I think the generation of experts of the 60s looked around and realized that the accomplishments of their elders had bought them enough status as a class that people would just… believe them. And so they did what most people would do if they suddenly discovered the magic power to make people believe anything they said. They abused it.
And this magic power became an attraction for people to join the class. And so people who joined this class of “experts” who are now being told, “no, we don’t believe you” feel like they’ve been aggrieved. This wasn’t the deal they were promised. And, naturally, the reason isn’t because they don’t deserve it; it’s because we’re all inferior.
It’s the corruption of a priesthood, and nothing more. The assumption of moral supremacy, the hunts for heretics and their consequent public destruction, the appeals to authority, the diminishing virtue… it’s all happened before. “You must let us regulate all aspects of your life to fend off the Climate Gods” is only different from the Aztec demands for human sacrifice to ensure the sun would rise at the margins. The core concept is the same.
“Aaron M.” commenting on Glenn Reynolds, “MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Suicide of Expertise”, Instapundit, 2017-03-20.
March 14, 2019
QotD: The doubting of the experts
March 13, 2019
QotD: Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier was challenged on his obsession with keeping his plan in the face of different local conditions, pre-existing structures, residents who might want a say in the matter, et cetera. Wasn’t it kind of dictatorial? He replied that:
The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques.
What was so great about this “biological creation” of “serene and lucid minds”? It … might have kind of maybe been evenly-spaced rectangular grids:
People will say: “That’s easily said! But all your intersections are right angles. What about the infinite variations that constitute the reality of our cities?” But that’s precisely the point: I eliminate all these things. Otherwise we shall never get anywhere.
I can already hear the storms of protest and the sarcastic gibes: “Imbecile, madman, idiot, braggart, lunatic, etc.” Thank you very much, but it makes no difference: my starting point is still the same: I insist on right-angled intersections. The intersections shown here are all perfect.
Scott uses Le Corbusier as the epitome of five High Modernist principles.
First, there can be no compromise with the existing infrastructure. It was designed by superstitious people who didn’t have architecture degrees, or at the very least got their architecture degrees in the past and so were insufficiently Modern. The more completely it is bulldozed to make way for the Glorious Future, the better.
Second, human needs can be abstracted and calculated. A human needs X amount of food. A human needs X amount of water. A human needs X amount of light, and prefers to travel at X speed, and wants to live within X miles of the workplace. These needs are easily calculable by experiment, and a good city is the one built to satisfy these needs and ignore any competing frivolities.
Third, the solution is the solution. It is universal. The rational design for Moscow is the same as the rational design for Paris is the same as the rational design for Chandigarh, India. As a corollary, all of these cities ought to look exactly the same. It is maybe permissible to adjust for obstacles like mountains or lakes. But only if you are on too short a budget to follow the rationally correct solution of leveling the mountain and draining the lake to make your city truly optimal.
Fourth, all of the relevant rules should be explicitly determined by technocrats, then followed to the letter by their subordinates. Following these rules is better than trying to use your intuition, in the same way that using the laws of physics to calculate the heat from burning something is better than just trying to guess, or following an evidence-based clinical algorithm is better than just prescribing whatever you feel like.
Fifth, there is nothing whatsoever to be gained or learned from the people involved (e.g., the city’s future citizens). You are a rational modern scientist with an architecture degree who has already calculated out the precise value for all relevant urban parameters. They are yokels who probably cannot even spell the word architecture, let alone usefully contribute to it. They probably make all of their decisions based on superstition or tradition or something, and their input should be ignored For Their Own Good.
