I’d love to hear a well-supported counter-argument.

If the Big Five are not universal, stable, or orthogonal, what good are they? They have a perfectly clear use. They replicate: the answers to many other survey instruments can be found to correlate with the Big Five survey responses, in multiple samples of survey-takers. To complain that the Big Five are meaningless is somewhat unscientific. They have a very specific meaning within the language game they belong to, and they are popular and memetically successful tools within that sphere.

The Big Five are, in a sense, protected from falsification. They make no predictions; there is no underlying causal model. As I understand it, no study could be devised to prove that the Big Five aren’t real, because they make no formal pretense to reality. They are innocent mathematical constructs that fall out of particular survey instruments administered to particular populations.

https://carcinisation.com/2020/07/04/the-ongoing-accomplishment-of-the-big-five/#more-732

There are a lot of myths about dangerous mythical creatures, from sirens to the Kraken to the hydra, some of which preyed upon humans. In Maori legend, Te Hokioi was a giant black-and-white bird, with a red crest and huge beak. And just like the Kraken was probably based on a real creature—the giant squid—Te Hokioi was probably a real bird.

That bird would be a Haast eagle, extinct for just 500 years, according to a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/legendary-human-eating-bird-was-real-probably-could-have-eaten-people-89257268/

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-reason-why-2-000-year-old-roman-concrete-is-still-so-strong

Interesting. Yglesias obviously has his own political bias, but tends to be careful about facts in my experience.

The Obama administration’s policymaking is not beyond criticism, but I do think the facts laid out in this report offer a considerably different context for assessing the administration’s economic track record. The left has often portrayed Trump’s win as, on some level, a punishment for the failures of neoliberalism with its endless inequality and stagnant wages. And a lot of elite-level thinking in progressive circles during the Trump years was driven by a determination to avoid the mistakes of Obamaism rather than to try to replicate its successes. It’s easy to forget now that he’s president, but Joe Biden received almost shockingly little elite support for a former vice president until very late in the cycle — he was seen as offering Obamaism 2.0 and was deemed unacceptable by people who saw Obama as a failure.

But if you understand the Obama record as successfully altering the inequality trajectory and bringing median income to an all-time high, that casts his other achievements (lower greenhouse gas emissions, marriage equality, etc.) in a different context and makes the idea of “let’s beat Trump and keep on keeping on” look more plausible.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/inequality-falling

Absolutely exquisite imagining of the lipid bilayer theory of how life emerged. Interesting for thinking about the theory, but more than that, it’s absolutely worth watching just because it’s so lovely.

See also additional image about the piece and the science at https://www.behance.net/gallery/159624143/aBiogenesis

Minecraft often seems to me to capture the essence of problems in my real life more than other games do. I have all these objects and space and I have to figure out how to usefully organize the objects in the space. I constantly think of things I should do and don’t know which ones to do first, or how to remember what they all are, and always feel like I should have a better mental schema for even knowing what the possible things are that I should maybe do. In the process of doing one thing, I am reminded of several other ones that I should imminently do. It is bed time way too often. I constantly forget to eat. If I’m doing a thing and its night time or I’m dying of starvation or something else to do comes up, it’s never clear if I should actually stop immediately. (When will I finish the thing? How will I remember?) Less importantly or intensely in real life than in Minecraft, I often suspect that I’ve been in this exact place many times before, and yet I can’t tell it from similar places. And I forget which direction is which every time I turn a corner.

Basically, I think Minecraft gets at something about organizing the information required to be an agent, given limited memory. As you walk around, you see a lot of things, and have a lot of options, such that at any given point, the relevant options are not just a set of salient paths ahead, as in a sophisticated choose your own adventure book. Most of the best courses of action are not physically represented in front of you, and can only be seen at all because of structures in your own mind constructed to keep them available.

https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/mine-craft-20-07-03

“She also describes rumors about long-simmering pots in France, such as one particular batch in Normandy that simmered constantly for over 300 years, while an even older pot, in Perpignan, had been bubbling since the 1400s until it finally met its demise in 1945 during World War II bombing raids.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/perpetual-broth

I find this quite troubling. The government shouldn’t be in the business of prohibiting speech, including by pressuring private parties to do so. The case law is a bit mixed, but I’d love to see this issue tested in court.

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

…

DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

An excellent read. I’m not quite as confident as he is, but I think he’s closer to the truth than a lot of the media would suggest.

In his speech this week, Biden mentioned various issues being contested and then added, “But there’s something else at stake, democracy itself. I’m not the only one who sees it. Recent polls have shown an overwhelming majority of Americans believe our democracy is at risk, that our democracy is under threat.”

This is one of the great misinterpretations of public opinion in my lifetime. A recent New York Times poll found that 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Republicans, and 71 percent of independents believe that “democracy is currently under threat.”

But Americans are all over the place on what poses the actual threat. Voter fraud, voter suppression, corruption, misinformation, polarization, Trump, Biden, nationalism, extremism, and the media all made the list.

For Biden, the topline number suggests everyone should vote for Democrats because Democrats are the only party committed to “democracy.” But that’s nonsense. The mere fact that a majority of Americans are worried that democracy is under threat suggests that Americans like democracy and want to keep it around. Heck, I’m pretty sure that the quarter of Americans who don’t think democracy is under threat like democracy, too.

Sure, Americans like to complain about democracy, but they don’t want to get rid of it. Indeed, besides a handful of fringe dorks and radical fantasists, there is literally no significant constituency on the American right or left for getting rid of democracy. There are significant constituencies for bending the rules, working the refs, even rigging the system, and these constituencies should be fought relentlessly. But while often in error, most of these people believe they are on the side of democracy. The people who wildly exaggerate both voter suppression and voter fraud believe what they’re saying. They’re just wrong.

Democracy Is Not on the Ballot

I’d say I’m 80% confident at this point that covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan biolabs. I applaud ProPublica for doing this investigation, especially since the lab leak theory has gotten coded Republican and so ProPublica had to go against their default political assumptions.

Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab