Archive for Culture
Arthur Brooks’ “The Battle”
Arthur Brooks, the polymath president of the American Enterprise Institute, today released his newest book, The Battle. It’s one barnstormer of a defense of free markets and a very lucid indictment of Brooks’ ideological opponents. Short, to the point, well-researched, and simple without being simplistic, this is a must-read for anyone who’s been bemoaning what for the last few years has looked like the death of intellectual conservatism.
Brooks’ thesis is that America is in the midst of a culture war, one that splits citizens who support markets and free enterprise from those who distrust it and want to fundamentally transform what America was, is, and will be; Brooks refers to the former as the 70 percent coalition and the latter as the 30 percent coalition, citing a plethora of data suggesting that Americans are split roughly 70/30 on the questions underlying the two different worldviews. (This echoes, but I think is emphatically different from, Grover Norquist’s “leave us alone coalition” and “takings coalition” division of the right and left.)
The difference between these groups has nothing to do with God, guns, and gays; rather, it’s about free markets and free enterprise. (To be sure, Brooks never touches on social issues.) Nor is this merely a consequentialist or Benthamite argument; Brooks writes that the “culture war between free enterprise and statism is not [about] material riches—it is [about] human flourishing. This is a battle about nothing less than our ability to pursue happiness.”
Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger’s
According to Wired’s Threat Level, noted hacker Adrian Lamo was institutionalized against his will for 9 days last month. He was released with a diagnosis of Aspberger’s. The whole article is an interesting read, but what fascinated me is how folks on the autism spectrum can go for so long without being diagnosed and how they’re surprised when they find out. From the article:
Also anecdotally, people with Asperger’s are frequently diagnosed in adulthood, even into their 50s, according to the U.S. Autism and Asperger’s Association. As in Lamo’s case, the diagnosis often follows a run-in with the police, says Dennis Debbaudt, an independent consultant who trains law enforcement agencies on interacting with people on the autistic spectrum.
Sir Mick on music profits
Via Gruber, here is a new BBC interview with Mick Jagger. He makes a very interesting point about music sales:
But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.
Don’t stop at 1900, though. If you think of the entire history of the world, the notion that you could make an outsized return on making music is a complete aberration.
Facebook’s autism
Until I read Tyler’s book, I never realized that autism had such a bad connotation associated with it, aside perhaps from it being considered a disability with which you wouldn’t want your child diagnosed. Now I see these views everywhere. Here are two from the last day, and interestingly they are both about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Jason Calacanis in his email newsletter:
Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur, I told Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that Zuckerberg would try and slit his throat.
Dan Lyons in his Newsweek column:
Based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, it portrays Zuckerberg as a borderline autistic, entirely ruthless conniver.
Perhaps there is a class of folks on the autism spectrum who use their ‘powers’ for evil, and this is where the prejudice originates? And perhaps Zuckerberg’s recent troubles, if he is autistic, stem from misreading Facebook’s users?
Why do we have panel discussions?
Why do we have panel discussions? The format is a peculiar mainstay of Washington policy circles that no longer seems to make any sense.
The first problem is that participants and the audience must congregate at the same time and place. Unlike lectures, which can sometimes be enlightening, you usually get four five minute talks that are too short to adequately treat any subject, but long enough, especially in the aggregate, to bore you to tears. Everyone knows where the panelists stand on the issue, and what everyone wants is for the panel to hurry up and get to the discussion.
Then there are the dumb questions and pontifications from the audience. As a frequent participant in panels (and increasingly less frequent attendee), I can tell you that most audience members who get up to the mic will ask rhetorical questions that are really meant to make a point on one side or the other, adding little to the positions that have already been staked out. Then there are those folks who dispense with the whole question thing and proceed to give their remarks as if they were some overlooked panel member. Why do we do this to ourselves?
As I’ve noted, the valuable part of any panel discussion is the discussion part. Listening to “experts” with differing views have a conversation about a particular topic can be a great way to learn something. And that’s why we have podcasts like Econtalk, BloggingHeads.tv, and maybe even your humble servant’s Surprisingly Free Conversations. Asynchronous and ageographic (is that a word?), you can partake of them any time and any place. Q&A and audience participation can take place in the comments section of a post. Yes, panel organizers will often make recordings available online, but that just highlights the fact that the conversation should have been produced digitally from the get-go.
The explanations I can come up with are that they are a vestige of a pre-internet time of couriers and fax machines in which congregating at the same time and at the same place was the only way to consume these discussions. No doubt these gatherings also served as a great way to meet or catch up with the inhabitants of a particular field or pursuit, and the post-event reception probably remains the only other redeeming quality of panel discussions. As an introvert, though, I see the forced socializing at these events as a bug, not a feature.