And lest I be unfair to Le Corbusier, a lot of his scientific rational principles made a lot of sense. Have wide roads so that there’s enough room for traffic and all the buildings get a lot of light. Use rectangular grids to make cities easier to navigate. Avoid frivolous decoration so that everything is efficient and affordable to all. Use concrete because it’s the cheapest and strongest material. Keep pedestrians off the streets as much as possible so that they don’t get hit by cars. Use big apartment towers to save space, then use the open space for pretty parks and public squares. Avoid anything that looks like a local touch, because nationalism leads to war and we are all part of the same global community of humanity. It sounded pretty good, and for a few decades the entire urban planning community was convinced.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
March 12, 2019
QotD: The creed of the editor
It is part of the woolly lore of editors and lawyers alike: the misplaced or absent comma in a statute or a contract that ends up costing somebody zillions of dollars. There really are not many examples of this happening, but lawyers have a responsibility to behave as though the danger were omnipresent. The thought of a comma disaster encourages close attention to detail: it provides a spur to the spirit during long hours of copy-editing.
As for print editors, believing in the myth of the expensive punctuation mark imparts a hypothetical cash value, even a heroic dignity, to the fussiness they probably acquired in toilet training.
The thing about text errors in the law is that natural language is highly redundant. You can transpose letters in a sentence or word, sow punctuation randomly, leave out the vowels: what’s left will ordinarily still convey the intended meaning. Errors induced by chance rarely create true ambiguity. Their disruptiveness is vexing when you are trying to create high art for a consumer’s pleasure, such as, say, a learned newspaper column. Usually they do not cost anyone money or alter history.
Colby Cosh, “At long last, milkmen deliver the punctuation scandal we’ve been waiting for”, National Post, 2017-03-22.
March 11, 2019
QotD: The purpose of language
But back to the mystics in general. I refuse to be swallowed up by their bullshit, nor do I allow myself to feel in any way inferior to their apparent greater knowledge. I once listened to some consultant describe a proposed change, and the description was filled with consultant-jargon — oh yes, they too have to impress clients with their insider language — and when he was done, I said, as succinctly as I could: “I didn’t understand a single thing you just said. Could you restate it, but in plain English this time?”
“Oh,” he stammered, “I simply meant that we need to streamline the process to shorten our product’s time-to-market.”
“You mean, the time between the thing’s production and its appearance on the retailer’s shelf?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you just say that, instead of having me waste both our time by getting you to explain it to me?”Roger Moore put it best, I think: “The point of language is to communicate your thoughts in the shortest possible time and in the clearest possible way.” My corollary to that excellent sentiment is, “And if somebody is not doing that, he’s pursuing a different agenda or has something he wishes to disguise.”
And finally, I should point out that Moore’s “clarity” does not equal “simplistic” (I nearly wrote simplisme, but you guys would have chased me from the room, and justifiably so).
Semper claritas should be your guiding principle.
Kim du Toit, “Mystics”, Splendid Isolation, 2017-03-28.
March 10, 2019
QotD: Surnames and taxes
… (related: Scott examined some of the same data about Holocaust survival rates as Eichmann In Jerusalem, but made them make a lot more sense: the greater the legibility of the state, the worse for the Jews. One reason Jewish survival in the Netherlands was so low was because the Netherlands had a very accurate census of how many Jews there were and where they lived; sometimes officials saved Jews by literally burning census records).
Centralized government projects promoting legibility have always been a two-steps-forward, one-step back sort of thing. The government very gradually expands its reach near the capital where its power is strongest, to peasants whom it knows will try to thwart it as soon as its back is turned, and then if its decrees survive it pushes outward toward the hinterlands.
Scott describes the spread of surnames. Peasants didn’t like permanent surnames. Their own system was quite reasonable for them: John the baker was John Baker, John the blacksmith was John Smith, John who lived under the hill was John Underhill, John who was really short was John Short. The same person might be John Smith and John Underhill in different contexts, where his status as a blacksmith or place of origin was more important.
