(Part 2) Best products from r/slatestarcodex

My kid just started at Montessori pre-school last month. We had all of the same concerns and observations. I can add a few things, all anecdotal...

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TL;DR: lots of qualitative data; no quantitative data; long-read

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Part 1: My oldest

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First, I have a college aged kid and a toddler (life is crazy). When the 20yr old was pre-k aged, I was essentially broke and sent her to a pretty normal, school-based, pre-k. The pre-k was in the basement of a Montessori school and was probably influenced by it, but was definitely not Montessori. From there she went on to a parochial Kindergarten and then to suburban public school for the rest of her pre-college career. She now is a 3.6-ish GPA junior at U of I, so academically, she did fine (not outstanding, but good enough).

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The issue, however, in my opinion, was all of the non-academic stuff: low self-esteem, a seeming lack of stake in the outcomes, an inability to make life choices or long-term plans, lack of functional skills (i.e. knowledge of banking and credit, time management) and a general fragility a la Haidt. I was not pushing college on her, but it ultimately seemed like the right call, partly because there was no other plan, but largely because she needed to get out from under her parents and take some responsibility for her future. So far it seems that this has been effective in that she has really started blossoming into a person who has interests and takes initiative and hasn't had an issue with her academics.

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The difficult thing to suss out is if any of her success or failure modes had anything to do with pre-k. Maybe? A little bit? Most of the difficulty in her teenage years might be due to a healthy dose of normal juvenile issues coupled with a major personal disruption during her high-school years with her mother's living situation. She definitely seemed to regress somewhere around 14 or 15 and I'm happy that she's getting back on-line, so to speak.

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Part 2: My Youngest

That said, my plan for the current kid is a bit reactionary, but largely influenced by my personal circumstances. First, I'm in almost the opposite financial situation and able to absorb both college and pre-k costs, which, 20 years later seem to have sky-rocketed across the board. All formal options (excluding home day-care/pre-k) in my area seem to be in the range of $1-1500/mo. There are probably more affordable options but I haven't researched them. The Montessori was less expensive than the day-care she had been in from 9 months to 2.5 years.

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Second, I have a lot more experience with kids and raising them this time around (in addition to child rearing, I've also been a teacher and a youth worker--I like kids and generally prefer them to adults). I'm able to envision the whole school career in a way I couldn't before, therefore it's easier for me to see where the mile-markers are. Also, my wife, child and I have a pretty good, high trust relationship going on. Everyone has a stake in the family functioning and there's little fussing, disobedience, or histrionics; it's really mostly pleasant and fun. I think this has a lot to do with us being older parents who are able to easily align ourselves with the child. To contrast, when my other daughter was little, I was 25 and in a rock band...I had goals and desires that weren't always aligned with hers. My guess is this will have a far bigger impact on my youngest daughter's outcomes than pre-school or even elementary school. Stable home life is no joke!

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While, it will be another five years before I have a reasonable gauge of how it went, it seems ok right now, but not amazing. The teacher we were going to have left the school suddenly just prior to us starting and the school's founder and administrator is running the classroom. For some reason my kid has a beef with her and it's a bit of an issue. (It's also an opportunity where I get to teach my toddler that one of the most valuable skills we can learn in life is how to get along with people we dislike). We're going to stick it out and see what happens next, but if my kid still seems to hate it a few months from now, we're going to try something else.

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Part 3: What Other People Have Told Me

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I've heard plenty of good stories about Montessori, I've also heard that it doesn't work for all kids and the school will tell you if they think your kid needs the structure a more formal school provides. That said, I have two other direct examples of Montessori education.

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The first is my coworker who attended Montessori as a kid in the 90's. His trajectory was Montessori pre-k, public school k-12, State University with Masters in CS to a cushy programming gig in the financial sector. He was also an Eagle scout, plays a musical instrument, is an avid gamer and, IMO, a very thoughtful, if soft spoken fellow. He seems to be popular in his group of friends and possibly even the Alpha of his pack (just an observation from going to a few of his parties--he's no 'Alpha' in the strict sense).

