@kitswulf

There are a couple different items here, please tell me if I don’t respond to any of them and I’ll add an addendum.

1. Some of the pieces that I found useful (in that they helped me understand things, not that I necessarily agree/endorse everything in them) are the following:

• https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/trump-politics-and-option-pricing-or-why-trump-voters-are-not-idiots-1e364a4ed940 This article helped me understand why people who I have lived with and cared about were supporting Trump. Like, nowadays I live in a big city and am a cosmopolitan PhD student in a foreign country and etc., but I grew up in a rural area for a good chunk of my life. Having people I considered friends, who I considered smart, become supporters (both full-throated and grudging) was confusing. Arnade’s article really helped lay out a reasonable idea: that for a lot of people in areas that have eaten shit over our policies for the last 20-40 years, having a really bad but high-variance-in-outcomes candidate was preferable. A lot of people I asked, given this frame, confirmed that it was their experience. Better to spin the Wheel o’ Who-The-Fuck-Knows than to accept the confirmed payout of the status quo of stagnant wages and crumbling cities. This frame even helped me talk a couple of them out of this idea, by basically arguing that yes, Trump was high variance, but his bell curve of outcomes had such a bad median that it’d be unlikely you get better than the status quo out of him. I feel modestly justified having now seen President Trump in action.
• https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/07/kentucky-trump-obama-unemployment-drugs This article is the sort of “field work” you mentioned. Since I work in politics and policy, understanding how and why people think in the way they do is important to me for at least 3 reasons: 1, maybe they’re experiencing something I’m missing. I mean, I haven’t lived in a city with less than 100k people for about a decade at this point. Their knowledge is more direct and recent than mine. 2, if I want to change their minds (e.g. on Trump), I need to understand how they think to make arguments that are convincing to them rather than just beating them about the head and shoulders while screeching “Stupid! Racist!”. 3, it makes me look over my models and policy recommendations from a different perspective, which makes them more robust. Am I certain I know the mechanism of how this policy will end up benefitting them? Is it presuming motivations or behavior that these people don’t actually have? For example, in this other article of his ( https://thebillfold.com/tarp-a-love-story-in-43-tweets-244e6fb9126c?source=user_profile———20———-) he’s certainly being hyperbolic, but he’s also illuminating that humans will generally veto a deal that is beneficial but unfair, and that a lot our policies for poor and uneducated people are pretty well-described as “beneficial but unfair”. If we keep offering people such deals, why are we unprepared for them to angrily veto it if they can?
  

I originally was going to write about how his goal is to be an advocate for an under-heard population, and speaking up for an underheard group requires obnoxious screaming, but @you-have-just-experienced-things did a better job of it than me: http://you-have-just-experienced-things.tumblr.com/post/158250611022/nostalgebraist-kitswulf-nostalgebraist. The post compares Arnade to Stallman, in that both are intentionally staking out extremist positions and being assholes because if they were too quiet and accomodating, people would ignore them, and even though they’re not correct on their own, the natural flow of The Discourse™ is away from their viewpoints, which are important to include. Just like any other disruptive protest, the question becomes: are you losing more people by being a jerk than you are gaining by presenting novel information? Considering that I think a lot more people need their faces rubbed in the horribleness of X than you do (maybe as a function of the average scrupulosity of the people we interact with?), I wonder if I value Arnade more because his face-rubbing is edifying to me and my network, but obnoxious to you and your network.

2. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if moral scrupulosity is the determining factor. I honestly don’t think Yglesias feels bad about Bangladesh, not deeply. I know this is uncharitable, but having encountered people similar to his mold, I’m the one who gets squicked, because people like him seem to sort of shrug and glibly go “Well, what are you gonna do?”, and if you reply with “What I am going to do is advocate for a different policy because I think it is telling that most countries that are able pay a productivity premium to reduce these sorts of conditions via labor laws, do so.” they become deeply horrified in a way that a mere thousand people dying can’t really compare to. As a result, the Arnades of the world rubbing the noses of the Yglesiases of the world in the results of their policies seems to me to be both intellectually valuable (”Maybe this policy isn’t the best, considering all the additional negative externalities Arnade is documenting…”) and also morally valuable (”It is one thing to grimly pay the cost of X because after forethought, all non-X alternatives are worse. It is another thing entirely to blithely champion X because the cost of X will never risk your life and family, so it’s just the cost of doing business.”). I think this ties into the squickiness a lot of the people in ratspace get from Arnade, since rationalists and -adjacents seem to be much more scrupulous than the average person, and so have been much more likely to go “X has awful parts, Y has awful parts, but after careful deliberation I think X is better even though it has so much awfulness”. So when Arnade bursts into the room going “HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT!? X! IS! BAD!“ it doesn’t feel like someone going “Are you certain of this model? I’d like to remind you of the costs in a more visceral way that’ll hit your affective/emotive processing rather than your logical thinking to ensure you have not reached this decision out of cognitive convenience.” it feels like someone simply shouting an appeal to emotion regarding an already-considered datapoint. The fact that he has, in many cases, not in fact been amongst the people he is advocating for simply piles hypocrisy atop an ineffective argument and makes it seem more likely to be made in bad faith.