But the government insisted on giving everyone a single permanent name, unique for the village, and tracking who was in the same family as whom. Resistance was intense:
What evidence we have suggests that second names of any kind became rare as distance from the state’s fiscal reach increased. Whereas one-third of the housholds in Florence declared a second name, the proportion dropped to one-fifth for secondary towns and to one-tenth in the countryside. It was not until the seventeenth century that family names crystallized in the most remote and poorest areas of Tuscany – the areas that would have had the least contact with officialdom. […]
State naming practices, like state mapping practices, were inevitably associated with taxes (labor, military service, grain, revenue) and hence aroused popular resistance. The great English peasant rising of 1381 (often called the Wat Tyler Rebellion) is attributed to an unprecedented decade of registration and assessments of poll taxes. For English as well as for Tuscan peasants, a census of all adult males could not but appear ominous, if not ruinous.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
March 9, 2019
QotD: “Scientific” urban planning versus messy, unscientific, evolved town growth
Natural organically-evolved cities tend to be densely-packed mixtures of dark alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts. Yet for some reason, whenever these new rational cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic suburbs. And again, for some reason the urban planners got promoted, became famous, and spread their destructive techniques around the world.
Ye olde organically-evolved peasant villages tended to be complicated confusions of everybody trying to raise fifty different crops at the same time on awkwardly shaped cramped parcels of land. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: giant collective mechanized farms growing purpose-bred high-yield crops and arranged in (say it with me) evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these giant collective farms had lower yields per acre than the old traditional methods, and wherever they arose famine and mass starvation followed. And again, for some reason governments continued to push the more “modern” methods, whether it was socialist collectives in the USSR, big agricultural corporations in the US, or sprawling banana plantations in the Third World.
Traditional lifestyles of many East African natives were nomadic, involving slash-and-burn agriculture in complicated jungle terrain according to a bewildering variety of ad-hoc rules. Modern scientific rationalists in African governments (both colonial and independent) came up with a better idea – resettlment of the natives into villages, where they could have modern amenities like schools, wells, electricity, and evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these villages kept failing: their crops died, their economies collapsed, and their native inhabitants disappeared back into the jungle. And again, for some reason the African governments kept trying to bring the natives back and make them stay, even if they had to blur the lines between villages and concentration camps to make it work.
Why did all of these schemes fail? And more importantly, why were they celebrated, rewarded, and continued, even when the fact of their failure became too obvious to ignore? Scott gives a two part answer.
The first part of the story is High Modernism, an aesthetic taste masquerading as a scientific philosophy. The High Modernists claimed to be about figuring out the most efficient and high-tech way of doing things, but most of them knew little relevant math or science and were basically just LARPing being rational by placing things in evenly-spaced rectangular grids.
But the High Modernists were pawns in service of a deeper motive: the centralized state wanted the world to be “legible”, ie arranged in a way that made it easy to monitor and control. An intact forest might be more productive than an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of Norway spruce, but it was harder to legislate rules for, or assess taxes on.
The state promoted the High Modernists’ platitudes about The Greater Good as cover, in order to implement the totalitarian schemes they wanted to implement anyway. The resulting experiments were usually failures by the humanitarian goals of the Modernists, but resounding successes by the command-and-control goals of the state. And so we gradually transitioned from systems that were messy but full of fine-tuned hidden order, to ones that were barely-functional but really easy to tax.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
March 8, 2019
QotD: Wine books as hagiography
Disasters of this sort happen much more rarely in books of the second category. Or rather, the things that do go wrong are sent from outside to try the heroic château-owners: items such as the French Revolution, the German occupation, hail, drought, floods, phylloxera, mildew and oidium. Disasters are there to be triumphed over; owners (or, at any rate, recent owners) are always doing their best, even when the world is less than the best possible. Greed, corruption, exploitation of employees and sharp practice turn up as rarely in the literary genre that is the château profile as does premarital bonking in Barbara Cartland. (And just out of interest, were there no collaborators in the vineyards during the last war? I’ve yet to read of any.) Of course, these books tend to be commissioned when the château is rich and its label famous; even so, it would be a nice change to read some day of an estate where the vineyards were wrecked, the workforce pissed, the proprietors fraudulent and the wine disgusting. In the meantime we have Asa Briggs: ‘I would not have written this book, however, had I not been invited to do so by the Duc and Duchesse de Mouchy, and they, along with other members of the Dillon family (who now own the vineyard) on both sides of the Atlantic, have given me great encouragement – and offered me memorable hospitality – throughout the inevitably protracted period of my research.’ Well, yes. Briggs does his little nods and bows, and writes with the bonhomie of a trusted courtier. He imparts all the key information that official sources will disclose about Haut-Brion; he writes effectively about the wider history of the Bordeaux wine trade (which perhaps should have been his subject in the first place), and fascinatingly about the city under the Revolution, when the owner of Haut-Brion was sent to the guillotine. But it is not for nothing that the name Asa Briggs, as a New Statesman competition entrant pointed out, is an anagram of Sir Gasbag. He just can’t help the pompous and the self-referential: ‘The year 1938, when I went up to university, was only an ‘average year’, rather like 1939, the first year I visited Bordeaux before war reached it … I have never tasted the 1955, the year of my marriage’. He is also a generous quoter of the gasbaggery of others. Take this insight from that ‘great citizen and long-time Mayor of Bordeaux’, Jacques Chaban-Delmas: ‘The spirit of a city takes bodily shape, so to say, across time and across the history that defines, affims and perpetuates both its identity and its raison d’être.’ Not much will have gone missing in the translation.