He said that he doesn't remember much about it but that it was fun and easy. He thinks his parents had more to do with his upbringing as they were very focused on him hitting certain age appropriate goals (ex. Eagle scouts). My take-away is that there's no telling if it had any benefit.

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A second, ex-coworker has his daughter in Montessori at either Kindergarten or 1st grade level and they intend to continue with her at least through elementary. They are avid fans and the mom is very active with the school. Their daughter loves school so much she now takes supplemental classes--on the weekend-- at Northwestern University. In their area, there are Montessori High Schools, so it's possible for their kid to stay in Montessori all the way through to college if they so choose.

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The anecdotes they told us were that once some sort of Montessori inflection point is reached, if the kids are put back into public school, they are so far ahead of their peers in terms of discipline and precociousness that school becomes a boring mess where they are surrounded by buffoons. I have no idea how true this is, but I can imagine that if Montessori were successful this would be the expected result.

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Part 4: Conclusion

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To sum up my feelings about all of this, I'd say that let your wallet be your guide. In terms of pre-K, I sincerely doubt that Montessori will forever impact your child in such a way that you'd regret not sending them. Other pre-k programs seem to be just fine at acculturating children for school and the long-term academic and personal benefits seem modest at best; I'd rank things like diet, rest, exercise and family cohesion as higher.

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That said, if your plan was to keep the child going through some sort of alternate education system (i.e. alternate to U.S. public schooling) then you might see some real gains starting around elementary school and possibly rolling off around middle school. These benefits would be mostly in terms of personal development, which should prepare them for more rigorous academic study in a field of their choosing.

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There seems to be little downside to Montessori, but the upside is hard to gauge at the pre-k level. If placing you child in Montessori causes familial strife, ex. long commutes, financial burden, then I doubt the cost outweighs the benefit. It's also important to understand that Montessori has fairly high expectations of the parents and your buy-in is important as well.

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Let this little rant be the first entry in my diary of a Montessori educated child circa 2020 and I can follow up with observations in a few years after I've accrued some more experience and data.

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A really detailed analysis of the most common 4-digit pin numbers. More than 10 percent of all passwords are 1234.

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This four-square graph plants Slatestarcodex in the realm of “insightful/serious” and places Reddit at “boring/trolling.” So, where does that place a subreddit devoted to SSC, then?

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At the recommendation of several people in this sub, I bought James C. Scott’s Seeing Like the State and wow, it is indeed fantastic.

A good review by J Bradford Delong here

Some highlights for me so far:

• At about 1500, just six names were the first names of 90 percent of all English men. Can you name those six names that comprised 90 percent of all Englishmen’s names? Answer
  
  
• In the 1700s and 1800s, houses in England, Scotland, and France were built with fewer and fewer windows. Why? Answer
  
  
• The Spanish colonial government of the Philippines insisted the citizens have last names. Thus [the edict] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A1logo_alfab%C3%A9tico_de_apellidos) went out and chaos ensued. Strangely, in some towns, nearly everyone in the village had their new last names start with the same letter! Why? Answer
  
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  I haven't made up my mind as to whether this post about "egregores" is profoundly insightful or silly or something else.
  
  
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  Subjects are surprisingly bad at judging their own proficiency in recognizing faces
  
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  The medieval oaks of Blenheim
  
  Bonus: Why so many English taverns are called “The Royal Oak"
  
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  Study: Human changes, especially fire suppression, have had greater impact on Eastern forest than climate change.
  
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  Study: Student evaluations are poor measures of teaching effectiveness.
  
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  "Baby Hands May Belong to Lizards"
  
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  Noam Chomsky's new book on language is drawing skepticism.
  
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  A crash course on black science fiction
  
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  I know that Scott is a fan of the Civilization PC strategy series, as am I. Here’s [a good article on Sid Meiers] (http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/3/4/11158134/the-man-who-made-a-million-empires), the man behind the Civilization series.
  
  
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  George Martin died last week. [Does he deserve more credit than being just the so-called “fifth Beatle”?] (http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-dont-call-george-martin-the-fifth-beatle-he-might-have-been-more-than-that)
  
  
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  The people who cannot stop making puns. There’s another name for folks who cannot resist puns…
  
  
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  This is a long quiz about music preferences. It starts out a bit bland but it gets interesting.
  
