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Wow, this passage really hit me.

"my worry goes beyond the fact that people are deceived by aspects of their social environment that appear to empower them without actually rendering them able to affect the course of things. Worse, I think, is that a great many don't care, or at least have passed a point of cynicism wherein they do not really think things can be otherwise."

We are having a local political issue in Boise, where something is proposed to happen, and a neighborhood doesn't want it to happen, I will not get into the details, because it doesn't really matter which side is right or wrong.

In the past, Boise elections were "at large", in that the whole city voted for candidates who could live anywhere. While this gives the illusion of democracy, the reality is that the wealthy hip neighborhood just had a lot more social capital and time (privilege) to get out the vote in local elections in concentrated numbers that the working class areas of Boise couldn't match.

The current result is Boise's government is literally controlled by a single neighborhood. 5 out of 6 city council members, and the mayor, literally live within a 10 minute walk of each other.

The neighborhood mentioned above has 0 representatives in the city government, so basically have no say in what happens.

I bring this up because someone had read a comment and blog post where I brought this up, and they messaged me, asking if it was really true. When I pointed out the facts, showed her a map of where everyone lived, she was truly shocked. She assumed that she had representation. She had the illusion that her vote mattered, or would matter. It really shocked me, because I assumed it was obvious, I actually felt guilty because I had shattered her illusions

I has also occurred to me that this is one of the problems of conflict in this country. People need to feel like they are in control. And for whatever reason, more and more things and issues are controlled by national policy. Things that you would think would be a local issue, are decided far far away. (I know I am sounding conservative here, but that is not my goal).

I think this effect sort of chips away at people. Leads to frustration or malaise.

I also suspect this is why smaller countries like New Zealand seem to have a lot less conflict. Even if things go against you, at least as 1 out of 5M is more of an impact than 1 out of 300M.

And in the US, it feels like control is moving more and more away from cities to states, states to government, etc... I don't want to bring up a specific policy, because that gets derailed into whether said policy is good or bad. The point is, why can't we let some states have bad policies. The more we nationalize and centralize things, in a big country, this just seems to make people feel like they have less and less power.

Which I suspects is leading them to cling on to these bat shit crazy conspiracy theories. I am not saying its a direct relationship, and maybe its just a peripheral connection. Who knows.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Would a return to more State control fix things? Maybe... maybe not. I suspect its not even possible.

I'm sure a historian or poly sci has all sorts of theories on this.

As far as our local issue goes, the State Legislature passed a law requiring cities of a certain size to have district representation, so next year, all neighborhoods will have a say. Does no good this year though. And because so many city councilors are lame ducks (only 1 out of 5 will survive), there isn't even the incentive of getting votes for reelection to use as leverage.

Anyway... if you made it this far, thanks.

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Claudia Sahm made a similar point in your interview . "After all, if I am not deciding what to read based on journal publications, a natural alternative is to allocate our attention based on who we already know and trust - and that will advantage the antecedently famous and the well connected. This could make research far too conservative, and in any case academics tend to be very sensitive to anything that might affect the distribution of credit and prestige, so this is very salient to many in our community."

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Feb 4, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Much of this I generally agreed with and much went over my head until and if I can find the time and the discipline to dive into the fundamental concepts more deeply. One thing I found refreshing was in Bright's usage of the phrase "managing climate change." Though this might strike some as accommodationist, it seems an important reframing of the issues from the binary "fighting" vs "denying" of the reality of climate change. For example, if we are determined to fight climate change and its obvious link to increasing forest fires, we might take the attitude of stopping the ignition of our forests at all costs, when the more helpful approach is to realize that forest fires will continue to erupt at higher frequency than in the past, and we must get better at managing the inevitable devastation. There are better and worse alternatives to denying the linkage and advocating no changes in policy towards the problem.

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One thing:

- "I have said before on twitter that I think to a significant degree many culture war issues are about resolving psycho-social tensions among the white (upper-)middle class in the west." I feel like Andrew Gelman's Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State provides a lot of evidence for this, although it may be slightly dated.

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Feb 4, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

I like the debate about Noah's "America has DNA" point

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There's also sometimes direct "street" science with high incentive bypassing the academic structure. For years I ran a glassblowing studio. In direct contrast to hundreds of years of secrecy in this art, a number of us came together in an online forum to share what we knew and create much that was new or unique. The results were spectacular and created a body of knowledge that solved a lot of problems in the present and could be an excellent reference for those in the future. The downside is that now all the technical knowledge has created a number of suppliers of the things you should really know how to build or formulate yourself. The schools teaching glassblowing have no interest in teaching the technical or the chemistry involved. The new ones in the art also just want to blow glass with minimum to no involvement in the technical side of their art form...which requires the infrastructure of a small city. There's a realization among us who know that all this sort of knowledge will be lost and will have to be to be rediscovered every hundred years. I laugh as I realize this is the overall trajectory of human endeavor, be it political or technical. At least it still seems to be two steps forward and only one step back, so sign me on as a positivist. Thanks to both of you for this interview, well done!

