Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
As Trump rails against 'far-left' fascism, new database shows leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists.
More broadly, the database lists 21 victims killed in leftwing attacks since 2010 , and 117 victims of rightwing attacks in that same period - nearly six times as much. Attacks inspired by the Islamic State and similar jihadist groups, in contrast, killed 95 people since 2010, slightly fewer than rightwing extremists, according to the data set. More than half of these victims died in a a single attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.
Data concerning Nigerian immigrants and their children emphasize this point.
The Migration Policy Institute reported in 2015 that they have a higher
median household income than other Americans, and are more likely to have
a college degree, a master's degree, a Ph. D, or a professional degree
and to be employed in professional or managerial occupations.
...
Some contend that Nigerian immigrants and their children are
different from other Black Americans, but - as Sowell has noted
- the theory that Blacks on average are poorer because their skin
color subjects them to racism cannot distinguish these immigrants and
their children from other Americans with the same skin color. Racism
isn't preventing these immigrants and their children from moving
ahead, so it can't be the reason that Blacks on average trail
economically.
Rather than racism, Sowell has highlighted a different factor as the big brake on Blacks' success: while "[m]ost black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s." With the rise of the welfare state, "today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families."
Paul Graham from January 2004!
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at
the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we
had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be
invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible
to all of us riding on it.
...
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just
as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're
much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral
fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at.
Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized,
imprisoned, or even killed.
The link to the document in question,
"
Open Letter to the Linguistic Society of America,"
was tweeted yesterday by Pinker's fellow linguist John McWhorter,
who clearly dislikes the letter. And, indeed, the letter is worthy
of Stalinism in its distortion of the facts in trying to damage
the career of an opponent.
...
Many of the signatories are grad students and undergrads, members of
the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), which may explain why the
vast amount of criticism leveled at Pinker comes from his social
media, all tweets from Twitter. The letter shows no familiarity
with Pinker's work, and takes statements out of context in a
way that, with the merest checking, are seen to be represented
duplicitously. In the end, the authors confect a mess of links
that, the signatories say, indict Pinker of racism, misogyny,
and blindness to questions of social justice.
How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times.
On June 22nd, visitors to Slate Star Codex, a long-standing blog
of considerable influence, discovered that the site's cerulean
banner and graying WordPress design scheme had been superseded by a
barren white layout. In the place of its usual catalogue of several
million words of fiction, book reviews, essays, and miscellanea,
as well as at least as voluminous an archive of reader commentary,
was a single post of atypical brevity. "So," it began, "I kind of
deleted the blog. Sorry. Here's my explanation." The farewell post
was attributed, like virtually all of the blog's entries since its
inception, in 2013, to Scott Alexander, the pseudonym of a Bay Area
psychiatrist-the title "Slate Star Codex" is an imperfect anagram
of the alias-and it put forth a rationale for this online self-immolation.
...
The final post went on, "It probably would have been a very nice article.
Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal
it in the article, ie doxx me." Alexander explained that he has a variety
of reasons to prefer that his real name, which can be ascertained with
minimal investigation, be left out of the paper of record.
The Scottish market strategist Russell Napier warns that investors should prepare for inflation rates of 4% and more by next year. The main reason: Governments have taken control of the money supply.
The Scottish market strategist has for two decades - correctly - seen
disinflation as the dominant theme for financial markets. That is why
investors should listen to him when he now warns of rising inflation.
...
We are currently in the worst recession since World War II, and
yet we observe the fastest growth in broad money in at least three
decades. In the US, M2, the broadest aggregate available, is growing
at more than 23%. You'd have to go back to at least the Civil War
to find levels like that. In the Eurozone, M3 is currently growing
at 8,9%. It will only be a matter of months before the previous
peak of 11.5% which was reached in 2007 will be reached. So I'm
not making a forecast, I just observe the data.
The media's fawning interviews obscure the New York governor's record.
The most egregious mistake was mandating nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients, but see the article for numerous other missteps.
We estimate the benefit of life-extending medical treatments to life insurance companies. Our main insight is that life insurance companies have a direct benefit from such treatments as they lower the insurer's liabilities by pushing the death benefit further into the future and raise future premium income. We apply this insight to immunotherapy, treatments associated with durable gains in survival rates for a growing number of cancer patients. We estimate that the life insurance sector's aggregate benefit from FDA approved immunotherapies is $9.8 billion a year. Such life-extending treatments are often prohibitively expensive for patients and governments alike. Exploiting this value creation, we explore various ways in which life insurers could improve stress-free access to treatment. We discuss potential barriers to integration and the long-run implications for the industrial organization of life and health insurance markets, as well as the broader implications for medical innovation and long-term care insurance markets.
Take down of the popular and positively reviewed book.
In the process of reading the book and encountering some extraordinary
claims about sleep, I decided to compare the facts it presented with
the scientific literature. I found that the book consistently overstates
the problem of lack of sleep, sometimes egregiously so. It misrepresents
basic sleep research and contradicts its own sources.
...
Walker's book has likely wasted thousands of hours of life and worsened
the health of people who read it and took its recommendations at face value.
A few minutes of looking into a deep red light could have a dramatic
effect on preventing eyesight decline as we age, according to a new study
published this week in The Journals of Gerontology.
The science works, Jeffery said, because the light stimulates the
health of mitochondria, which are like batteries in our cells.
Published paper abstract here.