Internet Reading Q3 2020

Here we go, three fourth of the very strange year is behind us. So it's time for another round-ups of links:

1. This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!”

And: The bubonic plague did not go away, it remained endemic, like influenza or chickenpox today. Losing a friend or sibling to plague was a universal experience from 1348 to the 1720s, when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because fourteen generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work.

More about the pandemic:

• Before I become your doctor, you have been intubated for weeks. Your name is a poem I’m required to keep to myself. Who were you before the virus, before you were this — this list of failing organs run in despair by a repurposed trainee neurologist? The New Stability
• This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic: k is a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen.
• Herd Immunity Is Not a Strategy
• Why Everything Is Sold Out: The pandemic broke online shopping.
• We Need to Talk About Ventilation: How is it that six months into a respiratory pandemic, we are still doing so little to mitigate airborne transmission?
• How Covid Sends Some Bodies to War With Themselves
• Bureaucrats defer to the policy decisions from the president and his ministers and implement them without asking any questions – no matter how good or bad these policies are. Indonesia’s Half-hearted Response to COVID-19
• Rents Swoon in San Francisco, Other Expensive Cities Y/Y.
• An Unexpected Consequence of the Covid-19 Pandemic? A National Coin Shortage
• Despite its epochal effects, COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one.
• FAQs on Protecting Yourself from COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission

2. The Great Climate Migration Has Begun

More about the environment and natural sciences:

• The desperate fight to save his family ends in tragedy
• How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
• Reducing the cobalt content in lithium-ion batteries is good for the environment, human rights, and maybe even the performance of the battery itself.
• The Rise of Eko Atlantic
• The scariest thing about global warming (and Covid-19): "Shifting baselines syndrome" means we could quickly get used to climate chaos
• How do trees find their sense of direction as they grow? Bent into shape: The rules of tree form
• How to Plan a Space Mission
• Mathematicians and physicists are also lazy - or rather, they want to be efficient, so that if they see something similar happening again and again in different places they want one unified way of understanding it so that they don't have to start from scratch every time. Eugenia Cheng's answers to Gracie Cunningham's questions

3. I’ve been deeply interested in personal knowledge management for almost 10 years now. V1 of my interest was a private wiki I created in college to help organize the notes I started taking from non-fiction books I was reading. Roam is V4. Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use It

More about thinking and knowledge:

• How might one create timeful texts--texts which continue the conversation with the reader as they slowly integrate those ideas into their lives? Timeful Texts
• I’ve worked in around Cambridge, and yet I can report that basically nobody has a schedule resembling the same rigor as that of a professional athlete. This is not to say that researchers don’t work hard—they absolutely do. It’s that information is gathered inconsistently, and that there is very rarely an organized process for testing recall/understanding of new facts. Let’s Take Our Brains More Seriously When Learning
• AskReddit asked recently: If you could only give an alien one thing to help them understand the human race, what would you give them? I would give them Charlotte Lennox’s write-up of how MsScribe took over Harry Potter fandom. We Are All MsScribe
• I’ve increasingly been seeing people outright reject the idea that they ever were anywhere but where they are now, and anyone who isn’t here already is lost forever. We need to remember the directions we followed. Remember How You Got Here
• The diversity of perspective is typically correlated with diversity of goals – someone who disagrees with how you see the world is also likely to want different things from it. But you should still push towards the margins of diversity as best as you can. In praise of negativity
• Negativity (when applied with rigor) requires more care than positivity.
• Views on politics reflect a lot about people. For instance, they show your first-hand knowledge, your courage and insight, how much you’ve read, your ability to think and distinguish right from wrong, how much you care for others and feel a sense of social responsibility, how well you can resist swindlers, whether you feel part of a national mission and love your compatriots, whether you especially love your homeland or other things, and so on. These things all distinguish people’s fundamental judgment. 'Thanks to Coronavirus, I Realized My Spouse's Brain is Broken'
• I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds! This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking--individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets.
• My own production function, in some ways, of continuing current projects is fine. I can do that. But I do feel that if this carries on for another year, the US economy is going to suffer a little bit in terms of struggling to come up with new ideas. I’m not randomly meeting people. I can easily Zoom current people I know, but it’s much harder to come up with random people at seminars you would’ve gone to, but clearly aren’t. Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress

