Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, Hachette's contact portal is weirdly restrictive. You could send an email to Basic's general publicity email, although this is generally intended for the media (usually for reviews and promotional materials). You could explain your situation and say that you aren't sure what the appropriate method of contact is, and that they can redirect you if necessary. You'd think there would be an academic option; but even though Basic publishes a lot of academic writing, they're actually a popular press.

Something to keep in mind: Hachette is a major publishing group, so there are likely quite a few levels of access between you and Sowell. One difficulty is that editors and agents are usually quite protective of their authors, and contact requests probably have to be (or should) couched in some kind of professional context (e.g. interview, invitation to give a talk, etc.). As an academic, you have a bit of an advantage. Academics are trying to get in touch with each other all the time, so I can't imagine it would be unusual for them to receive a contact request from an academic regarding a particular author; but you may have to justify it as more than just wanting to open a line of communication.

You might consider making something publishable out of your contact. For example, you could pursue an interview request that you plan to publish in a psychology journal. This would probably begin by contacting some journals and finding one that approves the interview, and then the editorial staff at the journal would likely put you in touch with Sowell.

Basic Books apparently publishes for many public academics. I wonder if that makes a difference to transparency?

How do you mean?

 

[Dak]

Yeah, Hachette's contact portal is weirdly restrictive. You could send an email to Basic's general publicity email, although this is generally intended for the media (usually for reviews and promotional materials). You could explain your situation and say that you aren't sure what the appropriate method of contact is, and that they can redirect you if necessary. You'd think there would be an academic option; but even though Basic publishes a lot of academic writing, they're actually a popular press.

Something to keep in mind: Hachette is a major publishing group, so there are likely quite a few levels of access between you and Sowell. One difficulty is that editors and agents are usually quite protective of their authors, and contact requests probably have to be (or should) couched in some kind of professional context (e.g. interview, invitation to give a talk, etc.). As an academic, you have a bit of an advantage. Academics are trying to get in touch with each other all the time, so I can't imagine it would be unusual for them to receive a contact request from an academic regarding a particular author; but you may have to justify it as more than just wanting to open a line of communication.

You might consider making something publishable out of your contact. For example, you could pursue an interview request that you plan to publish in a psychology journal. This would probably begin by contacting some journals and finding one that approves the interview, and then the editorial staff at the journal would likely put you in touch with Sowell.

Yeah I assume if I had a particularly academic reason for the contact that would smooth things. I could likely even contact the alumni department at either UChicago or Stanford for that purpose. However, I would certainly be doing something like that in a completely "free agent" sense if you will, and if it were still somewhat in relation to my area in psychology, the content would likely be against the grain of what my department would appreciate (eg disparities in health outcomes, etc.). I'm also not sure, in that sense, that I'd even be able to cover any new publishable (at least at the peer review level) ground either.

How do you mean?

Just basically what you said, the multiple levels of access thing.

 

[Dak]

https://subpixel.space/entries/after-authenticity/

For years my anxieties around work had centered on far-flung future goals—a sort of personal teleology about what I was supposed to achieve and the type of person I was supposed to become. It struck me then that there is a deep entitlement to the idea of an authentic self.

No wonder millennials, the Authentic Generation, all seem to think they can be the next Steve Jobs. If you believe in a “true self” that can be discovered or achieved you’re not a far cry from believing in destiny. Worse still, you could start extrapolating all sorts of conclusions from an imaginary “truth” at your “center.” It does not escape my attention that exactly this kind of assumption is at work whenever someone asserts absolute speech rights based purely on the combination of unique identities they can lay claim to. The more differentiated the self, the more defensible this demand tends to be. Identitarianism is mirrored in—would not be possible without—the widespread preoccupation with authentic selves. In the future we may be able to look back at toxic wantrepreneurship, white entitlement, and identity politics both “left” and ethnonationalist as being underwritten by the same philosophical blunder.

