Internet Reading Q4 2021

This collection of links are solid proof that I dicked around the Internet more this quarter.

1. Walking through doorways causes forgetting

Thinking, rationality, altruism, and longtermism

• Your Intelligent, Conscientious In-group Has Bad Social Norms Too by Sasha Chapin
• QALY thinking frees us from considering the specificity of whom we are helping; marginal and counterfactual thinking frees us from the specificity of ourselves. What matters isn’t who does the good, only that good is done. Stop the Robot Apocalypse--a review of MacAskill's book.  
• Also from the same review: Effective Altruism has been a conservative movement, calling us back to where we already are: the world as it is, our institutions as they are. EA doesn’t try to understand how power works, except to better align itself with it. This is no doubt comforting to those who enjoy the status quo – and may in part account for the movement’s success.
• A Case Against Strong Longtermism by Vaden Masrani
• The Poverty of Longtermism
• Against Longtermism by Phil Torres
• Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever
• Willingness to look stupid.
• High quality audio makes you sound smarter

2. Do I Have Productivity Dysmorphia?

Modern life and Social Media

• There's no money in streaming
• The creator economy by Nadia Eghbal. "Like nonprofits or the news, I think the reification of creators suffers from a rhetorical bait-and-switch. We believe on a surface level that “creating” is a divine form of self-expression that carries intrinsic public value. We should work harder to imbue it with something more."
• Does Social Media Sell Books? by Chuck Wendig--in which I found the term "artisanal data, by which I mean, my anecdotal experience and observations.". 
• Also: "It’s not that social media cannot have value. And it’s not that you can’t still try to get blood from that rock. But to my mind it’s a place you go because you want to be there, not because it is a necessary or even useful channel."
• I have started volunteering once a week at a local farm stand — but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t mostly because it’s reminding me how to exist as a person in the world. The Humble Vegetable
• Can We Live Without Twitter?
• Who’s Ashamed Of The Work They Do?
• Twitter Is The Worst Reader by Fonda Lee
• The Inner Ring of The Internet by Ali Montag
• Do you have dozens of tabs open like we do? OneTab takes your tabs and turns them into a list of clickable links h/t Insanely Useful Websites
• The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay.
• Why People Are So Awful Online by Roxane Gay

3. Rule no 1: Always decide the day before what you will write and when you will write, one key sentence and 27 minutes at a time. Rule no 2: Never write about something you just learned this week. Always write about something you knew last week at the latest. Also, why is this so hard?

Poems, puns, writing

• Daniel Craig: The Screensaver by Richard Goodson--and live reading of the poem.
• The Benefits of Education during Lockdown
• Good Bones by Maggie Smith
• Anthropocene Pastoral by Catherine Pierce
• Love in a Time of Climate Change by Craig Santoz Perez
• One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII by Pablo Neruda
• Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying by Noor Hindi (h/t inthemargins)
• Like a rebel in a secret war, I wrote.
• "Obsessive world building is [a] common cause of crap books." Complaints about depicting a detailed world in fantasy have potential sexist, colonialist, and racist implications. Why? Because the status quo does not need world building.
• Milagroso by Isabel Yap
• 44th Pun-Off World Championship Winners: Robin Roper, Katy Stevens, Martha Louise.
• What will the world look like in 2031?
• The Use of Atrocities in Fantasy
• Against Nature Writing
• I told the sunset about you and the sunset was curious. How did I hold on to such a good man, such a wonderful person? I could be glib and say I’m a good man too, a most wonderful person – who wouldn’t be lucky to have me too? But the truth is, and I know this, I am the one who got lucky. I am the one who is blessed. Well done, the sunset says. Excellent choice.

4. The Much Quieter Revolution of Synthetic Control

Economics and Development

• The Most Cited 2019 QJE Paper Relied on an Outdated Stata Default to Conclude Regression p-values Are Inadequate
• I’m not a fan of leave-one-out/spatial instruments
• Nothing scales by Jason Kerwin
• How to Mentally Prepare for the Job Market
• No wonder we cannot agree on how globalisation works and whether it’s a good thing. All the stories we have are flawed
• Persistence papers - A critical review
• What does “fixed effect nested within cluster” means? from reghdfe FAQ
• What makes a paper “development economics” and making this clear for a general journal audience
• The Upworthy research archive
• Chloe East's Metrics Discussions

5. Gay marriage was a victory, we’re told—but a victory for what? We could have dreamed bigger dreams, but we chose marriage instead. (Yasmin Nair)

More on LGBTQIA

• Gay Marriage, as a movement struggle, has often been criticised as assimilation. But that critique allows us to forget that Gay Marriage functions as well as it does because it is a naked tool of capitalism. How Gay Money Became Gay Wealth: A Fable
• The Collaborative Queer Indonesian Literature List
• Ngobrol Bareng Kawan yang Aseksual
• Aktivis HAM pelaku kekerasan seksual? Selama seseorang dibesarkan dalam budaya patriarki, ya dia harus belajar apa itu “sexual consent”.
• What Do We Mean When We Say “Toxic Masculinity?” by Luke Humphris
• Please Come And Be Fat
• "Am I bi?" - SexEd for Bi Guys and basically their entire series