Six degrees of Jesus
An intellectually stimulating iPhone and iPad game:
The basics idea behind Wiki Hunt is that you start on a Wikipedia article and try to make it to the target article in as few clicks as possible. You can play a completely random game where Wiki Hunt chooses your start page and your end page, a custom game where you pick the start and end, or my personal favorite: Six clicks to Jesus.
I wonder if something exists like this that automates Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon using the IMDB API. Read the whole article at Touch Arcade.
The best paragraph I’ve read today
On the front page of the New York Times today about formspring.me:
While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.
Facebook, I can’t quit you?
I am this close to closing my Facebook account. They continue to make incomprehensible changes to their privacy policy and settings, so that it’s completely unclear to me which of my actions will be observable by whom.
A while back there was an app making the rounds that published to the world who visited your profile most frequently. I was identified as a frequent visitor of some friends profiles, and some people were revealed as frequent visitors to my profile. I’m not sure how they determined frequency, but it certainly shattered any conception of anonymous browsing I might have had.
Yesterday I logged in after not having done so in quite a while and was soon presented with a screen that asked me to link my profile with “pages” related to things I had listed in my profile (e.g. my high school’s page, band pages, TV show pages, etc.). There were only two choices given to me: accept “linking” my profile to the dozens of pages Facebook had chosen for me, or choose which pages I wanted to link individually. Not wanting to link to any damn thing, I chose the latter option. I was taken to a screen where all the pages were listed with a pre-checked box next to each one. In order to link to none I would have had to painstakingly uncheck all those boxes. Defaults matter and this was incredibly presumptuous. I closed the window without doing anything and I have no idea if I’m linked to any pages or not.
Now comes word from TechCrunch that a security flaw in Facebook allows anyone to see any of their friend’s live chats as they happen. Unbelievable.
Government regulation is not needed to discipline Facebook. Consumers will grow tired of being jerked around by such an insensitive and juvenile company and will find better service elsewhere. Twitter, for example, has incredibly simple and respectful privacy options.
So what’s keeping me from quitting? I don’t know really. A sneaking suspicion that I’ll miss out on something if I do. An invitation or the ability to easily look up an acquaintance’s email address. But I think I might just be exaggerating. Perhaps like James Sturn has done with the whole Internet, I should quit Facebook for at least a while and report back the consequences. Is there anything valuable I’d be giving up?
On Irony
Earlier this evening I tweeted “Glee version of Rock Bank or Guitar Hero would be over 9000 kinds of awesome.”
Very soon thereafter, I got two responses from friends. One said “Gasp! I need that. Brilliance.” The other said, “Please tell me you’re joking, Dan,” to which I responded, “Not in the slightest. But in fairness I don’t know the difference between what I like for real and what I like ironically.”
I was serious in my response to the second tweet. The line between sincerity and irony, at least for a certain segment of the Gen X and Gen Y set (read: hipsters and fellow travelers), has more or less disappeared. In 2001, Roger Rosenblatt of Time famously suggested that the 9/11 attacks spelled the death of irony. Chalk that up to the worst facepalm epic pundit fail since Clifford Stoll’s recently reunearthed 1995 pronouncement that the Internet was basically a bunch of hype. Irony is alive and well, and thank goodness.
I have been remarking for years that I no longer distinguish between that which I do sincerely and that which I do ironically. And I’ve decided that’s a good thing.
Fox’s Glee, to stay with the current example, doesn’t know whether it’s sincere or ironic. The show is so good because on one level it echoes life and a classic high school narrative, but on another level it drips with self-awareness and ridiculous plot twists, like the discovery that the school principal previously starred in an Air India safety video. It is neither straight nor comedic, it’s somewhere in the middle, and it veers rapidly between the two poles.
Because I have broken down the wall between sincere me and ironic me, I can like shows like Glee — which is silly, predictable, and as camp as a row of tents — and silly Europop and 80′s power ballads — without secreting them away as what we previously would have called “guilty pleasures.” The same goes for 30 Rock, another show conceived and executed with a Jimmy Fallon-esque degree of self-awareness. And my two Twitter respondents can think I like the show either ironically or sincerely, depending on how they choose to interpret it.
The result is an increased freedom to like what we want, regardless of social norms or fads — and an increased willingness to share our tastes with the world. The shield of irony allows us to expose our real likes and dislikes; people who question our tastes can write it off as irony. What’s fun is fun, whether it’s trendy or culturally significant or otherwise. The irony shield allows us to embrace anything and everything that we find fun, other people’s opinions be damned.
I close with the greatest definition of irony every given, not from Alanis Morisette, but from Baldrick.