  
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  This 10-part series about destroyed items of cultural significance is good albeit depressing.
  
  
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  Milton Friedman’s thermostat.
  
  >It’s not even a very complicated idea. You can explain the gist of it using words and simple examples.
  
  >But it's a really really important idea. Both theoretically important, and practically important.
  
  >So why does such an important idea need to keep on being reinvented? Why are (almost all) economists unaware of this idea?
  
  >It's not as though Milton Friedman were some no-name economist that everybody ignored. Every economist is very aware of lots of Milton Friedman's other ideas. Those other ideas are taught to all economics students. Why not this idea?
  
  
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  The mysterious iconography of the 2000-year-old Portland Vase, the best known piece of Roman cameo glass.
  
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  The time that existentialist Jean Paul Sartre wrote a French-language film version of Arthur's Miller The Crucible.
  
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  In the 1850s, along the banks of the Delaware there was a floating church.
  
  
  Article
  
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  European buildings on the (literal) edge.
  
  
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  1910. Nine kings sitting for a photo. No word as to whether they were given rings of power.
  
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  An impressive work-in-progress: a taxonomy of space opera cliches
  
  
  
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  Don’t trust the pretty people. Short version and long.
  
  
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  Moloch! Moloch!
  
  
  
  Moloch! Moloch!
  
  
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  What professions are most attractive on Tinder?
  
  
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  Oklahoma now has more <3.0 earthquakes than California.
  
  
  I have a prediction that a fracking-induced earthquake is going to cause a major lawsuit in the next five years.
  
  
  
  
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  Tips for doing a PhD efficiently.
  
  
  
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  This historical homerun hitters gif is mesmerizing and reinforces to me what an phenomenon Babe Ruth was.
  
  
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  Washington Post had a fun quiz that tries to determine your marital status, age, and income by the apps you have on your phone. The quiz thought I was much younger than I am, so I am kindly disposed towards it.
  
  
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  The story of Saint Wilgefortis, the bearded lady saint, is all sorts of fascinating. Experts surmise that crucified images of Jesus depicted in a tunic that, through various corrupted and crude reproductions, eventually made Christ look like a bearded woman in a dress. Mystified believers then came up with a story to explain this figure:
  
  >According to the narrative of the legend, sometimes set in Portugal, a teen-aged noblewoman named Wilgefortis had been promised in marriage by her father to a pagan king. To thwart the unwanted wedding, she had taken a vow of virginity, and prayed that she would be made repulsive. In answer to her prayers she sprouted a beard, which ended the engagement. In anger, Wilgefortis's father had her crucified.
  
  
  
  
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  A very detailed graphic exploring the question: why is my TV bill so high?
  
  
  
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  A good post exploring unpaid parking tickets in NYC by diplomats to the United Nations. The post also explains why the number of unpaid tickets by diplomats plunged dramatically in 2003.
  
  
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  May 16 is the 50-year anniversary of Pet Sounds, which for my money is the best pop music album of all time. Good retrospective interview with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson here.
  
  
  Listen to the album.
  
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  Why upscale retailers are hiding their cash registers from customers.
  
  
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  “Why Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is Actually Way Better Than The 2016 Deadpool“. Heh.
  
  
  
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  The design evolution of soda cans since 1948 Neat.
  
  
  
  

First off check out this video.

So to me it sounds like you are looking for purpose from your work. You want your work life to be meaningful in some way and actually have an impact.

Are you looking for general impact or more charity/EA "doing good" type of stuff?

I don't really know much about EA stuff so I'll speak to the "general impact".

First off, you don't really need a credential if you want to be an entrepreneur. Do you have some specific business ideas that drove you down the tech start up route in the first place? If yes, this is the best road map I've found on starting your own business.

You should take a look at a bunch of start ups (or established firms) and make a list of 10-20 ones that if they offered you a job today then you'd wake up at 5:00 AM tomorrow to start working there. What problems are they trying to solve? Are they things that in 5,10,15 years you'd look back on and say "wow"?