 

[Einherjar86]

https://subpixel.space/entries/after-authenticity/

I read the excerpt you quoted and a fair amount of the original piece, and I feel like I'm behind this nearly 100%. A lot of it is how I've felt about the notion of authenticity for years now. Authenticity isn't something that precedes our social and economic lives, it's a product of them--and a commodity. People want authenticity, in their food, their music, their art, blah blah blah. I object to it on multiple levels, including an aesthetic one.

My major point of disagreement is with the claim that it's primarily millennials who crave authenticity. I'm not saying they don't, but they don't crave it any more than gen-x'ers do. Generation X is particularly absorbed by the myth of an authentic America, the country, the homeland, conditioned by the imagery they were born into post-World War II and threatened by the countercultural movements of the '60s and '70s. To this day, the idea of an authentic America persists in slogans like "make American great again." Each generation has its myths of authenticity, so I don't agree that it's limited to millennials.

One final comment I'll make as it pertains to authenticity and art is that the traditions of naturalistic and realistic art--i.e. verisimilitude and accurate portrayals/depictions--are born from an authenticity hunger (even though they also challenge/critique this hunger). This is why I enjoy writers who experimentally challenge the notion of authenticity--Joyce, Pynchon, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, etc... prose styles that don't conform to the boring rendering of reality in a way that enchants readers, that convinces us that "this is a skillfully staged representation of a plausible reality." Such appeals to readers' desires to be placated and swept away are what stock drugstore bookshelves and the bestseller lists, because most people don't want to feel challenged or inept when they read. They want the illusion of something unquestionably real. They want "authenticity." That there's skill involved here isn't in question; but it also takes skill to master such realistic/naturalistic techniques and then warp them into something challenging and defamiliarizing in a strikingly uncomfortable way--not merely something that is so meaninglessly alien that it forecloses any kind of reaction whatsoever.

This is why I enjoy fiction that threatens our comfort level when we read it, that deploys prose and grammar and punctuation in confusing and jarring ways, and that depicts scenarios and/or scenes that don't make sense on first reading. Fiction that skillfully reproduces reality isn't actually producing an accurate or authentic version of lived experience; it's catering to a middlebrow desire for the authentic that allows readers to escape the responsibility of truly understanding reality.

This isn't an original position when it comes to literature. Tom McCarthy has basically written the manifesto against superficial realist/naturalist/literalist art already:

We don't walk down the street saying to ourselves "As I walk down the street, comma, I contemplate the question of faith, or adultery, or x or y or z." A paradox emerges: that the twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteen-century realists ever did.

 

[Dak]

My major point of disagreement is with the claim that it's primarily millennials who crave authenticity. I'm not saying they don't, but they don't crave it any more than gen-x'ers do. Generation X is particularly absorbed by the myth of an authentic America, the country, the homeland, conditioned by the imagery they were born into post-World War II and threatened by the countercultural movements of the '60s and '70s. To this day, the idea of an authentic America persists in slogans like "make American great again." Each generation has its myths of authenticity, so I don't agree that it's limited to millennials.

I think I can agree with this; that the there's not an increase in interest in authenticity but instead a shifting focus of where authenticity is expected, or what the term refers to. I do think the millennial version of authenticity is particularly a form of conspicuous consumable consumption in comparison with those in that past (maybe as a result of increased ability to do so, or maybe in contrast the inability to either acquire larger durable signals or the inability to delay gratification/plan?).

One final comment I'll make as it pertains to authenticity and art is that the traditions of naturalistic and realistic art--i.e. verisimilitude and accurate portrayals/depictions--are born from an authenticity hunger (even though they also challenge/critique this hunger). This is why I enjoy writers who experimentally challenge the notion of authenticity--Joyce, Pynchon, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, etc... prose styles that don't conform to the boring rendering of reality in a way that enchants readers, that convinces us that "this is a skillfully staged representation of a plausible reality." Such appeals to readers' desires to be placated and swept away are what stock drugstore bookshelves and the bestseller lists, because most people don't want to feel challenged or inept when they read. They want the illusion of something unquestionably real. They want "authenticity." That there's skill involved here isn't in question; but it also takes skill to master such realistic/naturalistic techniques and then warp them into something challenging and defamiliarizing in a strikingly uncomfortable way--not merely something that is so meaninglessly alien that it forecloses any kind of reaction whatsoever.

