Links, Wednesday 25th May

Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) show immense promise as a treatment for depression, but research is being hindered by utterly excessive regulatory hurdles: “It cost £1,500 to dose each person, when in a sane world it might cost £30.” Guardian

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Interesting piece, which you could interpret as representing a sort of "left-wing libertarianism". It argues that economic growth has come about through improvements in *cooperation* (as opposed to competition), and that this cooperation is supported by making sure that everyone is given the opportunity to cooperate, and also a stake in the eventual economic fruits of cooperation. This means access to basic rights and dignity, but also some measure of economic distribution.

Much to agree or disagree with, thoughts welcome.

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I do wonder about the value of yet another report like this. Any policy maker who has seriously looked at the issue must, by now, realise that taking in refugees (and any category of migrant, more broadly) is good for economic growth. Some of them choose to misrepresent that fact, but they are aware it is a fact. Immigration politics have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with racism (sometimes dog-whistled down to "cultural issues").

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Social mobility in most Western countries is much lower than official statistics would appear to indicate

"It's not unusual for the child of an economically successful professional to attend an elite educational institution and then move into an artistic or academic or nonprofit career or political career that might still involve traveling in elite circles but at a much lower salary level than his father's. If the professional's grandson then also attended an elite college and moved into a high-paying career in business and law, statistics would show a great deal of economic mobility while common sense would indicate three generations' worth of a high-status family."

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The Nigerian dominance of high-level scrabble, and the wisdom in playing shorter words.

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Trees 'sleep' at night

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Thoughts?

"Much better than attempting to judge who other people are is to simply stipulate that attendees identify as queer, or a woman, or femme (depending on your goal), and assume they know better than you who they are. We must remove ourselves as the judge of someone else’s gender, presentation, or sexuality and accept that they will seek out and go to spaces which match who they are. And, frankly, even if a small number of attendees are lying about their identity, these few folks will be held to the same standards of behavior as the rest of the attendees, and may ultimately learn more about how to move differently in the world." The Toast

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This is great, and functions more generally as a demolition of TERFs who describe themselves as "gender critical" while working relentlessly to police people's bodies and gender expression.

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Heh :D

Links, Tuesday 17 May

So here's a conundrum for the digital age. What colour emoji should a white person use? (I agree with the comment in the article that it feels weird to affirmatively choose the white one instead of the "Simpsons yellow" default). Maybe the fault is still in the way the choices are presented though?

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It's really fucking gross that people (disproportionately young, working class black men) in Washington state are still being arrested for selling cannabis - a substance that it is now completely legal to own. Even by the law's own logic, what they are doing is now simply a tax offence.

There's some good discussion in here also of the economics of black markets, and how clever tax policy can effectively drive them out. But this really raises the question again of what these aforementioned working class people who depend on selling cannabis are supposed to do when that happens? It's already been observed that the legalised cannabis industry is extremely white and setting up is usually dependent on having capital and the ability to navigate bureaucracy.

Just IMAGINE if the state offered support in the form of capital and training to low-level cannabis dealers working the black market who wanted to take their business legitimate. Imagine an approach to drug legalisation that actually took seriously the economic needs of the people who are currently making a living from selling drugs.

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Oh god, I just hurt myself from laughing so hard. Send help.

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This is incredibly important and the headline in fact understates the conclusions: Dieting not only fails to help people lose weight in the long term, but it actually *CAUSES* weight gain by altering our body's inbuilt system of weight regulation. Moreover, actual health outcomes are incredibly poorly correlated with being 'overweight' - it's far more important to exercise and eat healthy foods, which you can do at any weight.

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"In countries where abortions are legal on a woman’s request, 34 women in every 1,000 have one. In countries where abortions are always illegal or legal only if a woman’s life is in danger, 37 women in every 1,000 have one. The slight increase in rates where abortion is illegal may be due to these countries also tending to have more restricted access to contraception which increases conception rates." Independent

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*snickers*

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A potentially effective new treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

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A really good example of how differences in pay are mostly driven by pure sexism... Athletes on the US national men's football team are paid *5 times* as much as the athletes on the women's team, despite the women winning more games, drawing more viewers and making more money for the federation.

