the most important and acclaimed American novel of the past year, by one of the most talented, protean and iconoclastic American writers of any ethnic group or socioeconomic background is, in effect, an accomplished concession to the mandates of wokeness is notable in the extreme.

On the complete other end of the spectrum comes this article from Jacobite (note, not Jacobin the UK socialist magazine). It's not the best written piece, but its on a subject of undue fascination to me. I came across a theory some months ago that much of the modern internet cultural battles have been driven by a proxy war between the websites somethingawful and 4chan , originating as mere trolling between the 'irreverent' left wing SA and "ironic"(don't have enough air quotes for that one) right wing 4chan before being taken over by 'true believers' as it spread across the internet. There is probably only a small kernel of truth to the whole thing but it's interesting to read about nonetheless.

4chan's pernicious influence is rather well known these days and this article looks at the possible influence that SA may have had on current political norms of the left. They appear to have been somewhat mindkilled, as all their own dumpster fires are dismissed as just a natural reaction taking place across the world whilst those of their enemies are entirely the fault of internet nerds, but the core of the article seems linked.

https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/12/how-message-board-culture-remade-the-left/

One scene that has been markedly successful in capturing the attention of the journalistic world is the one that developed from the pay-to-post forum Something Awful. Originally a humor site, it became one of the most influential sites on the internet — you probably know that 4chan was created by a Something Awful regular, and that its initial userbase drew heavily from SA. Its influence on politics, however, extends far beyond 4chan. Buckle up, folks: you’re in for a long, confusing, and terrible ride.

These aren’t the kangaroo courts of Stalin. What they are is the schoolyard courts of Helldump, a Something Awful subforum created for the strange purpose of being a schoolyard court. The Something Awful wiki speaks for itself here: “The official birth of Helldump 2000 spawned a new creative outlet for pedophiles, racists, bigots, Ron Paul supporters, gun zealots, defenders of anime and otherwise crap posters to be outed in a thorough, convincing manner by an astute civilian task force. Essentially, it checks and balances the stupidity that seeps its way into the forums as a whole, although (unfortunately) it does not function as a preventive treatment (shit posters still propagate at an alarming rate). Rather, the modus operandi of Helldump is to profile and insult the (assumed) poor goon for his questionable views, and in turn function as a virtual tourniquet in an attempt to stop the bleeding, as well as force said shit poster into online anonymity and/or reclusiveness.” In practice, most of what Helldump did was dogpile furries.

Helldump was closed after two years, and many of its regulars migrated to a different subforum, Laissez’s Fair, “the original Dirtbag Left.” The SA wiki entry for LF helpfully explains that it was “opened up to put all the Ron Paul shit” and became a “refugee holding bay” for Helldump after the latter was closed. “Over time people started making effort posts about such things the nightmare that is our criminal justice system, social justice in general, as well as the ideas of Karl Marx. The lack of moderation was made up for by basically shouting people out of the forum who were stupid MRAs and concern trolls. Gradually the complexion of the forum shifted from liberal to socialist.” Eventually, LF was closed, because “LF posters went internet detective on mods and posted death threats,” including several to then-President Obama.

Providing a precise accounting of the impact of Something Awful on the Anglosphere left is difficult, as it would be with any subculture. The history is oral, largely lost, deliberately obfuscated, and shrouded in irony. It is likely that nothing will come of it, and that, in the end, it will be the farce mirroring the tragedy of neoconservatism: an insane political movement that developed out of a bizarre and insular clique in a world where having the right connections matters above all else, writing things that very few people care about but doing a great deal of damage along the way. It seems that the norms of Helldump have become callout culture, SA users’ trolling of the libertarians corralled in LF have become the dirtbag left, and some of those responsible have written for not only Gawker and Buzzfeed, but also The New York Times.

I'm so glad I never go into the politic threads on SA and just stick with the sports and tabletop RPG threads.

e: also, there is no link to that article in your post :(

e2: Can also confirm that Helldump, while funny, was awful and shouldn't have existed. GBS, FYAD, and BYOB can go away, too, imo.

e3: Debate & Discussion is an awful sub-forum and is where most of the politics are discussed, though it sometimes seeps into other forums.

By Kibner Go To PostI'm so glad I never go into the politic threads on SA and just stick with the sports and tabletop RPG threads.

e: also, there is no link to that article in your post :(

e2: Can also confirm that Helldump, while funny, was awful and shouldn't have existed. GBS, FYAD, and BYOB can go away, too, imo.

e3: Debate & Discussion is an awful sub-forum and is where most of the politics are discussed, though it sometimes seeps into other forums.

Thanks for pointing that out, I've edited it in

By sohois Go To PostThanks for pointing that out, I've edited it in

Np. Just finished reading it and I had to laugh at the author closing with a reference to a popular meme:

I’m told that this is what Gamergate was about. But there are many things I’ve been told Gamergate was about.

It is not uncommon to see a response to a defensive/offensive post that is also insane/inane to be something along the lines of "<x> is really about ethics in journalism." The <x> was originally "Gamergate" and was one of the defenses used by its supporters.

