A Study of Merit

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. -Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (26 Apr 1889-1951

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FDR ordered the seizure of the private gold holdings of the American people on April 5, 1933.


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What’s wrong with the 1619 Project is that it is factually preposterous. The essence of the story is that Americans fought the American Revolution because Lord Dunmore said that slaves fighting on the British side would be emancipated. Well, he said that in November 1775 – after Lexington and Concord, after the Boston Tea Party, after the Boston Massacre, after the Stamp Act. The war was up and running, and this is after George Washington had been put in charge of the troops.

So it is factually illiterate to say this. And that is why, to use your term, it’s not a good-faith kind of argument. It’s tendentious, meretricious, and propagandistic.--will

A Study of Merit

A summary of paper co-authored by many luminaries, including two Nobel prize winners:

"Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities."

After rejection in several journals, it was finally published in...

Journal of Controversial Ideas
(ISSN: 2694-5991) Open Access Journal

The Journal of Controversial Ideas!!!!

Education and its Discontents

In September, two months before the 2022 elections, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that the committee had “surpassed another historic milestone: over 50 million voter contacts made cycle-to-date.” 

This January, State Voices, a nonprofit that convenes and coordinates left-wing nonprofit activist groups across the nation, issued a similar statement.
In 2022, the State Voices network made 140 million voter contacts “including 1.9 million calls, 34.5 million texts, and over 1 million doors, and 90 million contacts over mail via Voter Participation Center.” They also reported registering 820,000 new voters and making 3 million voter contacts during the Senate run-off election in Georgia.

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Everyone who has a job, even at minimum wage, is in the top 15 percent of the world's income distribution.

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After losing 100,000 registered nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nursing workforce is expected to lose an additional 900,000 workers by 2027, according to research from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing.

Education and its Discontents

George Will on the decline of interest in university:

There are powerful, immediate financial incentives to study, say, computer science rather than Victorian literature, but economic incentives only partially explain today’s flight from the humanities. Why study history when it is presented as a prolonged indictment — ax-grinding about the past’s failure to be as progressive as today’s professors? Who wants a literature major that is mostly about abstruse literary theories — “deconstruction,” etc.?

Recently the New Yorker magazine disturbed the academic pond with writer Nathan Heller’s 10,232-word attempt to explain plummeting enrollments in humanities classes and majors (“The End of the English Major”). Heller’s nuanced investigation suggests various explanations, including this:

Time was, Heller says, a student might have studied Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” for its “form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius.” But now a student “might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape.” Heller adds: “What does this have to do with how most humans read?”

Nothing. But it has everything to do with the saturation of academia with progressive politics.

A Better Philanthropy

“Ticket from Miami to Port-au-Prince: $124. Ticket from Port-au-Prince to Miami: $1,000-3,000”

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In our testing, when given a full battery of USMLE [medical licensing exam] problems, GPT-4 answers them correctly more than 90 percent of the time.
And it can give very good explanations.--forthcoming book

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Côte d’Ivoire citizens pay the highest income taxes in the world according to this year’s survey findings by World Population Review.

While both its sales and corporate tax regimes may be considerably lower than those of other countries globally, at 60%, Côte d’Ivoire’s income tax rates are markedly higher compared to developed countries.

Only Finland (56.95%), Japan (55.97%), Denmark (55.90%), and Austria (55%), closely follow Côte d’Ivoire to round up the top five countries with the highest income tax, in a study that surveyed over 150 countries.

A Better Philanthropy

At its best, lots of philanthropy is very useful, but may not be sustainable over time—a sugar high that rarely enables that “teach a man how to fish” thing. Effective altruism may be an oxymoron. And it’s hard to miss that much of philanthropy is to fix government failures in education, welfare or medicine. I think that was Bono’s point.

But at its shadiest, philanthropy drives the misallocation of capital, overvaluing professors, the U.N. and climate poets and undervaluing those who can productively increase societal wealth to fund solutions to the future’s harder problems.

If only there were a way to use capital to provide opportunity, train workers, pay middle-class wages, help people build wealth … wait, it just came to me. How about starting new companies and investing in entrepreneurs and world-changing technology? Sure, that’s “a hazardous journey,” but so what? Actually, part of OpenAI is now a for-profit. Yes, it turns out the perfect cure for the flaw in capitalism is, voilà, more capitalism. You may not get that warm fuzzy feeling or media adulation—in fact, you’ll likely be labeled greedy—but you might fund future economic powerhouses. Scolds will throw shade. Ignore them.--Kessler

Populism

Are airstrikes on AI “rogue data centers” really going to lower existential risk? I take it these are across borders as well and would cover rogue data centers in Beijing too? How about Tel Aviv?

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A fresh round of IMF bailouts is underway, and some of the world’s most indebted nations will have to sacrifice their currencies to get them.

The year has already seen three debt-laden countries — Egypt, Pakistan and Lebanon — drop their exchange rates to unlock International Monetary Fund assistance.

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About 20 percent of recruits in Russian prisoner units in Ukraine are H.I.V. positive, Ukrainian authorities estimate based on infection rates in captured soldiers. Serving on the front lines seemed less risky than staying in prison, the detainees said in interviews with The New York Times.



Populism

Caplan on populism's bitterness over America's direction:

"I’ve seen the tech industry dramatically improve human life all over the world.

Amazon is simply the best store that ever existed, by far, with incredible selection and unearthly convenience. The price: cheap.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media let us socialize with our friends, comfortably meet new people, and explore even the most obscure interests. The price: free.

Uber and Lyft provide high-quality, convenient transportation. The price: really cheap.

Skype is a sci-fi-quality video phone. The price: free. 

YouTube gives us endless entertainment. The price: free.

Google gives us the totality of human knowledge! The price: free.

That’s what I’ve seen. What I’ve heard, however, is totally different. The populists of our Golden Age are loud and furious. They’re crying about “monopolies” that deliver fire hoses worth of free stuff. They’re bemoaning the “death of competition” in industries (like taxicabs) that governments forcibly monopolized for as long as any living person can remember. They’re insisting that “only the 1% benefit” in an age when half of the high-profile new businesses literally give their services away for free. And they’re lashing out at businesses for “taking our data” – even though five years ago hardly anyone realized that they had data.

My point: If your overall reaction to business progress over the last fifteen years is even mildly negative, no sensible person will try to please you, because you are impossible to please. Yet our new anti-tech populists have managed to make themselves a center of pseudo-intellectual attention."