Cory Doctorow on Marshmallow Longtermism

Posted on Monday 2 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I read Cory Doctorow’s latest column for Locus Magazine last week, when I browsed through my advance PDF copy of the September issue. It’s a fascinating piece that considers the difference between the political left and the political right in terms of a classic experiment in child psychology. The column has now been posted on the Locus website, so I can link to it, and discuss it.

(photo copyright Julia Galdo & Cody Cloud)

Locus Magazine, Cory Doctorow, September issue, posted 2 Sep 2024: Cory Doctorow: Marshmallow Longtermism

The classic experience is the Stanford marshmallow experiment, and is about delayed gratification.

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Lukianoff & Haidt, THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

Posted on Sunday 1 September 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a book that was published six years ago this month, and which I read one year ago last month.

Subtitle: “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”

(Penguin Press, Sept. 2018, 338pp, including 70p of acknowledgements, appendices, notes, references, and index.)

In a structure similar to Robert Reich’s book just discussed, this one identifies a problem, explores how we got here, then provides suggested correctives.

By “coddling” the authors mean that Americans, students in particular, are over-protected. The problem, especially on college campuses, consists of three Great Untruths. These are discussed in the first three chapters.

1, The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker;

2, The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings;

3, The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People.

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Infrastructure, the Constitution, Changing Minds, and Fringe Items

Posted on Saturday 31 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How expanding America’s highways doesn’t solve their congestion;
  • Ten ways the heat is changing us, including impacts on the infrastructure;
  • Another perspective on issues with the US Constitution;
  • Changing minds, appeals to fear, or persuasion;
  • Fringe items about a fake dog, telling jokes, giggling in public, choosing misery, and performing gender surgery.

Here’s a great story that challenges the presumptions of the growing economy.

Slate, David Zipper, 28 Aug 2024: How America Can Break Its Highway Addiction, subtitled “In the 1980s, an unlikely alliance slowed the construction of nature-destroying dams. We just might be able to pull it off again.”

This is about America’s propensity for building new highways. Continue reading →

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Robert Reich, THE COMMON GOOD

Posted on Friday 30 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s another shortish book I read recently, not a memoir but a book at the intersection of politics, morality, and human nature, which is itself another theme of my reading the past two or three years. It’s by Robert Reich, about whom I’ve written before, e.g. here. I read this one on the plane during our last trip to Austin, in early June, and revisited it yesterday to write up these notes.

By “common good” Reich means the set of shared values of society, what we owe together as citizens of the same society, the norms we voluntarily abide by. Reich is quick to caution that this has nothing to do with communism or socialism, or about political parties. It’s something that seems to have been lost, he says, so in this book he explains what it is, what happened to erode it, and what might be done to restore it.

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Human Nature, Morality, Politics

Posted on Wednesday 28 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I think the title here is the name for the broad category of my interests. They all blend together. They connect.

For today:

  • Would conservatives ever allow a revision of the US Constitution? No matter how dysfunctional it’s become, no matter how they ignore it anyway?
  • How Republican policies are ‘anti-family’;
  • Links from my favorite aggregate site about conservative superstition and nonsense;
  • About Trump’s embarrassing appearance at Arlington;
  • How Rich Lowry defends Trump’s “character” and how Tom Nichols responds.

Can we change our ways based on experience? Or are we forever stuck with the wisdom of the ‘ancients’ (in this case the Founders)?

LA Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, 23 Aug 2024: Opinion: We’re living under a flawed Constitution. Let’s start fresh and rewrite it

How is it flawed? For example:

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Political Truths and Lies

Posted on Tuesday 27 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

A subject which never ends. My fascination with this, yet again, isn’t about politics per se, so much as trying to understand why people believe what they do, and how humanity struggles with the balance of survival vs understanding.

  • How Fox News spins crime data;
  • How Trump and RFK Jr. are epistemological pals;
  • RFK Jr. promises to investigate chemtrails!;
  • How Reagan tried out some of the ideas in Project 2025;
  • And David French on the Christian persecution narrative.

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Media Matters, Gideon Taaffe, 23 Aug 2024: Fox News is pushing data from a former Trump official to incorrectly suggest violent crime is rising during the Biden administration

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About Expanding the Human Population

Posted on Monday 26 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Two items today on this topic, first an essay in NY Times, then a letters column today responding to it.

I addressed a similar piece Saturday. Here’s the NYT essay.

NY Times, Victor Kumar, a philosophy professor at Boston University, 5 Aug 2024: Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be.

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Deutsch Infinity, Ch 1

Posted on Sunday 25 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

The next big science tome I’ve begun reading is THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY, by David Deutsch, his only other book following THE FABRIC OF REALITY in 1997, which I reviewed here. This second book was published in 2011. (There’s no clue he might be writing another; presumably these two books constitute his personal theory of reality, and he has nothing more to say without being repetitious.) He continues to be a professor at Oxford.

Let’s try writing up my notes here as I go, instead of waiting until I finish the whole book, then spending another week or more posted chapter summaries. These posts will be indicated by the abbreviated title format; a final summary post will have the book photo in the middle.

His first book, recall, Continue reading →

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Examining The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

Posted on Saturday 24 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a piece that challenges my challenge to the assumption, especially in America, than more is better, that the economy must always expand, that the population should continue to increase indefinitely. My point has been that this literally cannot continue forever. At the same time, projections acknowledge that the human population will continue to rise to a point, later this century, and cap out at around 10 or 12 billion, then level off and even decrease — an effect of wealthier populations deciding to have few children all by themselves. Because, in a sense people don’t consciously realize, you don’t need to churn out so many children when most of them these days will survive past infancy.

Big Think, Jason Crawford, 21 Aug 2024: The overlooked virtues of a crowded world, subtitled “In a world of rising cynicism, a celebration of our capacity to create, adapt, and thrive.”

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DNC and Late August Goings-On

Posted on Friday 23 August 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Last night was the end of the Democratic National Convention, with Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech as nominee for president, and it’s been well-covered in all the news media. Most of us thought Harris did quite well, as she bridged from her personal history to issues of the day and finally took on Trump directly. The MAGA media took issue, of course; whatever she could have said would have been bad. Trump, reflexively, calls her a disaster and a bringer of death to the United States — but he would say that whatever Harris said, or whomever else was the Democratic nominee giving any kind of speech. He’s a joke.

A sidebar issue Continue reading →

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