Check out what type of roles these places are looking for then figure out if those roles are something you can already jump into. If you can't jump in directly then go to linkedin or google and reverse engineer the role to figure out what these people's resumes look like & what background do these people have who are already working in the field. Contact some of them off linkedin. Check out the schools, or online classes or certifications these people have etc. Take online classes on Edx, udemy etc, check out the relevant subreddits etc just to try and get a taste for the role(s). Try to jump into the new role as far as you can to see if you like it & if it's something that you really want to pursue further. Obviously start easy and progress naturally...for example if your math skills are OK but you've never taken a calc class then maybe stay away from differential equations.

I mention start ups because this is where you will most likely have maximum impact & responsibility considering you will be helping a firm grow or die. Though, some established firms also have impactful roles too. Start ups can sometimes be hard to find but I guess one way to do it is to check out VCs & look at their portfolios. Those start ups will at least have funding.

Another way to try and answer the "what should I do question" is if you were independently wealthy what would a year in your life look like? What types of stuff would you ideally like to be working on? What type of stuff would you be learning?

As far as the anxiety about the application process goes, & this might sound harsh, but to me it sounds like you're afraid of failure/rejection & so you are using your uncertainty about establishing a priority in what you should be doing career wise as an excuse for not actually filling out apps thus avoiding the possibility of rejection. So, the question I have is would you still be anxious about filling out the app if you bumped into a CEO who really liked you and the perfect job landed in your lap you basically just had to give them a resume/fill out some forms to show you're "real" and the job was yours?

I feel you the uncertainty sucks about whether or not you'll actually get hired. Taking a hard look at yourself in order to market yourself also sucks. But IMO the best way to think about it is to just play the lottery...apply to as many places as possible & eventually you'll land something good. It's only hard at the beginning once you get experience then recruiters will be breathing down your neck & the tables will be flipped. So shotgun that resume. Maybe write a little python script to help you apply?

Good luck & feel free to DM me if you wanna chat.

This sounds pretty similar to a few meditation practices that I've seen and tried, such as this one. From that perspective, it's used for identifying and letting go of self-limiting fixed beliefs, thoughts, and identities. It would also be useful for working through childhood traumas where you were forced to rely on the fight/flight/freeze response and got emotionally locked into needing to respond in a certain way.

It's effective for two main reasons. One is that it's reconditioning your early childhood mental associations. We build our identities in successive developmental phases, with our adult self's functioning being driven partially by implicit models that were learned in childhood without being re-examined later. By using sensory cues from early childhood, it's easier to bring back up thoughts/beliefs/needs from that time and update them to match with how we now understand the world. You might like this book for an overview on how reprocessing stuff as an adult can help.

The other main reason is that this is basically a different cut at insight meditation practice, which Scott discusses in his review of MCTB. You're trying to work simultaneously with two versions of your sense of self, and at some point your brain will give up and adopt a more accurate model of reality. People often find that to be comforting and very worthwhile in the long run, but it can be an extremely disorienting existential crisis in the short run.

I'd recommend against using this practice and definitely against spending large amounts of time(more than 10-15 minutes/day) doing this practice unless you're committed to it for the long run. You might also find that it works for you at first, but there's a good chance that it will continue to bring up emotionally difficult material for a long time before you will see benefits. If you're really interested in doing inner work to work through this stuff no matter how long it takes, it can be really rewarding to establish a deep meditation practice using something like /r/TheMindIlluminated/ .

> Repeat the exercise often, always do it passionately and with genuine emotion.

If you try this, it might be worth trying to be flexible on this part. Sometimes emotional stuff from childhood is so hard to deal with that you're just going to be overwhelmed, and having fixed expectations for how you should be able to feel is going to just add more blame and suck.

This is a great idea. Please definitely post your list when you've got it compiled.

In addition to some of the other books that have been recommended, I suggest the slightly more unconventional 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed for a rather interesting look at a period in ancient history that I think is generally poorly covered. ("There were some civilizations like Egypt and Sumer, and they rose and fell, and look, it's Aristotle!") It really helps contextualize a lot of the ancient Mideast - who coexisted and what their relationships were, not just who was the Big Dog one after another.