Here's some creepy parenting shit: Parents who pay to be watched, about some bonkers company that offers to film and document every interaction a family takes and then gives you a detailed report and rules to improve your family.

https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/cognition-builders-family-intervention-parenting-help-adhd.html

One night, after confiscating his computer and iPad, Elizabeth woke up at two in the morning with a feeling of dread. She made her way down the hallway to Shep’s room, where she found his bed empty. She discovered her son in his closet, playing on an old, broken Xbox he’d restored himself, the iTunes gift cards he’d stolen from her office littering the floor. It was then that she realized they were in over their heads. An educational consultant they’d hired, Myrna Harris, suggested something that at first seemed extreme — a relatively new company known for helping children in crisis that could set up a highly structured, highly regimented environment in a home.

The company was called Cognition Builders, and Harris explained that they would send people to a family for a period of weeks to observe everyone’s behavior and to figure out how parents could get better control over their kids. The people they sent were called “family architects.” They’d move in with a family for months at a time, immersing themselves in their routines and rituals. The family architects were the foot soldiers in the Cognition Builders team, but the most critical part of the company’s strategy involved the installation of a series of Nest Cams with microphones all around the house, which enabled round-the-clock observation and interaction in real time. At the end of each day, the architects would send the parents extensive emails and texts summarizing what they’d seen, which they’d use to develop a system of rules for the family to implement at home. Over time, the role of the family architects would evolve from observing to enforcing the rules. Through this kind of intensive scrutiny and constant behavioral intervention, they claimed to be able to change a family’s, and a child’s functioning from the ground up.

Elizabeth said that at times, working with Cognition Builders felt like being part of an experiment with Pavlov’s dogs. She recounted how one of her friends came over and witnessed CB’s methods firsthand. One of Elizabeth’s children had broken a rule, muttered something disrespectful to his mother in the kitchen. It was the kind of behavior Elizabeth might have let slide before, but the family architect, who was standing nearby, intervened swiftly, issuing a “strike.” Her friend was horrified. “She was pulling me into the pantry saying, ‘This is too intense. It’s too much. They’re too strict.’” At moments, Elizabeth agreed with her, but after a while, she began to see how the strictness and consistency were working, and she started following the family architects’ lead.

Jessica Yuppa, Cognition Builders’ director of curricula and assistant clinical director, said the Nest Cams give CB an “unfiltered look” at what goes on inside the home. “Families think they know about themselves, but they don’t. Cameras give us a beat-for-beat of interactions. If a parent is struggling to communicate with a child, for example, we can watch a conversation and say, ‘Okay, why do you think he looked away when you said this?’” Yuppa said it doesn’t take long for families to adapt to the scrutiny. “My experience is the self-consciousness goes away very quickly,” she said. “People live their lives and forget we’re there.”

When the family architects were present, they went everywhere the family went, following them around from room to room, accompanying them if they went outside. They even came along when Elizabeth went school-supply shopping at Staples; as she was stocking up on three-ring binders and printer paper, two family architects followed behind her, taking notes.

The kids had mixed reactions. Shep told his Mom the family architects made him nervous but his 12-year-old brother was probably the least accepting of the project.

One afternoon, not long after the family architects arrived, he grabbed a footstool and put his face right up to one of the Nest Cams.

“Hey, buttholes!” he said. “Why don’t you leave us alone?”

At first, nothing happened. Then there was a crackle of static, followed by a voice on the other end. “That’s a strike,” it said.

I liked this recent posting from Otium about patriarchy. Note that is not "The Patriarchy" but rather the concept itself, "the system of social organization where families are hierarchical and headed by the father" as the author puts it. A smattering of monkey behavioural studies and some biblical reference form a basis for a conclusion of the damage that the traditional patriarchal model of authority inflicts upon the wider society. I'm assuming it's the first part of a series since the conclusion is rather undeveloped, and the author already has another post about it.

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/

I’m starting to believe that patriarchy is the root of destructive authoritarianism, where patriarchy simply means the system of social organization where families are hierarchical and headed by the father. To wit:

Patriarchy justifies abuse of wives by husbands and abuse of children by parents
The family is the model of the state; pretty much everybody, from Confucius to Plato, believes that governmental hierarchy evolved from familial hierarchy; rulers from George Washington to Ataturk are called “the father of his country”
There is no clear separation between hierarchy and abuse. The phenomenon of dominant/submissive behavior among primates closely parallels what humans would consider domestic abuse.

It's the Atlantic, in 2001: A Reader's Manifesto.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/

in which B.R.Myers, who you may know from his book on North Korea, The Cleanest Race, skewers modern literature criticism. Note that this is not an attack on modern literature per se, but rather the crap prose that is often held up as great writing for little reason other than signaling the erudition of the critic. Despite being written over 15 years ago, this remains pretty on point, and on its merits its a good breakdown of some supposedly classic books and authors.

Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is now considered to be "literary fiction"—not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance. It is these works that receive full-page critiques, often one in the Sunday book-review section and another in the same newspaper during the week. It is these works, and these works only, that make the annual short lists of award committees.

Really simple, primitive people like their poetry to be as … artificial and remote from the language of everyday affairs as possible. We reproach the eighteenth century with its artificiality. But the fact is that Beowulf is couched in a diction fifty times more complicated and unnatural than that of [Pope's poem] Essay on Man.

Mr. Cardan comes off in the novel as a bit of a windbag, but there is at least anecdotal evidence to back up his observation. We know, for example, that European peasants were far from pleased when their clergy stopped mystifying them with Latin. Edward Pococke (1604-1691) was an English preacher and linguist whose sermons, according to the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, "were always composed in a plain style upon practical subjects, carefully avoiding all show and ostentation of learning."

