Links for February 2022
I am going to start doing a links post toward the end of the month. It’s just going to be a collection of things that I find interesting. Your mileage may vary. Let me know if you like it. Thanks for reading Parrhesia’s Newsletter! For curated newsletters, you can check out the sample.
Why Are Some Fields More Left Wing?: My favorite philosopher, Michael Huemer, writes about the well-known fact that some disciplines are significantly more liberal than conservative. Huemer believes:
Business schools are a special case.
Left-wing affiliation goes along with interest in abstract, theoretical discussion.
Subjectivity goes along with left-wing affiliation; objectivity goes along with more moderate or right-wing affiliation.
For social science: An accepted, precise model diminishes bias.
People who are more strongly interested in politics tend to be more left-wing. So moderates tend to be found in non-political fields, e.g., business or engineering.
College: How to Make the Most of It: My favorite economist and noted critique of college, Bryan Caplan, explains how to use college effectively. Some of his tips include reading teachers reviews before picking a class, joining your school’s effective altruism club, finding love and fostering good relationships with professors.
Should you get off Twitbookgram?: A look at several studies analyzing the effects of social media on mental health. This is obviously a very important topic, but unfortunately there is not enough research behind it. I share Kirkegaard’s frustration:
I think the meta-take-away from this review is that social science has serious prioritization issues. Why do we have 1000+ useless studies on candidate genetics, and mostly fake GxE, ego depletion and all manners of other bullshit, or politically convenient falsehoods, AND YET we somehow don't know whether the largest change to human social behavior in the last... ever has negative effects on mental health, despite us facing a seeming mental health crisis. It beggars belief. Where are the adults in academia?
Higher impact factor journals have lower replicability indexes: With replicability estimates using Ulrich Schimmack Z-curve method, journals with higher citations have lower replicability estimates. If this is true, it flips our normal conception of good science on its head.
The Future of Humanity Is IVF Babies and Chinese Domination: Richard Hanania is a very interesting writer over at CSPI who interviewed Steve Hsu about China and embryo selection. Embryo selection is a very interesting topic, and I share the same sense of importance for it’s impact of the future.
The Altruistic Killer: A writer in the rational-sphere, Sam Atis, writes about the ethical differences between omission and commission.
Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness: A good interview between Dwarkesh Patel and CSPI’s Richard Hanania, one of my favorite intellectuals at the moment. Hanania recently published a book entitled Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy.
Richard Hanania: The Politics of Everything: Speaking of Hanania, this is another interview with him, but the interviewee is Bryan Caplan. This was one of my favorite conversations in a long time. They discuss a great deal of things that interest me: international relations, war, peace, sanctions, grand strategy (and the lack thereof), partisanship, ideology, wokeness, academia, discrimination, civil rights, legal reform, and Hanania’s unique career path.