(Better late than never) Quick hits

Busy weekend and a busy week, but here’s some good stuff:

1) Michael Powell with good stuff on “Rich Men North of Richmond”

The future of progressive politics in America just might revolve around whether someone like Chris Murphy, a U.S. senator from a prosperous New England state, can find common ground culturally and politically with a man like Oliver Anthony. Earlier this month, Anthony, a young country singer, dropped his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” into the nation’s political-cultural stew pot. A red-bearded high-school dropout, former factory hand, and virtual unknown, he strummed a guitar in the Virginia woods and sang with an urgent twang about the despair of working-class life:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

So I can sit out here and waste my life away

Drag back home and drown my troubles away.

His song, which became an unlikely national hit, also took jabs at “obese” welfare recipients and high taxes. The right applauded and that turned off the left. Vox christened Anthony a right-wing breakout star; Variety floated accusations that he was an “industry plant”; The Washington Post divined in his song the “mainstreaming” of conspiracy culture. The press coverage of Anthony, and the dismissive tone on the left, would change only on Friday, when the singer released a video in which he disowned the right’s championing of his song.

From the start, Senator Murphy, a liberal Democrat from Connecticut, winced at the anti-welfare and anti-tax tropes, which are hardly new to country music. But he was more struck by the anguish encoded in a haunting song by an artist who struggles with alcoholism and depression, and who lives in a camper in rural Virginia.

I got on the phone with Murphy recently to talk about all of this. “To just ridicule and dismiss the things that he is saying is a real lost opportunity,” the senator told me. “I worry that we are entering a world where we don’t talk unless people are 110 percent in alignment with us.”

By proposing a broader conversation, Murphy has given himself an intriguing task. At times, he wonders if liberals can recognize a primal call of pain for what it is. Anthony sings in an argot filled with cultural allusions that may sound offensive or at least alien to some (one commentator criticized his supposedly inferior use of rhyme). Progressives who want to fix a broken economy, Murphy argues, better find a way to hear out people like Anthony.

2) I don’t know who Scott Young is, but I really liked this, “7 Expert Opinions I Agree With (That Most People Don’t).”  Here’s a few I really liked:

1. Markets are mostly efficient. Most people, most of the time, cannot “beat” the market.

The efficient market hypothesis argues that the price of widely-traded securities, like stocks, reflects an aggregation of all available information about them. This means investors can’t spot “deals” or “overpriced” assets and use that knowledge to outperform the average market return (without taking on more risk).

The mechanism underlying this is simple: Suppose you did have information that an asset was mispriced. You’d be incentivized to buy or short the asset, expecting a better return than the current market would dictate. But this action causes the asset’s price to adjust in the opposite direction, moving it closer to the “correct” value. Taken as a whole, the very action of investors trying to beat the market is what makes it so difficult to beat.

Asset bubbles and stock market crashes are not good evidence against this view. (Of all the people who “predicted” a bubble/crash, how many made money from their prediction?) Nor is that friend you know who seemingly made fantastic returns from crypto/real estate/penny stocks/etc. (That’s usually explained by them taking on more risk, and thus having a higher risk premium, and getting lucky.)

The obvious consequence is that for most retail investors, it’s best to put their money in broad-based index funds to get the benefits of diversification and earn the average market return with few fees.

2. Intelligence is real, important, largely heritable, and not particularly changeable.

This is one that I fought accepting for years. It goes against my beliefs in the value of self-cultivation, practice and learning. However, the evidence is overwhelming:

• Intelligence is one of the most scientifically valid psychometric measurements (far more so than personality, including the dubious Myers Briggs).
• It is positively correlated with many other things we want in life (including happiness, longevity and income!).
• It shows strong heritability, with the g-factor maybe being as much as 85% heritable.
• Finally, few interventions reliably improve IQ, with a possible exception for more education (although it’s not clear this improves g).

I don’t like trotting this argument out. I find it much more appealing to believe in a world where IQ tests don’t measure anything, or they don’t measure anything important, or that any differences are due to education and environment, or that you could improve your intelligence through hard work.

That said, I do think there’s a silver lining here. While your general intelligence may not be easy to change, there’s ample evidence that gaining knowledge and skills improves your ability to do all sorts of tasks. Practically speaking, the best way to become smarter is to learn a lot of stuff and cultivate a lot of skills. Since knowledge and skills are more specific than general intelligence, that may be less than we desire, but it still matters a lot…

5. People are overweight because they eat too much. It is also really hard to stop.

The calorie-in, calorie-out model is, thermodynamically speaking, correct. People who are overweight would lose weight if they ate less.

Yet, this is really difficult to do. As I discuss with neuroscientist and obesity researcher Stephan Guyenet, your brain has specific neural circuitry designed to avoid starvation and, by extension, any rapid weight-loss. When you lose a lot of body fat, your hunger levels increase to encourage you to bring it back up.

This is hardly a radical view, but it’s strongly opposed by a particularly noisy segment of online opinion that either tries to explain weight in terms of something other than calories or, conceding that, seems to assert that the problem is simply a matter of applying a little effort.

One reason I’m optimistic about the new class of weight-loss drugs is simply that, as a society, we’re probably heavier than is optimally healthy, and most interventions based on willpower don’t work.

3) A fair and deeply researched piece from NYT about the gender clinic controversy at Wash U.  So, of course, it’s been relentlessly attacked by many as hopelessly transphobic. 