But what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average "genre" novel. Even today's obscurity is easy—the sort of gibberish that stops all thought dead in its tracks. The best way to demonstrate this in the space at hand is to take a look at some of the most highly acclaimed styles of contemporary writing.

In this scene from Accordion Crimes (1996) a woman has just had her arms sliced off by a piece of sheet metal.

She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the wood of the barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet and driven sand, the unconcerned swallows darting and reappearing with insects clasped in their beaks looking like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank windows of the house, the old glass casting blue swirled reflections at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her stumped arms, even, in the first moment, hearing the wet thuds of her forearms against the barn and the bright sound of the metal striking.

The last thing Proulx wants is for you to start wondering whether someone with blood spurting from severed arms is going to stand rooted long enough to see more than one bird disappear, catch an insect, and reappear, or whether the whole scene is not in bad taste of the juvenile variety. Instead you are meant to read the sentence in one mental breath and succumb, under the sheer accumulation of words, to a spurious impression of what Walter Kendrick, in an otherwise mixed review in The New York Times, called "brilliant prose" (and in reference to this very excerpt, besides).

Tanabe kicked off the Post's online discussion of Proulx's work by asking participants to join him in "choosing your favorite sentence(s) from any of the stories in Close Range." I doubt that any reviewer in our more literate past would have expected people to have favorite sentences from a work of prose fiction. A favorite character or scene, sure; a favorite line of dialogue, maybe; but not a favorite sentence. We have to read a great book more than once to realize how consistently good the prose is, because the first time around, and often even the second, we're too involved in the story to notice. If Proulx's fiction is so compelling, why are its fans more impressed by individual sentences than by the whole?

Lots more in the link.

I have no idea whether the person (people?) who write monthly articles for this site are being serious or not, but reading them is an odd combination of lol, huh, neat, and wut?. HERCULES AND THE HYDRA: BASKETBALL, MYTH, AND THE SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY

I liked this a lot: http://www.esquire.com/sports/a12461360/nba-activism/

Seeing as we have a lot more members these days, it seems like the perfect time for some more articles for people to completely ignore read with interest.

I'll start with a recent article that is tangentially related to the replication crisis, but comes at from a more personal perspective. for those unaware, the replication crisis refers to a recent trend of social psychology research to fail to replicate. Vast swathes of previously important work has been found to be bunk, either due to deliberate 'p-hacking' on the part of researchers or a simple failure to follow correct statistics. Anyway, The New York Times has more details in their article. The main thrust of the piece is from the perspective of Amy Cuddy, one of the authors of 'Power Pose' research which was disproven:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/when-the-revolution-came-for-amy-cuddy.html

Cuddy became famous in her field for a 2010 study about the effects of “power poses.” The study found that subjects who were directed to stand or sit in certain positions — legs astride, or feet up on a desk — reported stronger “feelings of power” after posing than they did before. Even more compelling than that, to many of her peers, was that the research measured actual physiological change as a result of the poses: The subjects’ testosterone levels went up, and their cortisol levels, which are associated with stress, went down.

But since 2015, even as she continued to stride onstage and tell the audiences to face down their fears, Cuddy has been fighting her own anxieties, as fellow academics have subjected her research to exceptionally high levels of public scrutiny. She is far from alone in facing challenges to her work: Since 2011, a methodological reform movement has been rattling the field, raising the possibility that vast amounts of research, even entire subfields, might be unreliable. Up-and-coming social psychologists, armed with new statistical sophistication, picked up the cause of replications, openly questioning the work their colleagues conducted under a now-outdated set of assumptions. The culture in the field, once cordial and collaborative, became openly combative, as scientists adjusted to new norms of public critique while still struggling to adjust to new standards of evidence.

Cuddy, in particular, has emerged from this upheaval as a unique object of social psychology’s new, enthusiastic spirit of self-flagellation — as if only in punishing one of its most public stars could it fully break from its past. At conferences, in classrooms and on social media, fellow academics (or commenters on their sites) have savaged not just Cuddy’s work but also her career, her income, her ambition, even her intelligence, sometimes with evident malice. Last spring, she quietly left her tenure-track job at Harvard.

The article is lengthy and difficult to excerpt, but the thrust of it is looking at the personal impact on Cuddy from what at times became a vitriolic and harsh response from the scientific community.

The article, whilst on Cuddy's 'side' is fairly even handed and this response from Andrew Gelman (http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/18/beyond-power-pose-using-replication-failures-better-understanding-data-collection-analysis-better-science/#more-37075) does not raise any large issues with the reporting, despite a somewhat unfair characterisation of him in the article.

What goes unsaid in the article, and I think it is to the credit of the author that she did not take the easy target, is the gender of the proponents. Cuddy, her co-author Dana Carvey & her advisor and editor of the journal where it was published, Susan Fiske, are all women, whilst many of the 'antagonists' in the article, such as Gelman, Simmons & Simonsohn, are men. And so naturally many of the top comments at the NYT, and even a number of comments at Gelman's blog, have immediately ignored the actual statistics and taken the whole thing to be bullying men taking down a woman. Anyone that has actually spent time reading Gelman's blog would know he is a man of high integrity, whose focus is on bad statistics and nothing else. It is unfortunate that readers of his blog took his complaints too far, but it's not his fault that this occurred.