4. Economics is a disgrace

More about economics and research sausage making:

• The stock market does not reflect the US economy. The stock market, for example — right now it’s 30 percent high tech, which has only 7 percent of US jobs. Also, when interest rates drop because the economy slows, it makes the stock market go up because it’s suddenly a relatively better investment. I think the stock market and the state of the US economy are only weakly linked. Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress
• A tool to create application packets for the academic Economics Job Market. With this code, you can create multiple templates for your cover letters, research statements, teaching statements, and diversity statements and inject wild cards into each letter or statement to customize them to a specific job
• Four Steps to an Applied Micro Paper by Jesse Shapiro
• Plotting regression coefficients and other estimates in Stata
• Best Practices for Code Review: R Edition
• Digital Exam Grading
• A Manifesto for Globalization
• Long or mutliple-line notes in esttab with automatic wrapping
• On the Frontier Thesis
• Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses?
• Economics is obviously an important subject, and economists know a lot of good and useful things. But in academia, you are rewarded for pushing the frontiers, for having the edgiest idea out there. But you don’t really want to base policy recommendations on something like that, right? One promising line of research that some hot shots have two new papers on is not what you want to bet the future on. To talk about policy, I think you want to know the basics, but the basics are relatively easy to learn. Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low

5. The 450 Movement: I do peer review and I want you to pay me four hundred and fifty dollars. I’ll even say please.

More about social science:

• The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
• The Value of the Third-Person Perspective in Evicted
• Robustness checks are a joke
• What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers
• When a manuscript with 20+ authors have grammatical errors, typos, and/or no page numbers, you wonder how many authors actually read it. Researchers wrestle with co-authorship
• NIH General Guidelines for Authorship Contributions
• CRediT – Contributor Roles Taxonomy

6. Seen in the best light, a wealthy person excited by stoicism is seeking a philosophy that helps the mind resist greed and the capitalist rat race and offers a wiser perspective and inner happiness; seen in the worst light it can be a tool for justifying keeping one’s wealth and power and not trying to help others.

More about social justice and racism:

• Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system.
• While I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work, but it’s the price you pay for owning everything. Anti-racism work is supposed to be hard
• VC Firms Promised to Help Black Founders. My Experience Shows a Different Reality.
• Why We Won't Defund the Police (in two graphs)
• We Want More Justice For Breonna Taylor Than The System That Killed Her Can Deliver
• When I assigned Abbott in May, I had no idea how timely it would be. Students started the series the week after George Floyd was killed and completed it the day after protestors in Minneapolis occupied and burned down the local police precinct. While students were quick to locate parallels between the series’ depiction of 1970s Detroit and our contemporary moment in terms of police brutality, they also interrogated how news stories get told in Abbott—and by whom. “Burn His Words”: Abbott and the Illumination of Whitestream Culture
• 10 Ways to Reduce Our Reliance on Policing
• In a gerontocracy, equality feels like oppression
• Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race
• An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
• If ever there were a well-respected class of rodent, it would have to be the beaver. They’re notoriously hardworking, acting as tree-cutters, masons, and engineers. Given this impressive resume, beavers seem like the perfect animal mascot for the Republican conception of Personal Responsibility. But not only is it impossible for many humans to work like beavers, but that people who do work like beavers are exhausted and frequently desperate.
• The Labour Movement: My Part in its Downfall
• Throughout my years in Wilkes-Barre, I believed the area had no culture. But I was mistaken. What I didn’t realize was that drinking alcohol is culture. Drinking Alone

7. Why Does Monaco Exist?

More readings about the US politics, Australia, China, Africa, Indonesia, UK:

