A reminder that America is such a young country that this is a legit debate to be had

https://twitter.com/noahpinion/status/1610870494328393728

imo a lot of discourse about the US in particular related to work, money, etc is confusing is because classes are forming and people are moving between them, but there's no standard vocab or common cultural way to describe this

I think the FIRE failure mode is basically the opposite of the “follow your dreams” failure mode

https://twitter.com/sairarahman/status/1564402746538598402

if you always just follow your dreams with no attempts to gain self-insight, no compromise and no strategy you’ll probably end up poor and struggling to do whatever now-devalued job was high status when you were fifteen.

Just landed in Seoul! Going to the DMZ and various palaces then taking the high speed train to say hello to @Makeuya 🇰🇷👍 We saw Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul today. One of the loveliest things about the visit was seeing all the people wearing Korean traditional dress, which is so strongly encouraged that the palace only charges an entry fee to those in non-traditional attire!

A lot of US confusion about monkeypox is because the federal gov & CDC have gone with an “anyone can get it” anti-stigma campaign while the NY city authorities are targeting vax doses at the people who are currently hundreds, possibly thousands of times more likely to catch it Each org is at one extreme end of the current public health debate- focus attention on cases and risk stigma, or reduce stigma but divert attention away from those most at risk

Another example of where doing the simple and obvious thing ('be nice to your kids') is right, and imagined just-world second order effects ('what if they don't learn to deal with bad people') are just not as important

https://twitter.com/TeiaOKOK/status/1543609057327587330

The one (small) cost is that just like the smart kids at selective schools who lose track of the average persons intellectual ability level, people raised by high functioning adults often find low functioning adults completely inexplicable and can't model them

By spending a lot of time in Taiwan I got to observe how people handle a massive ramp up in wealth over one or two generations, which has happened at a scale unimaginable in the Anglo West’s living memory Some people handle it very well and compound their gains, others not so much, and observing the sudden wealth failure modes made me realise how many UMC/UC social customs are highly functional adaptations for coping with and preserving prosperity, even if they don’t seem to be

Of the 93 cases of Monkeypox outside Africa where the patient's sex is known, 100% are male (127 confirmed cases overall). Suggests that casual contact probably isn't the driver unless these lads are socialising in *extremely* sex-segregated environments

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d… Good summary here by @maxdkozlov

- Monkeypox cases mostly linked to all-male sex parties, fetish festivals, saunas
- Key thing to watch for is larger numbers of female cases as that would indicate transmission beyond the initial network

science.org/content/articl…

In the early 30s people were boarding airships in Germany to spend 5 full days in flight all the way to to Brazil, steadily progressing at 70 miles an hour over the Atlantic Apparently the flights were only commercially viable because stamp collectors paid extra for the air mail they carried; a kind of early progress-enhancing DAO (as they were for the moon landings, where day-of-flight documents served as life insurance for the Apollo crews)

The western public health institutions which sagged most when facing their first real crisis seemed to employ lots of emotionally volatile ‘political’ people before the pandemic, and we probably should have seen the failure to kick them out as a sign of fundamental unseriousness When trying to evaluate whether other institutions will survive the first real test of their mission, “are you cohesive and focused enough to ignore and resist political scissor statements?” seems like the right question to ask

A common Fatfire thesis is if you just want to make money, you should start or buy-and-grow a boring unglamorous business- you won't have to compete as hard with smarter people because they won't like the risk and will mostly prefer to work on something more prestigious That means you'll be able to figure out solutions to problems that others in your space cannot. I've been thinking about it more because in Taiwan I'm not sure that pattern holds, as many families have a family business that gets free consulting from their highly capable kids

It's incredibly hard to think about what goes on in other countries unprompted. It's not that ideas from foreign countries are dismissed for xenophobic reasons, it's just psychologically abnormal to even notice them at all, especially under stress A lot of people who do compare policies between countries (eg the MPs who asked about covid stuff at the select committee) have spent periods living in other countries or are married to foreigners, it does seem to alter the default geographical scale of thinking

Are any psychologists studying individual level cheemsing? Something like 'status homeostasis' - the internal alarm which starts to sound when we begin to achieve 'too much' or think 'too big'. People talking themselves out of applying for better jobs etc It seems basically true that among richer people in richer countries the practical limits of what's possible for someone to achieve are rarely the barrier to improving a life, and psychological limits like "comfort zone" or anxieties about status gains play a much bigger role

This is obviously silly but it's an interesting example of two trends:

1 the (poss unconscious?) reflexive defence of any decision made by 'authorities'

2 (related) the need to frame any institutional imposition on kids as somehow in their best interest

nytimes.com/2021/08/18/opi… Reflexive deference to authority is easiest to spot when the authority changes position, and suddenly new pathologies emerge to explain what was previously the virtuous viewpoint

Weirdest thing I remember about learning languages at school
was how keen the textbooks were to make the country you were learning about seem completely atomised and boring. They presented the reward for years of learning as access to a sanitised suburb with no history or culture Maybe that's helpful and too much difference will scare off the median kid from learning anything. But then what could possibly be the point given we have sufficient access to deracinated blandness as it is?

More convinced that "social classes are sticky / fuzzy cultural adaptations to economic positions" is basically right, having seen people switch economic positions and develop new cultural norms similar to other groups in their economic position, even if the groups don't interact Not surface-level culture like tastes in food or music or clothes etc, those things change all the time and don't mean much, but norms and attitudes which may not be explicitly acknowledged- like attitudes to work, interests, money, status, relationships etc

15 months apart The border belief described here was incredibly powerful and wormed its way around institutions the world over. The pandemic preparedness index ranked you *less* prepared if you had previously closed borders in the event of disease outbreaks

There's a good essay in the psychological/social condition (rather than just the direct economic position) of smart upper middle class young adults, and why Altman observed founders disproportionately coming from that background Obviously by definition there are very few "super successful" people so it could still be that their offspring have an even bigger advantage than the UMC kids and it's obscured by their scarcity, plus thanks to homophily Altman is gonna know more UMC people anyway but

We're emerging from a pandemic where we learned that national science teams can make bad calls due to groupthink and cultural baggage, and we've put in place mechanisms (banning "anti-science" people from social media) to make it *harder* to disagree with them in the future In April 2020 twitter and FB started banning accounts which encouraged people to break virus rules or (more loosely enforced) challenge established virus science. It's been escalating a bit since then with youtube joining in too