I haven't spent much time on personal updates here the past several years, but it matters on some topics to know what my personal affiliations are, so I wanted to share that I've left Oculus as of mid July. I'm not sure what's next yet, but I've enjoyed having some time to travel to see friends and family, catch up on reading, and get outside on my bike the past few weeks.

It's also been great to have the chance to connect with some of the smart people of the Bay Area, many of whom I've never met before except online. Bouncing ideas around with some of the interesting thinkers here is something I wish I did more of sooner, and I'm trying to make up for lost time. It has certainly helped me to refine my thinking about many topics, including my next venture, whatever that turns out to be.

Please ping me if you'd like to grab a coffee.

***

One of my goals during this break is to clear out a lot of things I've accumulated over the years. I donated six massive boxes of books to the local library the other week, and I've been running to a Goodwill dropoff center every few days.

The other cruft I've accumulated is of a digital nature, mostly an embarrassing number of browser tabs, some of which have been open since before an orange president became the new black. Such digital cruft is no less a mental burden than its physical counterparts, so I'm going to start to zap them, ten at a time. I have to; my Macbook Pro can no longer handle the sheer volume of tabs open, the fan is always on full throttle like a jet engine.

Here are the first ten to go.

1. The War Against Chinese Restaurants

Startlingly, however, there was once a national movement to eliminate Chinese restaurants, using innovative legal methods to drive them out. Chinese restaurants were objectionable for two reasons. First, they threatened white women, who were subject to seduction by Chinese men, through intrinsic female weakness, or employment of nefarious techniques such as opium addiction. In addition, Chinese restaurants competed with “American” restaurants, thus threatening the livelihoods of white owners, cooks and servers; unions were the driving force behind the movement.

The effort was creative; Chicago used anti-Chinese zoning, Los Angeles restricted restaurant jobs to citizens, Boston authorities decreed Chinese restaurants would be denied licenses, the New York Police Department simply ordered whites out of Chinatown. Perhaps the most interesting technique was a law, endorsed by the American Federation of Labor for adoption in all jurisdictions, prohibiting white women from working in Asian restaurants. Most measures failed or were struck down. However, Asians still lost; the unions did not eliminate Chinese restaurants, but they achieved their more important goal, extending the federal policy of racial exclusion in immigration from Chinese to all Asians. The campaign is of more than historical interest. As current anti-immigration sentiments and efforts show, even today the idea that white Americans should have a privileged place in the economy, or that non-whites are culturally incongruous, persists among some.

The core of the story of America is its deep seated struggle with race, not surprising for a country founded on the ideal of the equality of all even as it could not live up to that itself, in its founding moment. That continual grasping at resolving that paradox and hypocrisy is at the heart of what makes the U.S. the most fascinating social experiment in the world, and one reason I struggle to imagine living elsewhere right now.

From the former:

A complex society can’t dispense with elites. That is the hard reality of our condition, and it involves much more than a demand for scarce technical skills. In all human history, across continents and cultures, the way to get things done has been command and control within a formal hierarchy. The pyramid can be made flatter or steeper, and an informal network is invariably overlaid on it: but the structural necessity holds. Only a tiny minority can be bishops of the church. This may seem trivially apparent when it comes to running a government or managing a corporation, but it applies with equal strength to the dispensation of truth.

So here is the heart of the matter. The sociopolitical disorders that torment our moment in history, including the fragmentation of truth into “post-truth,” flow primarily from a failure of legitimacy, of the bond of trust between rulers and ruled. Everything begins with the public’s conviction that elites have lost their authorizing magic. Those at the top have forsaken their function yet cling, illicitly, to their privileged perches. Only in this context do we come to questions of equality or democracy.

If my analysis is correct, the re-formation of the system, and the recovery of truth, must depend on the emergence of a legitimate elite class.

From the latter:

To protect against abuse by those with higher status, hierarchies should also be domain-specific: hierarchies become problematic when they become generalised, so that people who have power, authority or respect in one domain command it in others too. Most obviously, we see this when holders of political power wield disproportionate legal power, being if not completely above the law then at least subject to less legal accountability than ordinary citizens. Hence, we need to guard against what we might call hierarchical drift: the extension of power from a specific, legitimate domain to other, illegitimate ones.

This hierarchical drift occurs not only in politics, but in other complex human arenas. It’s tempting to think that the best people to make decisions are experts. But the complexity of most real-world problems means that this would often be a mistake. With complicated issues, general-purpose competences such as open-mindedness and, especially, reasonableness are essential for successful deliberation.

Expertise can actually get in the way of these competences. Because there is a trade-off between width and depth of expertise, the greater the expert, the narrower the area of competence. Hence the best role for experts is often not as decision-makers, but as external resources to be consulted by a panel of non-specialist generalists selected for general-purpose competences. These generalists should interrogate the experts and integrate their answers from a range of specialised aspects into a coherent decision. So, for example, parole boards cannot defer to one type of expert but must draw on the expertise of psychologists, social workers, prison guards, those who know the community into which a specific prisoner might be released, and so on. This is a kind of collective, democratic decision-making that makes use of hierarchies of expertise without slavishly deferring to them.

What would constitute a new legitimate elite class? It's a mystery, and a grave one. When truth is largely socially and politically constructed, it weighs nothing. The whole psychology replication crisis couldn't have hit at a worse time. With the internet, you can Google and find a study to back up just about any of your views, yet it's not clear which of the studies are actually sound.

At the same time, we can't all be expected to be experts on everything, even if, with the internet, everyone pretends to be.