This is why I enjoy fiction that threatens our comfort level when we read it, that deploys prose and grammar and punctuation in confusing and jarring ways, and that depicts scenarios and/or scenes that don't make sense on first reading. Fiction that skillfully reproduces reality isn't actually producing an accurate or authentic version of lived experience; it's catering to a middlebrow desire for the authentic that allows readers to escape the responsibility of truly understanding reality.

This isn't an original position when it comes to literature. Tom McCarthy has basically written the manifesto against superficial realist/naturalist/literalist art already:

Maybe you just prefer fiction that conforms to your conception of reality . I agree that most if not all fiction is simply escapism (like movies, TV shows, etc). I waffle a bit on the degree to which it is good or bad qua escapism. People who live on a constant diet of cheap fiction in particular are escaping from what? To where? For what purpose?

I see it as a form of rudderlessness. Maybe I'm biased, in that I felt somewhat rudderless during the time I was engaging in primarily escapist activities in my late teens. This interrsects with a longstanding criticism I've had of "the way things are", which this book review manages to lay out better than I could:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/14/west-isnt-committing-suicide-dying-natural-causes/

Goldberg is correct that we have lost our sense of gratitude, that we don’t really feel like things are as good as all that. But a large part of the reason is that the liberal order itself has robbed us of our ability to articulate what constitutes human happiness. We have freedom, we have immense wealth, but we have nothing to tell us what we should do with it, nothing to tell us what is good.
.............
[Young people] are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. They can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular............There is no necessity, no morality, no social pressure, no sacrifice to be made that militates going in or turning away from any of these directions, and there are desires pointing toward each, with mutually contradictory arguments to buttress them.
...........................
Plato’s description of young people in democracies. The youth lives “day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy.”

Immense social wealth + a collapse of strong (religious & civic) norms. I can't say I know what the answer is, and I'm not sure there is an answer. But I don't think many are looking in the right place for it, if they are looking at all.

 

[Einherjar86]

Maybe you just prefer fiction that conforms to your conception of reality .

If that's true, then my conception is that reality is challenging, it's evasive, it isn't what you think it is... in other words, it takes work. I'm okay with that.

I see it as a form of rudderlessness. Maybe I'm biased, in that I felt somewhat rudderless during the time I was engaging in primarily escapist activities in my late teens.

The escapism I'm talking about is also deceptive in that it masquerades as "authentic" reality. The deception lies in persuading readers that what the text depicts is some accurate/plausible version of reality.

I also wouldn't say there's no place for escapism in literature and art (in which I'd include movies, television, comics, etc.); but I think that a lot of "middlebrow" (for lack of a better word) art achieves its commercial success by appealing to a desire for the authentic. People want to be reassured that their internal images of the world match up with how the world actually is.

 

[Dak]

I don't get to spend as much time reading/thinking about monetary/macro policy as I would like, but it's something that feels like, without some coursework, is dancing outside the limits of my ability to treat with it. My main interest really is in inflation/deflation, which is pretty much the center of macro policy - controlling inflation. Modern monetary policy has built in inflation - the money supply is intentionally grown. This almost always leads to some amount of inflation, but not always "problematic levels". I was ruminating on it yesterday and it seemed to me that a buffer against inflation with a growing money supply would be a growing population - demand keeping up with the supply. This has previously not really been an issue - but with multiple nations, and the global population projected to peak in the coming decades, we have a problem. Past and current spending globally has been kicked down to future generations with the expectation that there will always be more. But our best estimates now are that there won't be. So more money will have to be injected to cover the past debts, with lower levels of consumer demand to pick up the slack. And then I read this today:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/demography-predict-inflation.html

