Articles 12.

12.1

In the absence of reality-testing, bullshit wins - Helen Dale

“In the absence of sufficiently binding reality-tests, truth is either too easy (so too common), or too hard (so too costly), a social signal.

It’s too easy when everyone—or almost everyone—can see something is true. Then there’s nothing special about affirming it.

Meanwhile, it’s too hard when it takes genuine expertise to understand why something is so.

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If one’s political benchmark is the imagined future, and given that there is no information from the future—nor, in the case of imagined futures, binding tests against self-contradiction—the effect is further magnified.

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One of the problems of universities is the use of quantified proxies for quality, such as citation rates. Academics are judged by how much they publish and are cited, not so much by how well they teach. This produces the “publish or perish” mentality, and the use of citations as a measure of success.

Citation measures have so many problems, it is hard to know where to start.

First, they do not include the most useful academic publications—good quality textbooks. Second, they encourage “salami slicing”: dividing work up into as many different individual papers as possible to increase citations, plus throwing as many darts at the dartboard as possible, hoping one will “stick”. The incentive to multiply publications also encouraged the proliferation of under-powered studies, a major cause of the replications crisis.

Third, they encourage citation multiplication. Scholars create mutual citation chains and individuals cite themselves. Both create a false appearance of acceptance.

Fourth, they enable idea laundering. A growing number of journals providing citation opportunities means that bad-but-congenial ideas can be run through the citation mill, giving the appearance of sound scholarship.

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We live in societies of huge, and expanding, evolutionary novelty. As we are not fitness maximisers (that is what lineages do) but adaptation-executors, we are running into increasing problems with unmoored adaptations. Our evolved cognition (and metabolism) is now operating in social milieus where crucial features are primed to malfunction.

We are a highly imitative species much concerned with status. If one gets selection-by-approval, without strong character or reality tests—as is rife through our universities, non-profits and bureaucracies—then the levels of efficient self-deception will be high, as will selection for rhetorically convenient and congenial bullshit.

Meanwhile, bureaucratisation in itself weakens reality tests by insulating decision-makers from the effects of their decisions, increasing selection-by-approval and raising the levels of efficient self-deception.

Societies dominated by social signalling where truth is too weak a differentiating social signal, because it is either too common or too hard, will generate even more congenial bullshit. However, becoming ever more a civilisation of broken feedbacks is not something that can go on indefinitely, so it won’t.

If the weakness of truth as a social signal in developed societies does not terrify you, you have not thought through the implications. “

12.2 *

Divide & Conquer: Mastering The Art of Spinouts - Auren Hoffman

“There are start-ups that actually spin out companies to help them thrive.  And that is not fake news.

Spinning out a company allows you to: 

(1) Focus more on your core business (like finally focusing on that diet you've been talking about)

(2) Give the new idea a chance to thrive because there will be people solely focused on it (sort of like sending your child to a boarding school)

(3) Raise additional money (that you don't have to fund from your balance sheet) … like getting someone else to pay for your kids education

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The Four Horsemen of Spin-Outs (IPDA)

Now, let's talk about what I like to call "The Four Horsemen of Spin-Outs" (IPDA). And no, IPDA isn't a new craft beer you missed out on, it's a handy acronym for the types of spin-outs: Incubation, Product, Division, or Acquisition. 

Incubation Spin: An Incubation Spin is like a baby chick just hatching from its egg; an idea born within your company that's still super early.  These ideas come about because it is either a product that your company needs or something that could be a complementary product to yours.  

Product Spin: This is a product or service that you have already built internally where your company is the only customer.  You realize that other companies could benefit from this product.  You already have code, engineers, and the first customer (you). It's like making a fantastic homemade salsa and realizing your friends might enjoy it too. You've got the recipe, the ingredients, and the first taster (you). 

Division Spin: You have a product or division that is generating revenues but it is not part of your core offering and would have a better chance of growth on its own or part of another entity.  

Acquisition Spin: There is a company you acquired that is no longer part of your core thesis.  This spin rhymes with the Division Spin but can be easier to do because there might be a way to sell it back to the founders of the acquired company.  This spin is like regifting an unwanted Christmas present. “

12.3

Childhood Vaccines Aren’t Tested Against Placebo - Heather Heying

“Kennedy’s alleged crime—one of his many alleged crimes, none of which hold up under scrutiny, but boy is the list of his alleged crimes a long one—is that he does not simply accept the pronouncements of public health authorities regarding vaccine safety. Kennedy’s crime is that he would like to see the drugs that we inject into our children tested for their safety.