3. Why Men Don't Live As Long As Women

Evidence points at testosterone, which is useful for mating but costly in many other ways. I maintain there is nothing more frightening in the world than a bunch of single young men full of testosterone.

This does not mean, however, that men cannot evolve other reproductive strategies. Despite their propensity to engage in risky behavior and exhibit expensive, life-shortening physical traits, men have evolved an alternative form of reproductive effort in the form of paternal investment—something very rare in primates (and mammals in general). For paternal investment to evolve, males have to make sure they are around to take care of their offspring. Risky behavior and expensive tissue have to take a backseat to investment that reflects better health and perhaps prolongs lifespan. Indeed, men can exhibit declines in testosterone and put on a bit of weight when they become fathers and engage in paternal care.10, 11 Perhaps, then, fatherhood is good for health.

Perhaps we should be extolling the virtuous signal that is dadbod to a much greater degree than we have. And, on the flipside, we should look with a skeptical eye on fathers with chiseled abs. How does one get a six pack from attending imaginary tea parties with one's daughter for hours on end?

4. Increasing consumer well-being: risk as potential driver of happiness

We show that, even if, ex ante, consumers fear high risk and do not associate it to a high level of happiness, their ex post evaluation of well-being is generally higher when identical consequences result from a high-risk situation than from a low-risk situation. Control over risk-taking reinforces the gap between ex ante and ex post measures of happiness. Thus, our article provides empirical evidence about a positive relation between risk and individual well-being, suggesting that risky experiences have the potential to increase consumer well-being.

While I'm not certain what I'm going to do next, I would like to increase my risk profile. It seems a shame not to when I'm fortunate enough to live with very little downside risk.

5. “When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear.” — Lao Tzu

There is some debate over the provenance of this quote but I have rarely read the second sentence, the first part is the one which has had the more enduring life, and for good reason. It's a rhetorical gem.

The second half is underrated. The best coaches know when stepping aside and pushing the student to new challenges is the only path to greater heights. Rather than becoming some Girardian rival like Bill Murray in Rushmore, the best teachers disappear. In the case of Yoda in Return of the Jedi, he literally disappears, though not until giving Luke his next homework assignment: to face Darth Vader.

6. The third wave of globalisation may be the hardest

First we enabled the movement of goods across borders. Then the internet unleashed the movement of ideas. Free movement of people, though? Recent nationalist backlashes aren't a promising sign. Maybe it will happen in its fullest online, maybe in virtual reality.

I am pro-immigration; my life is in so many ways the result of my parents coming to America in college. For decades, the United States has had essentially first pick of the world's hungriest, most talented dreamers, like a sports team that gets to pick at the top of the draft year after year despite winning the championship the year before. Trust the process, as Sam Hinkie might say.

On the other hand, taking off my American goggles, the diversity in the world's cultures, political and social systems, and ideologies is a source of global health. It feels like everyone should be encouraged (and supported) to spend a year abroad before, during, or after college, prior to entering the world, just to understand just how much socially acquired knowledge is path dependent and essentially arbitrary.

7. Tyler Cowen's Reddit AMA

What is the most underrated city in the US? In the world?

TylerCowen

Los Angeles is my favorite city in the whole world, just love driving around it, seeing the scenery, eating there. I still miss living in the area.

I don't know if I have a favorite city in the world, but I'd agree Los Angeles is the most underrated city in the U.S. considering how many people spit on its very mention. Best dining destination of the major U.S. cities.

8. What are the hardest and easiest languages to learn?

Language Log offers a concise scale as a shorthand answer.

EASY

1. Mandarin (spoken)

2. Nepali

3. Russian

4. Japanese

5. Sanskrit

6. Chinese (written)

HARD

9. Under mentioned side effect of global warming

Time was, the cold and remoteness of the far north kept its freezer door closed to a lot of contagion. Now the north is neither so cold nor so remote. About four million people live in the circumpolar north, sometimes in sizable cities (Murmansk and Norilsk, Russia; Tromso, Norway). Oil rigs drill. Tourist ships cruise the Northwest Passage. And as new animals and pathogens arrive and thrive in the warmer, more crowded north, some human sickness is on the rise, too. Sweden saw a record number of tick-borne encephalitis cases in 2011, and again in 2012, as roe deer expanded their range northward with ticks in tow. Researchers think the virus the ticks carry may increase its concentrations in warmer weather. The bacterium Francisella tularensis, which at its worst is so lethal that both the U.S. and the USSR weaponized it during the Cold War, is also on the increase in Sweden. Spread by mosquitoes there, the milder form can cause months of flu-like symptoms. Last summer in Russia’s far north, anthrax reportedly killed a grandmother and a boy after melting permafrost released spores from epidemic-killed deer that had been buried for decades in the once frozen ground.

Because we don't already have enough sobering news in the world.

10. Why do our musical tastes ossify in our twenties?

It’s simply not realistic to expect someone to respond to music with such life-defining fervour more than once. And it’s not realistic, either, to expect someone comfortable with his personality to be flailing about for new sensibilities to adopt. I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of those who truly do, as the overused phrase has it, listen to everything. Such schizophrenic tastes seem not so much a symptom of well-roundedness as of an unstable sense of self. Liking everything means loving nothing. If you’re so quick to adopt new sentiments and their expression, then how serious were you about the ones you pushed aside to accommodate them?

Oh yeah, and one more thing: music today fucking sucks.

I still pursue new music, despite being past my twenties, driven mostly, I suspect, by a hunger for novelty that still seems to be kicking. At some point, I can't really recall when, the signaling function of my musical tastes lost most of its value. Once most of your friends have kids, you can seem cultured merely by having seen a movie that's released in the last year.