Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.
Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.
Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.
"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

(end)

More from Noah Smith

This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.


My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. https://t.co/MqLyyppdHl

If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.

In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://t.co/DBCRRc8Mir

But mathiness and jargon are not quite the same...

Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point.

Mathiness often does. By forcing you to write your model in a way that's mathematically tractable (easy to work with), mathiness often impoverishes your understanding of how the world really works.

has written about this problem:
Today's @bopinion post is about how poor countries started catching up to rich ones.

It looks like decolonization just took a few decades to start

Basic econ theory says poor countries should grow faster than rich ones.

But for much of the Industrial Revolution, the opposite happened.
https://t.co/JjjVtWzz5c

Why? Probably because the first countries to discover industrial technologies used them to conquer the others!

But then colonial empires went away. And yet still, for the next 30 years or so, poor countries fell further behind rich ones.
https://t.co/hilDvv0IQV

Why??

Possible reasons:
1. Bad institutions (dictators, communism, autarkic trade regimes)
2. Civil wars
3. Lack of education

But then, starting in the 80s (for China) and the 90s (for India and Indonesia), some of the biggest poor countries got their acts together and started to catch up!


Global inequality began to fall.
Time for panel #3: Big Tech and regulation!

I will be live-tweeting again, and you can also watch video at either the Twitter or Facebook links below!


Kaissar: Every industry gets regulated when it gets big. The question is what kind of regulation Big Tech will get,and whether the companies will be proactive in shaping it.

Kaissar: More profitable companies have higher returns. Why? Maybe it's a risk factor, because more profit = higher risk of getting regulated.

Bershidskyis showing a diagram of GDPR complaince pop-ups. What a massive ill-conceived bureaucratic mess.

Ritholtz: It's 2018 and we're still talking about Facebook privacy settings?! If you're still giving your personal data to Facebook, you just don't care about privacy!
When Republicans started to believe in racial bloc voting - when they stopped believing that nonwhite people could ever be persuaded to vote Republican - they started to see immigration as an invasion.

This explains why immigration is now at the center of partisan conflict.


Of course, the belief in ethnic bloc voting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When a slight Dem tilt among Hispanics and Asians caused the GOP to turn against them, Hispanics and Asians shifted more toward the Dems. Etc. etc. A self-reinforcing cycle.

Bush's 2006 amnesty attempt, and the 2013 intra-GOP fight over immigration reform, were two moments when the GOP could have turned back to the approach of Reagan, and courted Hispanics and Asians.

But they decided against this, and...here we are.

What will disrupt this bad equilibrium, and save American politics from being an eternal race war?

Either:
A) More white voters will grow disgusted with the GOP approach and defect, or
B) The GOP will find some non-immigration-related issues to attract more Hispanics and Asians.

As long as both parties see elections in terms of racial bloc voting - where the only way to win is to increase turnout among your own racial blocs or suppress turnout by the other party's racial blocs - American politics will not improve, and the country will decline.

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More from Society

The Nashville Operation - A Battle in the War

A thread exploring the Nashville bombing in the context of the 2020 Digital War (via SolarWinds) against the United States perpetrated by our enemies, likely China, Iran and/or Russia.


SolarWinds Hack

A digital "Pearl Harbor" moment for the United States, whoever was responsible had access to the keys to the kingdom for months during 2020, including sensitive military infrastructure. This is war!

SunGard + SolarWinds

SolarWinds software company is owned by same company that owns SunGard, which essentially provides data center services. A secure place to host internet servers with redundant power and "big pipe" data connections.

https://t.co/U3P3SrrkM1


SunGard Data Center

In Nashville, around the corner from their "big pipe" connection, AT&T. Like any data center, highly secure. Only authorized personnel can enter, and even fewer can access the actual server rooms. Backup generators are available in case of power failure.


If the SunGard hardware was being used to "host" critical command and control software related to SolarWinds, the US powers would be very interested in gaining special access keys that are stored on the hard-drives of specific servers.
I’ll address every nonsense argument and lie used to defend the suicidal gender ideology Thats in vogue today:

3:45 - “So what if you don’t have gametes?”

It’s called a birth defect. You’re still male or female.


~5:00 *nonsense trying to say the sexes of seahorses could be swapped coz male carry the eggs*

male doesn’t produce eggs, he produces the sperm. He’s still the male. If I impregnated a chick then carried the amniotic sac in a backpack ‘til the baby was done I’ll still be male🤦‍♂️

5:10 - we could say there’s 4 sexes of fruit fly cause there’s 3 producers of different sized sperm

No. They’re still producing sperm. They’re males. This is idiotic. Is this whole video like this? (Probably. 99% likely. Abandon hope.)

~6:10 - hermaphroditism and sequential hermaphroditism exists therefore....

No. Some animals being hermaphrodites, which is meaningless w/o the existence of binary sex to contrast it to, still doesn’t make gender ideology or transgenderism valid.

Intersex ≠ transgenderism 🙄

6:20 - bilateral gynandromorphism is a disorder in some species (not in humans). Has nothing to do w/ “gender” or transgenderism.

Ova-testes in humans are also a disorder, usually found in those w/ the karyotype disorders that you ppl also try to appropriate (extra X’s/Y’s).

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