3. Building off of point 2, I think a good chunk of Arnade’s value comes from the fact that humans tend to think narratively and with bounded rationality, and that tragically includes a lot of policymakers and the like. And if we don’t ensure a good spread of stories exist (if only to make sure that people can come up with counter-anecdotes sufficiently to force them to regard data) then we’ll still have people thinking in stories, but they’ll be few, simple, and glib. “Trump supporters are all racists, and the way to fix that is to keep calling them racists and harassing them, and this will get Hillary elected in November.” “Freer markets are always good and there are never any losers that we should compensate, if only out of the pure self-interest of them not burning everything down out of spite a la Brexit.” “Drug users are just inherently irrational due to their addictions and we won’t learn anything about how to help them by interacting with them, and they resist us purely out of moral weakness and not because people resent being talked down to.” Having someone pull out those intended-to-be-heartbreaking narratives to make people consider alternate points of view is pretty important, and seems to provide an important counterbalance.

And…some people find that tactic gross? Like, besides your reply others have reblogged sharing that revulsion, which I think I can understand but not share. Most humans out there are motivated by stories and think in stories, and I feel like I should take action presuming I live within that constraint. If that means that one sad, crying child in a commercial gets more funding than the far-more-thorough statistics about child mortality in a region, I’m going to try and make policies based on mortality risk…but I’m going to rally support and funding by talking about that one crying child. To once again quote @you-have-just-experienced-things, “whenever Arnade actually tries to argue about the real tradeoffs associated with a particular policy or law the result is disastrous”, and I agree to the extent that I think your original post nailed it: Arnade would need a policy of national befriending-and-community-integrating, which is…not an effective policy, to say the least. But without Arnade, we don’t get a marvelous statisitically-focused policy selection, we merely get a smaller subset of anecdotes, ones that seem to pander to the biases and preferences of those currently in power.

Cut (and thread snip) bc length

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(via kitswulf)

You know what’s really weird?  From what I can tell (having read descriptions/reviews and some scattered bits of the book itself), the parts of The Bell Curve that aren’t about race are dedicated to making a completely standard disability-rights type argument that could be almost effortlessly rephrased using terms like “ableism,” “accommodations,” “cognitive privilege,” etc.

Basically Charles Murray thinks the social structures around us have been designed by people with high IQs on the assumption that everyone can do the things they can do, and just as easily as they can do them, and so the world is lacking in figurative “wheelchair ramps” for people who don’t have relatively high cognitive ability.  His policy proposals at the end are stuff like “more accommodations” and “better social safety net.”

I know next to nothing about Murray, but have to I imagine that when he hears “IQ research is bad because it was used to justify eugenics,” it sounds to him like “some people wanted to sterilize people who couldn’t walk, and that involved identifying who could walk and who couldn’t, so let’s just pretend everyone can walk.  What could go wrong?”

This isn’t some horseshoe theory joke or any other kind of “own,” or like, anything, it’s honestly unsetting how leftist this stuff sounds and how easy it is to imagine it being a standard leftist concern.  And hell, if this critique of society is true, well, most people are never going to know that, because it’s written in The Horrible Book, by Voldemort, and not really (m)any other places that I know of

What if Charles Murray is right about why people suffer and there are people suffering who will go on suffering because instead of spreading the idea in a pragmatic way, he chose to put it in something that would predictably become The Horrible Book by Voldemort and make very very sure no one would go near the radioactive idea for decades, what if, what if.  These are the kind of things that bother me, like, constantly, as ever-present background noise whenever I think about Serious matters, and, argh,

BTW I got that Jemaine image from the currently airing TV show “Legion,” which I am really enjoying

So far (4 episodes) it’s not especially deep or original writing-wise, but it has wonderful directing / editing / audiovisual style, and although it’s yet another story like Fight Club or Mr. Robot that uses the protagonist’s mental illness* mostly as a mechanism for creating weird plot shit, it does nicely capture the feeling of “yes, I’m crazy, but the world is also crazy, and sometimes I’m not the crazier of the two”

*(technically, he isn’t mentally ill, his symptoms are just manifestations of his superpowers! except then there are hints that maybe he is mentally ill but also has superpowers, so who even knows what’s real, man??  it’s that kind of story)

Ph.D blues (don’t reblog, will probably delete later, just a standard freakout that will pass, and soon it will be done and there will be no more of those)

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Posting any kind of potentially controversial stuff on here stresses me out – like I woke up this morning worried that someone might have yelled at me for that post last night.  Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, right?  I dunno, it’s stupid and oversensitive, but that kind of thing does stress me out, to a extent comparable to other, “bigger deal” stressors.  I think because of the “latent sense I’m a bad person which will reassert itself if presented with the slightest apparent confirmation" thing.

