Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 100
July 28, 2022
the file system
“I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function,” says Saavik Ford, a professor of astronomy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. But among her students, “There’s not a conception that there’s a place where files live. They just search for it and bring it up.” She added, “They have a laundry basket full of laundry, and they have a robot who will fetch them every piece of clothing they want on demand.” […]
To a point, the new mindset may reflect a natural — and expected — technological progression. Plavchan recalls having similar disconnects with his own professors. “When I was a student, I’m sure there was a professor that said, ‘Oh my god, I don’t understand how this person doesn’t know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,’” he says. “This kind of generational issue has always been around.” And though directory structures exist on every computer (as well as in environments like Google Drive), today’s iterations of macOS and Windows do an excellent job of hiding them. (Your Steam games all live in a folder called “steamapps” — when was the last time you clicked on that?) Today’s virtual world is largely a searchable one; people in many modern professions have little need to interact with nested hierarchies.
“Search, don’t sort,” Google says, but increasingly I’m wondering whether I ought to spend more time sorting and less time searching. I’m always looking for ways to introduce constructive friction into my working practices — see this post for an example — and maybe going Old Skool with some kind of rational filing system would be more helpful than either (a) searching or (b) using the inconsistent and ad hoc system of folders I now have. If I designed a new system Hazel would help me implement it.
Critical research on the causes of Alzheimer’s may have b...
Critical research on the causes of Alzheimer’s may have been falsified — and as a result, researchers may have concentrated too much on a hypothesis that was not as well-supported as they thought. Further investigation will tell whether that’s true, but in any event the story is a useful reminder that we shouldn’t assume that the fudging or outright falsification of scientific data is a victimless crime. In some cases — in this case, if falsified data inappropriately changed the direction of Alzheimer’s research — there could be very many victims indeed before the course of research gets corrected.
Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy – The A...
Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy – The Atlantic:
Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.
A good response by Jon Chait to critics of his work, one that calls upon many new studies. I mean, if you’re not yet convinced.
July 27, 2022
Mary Midgley, in a late interview:“The kind of thing that...
Mary Midgley, in a late interview:
“The kind of thing that Paul Davies has dwelt on, about the improbability of all this order, seems to me to be sensible. So that one has to say that from the big bang onwards there’s some sort of tendency towards the formation of order and in certain stages of order towards proceeding to life and to produce more and more perceptive life as it were. Well this talk about a life force seems to me highly suitable and I don’t see anything superstitious about it. It’s still very vague but of course that’s getting you quite near to ‘well of course that means there’s a God’. People talk about the origin of having gods was just that you wanted to explain things or have something to placate us, but it seems to me one important source of it is gratitude. You go out on a day like this and you’re really grateful. I don’t know who to.”
Ross Douthat: “More Americans should live in the West, an...
Ross Douthat: “More Americans should live in the West, and more Americans assuredly will.” Yeah, they probably will, but they shouldn’t, because there’s not enough water.
Mary Leng:
Indeed, armed with a new toolbox of Latin name...
Indeed, armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, shouting out their Latin names (ad hominem!; secundum quid!) as if they were magic spells. This is what Scott Aikin and John Casey, in their delightful book Straw Man Arguments, call the Harry Potter fallacy: the “troublesome practice of invoking fallacy names in place of substantive discussion”. However, they note another, less wholesome reason why some may be interested in fallacy theory. If one’s aim is not so much discovering the truth as winning an argument at all costs, fallacy theory can provide a training in the dark arts of closing down a discussion prematurely, leaving the impression that it has been won.
This, for Aikin and Casey, is the essence of what makes the straw man a fallacy: if we successfully “straw man” our opponent by knocking down a misstated version of their argument, we give the mistaken impression that the issue is closed.
Paradoxically, the straw man works particularly well on people well trained in the norms of good argument (the authors call this the “Owl of Minerva problem”: “we, in making our practices more self-reflective … create new opportunities for second-order pathologies that arise out of our corrective reflection”)…. Observers are generally more likely to be taken in by shoddy reasoning if they are already sympathetic to one side, and straw-manning contributes to the polarization of political debate. In today’s political environment it is not uncommon for partisans intuitively to see themselves as being on the right side of history, with their rivals adding nothing of value to the conversation and deserving of intellectual – or even moral – contempt. The prevalence of this fallacy in democratic political debate is thus a matter of significant concern: as Aikin and Casey write, it is “a threat to a properly functioning system of self-government”.
no nonsense
For the past few weeks I’ve been watching the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Football Championship, AKA the women’s Euros, and it’s been enjoyable throughout. And as much as the generally high quality of play — most notably from Arsenal legend Beth Mead — I have enjoyed the complete absence of drama-queen nonsense. I’ve been watching women’s footy for a long time, but not so much in so short a time, and I think perhaps it’s the condensed timeline that has made me so aware of what’s missing: the flinging yourself to the tuft, the rolling around in mock agony, the clutching of your face when an elbow grazes your bicep — the constant bullshit that really, seriously defaces the men’s game.
By contrast, these Euros have been all Chumbawamba: they get knocked down, they get back up again. They don’t get a call they want, they go on with the game. Sure, they let the ref know when they think a call has been missed, but essentially they just play footy. It’s been great.
Yasmin Tayag:At this point, I worry about how much longer...
At this point, I worry about how much longer it’s going to last. People like [my fiancé] — I think of them as “COVID virgins” — are becoming a rare breed. Just yesterday, President Joe Biden thinned their ranks by one more person. The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation suggests that as of earlier this month, 82 percent of Americans have been infected with the coronavirus at least once. Some of those people might still think they’re never had the virus: Asymptomatic infections happen, and mild symptoms are sometimes brushed off as allergies or a cold. Now that we’re battling BA.5, the most contagious and vaccine-dodging Omicron offshoot yet, many people are facing their second, third, or even fourth infections. That reality can make it feel like the stragglers who have evaded infection for two and a half years are destined to fall sick sooner rather than later. At this point, are COVID virgins nothing more than sitting ducks?
“Destined to fall sick” — or not, depending on how common asymptomatic or nearly-asymptomatic infections are. But how can we know how common they are, since not many people who have no symptoms are likely to get tested. I don’t think I’ve had COVID, but who knows? Maybe I’ve had it once or twice or even more, but am one of the super-lucky ones. Nobody knows anything, basically.
July 26, 2022
two varieties of human frailty
Breaking Bad is a story about ressentiment; about a man who feels himself marginalized and neglected, powerless and ineffectual, who, therefore, cannot resist the temptation to establish himself as a Power — as a man who says, and means it: “I am the one who knocks.”
Better Call Saul dramatizes a radically different form of human frailty: the temptation of the con. The person so tempted may be socially marginal or socially dominant or something in between — though the marginal will have a few more incentives pushing them towards scamming. What’s at work here is not ressentiment but rather (a) a desire to dominate people, a desire to know what they don’t know and act on that knowledge in a way that enables you to triumph over them, and (a) the intellectual challenge of building a successful scam: the meticulous planning, the anticipation of the responses of your marks, the ability to improvise when things go wrong. What you see in Better Call Saul is, first, how the power of these two motives — the desire to dominate and the love of intellectual challenge — vary from person to person, and within a person from moment to moment; and also the crack-like addictiveness that follows upon the running of a successful scam.
Both shows then are about extremes of human frailty — frailty become perversity, perversity become wickedness — and how inescapable the associated habits of thought and action can be.
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