It's actually quite impressive how the author identifies the obstacle, swerves to avoid it but still ends up crashing right into the issue. Part of me wonders if the author wanted to have her cake and eat it too, getting the clicks from the gender issue whilst still appearing responsible and not deliberately provoking the controversy. Certainly, the article is very generous to Cuddy, a woman who in the end was able to become a prominent and highly paid public speaker almost entirely through false research, and still defends that research with very little evidence. It also completely fails to mention the absurd defence from Fiske (https://www.dropbox.com/s/9zubbn9fyi1xjcu/Fiske%20presidential%20guest%20column_APS%20Observer_copy-edited.pdf). Cuddy has received plenty of benefits and has some high profile defenders already, she really doesn't need the NYT to go to bat for her as well.

This thread is madness. Will read a few. Cheers lad.

Do you like food? I like food, and cooking food, and reading about food. If you don't agree with these statements then psy's thread should be on the front page somewhere, but for everyone else here's a piece from Serious Eats:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2017/09/pho-essay-taste-memory.html

I'm not sure whether it's the taste that comes first when the memory hits me, or the sense of place. I do know that it usually happens when there's a threat of rain, and particularly when I'm walking. All of a sudden, for a moment, I'll feel as if I'm on a humid sidewalk in Hong Kong, and I'm about to eat the best bowl of pho in the world.

It may seem odd for a Japanese-American expat to claim a Vietnamese bowl of beef noodle soup, served in Hong Kong, as his birthright, but I do. Our family lore is very clear about this pho's importance. My mother downed two bowls before going to the hospital where she gave birth to my brother, and repeated the process a couple years later when I came due. And even though we left Hong Kong when I was six months old, only returning to live there 17 years later, we'd make the pilgrimage back to the same restaurant every time we passed through the city. Sometimes my mother would insist on taking a cab there straight from Kai Tak Airport, with all our bags in tow. The restaurant staff would invariably recognize us—or, rather, they'd recognize my mother—and our order never changed: a bowl of beef pho each and a side order of cha gio, or spring rolls, to share.

The pho would come out first: a clear, thin broth, filled with submerged banh pho noodles, obscured by raw beef slices haphazardly arranged, like lotus leaves on a pond. Translucent arcs of shaved raw white onion and a few leaves of cilantro were the only garnish. Instead of the plate of bean sprouts and herbs commonly served at other Vietnamese restaurants, the bowl was accompanied by a small plate of chopped red chilies and a little lime wedge. The spring rolls would arrive a bit later, remarkable for both their craggy crusts and the similar restraint shown in their accompaniments—they were served with nothing more than a little green leaf lettuce, which you'd use to wrap the rolls up before dipping the whole thing in the nuoc cham.

Nowadays, I make a pretty decent chicken pho regularly. I rarely attempt beef, and even when I do, I try to tamp down my expectations, in order to stave off my inevitable disappointment. All of which is to say that it is not a fond taste memory so much as a haunting. It holds no promise for better pho on the horizon; it is, like any memory of my mother, only a reminder of loss.

If you're familiar with Serious Eats, you probably largely know it for its excellent recipes, particularly the Food Lab recipes done by Kenji Lopez Alt. There's more to the website than just cooking though, and they occasionally have nice stories such as this one by Sho Spaeth, on his childhood memories of a very specfic bowl of pho. Give the whole website a read.

You might have read a while ago about the somewhat mad culture surrounding Young adult fiction. The Vulture (http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html) had a length takedown of how bizarre the culture has become. Now it seems the problems have arisen again, this time over a novel called American Heart.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/10/16/kirkus_withdraws_starred_review_after_criticism.html

When Laura Moriarty decided she wanted to write a dystopian novel about a future America in which Muslims are forcefully corralled into detention centers, she was aware that she should tread carefully. Her protagonist is a white teenager, but one of her main characters, Sadaf, is a Muslim American immigrant from Iran, so Moriarty began by diving into Iranian books and films. Moriarty explained via email that she asked two Iranian immigrant friends to read an early draft and see if Sadaf seemed authentic to them, and whether the language and accent fit with their memories and experiences. A friend of Pakistani and American descent who is a practicing Muslim gave additional feedback. Moriarty asked a senior colleague at the University of Kansas, Giselle Anatol, who writes about Young Adult fiction and has been critical of racist narratives in literature, to read the book with a particular eye toward avoiding another narrative about a “white savior.” And after American Heart was purchased by Harper, the publisher provided several formal “sensitivity reads,” in which a member of a minority group is charged with spotting potentially problematic depictions in a manuscript.

None of this, as it turns out, was enough to protect American Heart from becoming the subject of the latest skirmish in the increasingly contentious battle over representation and diversity in the world of YA literature

…Kirkus’ decision to take down a published review in the wake of online backlash is disturbing—a suggestion that individual writers and critics must hew to an increasingly narrow definition of woke-ness to be deemed acceptable. “To me, it seems clear they are bowing to pressure from this small but very vocal group of people who want to protect young readers from stories and ideas they find harmful,” Moriarty said.

Not content with ruining twitter, the 'culture cops' have even managed to get reviews changed in their quest for some kind of ideological purity. How people perceive art has changed a lot in recent times as ideas such as cultural appropriation have gained traction, yet the issues raised about these books have little to do with writing from the wrong perspectives or taking from works of other cultures; instead, it seems they merely do not like that the main characters do not display a sufficiently quick turn to progressive thought. The idea of a character journey appears lost on these critics.