• When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number
• I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.
• Yes, We Are in an Ideological Competition With China
• China and the Rules‑Based Order
• The World That China Wants (III): Taking Chinese Communism Seriously
• Indonesia's harmful restrictions on foreign journalists, academics
• In the US, around 163 million cats and dogs consume as much dietary energy as all of Canada’s humans. The Naturalistic Fallacy Has Pet Owners Barking up the Wrong Tree
• Coronavirus pandemic will serve the same historic function as major wars in recent history. Yuan compares current Sino-American relations, in geopolitical terms, to relations between Great Britain and the United States at the end of WWI. Britain’s historical moment was waning but while America was on the rise, she was not ready to take Britain’s place. Today’s America is thoroughly dysfunctional, but China is not yet ready to lead.The Coronavirus Pandemic and a Once-in-a-Century Change
• Why Do Republican Leaders Continue to Enable Trump? History Will Judge the Complicit
• What can Africa do to overcome the limitations of having so many landlocked countries? The obvious thing would be a transportation network that’s improved beyond what they currently have, particularly railways, so that landlocked countries can transport their goods to the sea. And we know that sea transport is much, much cheaper, much more effective.
• Multinational baby formula companies, such as Nestlé and Danone, are turning Indonesian Instagram into free formula ads
• It’s so hard to find good help: Chinese broadcasters are making inroads in Russia, but Beijing has stumbled due to a shortage of capable propagandists
• A long trip through Malaysia, Indonesia and China leaves me more convinced than ever that east Asia has two distinct destinies in economic development terms, and that the south-east Asian states are on the wrong side of the tracks.
• a critique of How Asia Works with specific reference to Indonesia.
• From 2022, all students in Inner Mongolia will be taking classes solely in Chinese. Previously, in many schools in Inner Mongolia, these subjects were taught in Mongolian through high school. The message in a Chinese developmental context is clear: Mongolian is backward and cannot be developed. [https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/08/30/bilingual-education-in-inner-mongolia-an-explainer/]
• The scaly sweet was too valuable to eat - a single fruit was worth thousands of pounds and often the same pineapple would be paraded from event to event until it eventually went rotten. The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple Once the pineapple was on the menu for ordinary people, did the upper classes learn their lesson from the short-lived status and money-sucking nature of the pineapple? No, they didn't. They set their caps at another luxury and difficult-to-grow food: celery.
• Indonesia Merdeka Karena Peraih Beasiswanya Rajin Plesir dan Kena Paham Radikal
• When your name is Osama and you’re living in post-9/11 America, you always know The Question is coming. “Do You Get Shit for Your Name?”
• QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded
• Why Are Conservatives Obsessed with Pedophilia Right Now?
• Effective Political Giving What Ails America
• Informational Lobbying: Theory and Effectiveness

8. During this [Radical Honesty] experiment, a freelance writer asked me if I would go to coffee with him, and I said, “I just got to be honest. The thought of it gives me dread”. And I was terrified to send it, but he wrote back, “You know what, I am not very social either. It gives me dread. But I felt I had to do it for my career”. And then we came to a compromise that we would talk on Skype.

And: Of course it’s ridiculous and cartoonish, but also I liked it. And so I do say to my wife, half-jokingly every Valentine’s day, “The benefits of being married to you outweigh the cost”. But I say, “I love you, but there are things that annoy me. But overall I love you very much”. And I think that might not work for everyone, but it works for our relationship so far, at least.

More about relationships and queerness:

• A queer take on gendered Japanese
• Polish towns pay a steep price for anti-LGBTQ views
• Here's the Thing: Stop Cheating

9. Anduin is Indus River, Mordor is Pamir/Himalaya/Tian-shan. The Tale of the annotated map and Tolkien’s hidden riddles

More about books, writing, and other miscellanea:

• This all started with a particularly sexy fairy.
• She Still Loves the Dragon BY ELIZABETH BEAR
• Muggeridge’s description of World War II is actually super hilarious. I was not expecting this. When you take one of the darkest and most pessimistic writers of the twentieth century and put him in the middle of one of the twentieth century’s greatest horrors, you might expect the result to have at least a touch of grimness about it, or at least not to leave you rolling on the floor laughing. You would be wrong. Book Review: Chronicles Of Wasted Time
• Everything I've Learned: Reader Funding and Memberships
• In retrospect, I mistook hard work and unusual data for an interesting article. The Courage (and Disappointment) of Pitching a Visual Essay
• Pure Skill Minesweeper
• Divinity consultants are designing sacred rituals for corporations and their spiritually depleted employees
• How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole
• It is easy to fall into self-orientalism — taking aspects of one’s culture or background and allowing oneself to fetishize it for the comfort of late-stage capitalism. However, it is problematic when we allow some members of victims of orientalism to speak over others. - This becomes even more problematic when they not only speak over others, but use others’ cultures to create profit and to exemplify cosmpolitanism. Self-Orientalism Amongst Muslim Content Creators