It is, no doubt, the fault of the genre, but Haut-Brion avoids controversy like a corked bottle. Briggs praises Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s ‘thoughtful and wide-ranging’ The Wines of Bordeaux, but does not quote its author’s judgement that ‘vinously the château has had its ups and downs in this century’. Briggs is ‘deeply impressed’ by Robert Parker and his ‘outstanding personality’, but does not refer to Parker’s assertion that the château produced ‘simplistic’ claret in the years 1966-74: ‘Whether this was intentional,’ Parker writes in Bordeaux, ‘or just a period in which Haut-Brion was in a bit of a slump remains a mystery. The staff at Haut-Brion is quick-tempered and sensitive about such a charge.’ Briggs also manages to blandify the potentially interesting anecdote. There is a story about Malcolm Forbes (‘who died while I was carrying out research for this book’), who at one extreme famously bought a bottle of Jefferson claret for $156,000, and at the other several hundred bottles of 1965 Haut-Brion for $5 a throw. ‘Forbes described himself as an appreciator of wine rather than as a collector, and he was a shrewd appreciator at that, a man who liked a bargain,’ Briggs notes. He records Forbes’s opinion that the 1965 got ‘better and better’ each time he drank it, the owner of Haut-Brion’s view that Forbes had been ‘quite right’ to have bought the wine, and ends by nervelessly quoting the Haut-Brion brochure to the effect that the wine is ‘astonishing for the vintage’. Sir Gasbag concludes: ‘Six thousand cases of Haut-Brion were produced in 1965. The comparative figures for 1964 and 1966 were 17,500 and 19,500. Forbes obviously knew what rarity meant.’ Among the fawning and the back-slapping lies a moderately interesting story about the penny-pinching of the super-rich. Of course, the reason the 1965 is ‘rarer’ than those on either side of it was because of climactic conditions which made it one of the crappiest of all postwar vintages, in which Haut-Brion produced a marginally less crappy wine than some of the other first growths. And would any vineyard-owner ever willingly dump on his own wine in overt contradiction of a millionaire client? I once attended a vertical tasting of a second-growth claret in the presence of the owner and her business manager. Among several excellent vintages there was an obvious super-dud of a 1958, which should long since have been emptied straight into the vinegar mother. When the owner arrived for the tasting she asked her manager in some puzzlement why they were showing the 1958. Because we have several hundred cases of it left,’ he replied. Whereupon, a few minutes later, she rose to her feet and gave measured praise to the lesser-known but arguably undervalued 1958.
Julian Barnes, “Did You Get Black Truffles on the Nose?”, Literary Review, 1994-10.
March 7, 2019
QotD: Marxist absolutism
Do you know why Marxists like absolutism so much? Why even a 99.9% success rate is not good enough for them? Because it gives them an excuse to continue to exist. No human society will ever reach 100% of anything. There will always be people who are poor, people who don’t get the care they need, people who die senselessly, idiots who get drunk and wreck someone’s life. Always.