To wrap up this dump of articles, another piece from the blog "Put a Num on it"

https://putanumonit.com/2017/10/11/winning-is-for-losers/

Human life is all about competition, from the micro level to the macro.

We are built by genes that outcompeted their rivals over aeons of natural selection.

The problem with living in a dog-eat-dog world is that dogs just aren’t very tasty. But is it avoidable? Can you do well in life without trying to compete, dominate, and win anything? Can you even get a date?

Life is a game, but there’s more to playing games than trying to beat someone. To understand this game better we require some general theory of games. I suggest game theory.

Game theory distinguishes between zero-sum games which are purely adversarial and positive-sum games which allow for cooperation. “Zero-sum” means that any gain for one player means a loss for the other players. In a zero-sum game there are no win-win possibilities and thus no point in trying to cooperate.

Let’s look at a more complex example from an arena that at first glance appears purely competitive – professional sports. Specifically, is the NBA a zero-sum or positive-sum game for LeBron James?

A single game of basketball is a relatively zero-sum affair, but athletes don’t join the NBA for the pursuit of basketball wins in a vacuum. They get many rewards for participating: money, fame, groupies, and the satisfaction of a basketball game played at the highest level. All of those make up the pie that NBA players bake together.

LeBron welcomes better players joining the league because that would increase the NBA’s prestige, popularity, and profits, of which he gets a share. In fact, in 2017 LeBron cost himself money by beating other teams too quickly – this led to fewer playoff games, which in turn decreased league revenues, total salaries paid to players, and subsequently the value of LeBron’s own contract. LeBron wants the league to be as good as possible, and the other players are collaborators rather than competitors in the bigger picture game of the NBA.

Of course, the NBA looks much more zero-sum to a marginal player. Unlike LeBron, a benchwarmer is not happy when more talent joins the league, they may end up taking his job. This points to another important principle of games: strong players have more room to cooperate, while weaker players are forced to compete with each other.

We have started building a framework of competitive and cooperative situations. Competition stems from zero-sum contests over a fixed pie, where additional players are never welcome. Cooperation comes from an opportunity to bake a pie collaboratively, and strong players are welcome if they contribute. Ending up in the latter situation requires being more capable than anyone else, or really different from everyone else.

Whichever game you’re playing, lead with cooperation and play tit-for-tat. Cooperate at times even when the other person seems to defect, just in case. Be honest and radically transparent to reduce the cost of interacting with you. Pursue weird interests and goals. Write honestly about your weird interests and goals, and publish them for free online. Don’t be a dick. Deal with every person as if you’re going to be playing repeated games with them for the next 10,000 years.

It's a long one, and my quotes only cover a small amount of the actual content of the article, which establishes the basics of game theory and competition in society, before leading to points on why cooperation strategies really do work and how to apply in them, in particular with reference to 'cooperation' in the online dating market. Whether or not you find Falkovich's strategies useful, its still an interesting approach that can have a lot of value in different arenas where competition for things is intense. And even if you don't agree with any of the ideas, its still an interesting piece with plenty of neat facts.

"When the revolution came for cuddy" is a really good read. Thanks.
This subject of how P-Hacking and the lack of reproductibility is affecting peer-reviewd publications is really a hot topic right now, but one of those things that I believe it will improve the world for the better.
That said, this article really puts a human face on the whole thing and yeah, feels bad when you realize that these people you dismiss as hacks are... you know, people.

Some geography today: An article from a few years back that traces the evolution of the city of Rome through it's various phases and how each of those in control of the City - Romans, Goths, Christians, Renaissance Italians, Mussolini, etc - have left their mark and contributed to a city of many layers.

https://www.exurbe.com/?p=2219

This curious range of reactions seems the perfect moment for me to discuss something I have intended to talk about for some time: the shape of the City of Rome itself. We all know the long, rich history of the Roman people, and the city’s importance as the center of an empire, and thereafter as the center of the memory of that empire, whose echo, long after its end, still so defines Western concepts of power, authority and peace. What I intend to discuss instead is the geographic city, and how its shape and layers grew gradually and constantly, shaped by famous events, but also by the centuries you won’t hear much about in a traditional history of the city. The different parts of Rome’s past left their fingerprints on the city’s shape in far more direct ways than one tends to realize, even from visiting and walking through the city. Rome’s past shows not only in her monuments and ruins, but in the very layout of the streets themselves. Going age by age, I will attempt to show how the city’s history and structure are one and the same, and how this real ancient city shows her past in a far more organic and structural way than what we tend invent when we concoct fictitious ancient capitals to populate fantasy worlds or imagined futures. (As a bonus to anyone who’s been to Rome, this will also tell you why it’s a particularly physically grueling city to visit, compared to, say, Florence or Paris.)

San Clemente is a modestly-sized church a couple blocks East of the Colosseum, one of many hundreds of churches in Rome, and, in my mind, the most Roman. … It is reasonably impressive, but when we pause and look more closely, we realize the decoration is not as simple as it seems. Nothing matches, for a simple reason: No two pieces of this church are from the same time.

The basic structure of the church, the actual edifice, is from the twelfth century. But nothing else.

….

What’s this? What are these arches in the wall next to the floor? Why would there be arches there? It makes no sense. Even in a building that used secondary supporting arches in the brickwork there would be a reason for it, a window above, a junction, and they would end at floor level. Our architecture-sense is tingling.

So we go down stairs.

Welcome to the 4th century Roman basilica which the 12th century upper church was built on top of.