I was sick yesterday and spent a lot of the day reading Trump news + tumblr and getting scared about everything, and all the Spencer-punching-euphoria was making me extrapolate even more scary realities, but I don’t think posting actually helps with any of that.  I should just be a friendly #quotes merchant and that sort of thing, I’m too much of a delicate flower for discourse

(Read more books, Rob, don’t look at the computer – reading books can even give you historical perspective on the present if you want)

aprilwitching

replied to your post

“I identify as a rando Like, my anxious/self-hating fantasies have…”

i dont think so. like a “rando” in this sense is usually someone who’s being rude or mean or egregiously invasive, and *knows it*. sometimes maybe they think their rudeness/meanness/invasiveness is justified, or funny. sometimes maybe they are having a hard time regulating their tone and making good choices about how to approach strangers on the internet due to some brain-detrimental factor, like say maybe they’re drunk, or bipolar, or seventeen.

certainly i have some sympathy for some of those people. i’ve been told off for my chronic Foot-In-Mouth Disease a whole lot in my life, and even if you know you fully deserve to be told off it’s still really embarrassing and it can still hurt your feelings. but i just dont think youre like that, really– sometimes you can be a little socially tone deaf, perhaps, but ive never seen you engage with literally anybody by insulting them, mocking them, throwing around wild

accusations about their beliefs, character, intentions, etc. if you make a habit of harassing strangers on the internet, it’s sure news to me! i think a lot of socially anxious people, or people with histories of being bullied/mistreated/ridiculed for being kind of awkward or harmlessly odd, end up with this idea that theyre really big jerks, or somehow hurting/burdening/harassing other people just by existing or trying to interact with anyone in any way. this is sad,

and not true! i DO think that it can result in increased understanding and compassion for people who are socially off-putting or difficult to like in any way, which is admirable. but sometimes, in some people, i think that tendency can slide into a failure to recognize real malice, or into making excuses for interpersonal behavior that is seriously out of line and should be rebuked. like, i am thinking now of that whole conversation surrounding dick pics from early 2016.

also i am thinking of an attitude i occasionally see that….hm. somehow being….not even a jerk really, but just, like, sort of unfriendly, or exasperated, or snarky….in response to someone who IS in fact being a jerk, who is indisputably being a jerk, is, like, THE MOST TERRIBLE THING IN THE UNIVERSE. worse than the jerk’s unprovoked jerkitude by far, at any rate! this is a pretty backwards attitude even in cases where you can make the argument that the person

being jerked at could and should have responded more politely (or just ignored the jerk). uh, these are way too many thoughts for this post already, man, im sorry. i hope you dont feel flooded! but my last one was, i guess– you specify in this post that in your fantasy, the takedown would be stern but fair/polite/measured. well, that wouldn’t be so bad, really, would it? that’s a world away from mockery and ostracism (which, beg pardon if im totes off base here, kinda sounds like it might be what youre actually afraid of?) …i mean, when someone rebukes or corrects you in a way that’s not rageful or gratuitously insulting/embarrassing/aggressive, in a way that makes it clear to you what (they think) you said or did that was wrong/hurtful, isn’t that a kindness? far from treating the “rando” as less than human (as one response to this seems to be implying), or making him a target for schadenfreude, that sort of response says “listen,

you’re being a real asshole right now, but i believe in your capacity to not be an asshole. i am demonstrating this belief by engaging with you in the best faith i can, by actually taking the time out of my day to explain things to you". i’m not saying super mean, mocking rebuttals don’t happen (they sure as hell do) or that a lot of people don’t enjoy reading the occasional savage takedown of Some Blowhard Or Jerk Or Ignoramus On the Internet. i’m just saying that’s not what youre describing here and…well, actually maybe you know that, and ive read this whole thing wrong. sorry rob. thanks for ur time

No problem!!

I think I’m generally not a very angry person – like, I really do not get angry that often, compared to what is the norm as far as I can tell – but also, this fear I’m describing causes me to be less forthright, and less insulting / flippant, than I otherwise would be.  So what you’re seeing is kind of an overcorrection?