Reducing the incidence of those things is a good and noble pursuit. But they can never be stopped completely. By saying that nothing is good enough unless it has a 100% success rate, the Marxist is giving himself power for life, and his organization power forever. Because so long as one person slips through the cracks, he can say “my work is not done yet.”
But the single-minded focus of Marxists on power politics is a good tell. Absolutism can tell you if someone is a Marxist, but so can an over-reliance on the language of political power. Normal people might talk politics for a while, even rant about it as I do here, but there are also times when they just don’t care about politics at all.
Marxists want to bring politics into everything. Are you eating a plate of Chinese takeout? Cultural Appropriation. Do you drive a nice car? Privilege! Do you like your hair a certain way? Racism! Everything must involve politics with them. They cannot stop thinking about their obsession for even the briefest of moments. At some point, a normie is likely to talk about his dog, or his kid, or how much he likes beer, or something totally unrelated to politics. The Marxist, on the other hand, will find a way to steer that back.
Dystopic, “Marxism: The bug wearing an Edgar suit”, The Declination, 2017-03-10.
March 6, 2019
QotD: Teaching evolution in the “Bible Belt”
I teach college in a small city in Arkansas, deep in the American Bible Belt. I am a historian of Africa and in my department that means that I also teach a world history survey. I always start with the expansion of modern humans out of Africa and their encounter with other types of humans: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Denesovians and what seems like an ever-growing list of newly discovered human-like creatures. It’s less the case now, but when I started twenty years ago this part of the course was initially met with polite but firm resistance, which gradually gave way to a sort of furtive curiosity. I eventually realized that even my cleverest students knew very little about human evolution except that it was false and that they were supposed to reject it. They came to the university having been taught that evolution was part of a larger attack on their faith and values, but they had never really been exposed to anything but a sort of parody version of it. A small number of them accepted evolutionary theory, but being a Darwinian in rural Arkansas was usually more about youthful rebellion and non-conformity than it was about informed, rational consideration of evidence.
Once we got past the denunciation or acceptance of evolutionary theory as a form of tribal affiliation, I found students to be deeply curious about it. It was such a taboo subject that their high school teachers had only skimmed over it and often with some careful personal distancing from the material. So the opportunity to delve into the details of this forbidden knowledge was intellectually thrilling for them. Despite the excitement engendered by the topic only a few changed their minds; most did not.
My students had grown up in communities where evolutionary theory was so wrong, so contrary to the accepted worldview of all decent people, that the only acceptable way to talk about it was to denounce it or reject it. The result was that most of my students rejected evolution, but getting a chance to learn about it was profoundly exciting, even if most of them were too conformist (these were Honors students after all) to change their positions.
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
March 5, 2019
QotD: Modern architecture
Now that I think about it, he said, spitballing for no particular reason, having a lot of art books of a certain sort is a political statement: if people suspects that your choice of subjects implies a rejection or at least a lack of interest in modernism or other cultures, they infer things.
My architecture books would be a rebuke to some, since they’re focused on particular eras and styles. I don’t have any books about other styles or cultures because I am not interested in them. At all. I know it’s a sign of a robust and well-rounded mind to be utterly fascinated by everything, but I’d rather spend the time knowing more about what I’m interested in. I mean, there’s no way I could begin to pretend I care as much about Japanese art as I do about Western art. I know it has its own complexities and meanings I don’t understand or recognize, but I simply don’t care.
Then again, my books are rebuke to my own culture, since the architecture and art they contain are better than the tiresome products of the contemporary art establishment. This remarkable article in Forbes – not recent, but recently discovered – contains some gas-inducing quotes about the function and purpose of modern architecture, and it’s basically this: the brightest minds of the profession believe it is the duty of the architect to startle, confront, unnerve, dissolve, destroy, and also whip out the willie to irrigate the fusty bourgeoisie notions like beauty and tradition.