…

Wandering a bit we find more modern additions, post-excavation. One of the most beloved 20th century heads of the Vatican Library has been buried here, just below the now-restored old altar of the lower church. And the tomb of St. Cyril [or possiby it contains Cyril and his brother Methodius – there is debate] is here. They are the creators of the Glagolitic alphabet (ancestor of the Cyrillic), surrounded by plaques and donations and tokens of thanksgiving from many Slavic countries who use that alphabet. Below is a modern mosaic, thanking them for their work:

And nearby there are stairs down… Freud needs to stop and breathe into a paper bag.

There are stairs down because this is not the bottom layer, not yet. The 4th century church was built on top of something else. We descend another floor and find ourselves in older, pre-Christian Roman brickwork. We find high vaults, frescoed with simple colorful decoration, as was popular in villas and public buildings. Hallways and rooms extend off, a large, complex building. Very complex. Experts on Roman building layout can tell us this was once a fine Roman villa of the first century AD.

Every century from the Republican Roman construction of the Mint to the 20th century tombs is physically present, actually physically represented by an artifact which is still part of this building which has been being built and rebuilt for over 2,000 years. Not a single century passed in which this spot was not being used and transformed, and every transformation is still here. And all that time, from the first sacred spring, to the Mithraism, to today’s Irish Dominicans, this spot has been sacred.

This is Freud’s metaphor for the psyche: structure after structure built in the same space, superimposing new functions over the old ones, never really losing anything.

This is Rome.

Just the examination of San Clemente alone is interesting enough for a read, but that's less than half of the article. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in the evolution of cities.

This is the thead that made me want a sub ability on slaent. It's so awesome.

I have spent countless hours clicking nodes/hyperlinks on Everything2.com

More of a standard news article this, but a pretty damn interesting read about the complete capture of Jacob Zuma and the South African state by a trio of Indian brothers, the Guptas.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-09/the-brothers-who-bought-south-africa

As Jonas recounted this story on the balcony, Nene reacted dismissively. The Guptas might be well-connected and could roll over lesser officials, but the idea they could depose a sitting finance minister seemed absurd. “Nonsense,” he told Jonas. “Those guys can’t remove me.” The best response, Nene said, was to focus on their work. They had a budget to prepare and Africa’s most sophisticated economy to run.

Just over six weeks later, on Dec. 9, 2015, Nene was leaving a cabinet meeting when he received a call from one of Zuma’s advisers asking him to report to the president’s office. Nene turned around to return to the Union Buildings, the sprawling hillside complex that houses the presidential administration. Zuma was waiting for him. Speaking in a mix of English and his native Zulu, the president stood as he told Nene he was finished at the finance ministry, effective immediately, and should start preparing for a post at a government-backed bank. Nene, returning to his car, texted Jonas: “The ax has fallen.”

Since Nene’s firing, long-standing questions about the scale of the Guptas’ power in South Africa have exploded into the most severe political and economic crisis since the end of apartheid. The family has been accused by activists and opposition politicians of stacking the leadership of powerful state companies, rigging bids in favor of suppliers it controls, and even helping orchestrate a planned $70 billion nuclear-power deal with Russia, for which it could supply vast quantities of uranium—all while using an alliance with Zuma to neuter law enforcement agencies that would otherwise shut down its efforts. Blue chip companies including McKinsey, KPMG, and SAP have been embroiled in what’s fast becoming a global scandal.

In 2005 the brothers began putting Zuma’s family on their payroll. They hired his son Duduzane, then in his early 20s, as an IT specialist; appointed Duduzane’s twin sister, Duduzile, as a company director; and made one of Zuma’s wives (polygamy is legal in South Africa, and Zuma currently has four) a communications officer.

At a turbulent ANC conference in 2007, Zuma deposed Mbeki as party chief, then won the South African presidency in a general election two years later. His intimacy with the Guptas was soon on display. Zuma’s first state visit to Asia, in June 2010, was to India. He took a suite at the seaside Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, using its sitting room to meet with investors. As they filed in, they found the president accompanied at almost all times by Ajay or Atul. According to a person familiar with the trip, the local Indians did not know what to make of their former compatriots. As far as they knew, the Guptas were nobodies.

The day Maseko was scheduled to go see Ajay, his cellphone rang. He recognized the number immediately, he said in an interview, expanding on an account he has previously laid out for investigators. It was the switchboard at South Africa’s presidential residence. Zuma came on the line. “These Gupta guys … need your help,” he said in Zulu. “Please help them.” Maseko was alarmed. Why would the president himself be involved?

The wider public discovered the Guptas on a cloudy Tuesday in April 2013, when a chartered Airbus A330 touched down near Johannesburg. The jet, carrying more than 200 Indians bound for the wedding of a 23-year-old Gupta niece, didn’t land at OR Tambo International, the region’s commercial airport. It touched down at the South African Air Force’s Waterkloof base, an ostensibly ultra-secure facility that manages transport and reconnaissance planes and presidential flights. The Indian nationals handed over their passports en masse, without the nuisance of individual screening.

It's a lengthy breakdown with far more in the article, and some really quite staggering examples of corruption. If Zuma succeeds in getting one of his wives or cronies to succeed him, it would be safe to say that South Africa is nothing more than a kleptocracy.

Turning back to more 'geographically' minded content, I've recently discovered a blog called Granola Shotgun, seemingly most of it written by a "Jacob" who is some kind of amateur architect. The subject is mostly American suburbs and zoning regulations, which might sound enthralling enough on it's own but the blog is really helped by some excellent photography, which litters every article, and Jacob's simple, brisk style.

