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HWFO Reading List May 2023

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HWFO Reading List May 2023

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

Handwaving Freakoutery
May 17, 2023
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HWFO Reading List May 2023

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Peter Boghossian keeps stealing my material, or rather, replicating it independently with wider reach right after I write something. Which is cool, it’s no big deal, the important thing is the distribution of sane concepts for the betterment of society. But I did notice his director of content reads HWFO, so that’s sorta funny.

Hey Gina, if you’re reading this, reach out and see if you can squeeze me in as a guest. I’ll buy you a beer.

Beyond Woke with Peter Boghossian
Race, Homicide, & Data
“If you had to guess, how many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?” The majority of responses to this 2020 poll question were inaccurate—many wildly inaccurate. Why? News media creates an alternate reality through its ceaseless production of unbalanced and data-poor reporting. Politicians and public figures encourage inaccurate narratives th…
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5 months ago · 45 likes · 11 comments · Peter Boghossian

David Yamane of Wake Forest and Gun Culture 2.0 fame wrote this great piece about absolute vs relative risk.

Joel Kotkin wrote this in 2020 for Quillette, characterizing the two different kinds of middle classes we have in America, yeomanry and clerisy.

The Wikipedia article on Folk Theorems (game theory) is interesting because it describes how the Nash Equilibria change depending on whether you’re playing a game once or playing it in infinite series. Applicable to social evolution / etc.

October 2021 Spectator Throwback talks about how the New York Times broke, and broke the rest of journalism in the process.

This is a really good Substack Notes post by Gurwinder that is worth going back to read once a month, like a koan for online and real life.

The Manhattan Institute did a numbers breakdown on the 2020 homicide spike that’s quite good.

A recent study in Neuropsychopharmacology identified the dose-response relationships of LSD experiences in humans.

A fascinating article in The Critic discusses oikophobia, and the cycle of self-contempt.

Media Be Craycray:

Rozado’s Visual Analytics
Out-of-office Donald Trump still more prominent in news media content than the current U.S. president Joe Biden
In 2019, I helped my colleague Musa al-Gharbi document the extraordinary prominence of Donald Trump in news media content (see here). I have recently updated that previous analysis. Briefly stated, no U.S. president in recent history has received a similar amount of media attention as Donald Trump. Even as of 2022, out-of-office Trump is often more prom…
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5 months ago · 15 likes · David Rozado

More Haidt on social media / mental illness:

After Babel
Why Some Researchers Think I’m Wrong About Social Media and Mental Illness
In the first eight posts of the After Babel substack, we have laid out the evidence that an epidemic of mental illness began around 2012, simultaneously in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Zach will show what happened in the Nordic countries on Wednesday…
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5 months ago · 244 likes · 205 comments · Jon Haidt

And again, since that’s his thing:

After Babel
Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health
When parents are asked to identify their top fears about the safety of their children, what do you think tops the list? According to a survey last year by Safehome.org, it’s not cars, strangers, or any other physical threat; it’s “internet/social media.” That’s not just for parents of teenagers and pre-teens, whose lives seem to revolve around their phones. It’s even true for parents of younger kids, ages 7-9 because every parent sees it coming and few know what to do about it. Parents don’t want their children to disappear into phones, as so many of their friends' children have; some resolve to…
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4 months ago · 186 likes · 69 comments · Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch

Which ties in well with this.

The Prism
Dramageddon: The Virtual Civil War
There's a sense that the US is irredeemably divided, that it’s split into a pair of parallel societies, one red, one blue. And the tension between these estranged twins seems to be escalating toward an inevitable showdown, a second American Civil War…
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9 months ago · 121 likes · 30 comments · Gurwinder

And this.

The Abbey of Misrule
The Universal
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5 months ago · 725 likes · 424 comments · Paul Kingsnorth

Scott Alexander puts together a headscratcher, which seems to indicate that some portion (but probably not all) of Long Covid is mental.

Astral Codex Ten
Replication Attempt: Bisexuality And Long COVID
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5 months ago · 125 likes · 433 comments · Scott Alexander

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HWFO Reading List May 2023

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HWFO Reading List May 2023

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Elisabeth Piper
May 17Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Basic game theory principles are so useful, tit for tat will iterate infinitely unless one side decides to take the immediate hit and be a first mover to opt out (in return for the LR benefit of not wasting resources on the game aka don’t fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy), the prisoner’s dilemma highlights how our fears/fixed beliefs incentivize us to choose suboptimal choices/not trust/listen to the devil on our shoulder... it was game theory that did the most in terms of educational payoff for me

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Gina
May 17Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery

Dear HWFO,

My hands are waving and I’m freaking out after seeing the accusation of Peter Boghossian (or me, as his Director of Content) stealing your material!

You published an article about crime and absent fathers on April 20, 2023, while we released a video on the same topic on May 2, 2023. The thing is, our video (featuring Matt Thornton) was recorded months ago ahead of the release of his book, “The Gift of Violence.” Matt’s book was released on April 11, 2023 and addresses the exact same topic. Peter produced the video and wrote the afterward to the finished manuscript last year.

Back in November 2022, Matt was a guest on our “All Things Re-Considered” series (about the collapse of NPR’s journalistic integrity) and spoke about these issues. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb-ApHyd01I&t=3742s

Now, I wouldn’t dream of accusing you of stealing content from our channel (or from Matt’s book). I’d chalk it up to “great minds think alike” (plus “anyone with a brain can see what the media is doing”).

Regarding your request to be a guest with us, that’s an absolute possibility! While Peter is traveling over the next several weeks, I’ll see if he’d like to have a conversation later this summer.

Regarding the beer: Yes, please! What coast are you near?

Sincerely,

Gina

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