Best Interview Question? What are your open Tabs?
Let's log many of the websites I've visited and thought about
Tyler Cowen of MR discusses why it’s a great question for the interviewer to ask a job seeker. It’s also a bit about the clean-desk / messy-desk (closure / open; J / P in Myers Briggs personality. (I’m a big P - open - messy desk guy).
There was a Twitter joke about some geek showing an older aunt “how to close 3,486 open tabs” (or some 3k+ number). I often have dozens. Because I think about them. I’m addicted to the thinking about the blogging posts which I think about. So this will be more an attempt to be like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, a usual open tab.
Now I realize I should learn more about Substack and have a Blogroll - but first let’s just list & quick mention a thought or two.
Most often I hang out in comments at TheNewNeo, like in my comment to her post on Abortion, angry women, and “choice”.
»Women with many grandkids will usually change the world more than angry women with few or none.«
or in Maybe Musk will now start reading NewNeo to guide him through the transition to voting Republican
»Neo should also write a book, or two, or… 2021-2004 = 17 books.
A series of yearly diary posts. “21st Century Diary”.«
Dick Francis became famous for this UNBELIEVABLE Finish at the Grand National Horse Race (1956) He was a real jockey before he became a horse oriented murder mystery writer - quite popular here in Slovakia, too. Saw this after seeing Rich Strike win at the Kentucky Derby
Covered by Neo, but first seen from Steve Sailor, in the overhead view. Which reminded him, and me, of the 1972 Olympics with a Dave Wottle come-from-behind 800m victory. Steve is a bit bitter about being an excellent researcher, good writer, good thinker, but because he’s honest about racial differences he’s more toxic than Charles Murray. Steve often has overlooked notes on Homicides, and IQ, like this 16 point twin difference of two Koreans, raised in the US & Korea.
Seldom do I now tweet, but if I did more, I’d be linking like I am here to other things I read & think about. I joined as TomGrey56 in 2016, since I was suspended without notice for a retweet of something from Trump with my earlier(2014) TomGreySVK handle; but I think I’ll stick more to the 56, now.
David Friedman at the Konzervativny Institut in Slovakia, in English. Still need to listen to this, maybe in the sunshine.
The mystery of the miracle year
"For in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since."
Lots of geniuses, not just Einstein & Newtown, had a “miracle year” of huge inventive advancement.
Brandon Sanderson, on the other hand, is a prolific writer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy - tho I haven’t read his stuff. Wonder if my friend Ed has. Now that the link is here, I can close the tab.
Chris Blattman is excellent about development, and wrote a book that maybe I should read: “Why We Fight”. His blog: The terrible trade-off: Why less violent cities often means more powerful and organized crime
We need more acknowledgement of tradeoffs, and more honest discussion about them.
One reason for my Great Discover / current intellectual crush about Responsibility being only 100% is to push every “blame” discussion towards who gets more or less. Which is more clear if there’s a limit, but not if not - 150%, 1000%, 1,000,000%. What would that even mean? (Every Trump-voter is a tiny bit responsible for each of his problems; 74mln voters, 74,000,000% ? Or 81mln for Biden?) Chris would be a great guest for Glenn Loury.
Glenn Loury was a double FIT pick for me - US Black poverty is a key problem in the USA and the world. Because of the issue of responsibility. Besides podcast interviews, tho usually with only a portion in a transcript, he often has guest writers as well, like Clifton Roscoe on the Present Crisis. Clifton supports charter schools, but only those of “good quality”.
»Only if "we" means the parents of the kids in school is it true that "we have to ensure that the schools competing for these dollars are of good quality."
The gov't should ensure that parents know how the schools are. Both private, peaceful schools, and gov't (public, less peaceful) schools should be rated on various metrics.
Who educates the Forrest Gump like IQ 76 kids? And what does good quality look like there?«
Glenn had a talk at St. Olaf College on Discrimination and the Search for Truth and Justice
Ed West in the UK, Wrong Side of History, has his list of the best of April 2022,
Return of the Mac(ron), terrible ideas from the 60s, and the (radical) Right Young Things,
Most recent, agreeing with my Demographics is Destiny thoughts (locked).
The growing ideological baby gap
Conservatives and liberals used to have an equal number of children – not any more
Arnold Kling is naturally open, with his Fantasy Intellectuals Team ideas, and his series on FIT thinkers, as well as other blog posts like this one about his own thinking:
Show Your Work 5/16 which he does in a book, almost ready, of Memoirs.
My biggest surprise is liking Freddie deBoer, an avowed Marxist, who writes very well and wrote a book I now plan to order, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
What to do about low IQ people. He agrees there’s a genetic element, AND a Socio-Economic Situation portion. “Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved.” His blog gets hundreds of comments, but it’s not clear I should spend much time commenting there. Makes me do lots of thinking - he’d be another good person for Glenn to interview. Or Arnold.
One of Arnold’s commenters now has his own substack blog, Infovores, with good comments and good posts, like this old one on Institutions that showed the fishery price stabilization effect of mobile phones.