I can't really do the blog justice without the photographs, but I'll quote one of his articles so you can get an idea of the topics:

https://granolashotgun.com/2017/11/08/give-it-another-century-and-well-see-how-it-goes/

My observation was meant to be simple. We’re on a trajectory of ever larger, more complex, and highly leveraged institutional “solutions” to endemic social and economic problems that don’t actually make things better. Quite the opposite. What we need are small, direct, hyper local, and incremental responses that address immediate needs at a very low burn rate. This was misinterpreted as, “Oh, you think growing zucchini is more important than solving the housing crisis for working families.” Not what I’m saying. At all.

Everywhere I go in the world I find older neighborhoods that were built in a surprisingly similar manner regardless of geography, culture, religion, politics, or climate. Philadelphia has a wide variety of established neighborhoods that rarely get above three stories tall. Yet they provide convenient employment, local shops, schools, hospitals, houses of worship, groceries, culture, public parks, universities, and so on. Everything is within a reasonable walk or bike ride of a generous supply of homes. The residential and commercial activities are completely mixed together. Rich and poor tend to occupy the same neighborhoods in close proximity even if their accommodations are wildly disparate. Before planes, trains, and automobiles there weren’t that many options beyond shoe leather, horses, and sailing ships so urban form and daily customs accommodated that reality.

When I see these condos I don’t object to the architecture or even the way the buildings and complexes relate to each other per se. They aren’t that different physically from the traditional form seen all around the globe. There’s no more or less open green space here than in Philly. The faux Spanish casitas are pretty close to Japanese machiya in their morphology. The clusters of narrow side streets are reminiscent of Turkish souks. The density is comparable to many of San Francisco’s quiet neighborhoods.

The real problems are the administrative constraints, social prohibitions, and poor economic performance. Decades of suburban life have conditioned everyone to demand certain characteristics. Renters are a transient and unsavory element that destroys the value, safety, and respectability of the community. Therefore only owner occupied single family units are permitted. Anything too small or too inexpensive will attract the poor and undesirable. So let’s only build homes large enough for middle class families to filter out the riffraff. Strangers loitering on the street are a menace. Homes must be buffered and isolated from the public realm. It is absolutely forbidden to conduct any kind of commercial or professional activity within the residential enclave.

Except there isn’t an “affordable housing crisis.” Instead we’ve had a national economic policy that’s consistently driven down real wages for the majority of the population for the last forty years and concentrated wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Those same policies have condensed access and opportunity to a small number of geographic hot spots and denuded all others. You can’t fix that by building more condos.

The key to building a stronger town is cultivating dynamic household economies. Each home needs to generate wealth within its walls one way or another. And all the households need to sustain each other collectively in a fine grained interconnected web. Sounds hokey right? But that’s exactly what Main Street was a hundred years ago.

But eventually the whole big pile of overly leveraged 12,000 mile supply chain debt soaked tech extravaganza is going to break down and crash of its own dead weight. When we finally get back up and dust ourselves off we’ll have no choice but to reinvent things. A century from now the most successful places will probably look a lot like the places that were successful a century ago. Everything else? Detroit.

Some other stuff worth reading:
https://granolashotgun.com/2017/06/25/lets-cut-the-crap-and-embrace-reality/
https://granolashotgun.com/2017/07/05/deep-ellum/
https://granolashotgun.com/2017/11/08/crisis-opportunity-ambivalence/
https://granolashotgun.com/2017/11/13/mind-the-gap-2/
https://granolashotgun.com/2017/06/27/boom/

Particularly interesting to me was the juxtaposition of a general government skeptic, anti-regulation mindset coupled with a searing disgust at inequality, community destruction and the separation of rich and poor into isolated, gated developments. This is probably the most practical example of a 'Left-Libertarian', disdaining modern society's flaws but finding governments to be just as badly at fault.

Please enjoy this write up of the utter economic takeover of a pretty regular minecraft sever, from someone called Alice Maz. Recommended reading for anyone who enjoys minecraft, arbitrage, tax avoidance, investment bubbles, market making, insider trading, niche advertising, dumping, cartels, systems analysis, classical Chinese architecture and autism.

https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html

Working a game's economy is an interesting pursuit because it, like most interesting pursuits, requires your whole brain to get really good at it. It's both analytical and creative: devise general theories with broad applicability, but retain a willingness to disregard or reevaluate those theories when something contradicts them. And it's fun as hell. There's not much quite like the brainfeel of starting with nothing, carving out a niche, getting a foothold, and snowballing. Game economies are all radically different because there aren't any limits on weird things the designers can do with the game, but they're all fundamentally similar too.

Zel's Emporium was truly a wonderland. Three stories, couple hundred chests, and every item they sold, they also bought. From the same chest. In theory, the arbitrage business is a good one: set up your shops, keep an eye on the prices, collect free money off the spread with very little effort. The Emporium's stock was so diverse that it did plenty of business in both directions, and Zel had enough cash reserves to bounce back from most setbacks.

Well, most. Let me tell you about lilypads. Lilypads gen on water in swamp biomes. Very common and fairly easy to gather but don't have much use besides decoration. People who wanted them usually just needed a handful to decorate a pond or two, people building in swamps only ever harvested them incidental to other activities, and most people didn't like to build in swamps anyway. Lilypads were garbage. Zel, being the long tail merchant that they were, sold them for 5M. Overpriced relative to their commonness in the world, but fine considering their scarcity in the market. One of their hundreds of tiny rivlets of income.