It will also help break up the monotony of all the other books reading the same, because it's not organized like a traditional history book: instead it's organized almost like a play, with a cast of characters, a "prologue" and "epilogue," and several "Acts" describing key sequences of events! Despite that, the author is a pretty well regarded archaeologist at GWU, and it was published by Princeton University Press.

Climate scientist Michael Mann criticizes several of the claims in the article as overstated in this facebook post, though like most scientists he agrees with the general point that the consequences of climate change will be dire unless we take serious action (he has a book for non-scientists outlining the dangers and the politicization of the issue, The Madhouse Effect). And if anyone's interested in a book focused specifically on the best scientific predictions about the consequences of various amounts of warming, you could check out Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (see this post from one of the climate scientists on the realclimate.org blog, which gives it a positive review and says it accurately reflects the scientific literature on future scenarios).

I think our best chance of avoiding disaster lies in some combination of moving over to renewables and/or nuclear within the next few decades combined with massive production of carbon capture devices in the second half of the century, which could allow us to keep the warming to around 2 degrees or less. One important point is that without such massive deployment of carbon capture we don't really stand a chance of keeping it that low--check out the graphs here where the first two graphs show how fast carbon emissions would have to go to zero without any carbon capture if we want to keep warming to 1.5 degrees or less, along with a third graph showing how the decline can be more gradual if we have negative emissions later. The graphs are based on the "carbon quotas" for different amounts of warming on p. 64 of this IPCC report, and the quota for 2 degrees is not that much larger than 1.5 degrees (2900 gigatons vs. 2250 gigatons, only 29% larger) so the corresponding graphs for keeping it under 2 degrees wouldn't look too different.

The cause for hope here is that prototypes for carbon capture devices that remove CO2 much more efficiently than trees have already been built, see this article and this one, along with this interview with a physicist involved in the research where he makes the following point:

>My hope would be that we then would have a device that can take out a ton a day of carbon from the atmosphere. If you take out a ton a day, you would need 100 million air capture devices to take out all the C02 that we putting into the atmosphere today. And I would argue that it would be a lot less than that because we would also be capturing carbon at the flue stack, and not making the C02 in the first place by developing solar and wind technologies. ... There are about 1 billion cars out there. We are building 70 million cars and light trucks a year. So that kind of industrial production is quite possible. Eventually we should be able to produce an air capture device for roughly what it costs to manufacture a car.

I also think that another reason to be hopeful is that we may in the not-too-distant future achieve full automation of the production process for most mass-produced goods, leading to the possibility of self-replicating robot factories (what Eric Drexler calls clanking replicators), and I think the effect of this would tend to drive down the prices of all mass-produced goods--including things like carbon capture devices and solar panels--down to barely more than the cost of the raw materials and energy that went into them, so large-scale production of any good would be much cheaper. I talked more about this idea here.

Some good book recommendations in the article:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/177068.The_Fabric_of_Reality

https://www.amazon.com/Delta-v-Daniel-Suarez/dp/1524742414/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=delta+v&qid=1562420668&s=gateway&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fact-England-1550-1720/dp/0801488494

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I didn't like Fall overmuch, but the interview helps put some of the story points into better context. Cohen makes a great point about no one wishing Paradise Lost to be any longer than it is- that applies equally well to the groaningly large books Stephenson has put out in the last decade.

Two recommendations:

1. If you're looking for a comprehensive course, *including* grammar (and of course also vocabulary, listening practice, etc.), then probably the best regarded in the language learning community is the Teach Yourself series. It looks like the courses are now called "Complete X", for example: https://smile.amazon.com/Complete-Spanish-Two-Audio-CDs/dp/1444177249/
   
   1. Note that Teach Yourself is the name of the company, which is focused on language learning materials; this is not the same as all of those "Teach Yourself C++ in 7 Days" books.
      
2. If you're looking to learn/drill grammar *specifically*, the best is probably Practice Makes Perfect, e.g. https://smile.amazon.com/Practice-Makes-Perfect-Complete-Spanish/dp/1259584194/ They have ones for overall grammar, as well as ones specifically for verb tenses, pronouns and prepositions, etc.