The article discusses a piece that took modern architecture to the woodshed, where it said “look at this woodshed. It’s more humane than anything you design.” Someone wrote a defense, but had to be honest with himself:
Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.
[…]
The ongoing project to unmoor Western Civ from its roots can only be enabled by people who believe the world has to be remade with its core memory wiped. I don’t share their hatred; why do I have to be forced to experience it, over and over again?
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-01-30.
March 4, 2019
QotD: Gandhi and the partition of India
Anyone who wants to wade through Gandhi’s endless ruminations about himsa and ahimsa (violence and nonviolence) is welcome to do so, but it is impossible for the skeptical reader to avoid the conclusion — let us say in 1920, when swaraj (home rule) was all the rage and Gandhi’s inner voice started telling him that ahimsa was the thing — that this inner voice knew what it was talking about. By this I mean that, though Gandhi talked with the tongue of Hindu gods and sacred scriptures, his inner voice had a strong sense of expediency. Britain, if only comparatively speaking, was a moral nation, and nonviolent civil disobedience was plainly the best and most effective way of achieving Indian independence. Skeptics might also not be surprised to learn that as independence approached, Gandhi’s inner voice began to change its tune. It has been reported that Gandhi “half-welcomed” the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a fratricidal “bloodbath” (Gandhi’s word) would be preferable to the British.
And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men “using violence in a moral cause.” How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, “unless I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?” He blessed the Nawab of Maler Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state. He sang the praises of Subhas Chandra Bose, who, sponsored by first the Nazis and then the Japanese, organized in Singapore an Indian National Army with which he hoped to conquer India with Japanese support, establishing a totalitarian dictatorship. Meanwhile, after independence in 1947, the armies of the India that Gandhi had created immediately marched into battle, incorporating the state of Hyderabad by force and making war in Kashmir on secessionist Pakistan. When Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist in January 1948 he was honored by the new state with a vast military funeral — in my view by no means inapposite.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
March 3, 2019
QotD: Four ways to corporate monopoly
1. Proprietary technology. This one is straightforward. If you invent the best technology, and then you patent it, nobody else can compete with you. Thiel provocatively says that your technology must be 10x better than anyone else’s to have a chance of working. If you’re only twice as good, you’re still competing. You may have a slight competitive advantage, but you’re still competing and your life will be nasty and brutish and so on just like every other company’s. Nobody has any memory of whether Lycos’ search engine was a little better than AltaVista’s or vice versa; everybody remembers that Google’s search engine was orders of magnitude above either. Lycos and AltaVista competed; Google took over the space and became a monopoly.
2. Network effects. Immortalized by Facebook. It doesn’t matter if someone invents a social network with more features than Facebook. Facebook will be better than their just by having all your friends on it. Network effects are hard because no business will have them when it first starts. Thiel answers that businesses should aim to be monopolies from the very beginning – they should start by monopolizing a tiny market, then moving up. Facebook started by monopolizing the pool of Harvard students. Then it scaled up to the pool of all college students. Now it’s scaled up to the whole world, and everyone suspects Zuckerberg has somebody working on ansible technology so he can monopolize the Virgo Supercluster. Similarly, Amazon started out as a bookstore, gained a near-monopoly on books, and used all of the money and infrastructure and distribution it won from that effort to feed its effort to monopolize everything else. Thiel describes how his own company PayPal identified eBay power sellers as its first market, became indispensible in that tiny pool, and spread from there.
3. Economies of scale. Also pretty straightforward, and especially obvious for software companies. Since the marginal cost of a unit of software is near-zero, your cost per unit is the cost of building the software divided by the number of customers. If you have twice as many customers as your nearest competitor, you can charge half as much money (or make twice as much profit), and so keep gathering more customers in a virtuous cycle.
4. Branding. Apple is famous enough that it can charge more for its phones than Amalgamated Cell Phones Inc, even for comparable products. Partly this is because non-experts don’t know how to compare cell phones, and might not trust Consumer Reports style evaluations; Apple’s reputation is an unfakeable sign that their products are pretty good. And partly it’s just people paying extra for the right to say “I have an iPhone, so I’m cooler than you”. Another company that wants Apple’s reputation would need years of successful advertising and immense good luck, so Apple’s brand separates it from the competition and from the economic state of nature.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.
