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April 8 - July 30, 2018
To this day, historians of World War I puzzle over why England and Germany, countries with a lot in common—Western, Christian, industrialized, affluent—would choose to hold a pointless bloodbath.
I’m not sure either - though I’ve read books about it, I couldn’t really tell you.
And perhaps most disappointing to those who hold strong opinions without needing evidence are the equivocal effects of gun legislation. Neither right-to-carry laws favored by the right, nor bans and restrictions favored by the left, have been shown to make much difference—though there is much we don’t know, and political and practical impediments to finding out more.
The additional miles driven did not eat up the safety gains: automobile deaths per capita (as opposed to per vehicle mile) peaked in 1937 at close to 30 per 100,000 per year, and have been in steady decline since the late 1970s, hitting 10.2 in 2014, the lowest rate since 1917.
Wealth buys life.
The Brooklyn Dodgers, before they moved to Los Angeles, had been named after the city’s pedestrians, famous for their skill at darting out of the way of hurtling streetcars.
Who knew
At almost 5,000 deaths in 2015, the number of workers killed on the job is still too high, but it’s much better than the 20,000 deaths in 1929, when the population was less than two-fifths the size.
Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. Modern terrorism is a by-product of the vast reach of the media.11 A group or an individual seeks a slice of the world’s attention by the one guaranteed means of attracting it: killing innocent people, especially in circumstances in which readers of the news can imagine themselves.
an average person of 1910, if he or she had entered a time machine and materialized today, would be borderline retarded by our standards, while if Joe and Jane Average made the reverse journey, they would outsmart 98 percent of the befrocked and bewhiskered Edwardians who greeted them as they emerged.
E so much fun
This chapter is about a broader cultural pessimism: the worry that all that extra healthy life span and income may not have increased human flourishing after all if they just consign people to a rat race of frenzied careerism, hollow consumption, mindless entertainment, and soul-deadening anomie.
The 60-hour workweek of Bob Cratchit, with only one day off a year (Christmas, of course), was in fact lenient by the standards of his era. Figure 17-1 shows that in 1870 Western Europeans worked an average of 66 hours a week (the Belgians worked 72), while Americans worked 62 hours.
“We constantly worry about the looming ‘retirement funding crisis’ in America without realizing that the entire concept of retirement is unique to the last five decades. It wasn’t long ago that the average American man had two stages of life: work and death. . .
the poverty rate for people over 65 plunged from 35 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2011, well below the national rate of 15 percent.
in most times and places housework is gendered, so the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general.
in 1929 Americans spent more than 60 percent of their disposable income on necessities; by 2016 that had fallen to a third.
Drives stock market investing?
Affordable transportation does more than reunite people. It also allows them to sample the phantasmagoria of Planet Earth. This is the pastime that we exalt as “travel” when we do it and revile as “tourism” when someone else does it, but it surely has to count as one of the things that make life worth living.
Funny but true
There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.
People seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp, and kvetch as much as ever, and the proportion of Americans who tell pollsters that they are happy has remained steady for decades.
According to the theory of social comparison (or reference groups, status anxiety, or relative deprivation, which we examined in chapter 9), people’s happiness is determined by how well they think they are doing relative to their compatriots, so as the country as a whole gets richer, no one feels happier—indeed, if their country becomes more unequal, then even if they get richer they may feel worse.
This shouldn’t be... but probably is.
We can see happiness as the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved. The function of happiness is to goad us into seeking the keys to fitness: when we are unhappy, we scramble for things that would improve our lot; when we are happy, we cherish the status quo. Meaning, in contrast, registers the novel and expansive goals that are opened up for us as social, brainy, and talkative
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Americans today spend as much time with relatives, have the same median number of friends and see them about as often, report as much emotional support, and remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships as their counterparts in the decade of Gerald Ford and Happy Days.
And notwithstanding the rumor that they are drawn into an anxious competition to keep up with the furious rate of enjoyable activities of their digital faux-friends, social media users do not report higher levels of stress than non-users.
Dont buy this
A recent one entitled “Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?” vindicated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.
Ha
Everything is amazing. Are we really so unhappy? Mostly we are not. Developed countries are actually pretty happy, a majority of all countries have gotten happier, and as long as countries get richer they should get happier still. The dire warnings about plagues of loneliness, suicide, depression, and anxiety don’t survive fact-checking. And though every generation has worried that the next one is in trouble, as younger generations go the Millennials seem to be in pretty good shape, happier and mentally healthier than their helicoptering parents.
an experiment in which people watched news stories that had been doctored to have a positive or negative spin found that “participants who watched the negatively valenced bulletin showed increases in both anxious and sad mood, and also showed a significant increase in the tendency to catastrophize a personal worry.”85 Three decades later I suspect that many therapists are listening to patients sharing their fears about terrorism, income inequality, and climate change.
But the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the sky and seize our cattle.
Wtf? He’s not approaching this one in an unbiased way...
There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.
Some of the threats to humanity are fanciful or infinitesimal, but one is real: nuclear war.66 The world has more than ten thousand nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries.