During Covid, we learned that all one has to do to render something a vaccine is to call it a vaccine. Abracadabra!—you’re a vaccine! And anything that has been labeled a vaccine must be accepted, nay—loved—by all, lest they be labeled an anti-vaxxer.

This is the third rail that a huge number of us would not have considered touching until the Covid vaccine roll-out. Vaccines—I still hold, and have written into my co-authored book A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21stCentury—are one of the triumphs of Western medicine. That does not mean that they are a cure-all:

Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias toward reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of Western medicine— surgery, antibiotics, and  vaccines— have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.

Until the Covid vaccine roll-out, I figured that the people questioning vaccines were simply wrong. “Anti-vaxxer” was a powerful enough epithet to still nearly any dissent.

Well. As it turns out, epithets lose their power when you discover that they’re patently false.

I’ve been called a racist, a fascist, a TERF, and more. I have also, due to my rejection of the mRNA treatments for Covid, been called an anti-vaxxer.

Realizing that you are hearing lies about yourself encourages a person to look around and wonder: If I’m not an X, I wonder if that guy isn’t either?

I am not an anti-vaxxer. And neither is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

He would like to have vaccines safety-tested before injecting them into people, particularly children.

Sure sounds like a dangerous lunatic to me.”

12.4

Design For The Web Without Figma - David Hansson

“ Because no matter how good Figma is, it's an intermediary abstraction, like Photoshop before it. If you're working with the web, you'll work faster without such an abstraction layer in the design process filtering the collaboration between programmer and designer.

I think that's exactly the wrong conclusion. Creativity thrives on constraints. Knowing how to cut with the grain makes getting the most out of the material much easier. While we've thankfully moved on from the pixel-perfect nonsense, with its spacer gifs and rounded corner images, the no-constraints thinking of today still exists in that mind space.”

12.5

Educational Philosophy - Heather Heying

“The final line is this:

Education is about enriching the lives of students so that they may live informed, enlightened lives in which they have the curiosity to ask “why?”, the knowledge to ask “are you sure?”, and the courage to ask “is this right and good?”.

Embracing uncertainty, knowing that you do not know, and that what you think you do know may be wrong—this is foundational to a scientific approach to the world. Over the last decade, and especially since Covid, we have seen an increasing focus on certainty, and on single static solutions to complex problems. Perhaps most alarming of all, those appeals to authority, and to silencing those who disagree, has arrived under the banner of science. #FollowTheScience, we are told, when that has never been how science worked. I hope, still, that the educational philosophy that I laid out here, as a young scientist who was yet to discover most of the joys of teaching, can once again rise up in institutions of higher education throughout the land.”

Education is at the heart of a functioning, democratic society.  As such, teaching is an honor, and an intellectual and creative exploration.  In teaching, as in science, process is paramount.  When students are able to derive meaning by applying their own logical, critical, and creative skills to a problem, then they have learned.”

12.6

10 Notes on the End of Affirmative Action - Coleman Hughes

“In a landmark decision handed down today, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of race in college admissions violates the 14th amendment––effectively ending “Affirmative Action” overnight. For some, this is a shocking step backwards. For others, it’s a long overdue endorsement of color-blindness and non-discrimination. 

I am in the latter camp. I think “Affirmative Action” is a misguided, discriminatory policy whose end is long overdue. But I know many intelligent and well-meaning people who disagree. In the coming weeks, I expect many media outlets to push an alarmist viewpoint that we have dialed the clock back to the days of Jim Crow. So I’d like to lay out, as clearly as possible, my reasons for believing that this decision is a net good for American society. 

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1. “Affirmative Action” is a Euphemism for Racial Discrimination

2. “Affirmative Action” Affects the Elites, Not the Masses

3. The Benefits of “Affirmative Action” are Dubious

4. Mismatch is Real

5. “Affirmative Action” is Not the Product of The Civil Rights Movement

6. Quotas are a Red herring

7. We’re Confused About Diversity 

8. Affirmative Action as Reparations?

9. The Equilibrium Will Change

10. If Not Affirmative Action, then What? 

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