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With regards to abolishing pre-publication peer review -- probably a good idea IMO -- it's worth emphasizing this is already the de facto state of things in many fields, most strongly in computer science, mathematics, and parts of physics.

Everything usually goes up on arXiv first and is shared openly. People will build on and cite these preprints before they are even "published". They end up going to a peer-reviewed venue, but this is just to give people academic career points so they can avoid being fired, and secondarily to publicize the work.

The funniest thing is that a lot of the time, the unofficial arXiv version is in fact the canonical version that everyone actually reads -- although you cite the journal version so people's academia scores will go up. This is because journal page limits + formatting often mean that the official journal version is ugly and mangled, or missing important material.

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I am rather disappointed in something. I cannot help but feel he has committed the cardinal error of becoming attached to means, not to ends. It is perfectly alright to want people to be better off, but we must take care to not be attached to the how. He is attached to socialism; and if achieved, it would lead to the exact opposite of what his supposed ends are. For one who cares about verifiability and truth, I would have expected better.

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"The Only Carbon Capture Coal Plant in the U.S. Just Closed.

"Decades of research has made CCS technically feasible, but it’s both incredibly complex and wildly expensive. Petra Nova was the only operational CCS project in the U.S., and the largest one in the world using its specific technology. While other projects have attempted to get off the ground in the U.S., there have been some painfully high-profile failures, including one plant in Mississippi where costs ballooned more than 200 percent to $7.5 billion without ever actually coming online. Nevertheless, the fossil fuel industry continues to chase after carbon capture. Just this week, Exxon-Mobil said that it was investing $3 billion over the next 5 years on projects to lower emissions, including 20 carbon capture projects around the world.

"Petra Nova looked at first to be a bright point for CCS before flaming out last week."

Flamed out, just like Sears.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/the-only-carbon-capture-plant-in-the-u-s-just-closed-1846177778

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I am looking for a bit of clarity on this statement', "And as to the Enlightenment, in a remarkable coincidence it turns out that all and only the bits I disagree with are racist."

Should I take this to mean the entire Enlightenment project is (predominantly) racist and that the bits held in disagreement racist?

It seems that Noah agrees with the original syntax, "N.S.: Excellent answer. Happens to be mine too, what a coincidence! :-)"

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Bright said "I really do think I’m more Israel’s-radical-enlightenment than most."

Smith's argued that "the study of history can do more harm than good".

Positivism has always been a disaster.

https://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/actually-herzl-was-a-colonialist/

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Some interesting points and a lively conversation

One quibble : the very briefest inclusion of Africa in the conversation with a link to the Brown Political Review, as its name indicates dedicated to discussion of all things Brown

Except, once again, Africa - click on their sections- no Africa

What is it with the no Africa - and why is not exploitation oppression and the general structure of the world not, ever, discussed with Africa as the centrepoint

African Americans, and African English, while stating a level of concern, seem willing to adopt the name un willing to assume that part of the name, equally

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I realise I’ll be bashing my head against a brick wall, as people – even articulate and intelligent people like Noah and Mr Bright – never want to confront their own cognitive dissonance. Noah “shudders” at the “intellectual dark web”, despite the fact that anyone has actually bothered to spend time listening to, say, Jordan Peterson or Bret Weinstein, could be nothing but impressed by their integrity, their articulacy, and the clarity of their thought processes. It’s easier just to have a prejudice against them. Then Mr Bright apparently delights in teaching from an article which leads from democracy to women’s rights to, without anything like sufficient logical or well-argued connections between them, the public ownership of production! We could start with the fact that that article argues that negro slaves were never “freed”, they rose up and fought for it, which firstly just isn’t true, and as if there are no complications in the picture like compassion and white activists being troubled by the existence of slavery at the same time as the existence of their own Christian philosophy. We could finish with the fact that the article finishes with the word “Comrade” and was published in 1920, when loads of Western intellectuals were in love with the communist ideal and before the horrors of the Gulag archipelago or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, when a completely left wing approach – just as deluded as a completely right wing approach – really came into its own, didn’t it? Communism has been tried, and it didn’t even need to be overthrown by Western capitalism in western Europe, it collapsed through its own economic and social incompetence! Then we have Mr Bright’s sideways comment indicating that leaving the existing structures and institutions in place but staffing them with different people is not enough, i.e. underneath it he wants enough of a revolution to tear things down, even things that have developed over centuries of complications and survived democratic scrutiny, as if human history has no experience of how appallingly wrong revolutions can go. And this is while Noah think he can deny the validity of thinking there is some kind of neo-Marxist takeover over the humanities in universities, as if it’s a ridiculous thing to suggest, rather than actually listening to his own interviewee! On top of all that, Mr Bright says there is some kind of systemic attack on trans rights people in Britain – well, I live in the UK, and there is no such thing. Perhaps he is referring to the legal case against the Tavistock clinic, a place which is now a national shame and the UK’s equivalent of Auschwitz, as it has been permitting medical procedures and experiments on children, who are emotionally and psychologically unformed. Jesus Christ, we need philosophy and articulate people all right, but we need sanity as well.

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