Demographic shifts, such as population ageing, have been suggested as possible explanations
for the past decade’s low inflation. We exploit cross-country variation in a long panel to identify age structure effects in inflation, controlling for standard monetary factors. A robust relationship emerges that accords with the lifecycle hypothesis. That is, inflationary pressure rises when the share of dependents increases and, conversely, subsides when the share of working age population increases. This relationship accounts for the bulk of trend inflation, for instance, about 7 percentage points of US disinflation since the 1980s. It predicts rising inflation over the coming decades.

This is another reason I have no expectation of a true retirement, at least based on past financial retirement models. I might pull a military pension, but is it going to be indexed to inflation in the future? Unlikely.

 

[Dak]

Two separate concerning issues that we've touched on some. Not that I think anything is going to slow this train, but I'm beginning to see the window opening for "Victorian" services

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/software-eating-world-tesla-edition.html

Last week Consumer Reports refused to recommend Tesla’s Model 3 because it discovered lengthy braking distances. This week Consumer Reports changed their review to recommend after Tesla improved braking distance by nearly 20 feet with an over the air software update!

A few concerns:
1. If braking distance can be changed via an OTA update, what else can be changed, and how long before the process is easily hackable?
2. Was the braking distance left artificially long so that Tesla could play this media game? Was anyone going to be put at risk?
3. As other commenters mentioned, how does this affect differing conditions.
4. As someone who used to like playing rdriving/racing games, I know I was a much better driver when driving the same balanced stat car across many types of challenges because I had learned exactly how it would handle, as opposed to trying to match certain types of cars to different tracks or challenges. From this perspective, having a car with the potential of top-down pushed changes to handling does not sound appealing.

Now the more "meta" concern:

The larger economic issue is that every durable good is becoming a service. When you buy a car, a refrigerator, a house you will be buying a stream of future services, updates, corrections, improvements. That is going to change the industrial organization of firms and potentially increase monopoly power for two reasons. First, reputation will increase in importance as consumers will want to buy from firms they perceive as being well-backed and long-lasting and second durable goods will be rented more than bought which makes it easier for durable goods producers not to compete with themselves thus solving Coase’s durable good monopoly problem.

Adobe is an excellent/widely known example on the software side of this process. You do not buy Adobe now, you rent it. This is obviously better for the company, and the constant updating and cloud services are sold as an also-benefit to the consumer, but I don't "buy" it. Microsoft Office is going to the same route. When goods become services, it's economic death by a thousand cuts. Of course, this is software, and there are work arounds/competing free services. When looking at durable goods, I think we are starting to see the crack appear on the margin for quality, non-connected goods.

 

[Dak]

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1003276176045961216

Interesting bit on Chinese transnationals.

 

[Einherjar86]

Kinda behind on a lot of these posts. The info looks interesting but I've been a bit absorbed in current projects and haven't had the time to devote to reading the links. Hopefully I'll have a chance in the next couple weeks.

 

[Dak]

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/deliver...6126100114074064019125107005113092066&EXT=pdf

Psychopathy by State:

1. D.C.
2. Connecticut
3. California
4. New Jersey
5. New York/Wyoming
7. Maine
8. Wisconsin
9. Nevada
10. Illinois

Looking at the next 5-10 almost all more NE states + Florida. I'm guessing their model loaded Neuroticism more heavily on the Psychopathy construct.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Seems pretty useless until that Hyatt et al comes out and shows how they define psychopathy.

 

[Dak]

Seems pretty useless until that Hyatt et al comes out and shows how they define psychopathy.