Zel bought lilypads for 3M. This was easily one of the most absurd prices I had ever seen on the server for anything and I spent days stripping swamp biome after swamp biome for the things just to take advantage of it. I emerged from the swamps and with no warning sold Zel around 3500 lilypads for just over 10000M. Zel later told me they knew the price was high but never in a million years thought anyone would be insane enough to do what I did.

I don't think I can stress this enough: even if you suck at playing the market, even if you don't have much time to invest into the game, you can blow any virtual economy wide open just by reading the upcoming changes, predicting how those changes will shift supply/demand curves, and investing in items based on those predictions. Huge, complicated MMOs, it can often be hard to make accurate predictions without an encyclopedic knowledge of game mechanics. Often it's pretty simple though. People want cool shit.
Minecraft 1.6 was colloquially known as The Horse Update. It added such things as:

Horses
Hardened clay
Coal blocks
Stained clay
Carpets

It was a popular topic of conversation on our 1.5 server for some time; we always got updates several months late since we needed to wait for Bukkit and our core plugins to update. (I'm not sure if things have changed since, but back then, every Minecraft update was a breaking one. Modders had to dump the jars every release and work from the decompiled artifacts directly. It is a testament to how enjoyable a game Minecraft is to play that it even has a mod community at all.) Here are all the new 1.6 features people on our server talked about:

Horses
Horses
Omg horses
Guys I can't wait for horses
Horses!!!!

To ride a horse you need a saddle. Prior to 1.6, saddles could only be used to ride pigs, and pigs are terrible mounts, so no one used them. Several shops stocked saddles at 20-30M. Some people sold for more, since saddles were uncraftable and pretty rare, but no one ever paid that much. For about a month leading up to 1.6, I bought any saddle I could find under 60M. In theory most players would only need one or two of the things, so I didn't want to spend absurd amounts on them. I ended up with several dozen, figured they'd go up to maybe 80-90M and I'd turn a decent profit.

I placed a chest in the center of my main store, atop a nice little diamond block pedestal, selling one saddle, for 750M. Most people laughed at the price, some cursed my greed, plenty sent me private messages trying to haggle or find out if I had more. A few hours later, it sold. I let the chest sit empty until word got around, then put another saddle in it.

All told I moved ten or twelve at 500-750M apiece, average profit per around 1000-2000%. The pricepoint proved unsustainable, but because of a rather mysterious supplier (which I will get to soon) I had a steady stream of saddles that I could sell quite briskly at a modest markup. People were starting to pour hours into extracting the things from dungeons too, hoping to cash in on market conditions they didn't realize had already evaporated. But I managed to outsell them anyway.

…the damage was done. The only reason you couldn't say the economy was in freefall was because all that remained was a stain on the ground. Many players who'd harvested and traded only did so to reduce the time they spent mining for diamond, and the game's equivalent of middle-class affluence was steady access to diamond tools. At first the abundance of diamond must have seemed like a boon to people who long had to struggle to get enough to sustain their needs. But mining diamonds to sell was also the primary way most knew to make money with which to buy building materials, thus the purchasing power of the vast majority plummeted alongside its price. (Diamonds are rare in the ground and as such have a Skinner box sort of reward-feedback loop when uncovered, which makes them for many players the most enjoyable thing to farm. The things I did to make my first tens of thousands–digging clay out of riverbeds, gathering lilypads from swamps–were more lucrative but less exciting, and as such I was the only one who did them.)

In this way, diamond was the linchpin of the entire system, so when its price bottomed out, everything else went with it. Nothing you could gather and sell was worth the money you'd get for it. And even if it was, nothing you'd want to buy with that money was available for purchase. Everyone on the server was reduced to subsistence, forced to harvest everything they might need. Even those of us with real money, once our stockpiles of raw materials started to dwindle, had to dig more out the dirt like a bunch of scrubs. The entire market was as illiquid as a Weichselian glacier.

Rumors swirled about a cabal of players manipulating the market, abusing their wealth to force a change that everyone else could only go along with. We coyly denied the whole thing, a wink and a smile, "Wow, wouldn't that be something if there was, hm?" They called us the diamond cartel. We called ourselves the Minecraft Illuminati.

Once we started making diamond money again, there was nothing that we couldn't do. No other item was duped so prolifically, and nothing available in comparable quantities came near its per-item cost. We were free to set the prices we pleased and had both the resources and the hubris to enforce them over any objection. Gold and coal up fivefold, wood and obsidian up ten. And every time we raised a price, our daily incomes went up higher.

There were no restraints anymore. We could do whatever we wanted. It was our server. Everyone else was just playing on it.

Hey sohois I thought you might appreciate this blast from the past: http://www.michaelparenti.org/IRAQGeorge2.htm

Soon after the overthrow of the Soviet Union, US leaders decided that Third World development no longer needed to be tolerated. Just as Yugoslavia served as a “bad” example in Europe, so Iraq served as a bad example to other nations in the Middle East. The last thing the plutocrats in Washington want in that region is independent, self-defining developing nations that wish to control their own land, labor, and natural resources.

The difference between poor and broke: https://longreads.com/2018/06/12/the-difference-between-being-broke-and-being-poor/