Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• George Soros: Investors in Xi's China face a rude awakening

  The leader's crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy

  Xi does not understand how markets operate. As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far. It began to hurt China's objectives in the world. Recognising this, Chinese financial authorities have gone out of their way to reassure foreign investors and markets have responded with a powerful rally. But that is a deception. Xi regards all Chinese companies as instruments of a one-party state. Investors buying into the rally are facing a rude awakening. That includes not only those investors who are conscious of what they are doing, but also a much larger number of people who have exposure via pension funds and other retirement savings.

  For some opposing arguments see:

  BlackRock vs Soros on China: Which view should investors believe?

• Buying A Stock Is Easy, Selling Is Hard

  Leaving on Bad Terms

  First, despite the mantra-and the data-that "active management underperforms," the data revealed that active managers actually display significant skill when buying. The average stock they purchased went on to outperform by more than one percentage point over the next year. While that might not sound like a lot, consistent outperformance by a margin like that would be notable. That was the first surprising finding.

  The second finding was that these same investors-who were so skilled at buying-completely fell apart when it came to selling. While their purchases outperformed, their sales underperformed by almost a percentage point over the next year, meaning the managers would have been better off selling a random selection of other stocks that they held.

• The Elizabeth Holmes Trial Sparks A Silicon Valley Debate: Why Not Other Tech CEOs?

  She points to Adam Neumann, who drove WeWork into the ground; former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who resigned after a sexual harassment scandal; and Juul's Kevin Burns, who stepped down amid questions over the company's role in stoking the youth vaping epidemic.

  There were lawsuits, settlements and more fallout - but notably, Pao points out, no criminal prosecutions.

  "That all these people continue to lead their lives and not be held accountable for all the harm that they've caused, it does send a message," she said.

• The 1619 Project Depicts an America Tainted by Original Sin

  John McWhorter

  Since last August, The New York Times has asked us to consider that America's real founding was not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to these shores. Nikole Hannah-Jones teaches that the Revolutionary War was fought mainly not to escape British tyranny, but out of fear that British tyranny was about to threaten the institution of slavery.

  Stimulating proposition, but professional historians, as modern academics about as enlightened on issues of race and racism as any humans on the planet, have politely but firmly declared that the facts simply do not bear out this take on our nation's founding. Gordon Wood and others wrote careful and authoritative pieces to this effect, and more recently Sean Wilentz has penned a careful response to the inevitable pushback. Unless fact is not fact, unless documentation is forgery, no unbiased observer could read Wilentz here as partisan or as even swayed by subconscious racism.

• Angels, demons, and videotape

  What happened in Central Park last year and what it tells us about journalism

  Amy Cooper was walking her dog early in the morning and wandered into a secluded part of Central Park, with nobody else in sight. She let her dog off the leash. Suddenly she heard a man bellowing at her. She turned around to see the man acting annoyed with her. When she failed to comply immediately with his instruction to tether her dog, he made an ambiguous threat. He said, "If you're going to do what you want to do, then I'm going to do what I'm going to do. But you're not going to like it."
  ...
  In fact, this wasn't the first time Christian had used such a tactic. Amy had accidentally walked into the middle of a polarised battle between dog walkers and birdwatchers that has been rumbling on for years in Central Park, and indeed other city parks across the country. In New York, Christian was known by locals as one of its most energetic combatants. Foster tracks down other dogwalkers, including a black man, who got almost exactly the same treatment from Christian, right down to the gripping of the bike helmet, and who found it intimidating for the same reasons.

• Why We Are Not Living in a Post-Truth Era

  Steven Pinker: An (Unnecessary) Defense of Reason and a (Necessary) Defense of Universities' Role in Advancing it.

  In his book The Last Word, the philosopher Thomas Nagel showed that truth, objectivity, and reason are not negotiable. As soon as you start making a case against them, you are making a case, which means you are implicitly committed to reason. Nagel calls this argument Cartesian, after Descartes' famous argument that just as the very fact that one is pondering one's existence shows that one must exist, the very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason. A corollary is that we don't defend or justify or believe in reason, and we certainly do not, as it is sometimes claimed, have faith in reason. As Nagel puts it, each of these is "one thought too many." We don't believe in reason; we use reason.

• How to Star-Man | Arguing from Compassion

  To star-man is to not only engage with the most charitable version of your opponent's argument, but also with the most charitable version of your opponent, by acknowledging their good intentions and your shared desires despite your disagreements. In our UBI example, star-manning would be to amend the steel man with something like, "...and you're in favor of this because you think it will help people lead safer, freer, and more fulfilled lives--which we both want." If used properly, star-manning can serve as an inoculant against our venomous discourse and a method for planting disputes on common ground rather than a fault line.

• The death of behavioral economics

  Jason Hreha

  1. Core behavioral economics findings have been failing to replicate for several years, and *the* core finding of behavioral economics, loss aversion, is on ever more shaky ground.
  2. Its interventions are surprisingly weak in practice.
• Facebook is the AOL of 2021

  The 1990s had a word for being trapped inside a manipulative notion of human contact: AOL. Facebook and its ilk are the rebirth of that limited vision.

  People were so excited by the World Wide Web, they never wanted to go back to AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy. The three services withered. Mostly, people who were older held onto their AOL accounts because they still had an email address linked to AOL and it was a little confusing to try to get a new email address. But over time, with help from the younger generation, even those people were able to shift to using new email services and enjoy the Web.
  ...
  There were just a couple problems with Facebook. Facebook was a lot like AOL. It limited people by telling them with whom they could communicate. And unlike AOL and Compuserve and Prodigy, people couldn't just be any fun identity they wanted, like picklefinger0237. They had to present themselves as themselves because advertisers liked to know who was talking to whom.
  ...
  But a few people got concerned. They noticed that not only did Facebook and services like it limit who could talk, and to whom those people could talk. The concerned people noticed that the services manipulated how people talked to one another, with computer algorithms called "data voodoo dolls." Even business people became alarmed. They said Facebook had "zucked" people by betraying people's trust.

• Reducing sugar in packaged foods can prevent disease in millions
  • A new economic and health model estimates that cases of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in the US would drop substantially if the food industry reformulates sugary products in 15 food categories.
  • By quantifying the healthcare and societal cost savings of Americans reducing their sugar consumption, the model may spur the launch of a national sugar-reduction policy aimed at food manufacturers.