John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

The government bailout of the auto industry just keeps getting worse: we’ve got the government rewriting car warranties now.

Bryan Caplan recently put up a great post describing the take away lessons he thinks behavioral genetics offers to parents and singles:

The practical lesson of behavioral genetics for parents, in my view, is to stop trying so hard to change your kids. The practical lesson of Rowe’s evidence for singles, in contrast, seems to be that you should hold out for a very close match. Once you accept that the person you marry is unlikely to “grow into” in the changes that you urge upon him or her, the sensible response is to rely more heavily on the power of selection.¹

1. Bryan Caplan : EconLog : Behavioral Genetics and the Single Economist↩

We refuse to accept any gifts from those we dislike, for fear that gratitude will change our opinion of them.

There is a very interesting paper in the February 2009 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics on “Performance Pay and Wage Inequality”. It’s fascinating to think that 21% of the rise in wage inequality since 1980 might be attributable to increased use of performance pay schemes.

The New York Times has a beautiful visualization of immigration trends in the United States since 1880. I highly recommend spending a few minutes playing with the interactive display.

It was freedom from want, not freedom to want -— a world away from the idea that the patriotic thing to do in tough times is go shopping.¹

Kamp’s essay is very good, though there are implicit assumptions about the continuity of intentions and consequences that I find troubling.

1. Vanity Fair : David Kamp : Rethinking the American Dream↩

For me, one of the best features of the upcoming iPhone 3.0 software is the ability to record voice messages for myself. This will totally replace Jott, which I decided a month or two ago to abandon after their recent — and asinine — decision to only offer voice recording to paying customers.

When it first debuted, Jott seemed to be useful. Unfortunately, it became clear over time that the text-to-speech conversion quality would remain low, particularly for the sorts of scientific ideas I would most want to take note of. Because of the terrible conversion quality, I would have been just as well served by a tool that merely recorded my voice and forewent the futile attempt at producing text. Since June of last year, I think that I have used Jott exactly one time.

And then Jott decided to begin to charge for their mediocre product, rather than improve it enough that their subscriber base would grow. This seemed to be a clear sign of their obsolescence. I suspect that this is general principle in the Internet age: when you convert a free service to a paid service, you are effectively admitting that your advertising income is so low that you need to do anything you can just to stay afloat.

But these last, desperate attempts to stave off bankruptcy merely delay the inevitable — and in the process they alienate those few customers these sites have. I would advise any start-ups to avoid this tendency. When the time has come to fold, you should fold gracefully.

One of the most remarkable observations from twins studies is that the role of genetics in shaping many traits grows with time rather than diminishes. I have always been fascinated by this: thinking about it now, as I am reading J. Settle, C. T. Dawes and J. H. Fowler’s paper, “The Heritability of Partisan Attachment”, I suddenly recalled the passage from Pindar that Nietzsche was so fond of quoting, in which each of us is urged to “become who you are.” The idea has always seemed quintessentially poetic to me: a phrase plainly self-contradictory used to express an idea that cannot be readily composed out of the concepts we keep on hand.

If we can become who we are, then there must be, for each of us, a true self that we come to resemble more closely over time, much as a sculpture is revealed by a craftsman’s long work on a generic block of marble.

But such an idea requires that, at at every moment, we are not our true selves, but only an approximation of the being we would be if we lived forever. We would have to be merely the shadow of our own Emersonian genius.

This is an enormously strange concept. What are we if we are not ourselves? And how can a self exist if it is not embodied in the world as a living person?

I think there’s something beautiful about the International Space Station becoming the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon.

It’s sad how easy it can be to catalog American democracy’s faults. As a case study, consider that the Oklahoma state government was just recently working to prevent Richard Dawkins from speaking at the University of Oklahoma because his

public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma.¹

It is disheartening how quickly the ideal of diversity, which was traditionally a liberal dream, has become a tool that can be exploited by religious conservatives. This is the danger of introducing inane ideals without definite meanings: they are readily transformed into political shibboleths entirely lacking any intellectual content. The notion of diversity has no place in science; no more than it has any place in mathematics, where all propositions are either true or false.

Perhaps more interesting is that the Catholic Church, the greatest of antidemocratic structures, is holding a conference to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of Species,” to which they have not invited any Creationist groups. Thankfully, diversity has never appealed to the Church, whose goal has always been unification under the one true belief. (That I do not think the belief is true in no way prevents my admiration for the Church’s earnest singlemindedness.)

1. Oklahoma Bill House Resolution 1015↩