6. If a fixation on personal behavior distracts from the political changes we need, dismissing the value of personal behaviors detracts from the political movement for climate justice. It may just be that encouraging personal behavior change doesn’t shrink or weaken the climate movement—it can expand, strengthen, and deepen it. Yes, Actually, Individual Responsibility Is Essential to Solving the Climate Crisis

More on Climate

• The climate crisis is worse than you can imagine. Here’s what happens if you try - a profile piece of Peter Kalmus, ex-NASA turned climate scientist.
• Working at the World Bank, I can see how it is failing humanity on the climate crisis by Jake Hess
• Do we need more scary climate change articles? Maybe.
• Art and Climate by Neil Gaiman
• Taming the Greedocracy by Jag Bhalla
• What happens when we do something—but not enough—to stop climate change?
• Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change? by Rivka Galchen
• The first climatologist to win a Nobel prize in physics
• You’re probably blowing way past your “fair share” of carbon emissions

7. My father was afraid for me to come to Australia. He mostly made jokes about it. But I know my father, and I know when the jokes have a serious undercurrent. And now that I’m here I know now that Dad was right to worry. This is not a safe country for people of color. Now. Before you tar and feather me, let me tell you something else I’ve come to understand in the past three days. Australia may not be the safest place for someone who looks like me… but it’s trying to become safer. You’re trying. I want you to understand that what you’ve done makes me want to weep with envy, and bitterness, and hope. After all: what is hatred, really, but supreme indifference to the suffering of another? (N. K. Jemisin)

More from around the world

• Seeing in the Dark by Breai Mason-Campbell - a secular sermon on race, grief, accountability and change at the Pipe Wrench magazine
• How did 30,000 Haitians get to Texas?
• Afghanistan 2021: A quickly made long tragedy by Lant Pritchett
• How to Destroy a Country: Does Ethiopia Have a Future?
• Dreams and Despair in Gaza
• The Untold Story of Sushi in America
• Cunhaporanga Tatuyo became a TikTok star by sharing glimpses of her life in a remote indigenous community in the Amazon
• The Top Feel-Good Stories of 2021
• Roach infestations. Mold problems. Overflowing dumpsters. Residents of Alpha Management’s Boston-area apartment buildings have suffered all kinds of horrors over the years.
• Makam Banyusumurup yang terletak di lembah terpencil di kawasan Imogiri jadi pemakaman bagi orang-orang yang dianggap musuh negara oleh Amangkurat I.
• Has Witch City lost its way?
• Culture Shock

8. Is Sucking Carbon Out of the Air the Solution to Our Climate Crisis? Or just another Big Oil boondoggle?

Other writings by Clive Thompson

• Does a new technology pose serious dangers — or are we just overreacting? Philosopher Evan Selinger has some ideas on how to tell the two apart: Strong affordances--what frictions the new technology diminish (think Internet and complaining)--and clear incentives to abuse the new tech (how this lines up with desire of people/govt/corp).
• We were the unpaid janitors of a bloated tech monopoly
• Rewilding your attention: To find truly interesting ideas, step away from the algorithmic feeds of Big Tech.
• Space junk in orbit is looking to become our next ecological mess
• The code that controls your money
• The ‘Long Nose’ Theory of Tech Innovation: Anything that’s going to have an impact over the next decade has always already been around for 10 years

9. Scott Alexander reviews Lifespan. Also, Ivermectin.

Science and technology

• The mass slaughter of whales destroyed far more than the creatures themselves by Ed Yong
• Why Channel 37 Doesn’t Exist: it would have interfered with a radio telescope in Danville, Ill.
• ‘Distant cosmic explosion’ was actually Russian space junk, new studies argue
• There are two classes of problems caused by new technology. Class 1 problems are due to it not working perfectly. Class 2 problems are due to it working perfectly.
• Please, enough with the dead butterflies! by Emily Damstra
• Jane Goodall Still Has Hope for Us Humans

10. [One thing] separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. They believe they're worthy. What do these people have in common? The courage to be imperfect, the compassion to be kind to themselves, and connection as a result of authenticity. They fully embraced vulnerability.

Being Human, Culture, and Miscellanea (and two writings by Yasmin Nair)

• That which is unique, breaks
• It's precisely because 98% of the American built environment is so blah that the 2% of places that are really well-designed quickly get bid up by the rich and become inaccessible to the rest of us. The solution to this isn't to stop creating such places, but to create vastly more of them. Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places
• Who Gets to Be Dirty by Roxane Gay
• The Myth of Panic: Acute fear of the mass of common men by the elites who govern them is not novel. 
• For years now, panicked headlines have warned Americans about the threat of illiberal left. I have (God help me) read a huge amount of this coverage and the thing that strikes me, over and over again, is the sheer sameness of it. The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism
• The Irony of Writing about Poverty on Medium by Yasmin Nair
• How to Be Poor by Yasmin Nair
• When Your Parents Are Dying
• The Professor - Irina Dumitrescu