It isn’t that I think I’m this rowdy, fight-starting person by temperament (I’m not) – the fear is that if I do, on some occasion, act aggressively, this will be perceived as baffling and inappropriate.  People will ask “what was that guy’s problem?” as a non-rhetorical question, because they’ll actually be confused.  What I feel kinship with is not the drive-by anon who makes a predictable objection (“lol, typical leftist scum…”), but the person who has a totally unanticipated pet issue and thinks you are just the worst for not anticipating it.  Because that is the way I expect (I mean, this self-hatey part of me expects) my aggression to be received, as making a big deal out of some out-there thing.

And so in that context, a “properly mean” response would be almost … dignifying? validating? … since in that case we would be two angry people having a fight, on the same plane, as though my thing is the sort of thing people have fights about.  Whereas the “graceful” responses can feel like I’ve made this “aberration” in the social fabric that is being quickly and efficiently closed, that people are telling me “look, I don’t know why you thought that was OK, and I’m going to explain why, but now let’s calm down and pretend it never happened, all right?”  Like the primary issue is not that I’m even wrong, or mean, but that I’m “acting up” like a child who inexplicably gets up and starts body-slamming the wall or throwing school supplies on the ground, and the socially indicated response is to convey with stern maturity that this is a Nonsense Action and get the kid back to their seat, not to engage them on their own terms (whatever those even are).

(To be clear, I’ve never even been that kid, not when I was a kid, I had Tourette’s but I was meek even back then)

Returning to my graduate thesis (for what is hopefully a brief round of polishing before the whole thing’s over) has put into stark relief how unpleasant grad school was.

Suddenly I’m back to the old (half-forgotten!) daily pattern of accomplishing a few minor things in the first few hours of the day, then spending the rest of the day in an anxiety loop where I plan to do a more substantial task and then worry about how hard it’ll be given how anxious I already am, which makes me more anxious, etc.  Fiddling with code and running endless tests becomes a way to avoid thinking about the bigger picture, because thinking about the bigger picture feels like watching some absurdist play about how there are no longer any clear standards of value in the world.  My desire for alcohol in the evening has increased, just as it immediately decreased when I stopped working on this project earlier in the year.

I hope this isn’t just “what confronting something serious and difficult” is like for me.  But I’ve had other challenges that don’t make me feel like this; the first time I remember this distinct thing was when I was a research assistant after college, which – hmmm – was the first time I did “real” academic research (as opposed to my undergrad thesis, where I just did a project I thought was cool and didn’t expect to publish any results or otherwise interact with academia).  So probably(/hopefully) I just hate doing academic research.

Predictably (in retrospect), the “why did people vote for Trump?” discourse is an anxiety minefield for me.  (Vast uncertainty with great moral and political weight attached – I really don’t know and I SHOULD know and not knowing makes me a milquetoast liberal or a sheltered coastal urbanite or both and more, I SHOULD be opening my ears and heart to Trump supporters OR fighting fascists in the streets OR PROBABLY SOMEHOW both at once)

I already said some things to this effect, but I am going to actively avoid talking about the Orange Man on this tumblr blog.  I may blacklist “trump” also.  (I am still going to be hearing plenty about the subject without tumblr’s help, anyway)

For, er, Historical Reasons, any interaction with my father in which I appear even temporarily incapable of performing some mundane task will tend to make me feel like complete shit

The twist here being that in interactions like the one I just had, I already felt pretty bad and that was why I couldn’t seamlessly do the thing without even a moment to collect myself and so then of course I ended up feeling much worse, making me even more visibly incapable and thus etc.

Fuck positive feedback loops, man

Felt anxious and restless all day, was wondering about possible causes, remembered I’d just started a new potent antibiotic (Levaquin), looked up its side effects and apparently it does have CNS effects and can cause anxiety (and convulsions, etc. rarely)

“Kinda sucks since I’ll have to take it for 10 days but whatever,” I think

Then I idly decided to just Google “levaquin anxiety” to see if there are internet reports of similar reactions, come upon a thread welcomingly titled “Levaquin anxiety forever ?”, and next thing I know I’m reading a 253-page PDF-format amateur medical treatise on the (supposedly) horrible long-lasting side effects of this class of antibiotics, written with a weird mix of shaky grammar, well-organized and user-friendly presentation, anti-Big Pharma paranoia and careful hair-splitting.  Great material for an acutely anxious human being :P

(But seriously I’m OK, taking a step back these are really really commonly used drugs, and even if I step back inside the crackpot vortex that PDF is mostly talking about higher doses in longer courses)