That's great! I agree that sleep is one of the biggest life hacks and after implementing a lot of techniques you detailed as well as other like an early morning meal and early morning light to entrain my circadian rhythm, I still occasionally had issues with falling asleep that I believe were due to anxiety I had about not getting a good nights rest. Reading The Sleep Solution has helped alleviate a lot of that anxiety, as well as helping me understand sleep a lot better.

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https://www.amazon.ca/Sleep-Solution-Why-Your-Broken/dp/0399583602

Deirdre McCloskey professor Economics UI Chicago (not the University of Chicago although she proudly describes herself as a Chicago economist, and she means the Friedmans, not the city) has published a trilogy, a magnum opus, which although obviously repetitive is magnificent and also magnificently readable.

The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce 2007

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World 2011

Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World 2016

If you want to use that word in 2017 you maybe might want to at least read a couple of Ms. McCloskey's blog posts. When the 3rd one was published I posted a link in r/economics but nobody over there liked it so it definitely ain't for everybody. The three together come in at over 2000 pages and they are not light.

Disclaimer: I haven't tried any of things I'm listing below, but they're on my to-read/do list because they were recommended by people in the rationalist sphere.

Luke Muehlhauser's The Science of Happiness recommends a bunch of books on body language to improve social skills.

80000 Hours, in a longer post on career development, recommends Succeed Socially, which is now available as a book, by Chris MacLeod, for beginners, and The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane, for not-beginners.

High doses reccomendations were based on flawed research on people who weren't producing enough natural melatonin. That dosage will just blow out your natural production of the hormone.

An effective dose is measured in the Micrograms and is best taken about 5 hours before you want to go to sleep instead of right before bed. Scott even wrote a good summary of the state of research on it. Here's the dosage I use

Look at Syria, Somalia, Bacha Bazi, Mao,Stalin, Jonestown, Kristallnacht, Rwandan Genocide...human beings desire what helps them and their friends at the expense of others

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As for Christianity's influence, check out these

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SEV7OQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3

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https://www.amazon.com/Under-Influence-Christianity-Transformed-Civilization/dp/0310236371/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=under+the+influence+schmidt&qid=1550452179&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr

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https://www.amazon.com/Shame-Sin-Christian-Transformation-Antiquity/dp/0674660013/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=from+shame+to+sin&qid=1550452191&s=books&sr=1-1

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https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Science-Its/dp/0895269031/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=stanley+jaki&qid=1550452348&s=books&sr=1-6

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https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundations-Science/dp/1848311508/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2U9CLH46W3A1O&keywords=god%27s+philosophers&qid=1550452394&s=books&sprefix=god%27s+phi%2Cstripbooks%2C127&sr=1-1

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Buy this book immediately and read it: The Social Skills Guidebook: Manage Shyness, Improve Your Conversations, and Make Friends, Without Giving Up Who You Are.

Your thoughts about this are totally correct; college is likely the last time in your life where you will be able to go up to a group of strangers and they will invite you in and accept you, mostly without judgement.

It is a perfect place to practice social skills!

> it would be that I don't trust a woman's brothers and/or father to be all that good at supporting her right to bodily autonomy

I think this is the right critique for you, as a feminist.

The cultures we are talking about here don't see individuals as the fundamental unit of society. They see families in that role. (You could actually think about the metaphor "head of the family" as suggesting the family as an organic body and whole, in fact).

Now, on the one hand, I think that means you're probably missing the mark about men sympathizing with each other, because a person thinking of themselves as a man, with class solidarity with other men, requires a kind of individualist notion about identity that is, in my experience, absolutely alien to people for whom the family is the fundamental unit. They're not a man - they're a father, say. It's their daughter, not a woman. Those are the identities.

If you're sharply committed to Enlightenment notions about individual rights and autonomy, this notion of family and familial obligation and duty are incompatible.

I do think the original observations about the steelmanning of honor culture, above, though, do get at something really crucial in this broader conversation.

Honor culture largely operates at a very local, individually adjudicated level. It's hyper sensitive to the particularities and nuances of individual contexts and relationships and histories. In this sense, it's of a piece with much of the kinds of local, pre-rational social organization that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State discusses as exactly the kind of rules that are invisible to states, that centralizing states try to sweep away.