On questioning motives
Why do [dermatologists] say that [you should avoid all sun exposure]? They are heavily invested, I think, with the cosmetics industry. The American Academy of Dermatology just had their annual meeting in Miami Beach. It was huge. Many of the major cosmetic companies were there, and they were spending thousands of dollars just to be out there and promote their products to the dermatologists. [...] In 2004, you were fired from Boston University’s department of dermatology by Dr. Barbara Gilchrest, who was head of the department. She called me into her office and said that she couldn’t have somebody in her department recommending sun exposure. At the time, she also questioned whether your findings had been compromised by money you received from the tanning industry. You received research money from the Indoor Tanning Association. That’s not true. The money came from the UV Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the Indoor Tanning Association.
From a NYT interview with Dr. Michael Hollick. When is it proper to question motives? Only after you’ve made a strong case on the merits?
Tumblr: Autism for the rest of us
The American Prospect has a great profile of Tumblr as a medium:
It’s this built-in community — a more formal linkage than most traditional blogs have — that leads to Tumblr’s focus on curation. According to Tumblr’s Web site, each month the average user creates 14 original posts, half of which are photos, and reblogs three. If you follow someone because you love her impeccable taste in vintage photos of Stevie Nicks, you might find that she is frequently reblogging from another Tumblr — and then start following that tumblelogger, too. It’s akin to the way that taste organically develops; you like a band, and you hear them mention an influence, and then you go out and buy that record, too.
If you don’t know what Tumblr is, I suggest you check it out. Here is my tumblr, here is Dan Rothschild’s, here is Robert Reich’s and here’s Merlin Mann’s. The article makes the point that the unlike blogs, tumblelogs are not about original content so much as about curation of other people’s content. My tumblr is an idiosyncratic collection of things I like or find amusing. If you share my tastes, you’ll enjoy it. Other tumblrs curate a particular topic. There are many “Fuck Yeah” tumblelogs, such as Fuck Yeah DC, Fuck Yeah Lost, Fuck Yeah Leonard Nimoy, and one of my favorites, Fuck Yeah Owls. It therefore surprises me that the ratio of original to reblogged content is so high.
Reading Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy a while back, I thought he might as well have been writing about Tumblr. The (autistic) notion of breaking down culture into tiny fragments and then ordering them however makes sense to us is basically what Tumblr is about. In many ways Marginal Revolution is a lot more like a tumblelog than a typical blog.
The community aspect of Tumblr that the American Prospect article lauds is possible because Tumblr combines the best parts of the open web and walled gardens like Facebook. Unlike Facebook, your tumblelog is visible to the wider web and anyone can view and link to you. You could visit a tumblelog and not realize that it’s hosted at Tumblr. However, if you are a Tumblr user, you will know that you’re looking at a Tumblr site and you can choose to “follow” or subscribe to the site. You then experience the content inside of Tumblr’s interface, which makes much easier and enjoyable to consume lots of content, much like Facebook’s news stream. And like with Facebook’s interface, it’s easy to “like” and reblog content, and that’s where the community forms.
Other great tumblelogs: Soxiam, Westworld, Stare Hard, Yeah, I Was in the Shit.
Political future of Millennials uncertain
Much has been written about Pew’s recent study on Milliennals, showing a generation that is more ideologically liberal and pro-government than previous generations. But a counter narrative seems to be emerging, reported at the Fiscal Times:
[Millennials are] collecting unemployment, signing up for food stamps, moving back home, and growing increasingly concerned about the future. A New York Times/CBS poll showed that 46 percent of Americans think the younger generations will be worse off than their parents, up from 32 percent last year. The Millennials — people born around 1980 and coming of age at the turn of the century — are the largest generation in the history of the country, about 80 million strong. In The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, Ron Alsop wrote, “If there is one overriding perception of the Millennial generation, it’s that these young people have great — and sometimes outlandish — expectations.” Described as confident, tech-savvy and optimistic, they are now seeing the American dream they once felt entitled to slipping through their fingers.
What will be the impact of this trend? Will Millennials become dependent on government or disillusioned with government? As David Boaz and I argued in our Cato study, “Libertarian Vote in Age of Obama,” Millennials seem prone to disillusionment, given the evidence of 9/11 and the Iraq war. And it is also true that there is a larger percentage of libertarian-leaning Millennials than in previous generations. But the ideological outlook for this generation seems very much uncertain.
Regardless, this is an opportunity for us in the business of educating about free markets. We should connect the dots for this generation, between the world of limitless opportunities they have come to expect and the structures of a free society that produce them.
