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HWFO Reading List April 2023

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HWFO Reading List April 2023

Compilation of articles, new and old, being discussed by the HWFO community

Handwaving Freakoutery
Apr 17, 2023
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A Library the Internet Can't Get Enough Of - The New York Times

Herein, Haidt responds to some of the discussion around an article we linked last month:

After Babel
Responses to comments on: Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Crisis
This week at the After Babel Substack is different from previous weeks. Today we have two posts, beginning with a guest post from Jean Twenge showing that the big rise in mental illness that began around 2012 does not seem to be caused by increasing pressure at school, as some have proposed…
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3 months ago · 119 likes · 58 comments · Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

Followed by some charts and graphs discussing the same problem internationally:

After Babel
The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International, Part 1: The Anglosphere
It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting in 2012. But if the epidemic started in many nations at the same time, then such country-specific theories would not work. We’d need to find a global event or trend, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis doesn’t match the timing at all, as…
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2 months ago · 313 likes · 185 comments · Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt

This post from Freddie inspired the Unified Theory of Wokeness HWFO post over the prior month:

Freddie deBoer
Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means
As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politics” to refer to the school of politics that is typically referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neutr…
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3 months ago · 747 likes · 504 comments · Freddie deBoer

A reader wrote this about criminal justice reform:

https://wayneboatwright.medium.com/criminal-justice-in-six-books-fcd444da8254

Scott Alexander dipped back into the fiction well for a moment and created this beauty:

Astral Codex Ten
Turing Test
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2 months ago · 506 likes · 319 comments · Scott Alexander

Read this for the phrase “Crowdsourcing the Superego:”

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/12/infidelity_and_other_taboos_me.html

How to use Bayes theorem to calculate your own Lab Leak Theory odds:

David Friedman’s Substack
The Lab Leak Theory
There are a few facts about the origin of Covid that almost everyone agrees on: It first appeared in Wuhan. It is derived from a bat virus. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was doing research on bat viruses. Wuhan also contained a wet market where live animals were sold…
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3 months ago · 17 likes · 10 comments · David Friedman

One of my social groups liked this article, and another thought it was trash:

PsyStack
Homophobia is Heritable, too
Encyclopedia Brittanica defines homophobia as the “culturally produced fear of or prejudice against homosexuals that sometimes manifests itself in legal restrictions or, in extreme cases, bullying or even violence against homosexuals (sometimes called ‘gay bashing’).” This intrigues me because it resembles Wikipedia’s tendentious definition of acquired …
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2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · PercyPrior

The Reload chronicles more numbers of gun culture winning that war:

https://thereload.com/poll-americans-most-likely-to-respond-to-gun-violence-fears-with-training-or-weapons-purchases/

Here’s the breakdown of what the public blames for spree shootings:

  • Mental health - 42%

  • Access to firearms - 29%

  • Social Media - 11%

  • School problems - 7%

  • Family problems - 6%

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/biden_administration/mental_health_leads_blame_list_for_mass_shootings

Matt Taibbi quits Twitter. This article is great if you can make it past the paywall:

Racket News
Meet the Censored: Me?
Nearly five months ago I was presented with a rare opportunity, to look through internal correspondence at Twitter. A small group of other journalists and writers soon jumped down the rabbit hole to join the one-in-a-million search. At the time the company was just completing a contentious sale, which featured multiple stops, starts and legal actions, along with competing furious public relations campaigns. New owner Elon Musk accused the old regime of lying about the…
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2 months ago · 2,912 likes · 1,031 comments · Matt Taibbi
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Mek
Apr 17·edited Apr 17

> Michigan repealing its right-to-work law [...] will have vastly greater positive consequences for actually-existing American people of color [than the Oscars giving awards to more people of color].

From Freddy. I wish I was smart enough to figure out a good way to make an actual bet on that matter with him.

Like, pick some state that didn't do that and track black employment or something, but I'm not sure how to make it even and fair.

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Ben Cohen
Writes Ben’s Personal Newsletter
Apr 18

love these digests, thanks :)

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