4) Jerusalem Demsas is so good. Love this, “Americans Vote Too Much: No one can be a full-time political animal.”

It’s always election season in america. Dozens of local contests are taking place across the country this month, from Montgomery, Alabama to the Mariana Ranchos County Water District in California. On August 8 alone, Custer County, Colorado held a recall election for a county commissioner; Ohio asked residents to consider a major ballot measure; and voters in Oklahoma weighed in on several ballot measures.

America has roughly 90,000 local governing bodies, and states do not—at least publicly—track all of the elections taking place on their watch, making an exhaustive accounting nearly impossible. In many cases, contests come and go without any local media coverage, either. I came across a notice for an August 29 election in Marin County, California. When I called the Registrar of Voters for more information, the county assistant had to search a few moments before he could tell me that the town of Tiburon (population 9,000) was selecting a short-term council member.

Americans are used to pundits and civic leaders shaming them for low-turnout elections, as if they had failed a test of civic character. Voters are apathetic, parties don’t bother with the hard work of mobilization, and candidates are boring—or so the story goes. But this argument gets the problem exactly backwards. In America, voters don’t do too little; the system demands too much. We have too many elections, for too many offices, on too many days. We have turned the role of citizen into a full-time, unpaid job. Disinterest is the predictable, even rational response.

5) Seth Masket, “There will not be a pivot: People asking when Republicans will turn away from Trump are asking the wrong question”

After his testimony in the Fulton County case against Donald Trump, former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) said that the sweeping indictments presented a “pivot point” for the Republican Party. Some New Hampshire Republicans are counting on the state primary’s quirky history of boosting underdogs to change the dynamics of the race, with Gov. John Sununu saying, “I’m hoping that most people come to their senses.” Recently, NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd noted that when a trial starts right before the Iowa caucuses, “I think that all of a sudden Republicans are going to ask themselves, ‘What are we doing?’” There’s a perpetual sense that this (Access Hollywood, Charlottesville, January 6th, the 2022 midterms, the Georgia indictment) will be the moment that they turn on him. Pundits have been waiting for some kind of “pivot” to occur since Barack Obama promised that his 2012 re-election would cause Republican’s “fever” to break… probably longer.

Folks, this is not going to happen. And it’s not for want of knowledge or media coverage, and it’s not due to some kind of mass delusion or mental illness. People waiting for the “fever” to break or for the party to return to “normal” are examining it through the wrong lens. But it’s the only lens “establishment” figures and pundits in Washington have.

Here’s what I think is a more useful framework: there is a populist, nativist faction within the modern Republican Party that has a long, long history in the United States but has rarely controlled a major party. It has championed candidates like George Wallace in 1968, Pat Buchanan in 1992, and others who advocate for strict limits or even the elimination of immigration and have a distinct white conservative Christian worldview they seek for national politics.

Importantly, they have often felt slighted, and they’ve not always been wrong to feel this way. For decades, Republican leaders in DC made modest overtures to them but never really wanted them in charge. Yes, they’d share some of their cultural claims on abortion and guns, but party leaders like Reagan, Bush, Romney, McCain, and others would still favor some sort of immigration and would leave this faction feeling used or ignored. The faction was put down for years by party leaders who told them that some of their views had merit, but only through moderation could they win national office; sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. The populists complained, but they just didn’t have the numbers to take over the party.

And then Trump came along.

Trump was exactly what most party leaders in DC had been trying to keep out of power. He wasn’t committed to the conservative program. He wasn’t respectful of party traditions. He threatened to blow up the fragile coalition they’d crafted. But he also championed the populist faction, and thanks to his own popularity independent from politics, he was able to turn that minority faction into a majority. He was what the populists were told they couldn’t have, because it would cost the party dearly. Instead, he put their faction in charge, and they won the White House.

6a) This sounds like crap, but there’s a reason I’m such a techno-optimist, “Scientists Recreate Pink Floyd Song by Reading Brain Signals of Listeners: The audio sounds like it’s being played underwater. Still, it’s a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can’t speak.”

6b) And this. “A Stroke Stole Her Ability to Speak at 30. A.I. Is Helping to Restore It Years Later.”

7) I love that EJ Dionne shares the gift links to all his columns, “Bidenomics is not a one-off. Ask the Australians.”

8) From Clearerthinking.org, “Two Daily Techniques to Make You Happier”  It’s mindfulness and gratitude.  I recommend both. 

9) I used to love seeing the butter cow at the Ohio state fair.  I still love it even knowing it’s not all butter:

The oily visage of a butter cow is an alluring sight at state fairs across the nation, but few people have taken the time to think about what’s inside them. Warning: It’s not more butter.

Instead, like any large sculpture not hewn from a solid block of clay or ice (or sometimes butter), the cows and other large dairy-based sculptures are assembled around an internal framework, or armature. This has come as a surprise to some on social media in recent days.

Paul Brooke, the lead sculptor for the American Dairy Association Mideast butter cow display at the Ohio State Fair, said that people have questioned why the sculpture was not made only of butter “over the years off and on.” It comes down to basic sculpting principles, he said.

“It would work without the armatures if you could start with a huge block and just do the whole thing just by carving removal of butter, it would stand,” Mr. Brooke said.

Sarah Pratt, the butter sculptor for state fairs in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas, added that not using an armature would “be like taking all of the bones out of a dairy cow and expecting it to stand.”

That’s it for now. Busy weekend continues.  Maybe more later.