The NYT’s first draft of history on display
Today I e-mailed a link to a New York Times article (which will run tomorrow on the front page) about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s proposed budget cuts. I made a special point of copying and pasting the third paragraph, which read in its entirety:
Upending the priorities of his Democratic predecessors, Governor Christie unveiled a budget that would hit the poor, elderly, schoolchildren, college students and inner-city residents hardest, while largely sparing the wealthy and businesses.
When my friend went to read the piece, he noticed that the paragraph I had sent had been changed to this:
Democrats were quick to characterize Mr. Christie’s proposal as falling disproportionately on the backs of the middle class, the poor, the elderly, schoolchildren, college students and inner-city residents, while leaving largely unscathed the wealthy and most businesses.
So, I guess kudos to the NYT for getting it better the second time. This seems to be an artifact of news on the web and the rush to publish in real time without much editing. There’s a reason, though, why bloggers have settled on a norm of using strikethrough when making major modifications to their posts.
Blood Donation Covariates
Today I donated blood at a blood drive at my office. Specifically, I did a red blood cell apheresis donation, where they take a pint of blood from your arm, centrifuge it to pull out the red blood cells, pump the plasma and whatever else is in your blood back into you, and repeat the process. This way they get double the amount of red blood cells, and since I’m blood type O, my red blood cells are particularly useful.
(I don’t care if they take my red blood cells. Those weakling cells don’t even have nuclei. And since they make up about a quarter of the cells in your body, the fewer of these second-rate cells I have coursing through my arteries, the better. But I digress.)
I wondered, though, why do people give blood? Obviously, altruism is the easy answer; we’re told that donating blood saves lives, and most people are altruistic enough to consider saving a life worth an hour of their time. (Plus you get cookies.)
My theory is that I donate blood, and have donated pretty regularly since I turned 17, because it falls into my list of Things That Are Done.
This list is a powerful motivator for me. I do a lot of things because they are Things That Are Done. In addition to donating blood, Things That Are Done include having a job, taking a daily newspaper, belonging to a religious community, clipping fingernails only in the privacy of one’s own home, and listening to one’s iPod as such a volume that a train or bus neighbor cannot hear it.
Because these are Things That Are Done, I do them. Simple as that. Call it traditionalist, call it Hayekian, whatever; we live in a society that is governed by rules and without these rules society will collapse, and we’ll be back to cavorting druids, death by stoning, and dung for dinner. Blood donation is the thin red line between civilization and a Hobbesian nightmare.
So, being a geek, I went to the literature to see if anyone had studied this. According to a paper in Transfusion, the main reason people give blood is due to altruism (Glynn et al, Transfusion 42(2), February 2002). Hardly a shocking find. In his 2007 book Who Really Cares, Arthur Brooks found that conservatives are more likely to give blood than liberals. Again, nothing counterintuitive.
But does anyone know what covariates exist with regular blood donation? I would hypothesize people of my general personality type — that is, people who believe that there are Things That Are Done, and hence do them — are overrepresented among blood donors in comparison with the general population. (We’re commonly called “gold” personality types by people who analyze such things, who are of course never themselves gold because gold people don’t care to analyze the feelings of people who are too ignorant to understand that there are Things That Are Done, and whining about how going to school doesn’t match your “tactile learning style” is Not Done, nor is excusing this behavior by saying someone has a Blue personality or whatever mumbo-jumbo they choose to employ.)
Does anyone know of any actual research on this? What is the relationship between subscribing to a newspaper and donating blood?
Interdisciplinary survey of Chatroulette
The award for academic entrepreneurialism goes to Alex Leavitt & Tim Hwang who earlier this week release the paper “Chatroulette: An Initial Surey.” Conducted over two days, the study “sampled 201 ChatRoulette sessions, noting characteristics such as group size and gender.”
They find that Chatroulette is “a probabilistic community: a community shaped by a platform which mediates the encounters between its users by eliminating lasting connections between them.” Uh-huh. I think it’s just easier to say that it’s a microcosm of the larger (and earlier) Internet–exhibitionists of the world, meet the voyeurs.
Putting the sample size aside, they found some interesting stats. Males accounted for 87% of their sessions, and 5% of chatters were exposing their genitals. While those two figures are probably related, “This suggests that–in spite of common assumptions–that the large majority of ChatRoulette users do not utilize the platform for sexual purposes.”
They finally make some interesting predictions about where Chatroulette, as a probabilistic community, will head.
After ChatRoulette users become more acquainted with the system (ie., do not browse solely to explore), we predict a decrease in explicit content, an increase in the consolidation of content genres, and an increase in the formation of celebrity figures.
Anyhow, this is all by way of making an excuse to link to this short video I made of persons on Chatroulette reacting to seeing Numa Numa Kid presented as their chat partner. Enjoy.