The paper uses this state-level data on personality in conjunction with Hyatt et al. (Forthcoming), who translate the Big Five personality traits into psychopathy. These latter authors argue counter to Patrick et al. (2009), who previously described psychopathy as a constellation of disinhibition, boldness, and meanness. Hyatt et al. demonstrate that these traits are superfluous, as they are already nested within 3 the Big Five personality traits. Boldness corresponds to low neuroticism and high extraversion, meanness corresponds to low agreeableness, and disinhibition corresponds to low conscientiousness. The findings of Rentfrow et al (2013) and Hyatt et al. (Forthcoming) can thereby be combined into a method of estimating the level of psychopathy for each U.S. state.

Edit: Just went digging for that. Off the cuff I had assumed high neuroticism due to the state rankings, but this also makes sense - and since psychopaths are a smaller portion of the population, it doesn't go against the aggregate findings of high neuroticism in the NE.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

That underlined portion describes the earlier definition they don't use, right? Simply listing the use of those "Big Five" doesn't say much without knowing precisely how the combined term of those five inputs is calculated.

 

[Dak]

That underlined portion describes the earlier definition they don't use, right? Simply listing the use of those "Big Five" doesn't say much without knowing precisely how the combined term of those five inputs is calculated.

Well, no it doesn't say how the calculation is run. It does give high/lows.

 

[Dak]

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/29/google-city-technology-toronto-canada-218841

At one of the series of roundtables Sidewalk Toronto has held, Doctoroff responded to a question about data management by saying, “There are cameras everywhere anyway. There’s chaos out there. Together we can bring order.” Whose “order” will it be? That’s what worries people.

If there's enough diversity among cities, this issue would theoretically resolve itself......but then my hunch is that the cities populated by people I adamantly disagree with would struggle in a variety of ways, either economically or "morally".

 

[Einherjar86]

I have admittedly not had time to read that closely, but the discussion of privacy is really confusing to me.

Aggarwala says that over time Sidewalk has come to appreciate “how deeply different” the Canadian view of privacy is compared with that in the United States. Canadians tend to see privacy as a fundamental human right; Americans have historically been more willing to see it as something that should be protected, with abuses punished after the fact, but which can be traded away in exchange for some benefits, like free Gmail.

This is absurd. The average American almost certainly views privacy as a fundamental right, they simply don't understand how participating in online social media and other virtual platforms is at odds with nose-length notions of privacy. The average Canadian probably doesn't understand this either; in fact, the average human with access to modern technology probably doesn't understand this. I'm perpetually vexed by those who advocate the idea of the virtual, information-based society, yet insist that such a society must protect the privacy of individual citizens. Privacy is not compatible with the freedom of information.

 

[Dak]

This is absurd. The average American almost certainly views privacy as a fundamental right, they simply don't understand how participating in online social media and other virtual platforms is at odds with nose-length notions of privacy. The average Canadian probably doesn't understand this either; in fact, the average human with access to modern technology probably doesn't understand this. I'm perpetually vexed by those who advocate the idea of the virtual, information-based society, yet insist that such a society must protect the privacy of individual citizens. Privacy is not compatible with the freedom of information.

You're probably right about the average person not understanding the situation now. Just read this related piece, and this is legitimately concerning:

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/07/what-cyber-war-will-look-like.html

 

[rms]

For @Dak

 

[Dak]

tl;dr version: Coates is an ignorant sycophant.

I liked the "Parable of the Pedestrian" portion. This is precisely the issue presenting itself in pretty much any therapy or rehab case. Also this:

cash transfers cannot solve a problem that the absence of cash didn’t cause. Herein lies one of the many issues with reparations: it would not address the root causes of black underachievement. Fans of the concept should ask themselves: what will happen the day after reparations are paid, when black students still spend less time on homework than their white peers, blacks are still making poor financial decisions, and two out of every three black kids are still living in single-parent homes? On that day, I’d hope to see progressive scholars acknowledge that they had been asking the wrong question for 50 years. But I would not be shocked to hear them insist that, if only the reparations checks had been a bit larger, black America’s problems would have been solved.

EG:



Of course, his extensive citing from Sowell will get all this handwaved by anyone not in the proverbial choir.