And a lot of the infractions (especially sexual harassment) we're talking about here also operate at very, very local levels, with innuendo and ambiguity and uncertain norms and expectations and he-said-she-said situations cropping up. And it's all very fluid and uncertain. Whatever its other flaws, the localness and particularness of honor culture is operating at the same general social level as these infractions.

It seems like all these discussions about getting the state involved about harassment flounder on these issues. No one can really say very clearly what behavior is or is not line crossing, because it's so sensitive to the woman, and her culture, and her history, and her expectations, and how she responds. It's so sensitive to the shared history of the individuals interacting, and how they read each other, too. And meanwhile, the state is very dumb, and very, very powerful. We have a lot of rules to bind the state's hands because it's so powerful and so dumb, such a blunt instrument. A lot of people have complained about the way "innocent until proven guilty" is such an incredibly high bar when it comes to questions of sexual misconduct that it just functionally let's almost all abusers get off the hook unless they are astonishingly egregious. But there's good reason for that - state power has to be used very, very judiciously.

And because women are all so very different from each other, with so many different traditions and cultures and temperaments and expectations and preferences, and because these matters are of the most intimate nature, it's not clear that the quest for more explicit and easily understood and enforced universal rules of the sort that Enlightenment states prefer will ever be completed.

Of course, honor culture historically has also been incredibly violent, and has a nasty habit of spiraling off into Hatfield-McCoy types of vendettas as punishment is met by retaliation is met by retaliation is met by...

Given all that, I think this is why, in the past, as a kind of middle ground, the centralized state didn't play much of a role in these questions, and instead people often navigated their love lifes by participating in voluntary organizations like churches (that don't have access to the monopoly on force that states have) that could make much, much greater and more invasive demands on them and could also filter bad actors out, and that could also rely more heavily on local knowledge and context for adjudicating conflict and setting norms. By being voluntary, people who were unhappy with them could leave. Also by being voluntary, they could make much deeper demands of their members to live up to pro-social ideals, solving a bunch of coordination problems. And, by claiming a kind of communal authority for dispute resolution, they could prevent escalation to violence, a la honor culture.

But none of that is compatible with more atomization, and a focus on loose ties and individual rights, with people freed from those kinds of invasive voluntary communities. It's not compatible with people moving all the time, and not wanting to lock themselves into a smaller, bordered communities.

Since nobody seems to have mentioned it already, I would recommend Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. There's a lot in there, part II is most similar to this essay, he comes up with a theory of moral foundations, for which classical liberals essentially use 3 (care, fairness, liberty) and conservatives all 6. The "care/harm" foundation sounds a lot like empathy, "authority/subversion" sounds a lot like discipline.

> High-skilled 2nd-gen immigrants are indistinguishable from native blue tribers.

Sure... if you know New Haven and you see that comment about "sketchy crowds" you might guess she's prejudiced against more than "white trash."

>Okay, but at this point, what's the difference between your position and plain racism? Like, you're not demonstrating any evidence for this position (like the HBD folks do), you're not admitting other races are superior to whites (East Asians), you're just saying other ethnicities are probably evil when they aren't dumb. Or at least, that's what it sounds like to me.

I'm OK with being called racist. At this point it's clear to me that blue-tribers consider that to be the worst non-violent crime, worse than lying or cheating. Not so for me. A little prejudice is adaptive. That's why it's so common.

Of course they don't have (incontrovertible) evidence for their position, nobody's gonna get funding for that kind of thing these days (GWAS results will bring this whole argument crashing down in less than a decade). BTW I don't really read any of them besides Cochran-Harpending as those two are the only people of this time who actually know what they're talking about and are willing to write about it. Stephen Hsu too though he only writes esoterically and rarely gets into technical details on any topic. Emil Kirkegaard is decent too though not nearly as sharp or credentialed as Cochran. The co-authors of this essay are competent as well (from the GxE research I've seen by some of them) and clearly have some balls to throw out even the more haphazard hypotheses in public.

There are plenty of studies showing correlations between Euro ancestry (in Latin America, African-Americans, other places) and various life outcomes. There are studies showing it's not mediated by skin color so it's not because of colorism (independent assortment is a thing).