Scarey
But the pathway has been laid out. If nuclear warheads continue to be dismantled faster than they are built, if they are taken off a hair trigger and guaranteed not to be used first, and if the trend away from interstate war continues, then by the second half of the century we could end up with small, secure arsenals kept only for mutual deterrence. After a few decades they might deter themselves out of a job. At that point they would seem ludicrous to our grandchildren, who will beat them into plowshares once and for all.
But in the 21st, the opposite fear has arisen: that the future promises not too much economic growth but too little. Since the early 1970s, the annual rate of growth has fallen by more than half, to around 1.4 percent.7 Growth over the long term is determined largely by productivity: the value of goods and services that a country can produce per dollar of investment and person-hour of labor. Productivity in turn depends on technological sophistication: the skills of the country’s workers and the efficiency of its machinery, management, and infrastructure.
The greatest ongoing progress in the world today is the rise of billions of people out of extreme poverty, and that ascent need not be capped by the American and European malaise.
“aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity . . . were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.”
In capitalizing on concerns about Inequality, Trump has demonized immigrants and trade partners while ignoring the major disrupter of lower-middle-class jobs, technological change.
Even then, populist parties have attracted only 13 percent of the votes in recent years, and they have lost seats in as many national legislatures as they have gained them in.
Danger of increasing
Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. . .
Though I hope Enlightenment ideals will become more deeply entrenched in the public at large—fundamentalists, angry populists, and all—I claim no competence in the dark arts of mass persuasion, popular mobilization, or viral memes. What follow are arguments directed at people who care about arguments. These arguments can matter, because practical men and women and madmen in authority are affected, directly or indirectly, by the world of ideas. They go to university. They read intellectual magazines, if only in dentists’ waiting rooms. They watch talking heads on Sunday morning news shows.
Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable. But that hasn’t stopped a slew of irrationalists from favoring the heart over the head, the limbic system over the cortex, blinking over thinking, McCoy over Spock.
Love mccoy!
By now many people have become aware of the research in cognitive psychology on human irrationality, explained in bestsellers like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.
To read
Professing a belief in evolution is not a gift of scientific literacy, but an affirmation of loyalty to a liberal secular subculture as opposed to a conservative religious one.
The principal reason people disagree about climate change science is not that it has been communicated to them in forms they cannot understand. Rather, it is that positions on climate change convey values—communal concern versus individual self-reliance; prudent self-abnegation versus the heroic pursuit of reward; humility versus ingenuity; harmony with nature versus mastery over it—that divide them along cultural lines.16
I read an article about this somewhere. This is totally true - its a value and societal thing, not a science thing.
people’s tendency to treat their beliefs as oaths of allegiance rather than disinterested appraisals is, in one sense, rational. With the exception of a tiny number of movers, shakers, and deciders, a person’s opinions on climate change or evolution are astronomically unlikely to make a difference to the world at large. But they make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle.
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”—they called for greater political diversity in psychology, the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).
Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities.88 One technique was discovered long ago by rabbis: they forced yeshiva students to switch sides in a Talmudic debate and argue the opposite position. Another is to have people try to reach a consensus in a small discussion group; this forces them to defend their opinions to their groupmates, and the truth usually wins.
Voters have a say on issues that don’t affect them personally, and never have to inform themselves or justify their positions. Practical agenda items like trade and energy are bundled with moral hot buttons like euthanasia and the teaching of evolution. Each bundle is strapped to a coalition with geographic, racial, and ethnic constituencies. The media cover elections like horse races, and analyze issues by pitting ideological hacks against each other in screaming matches. All of these features steer people away from reasoned analysis and toward perfervid self-expression.
To make public discourse more rational, issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible. Experiments have shown that when people hear about a new policy, such as welfare reform, they will like it if it is proposed by their own party and hate it if it is proposed by the other—all the while convinced that they are reacting to it on its objective merits.107 That implies that spokespeople should be chosen carefully. Several climate activists have lamented that by writing and starring in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore may have done the movement more harm than good, because as
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However long it takes, we must not let the existence of cognitive and emotional biases or the spasms of irrationality in the political arena discourage us from the Enlightenment ideal of relentlessly pursuing reason and truth.
In 1954 Paul Meehl stunned his fellow psychologists by showing that simple actuarial formulas outperform expert judgment in predicting psychiatric classifications, suicide attempts, school and job performance, lies, crime, medical diagnoses, and pretty much any other outcome in which accuracy can be judged at all. Meehl’s work inspired Tversky and Kahneman’s discoveries on cognitive biases and Tetlock’s forecasting tournaments, and his conclusion about the superiority of statistical to intuitive judgment is now recognized as one of the most robust findings in the history of psychology.
Many theistic beliefs originated as hypotheses to explain natural phenomena such as the weather, disease, and the origin of species. As these hypotheses have been superseded by scientific ones, the scope of theism has steadily shrunk. But since our scientific understanding is never complete, the pseudo-argument known as the God of the Gaps is always available as a last resort. Today the more sophisticated theists have tried to place God into two of these gaps: the fundamental physical constants and the hard problem of consciousness.