March 2, 2019
QotD: Big Brother
Actually, it seems that Orwell was mistaken. Oppression does not have to mean dismal living conditions, horrible food, telescreen propaganda and rusty rationed razor blades. Big government can control people far more effectively by giving them a small slice of comfort and domesticity. Allow them a modest home. Encourage them to accumulate trinkets and toys and the occasional status symbol. Allow commercial marketing to develop the propaganda that shapes opinion and mood and sets people on the desired path.
Commercial marketing is far more effective than state propaganda — “Drivers Wanted” has recruited more people than any poster featuring a stern and serious Uncle Sam. Keep them somewhat comfortable, keep them acquisitive rather than inquisitive, keep them entertained rather than informed — and no-one will be seriously tempted to pursue an alternative.
Jonathan Piasecki, private e-mail, 1999-07-07. (Republished with permission)
March 1, 2019
QotD: Toxic masculinity
Thanks to the new guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA) for practice with men and boys, male psychology is no longer a mystery and mental health professionals are now equipped with the tools they need to combat the worst forms of it. According to the APA, boys and men are at risk of suffering from traditional masculinity which is on the whole unhealthy. Turns out, the traditional masculinity that drives many of us men to be confident, assertive, adventurous, stoic, and willing to take risks for our goals, the people we love, and sometimes even complete strangers are bad for us and society.
Who knew?
Biologists, philosophers, theologians, physicians, parents, and really almost all regular folk have long believed that there are meaningful and biologically-based psychological differences between males and females. Fortunately for us mere mortals, the APA is setting the record straight. It is an oppressive patriarchy, not biology, that has shaped our psychology. Gender and the masculine traits associated with being male are social constructs. The APA obviously isn’t denying that evolution is true. They aren’t some kind of silly group of religious fundamentalists. But like most educated progressives, they understand that evolution stopped at the neck.
There is this odd group of evolutionary psychologists who seem hell-bent on holding onto antiquated views about human mental and social life. It seems pretty clear that these individuals are the academic wing of the alt-right. Don’t be fooled by surveys suggesting the majority of evolutionary psychologists self-identify as liberal. We can’t trust people to self-report their own politics. Only the most enlightened are in a position to tell everyone else what they really think. I would laugh at how ridiculous the academics are who continue to insist that males and females are distinct in any meaningful way, but I now know that comedy is a form of oppression.
Perhaps the saddest part of reading the new APA guidelines is realizing just how many American boys and men suffer from traditional masculinity and don’t even realize it, and how many mothers and wives tolerate and even promote this sickness. There are millions of couples and families across the United States who are living lives imprisoned by traditional gender roles and on the surface appear to be happy and flourishing. I especially feel for all the conservatives and devout Christians who are most vulnerable to this illness. It doesn’t help when alt-right institutions such as Harvard publish research suggesting that children may benefit from being raised in such traditionally religious homes.
Clay Routledge, “Thank you, APA”, Quillette, 2019-01-22.
February 28, 2019
QotD: Lawrence of the Arabian Nights
The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others’. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God’s stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.
Such exaltation of thought, while it let adrift the spirit, and gave it licence in strange airs, lost it the old patient rule over the body. The body was too coarse to feel the utmost of our sorrows and of our joys. Therefore, we abandoned it as rubbish: we left it below us to march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own unaided level, subject to influences from which in normal times our instincts would have shrunk. The men were young and sturdy; and hot flesh and blood unconsciously claimed a right in them and tormented their bellies with strange longings. Our privations and dangers fanned this virile heat, in a climate as racking as can be conceived. We had no shut places to be alone in, no thick clothes to hide our nature. Man in all things lived candidly with man.
The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we encountered in our months of wandering would have been nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled meat been palatable to a man of healthy parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies — a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.
T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926.