Not saying anything about superiority in any sense. I'm basically certain this is gonna be the Chinese century at this point (and am reading up to prepare for it). US upper middle-class may be too far gone. Economists tend to point toward the individualism-collectivism axis (1, 2) as a reason for the "Great Divergence," and these days Americans are all a bunch of conformist cowards while the Chinese are hungry as shit. I don't think of whites as the "master race." In fact, I think we've gone through 200 years straight of moderate dysgenics; not enough to explain the Asian-Euro IQ gap (and the Japanese went through their demographic transition a while ago but still score higher) so maybe we have an edge on some other factors, but it's going to be tough to stay competitive.

The idea that we should have a prior in favor of no difference is ridiculous. Only possible if you're heavily invested in social justice over truth normatively. It's been long enough with low gene flow and the differences in social structure all over the world (gene-culture coevolution) are manifest if you know any history.

For phenotypic evidence, see this behavioral econ study. The methodology is a little spare and the results not totally consistent but the fact that all the East Asian countries top one measure of dishonesty, including Japan, suggests to me it's not just a matter of comparative development. Or read this on the guilt-shame distinction. I don't know if that distinction carves reality at its joints and I don't know how you could end up selecting for honesty or "guilt," but it might be a thing. Or look at this on tax cheating. Self-reported ancestry is wonky (the type of person to identity with their English side and the type to identify with their Irish side are probably gonna be different), but maybe the Know Nothings had a point or two?

Also if you click through on that link next to "Big 5" in one of my earlier comments you'll find Nisbett notes that 2nd-generation immigrants converge some with NW Europeans on his novel personality measures but still differ noticeably. He still thinks the difference is environmental (I guess mediated by family), although I think he basically admitted the Ashkenazi-Euro gap was genetic at some point even though everything else is environmental which is kinda funny.

Or I can look at my own experience. The professors at my top 10 uni think the honor code is a joke. Don't think that was true back in the 50s. The math team at my high school got rocked by a massive cheating scandal too (why the hell would you cheat in an extracurricular of all things?). I know somebody who plagiarized an entire final project from alumni for a class in their major and is now going to a top 4 grad school in their discipline. I don't think they even know entirely why they're doing a PhD. Just "paid education."

In general my suspicion is that, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma that is life, NW Europeans tend toward playing C, while other groups tend to play D to varying degrees (more integrated immigrants are better but the gap will get smaller not disappear). You can fix that by just letting go of some freedoms (like honor codes), but it's a cost regardless.

As someone who tries to be an upstanding citizen and wants to raise my kids that way I would prefer for things to not shift toward a defect-heavy equilibrium. It might be hard to herd large masses of people with different preferences into one polity and still make things work.

I would think it would be smarter in the long run to stop pushing for the policies that are pissing people off than to try to suppress the response with moral haranguing. Tyler Cowen is a dilettante but it still might be worth it for you to read "The Complacent Class." The final passage is interesting and mostly references this book on the late Bronze Age collapse.

Pangloss wasn't right. All is not well with the world and Trump is not the worst of it. He is an epiphenomenon not a cause. The past half-century may have built the US and Europe into powder-kegs and the next 50 years are going to be far more interesting than the last. I don't have enough data yet but I have a bad feeling and I see rot.

The Perilous State of the University: Jonathan Haidt/Jordan B Peterson
>I recently traveled to New York University to talk with Dr. Jonathan Haidt about, among other things, disgust, purity, fear and belief; the perilous state of the modern university; and his work with Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/) an organization designed to draw attention to the lack of diversity of political belief in the humanities and the social sciences. Dr. Haid is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business and a social psychologist. He studies the psychology of morality and the moral emotions. He has been described as a top global thinker by both Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. Dr. Haidt is the author of three books: The newest is The Coddling of the American Mind: How Bad Ideas and Good Intentions are Setting up a Generation for Failure (http://amzn.to/2AN87a6). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (http://amzn.to/2yOOQnU) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (http://amzn.to/2hJ0TzT) His writings on diversity viewpoint for the Heterodox Academy are at (http://righteousmind.com/viewpoint-di...)