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Guys, I just realised that I may be a mutant (two copies of the recessive version of the ABCC11 gene). People have commented that I don't seem to have much body odour, and my earwax seems to be 'dry' as far as I can tell.

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And now we know

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This story is incredible and kind of horrifying. The US came very class to instituting a universal basic income as far back as 1970, with wide support, under the guidance of president Nixon (!). And yet a wave of misinformation and anti-poor moralising killed the initiative. What a missed opportunity!

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South Africa is weird. Mass murderer attends a session at a literary festival where the authors are discussing his crimes. He ends up sitting next to the sister of one of his victims. He cries, she cries. She starts a conversation with him.

What do you all think of this bit?

"If you walk, talk and drink in the same space as Neil Barnaard, FW de Klerk, Pik Botha and their ilk, add Eugene de Kock to your list. He was their foot soldier. He took the proverbial bullet. Apartheid was prime evil; De Kock was simply its loyal servant. "

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"Tragically, the history of South African slavery has been all but forgotten. Few know that, upon landing at the Cape of Good Hope, slaves were stripped of everything — even their names. As property, many were renamed after the calendar month in which they arrived." Vimeo

Links, Tuesday 10th May

Incredible to see the structural changes in the US economy over the last 70 years - the rich do increasingly well out of economic upturns, everyone else gains less and less (and have actually lost out during the most recent).

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"The story of the spinach myth is itself apocryphal. It’s true that spinach isn’t really all that useful as a source of iron, and it’s true that people used to think it was. But all the rest is false: No one moved a decimal point in 1870; no mistake in data entry spurred Popeye to devote himself to spinach; no misguided rules of eating were implanted by the sailor strip. The story of the decimal point manages to recapitulate the very error that it means to highlight: a fake fact, but repeated so often (and with such sanctimony) that it takes on the sheen of truth." Five38

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"Last October, Uber published data from New York showing that even as driver numbers had doubled, and fares had fallen, “partners” were earning 6.3% more per hour than they were the year before... The only trouble with “Uber math” is how it feels to be part of the labour force that delivers it." Guardian

This reminds me a little of something I posted a while ago about management-via-AI... The problem isn't so much that it doesn't *work*, from a purely economic standpoint, but that it often feels profoundly alienating to be asked not to exercise autonomy or judgement.

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Really good that this is appearing in a high-profile publication like the New York Times. It's not a perfect article, and there's the usual attempt at 'balance, but I think actually just enough to hoist antis by their own petard. When presented in any sort of neutral way, it is very obvious that proponents of decriminalisation have the better side of the argument, and that does come through here.

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"Google is sufficiently confident about its technology that its staff have discussed launching a fully autonomous taxi service in Mountain View as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. The service may initially be restricted to Google employees, which might get around any legal and regulatory issues." FT

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There doesn't seem to be robust evidence that offering people more choices makes them less likely to make a decision, and there are many circumstances where it makes them *more* likely to make a decision.

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"Usually when I talk about oppression, I emphasize impact over intention – because no matter how well-meaning someone is, they can still cause harm. Maybe we should consider the same emphasis when we’re trying to stop oppression. Regardless of our intentions, sometimes the only impact of calling someone out is that we get to feel like we punished them for what they did wrong." Everyday Feminism

Links, Tuesday 3rd May

This may come across as a bit of petty trolling of pet owners, but I think it actually goes to something quite deep, i.e. that we humans so often like to pretend that the emotions of other animals aren't 'real' in the same way ours are. And that our feelings about a given situation somehow 'overwrite' whatever they're feeling about it. So hugging a dog (or stroking a cat) is framed as a lovely, warm experience for both parties, even if the animal is actually stressed and merely tolerating it.

(This, incidentally, is also the way that more privileged people are trained to think about the emotions of more marginalised people. Many authors have drawn attention to the ways in which objectification and subjugation in human society are patterned on our collective treatment of animals)

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"We found that spanking was associated with unintended detrimental outcomes and was not associated with more immediate or long-term compliance, which are parents' intended outcomes when they discipline their children," IFL Science

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Grim

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Surprise, surprise! UK immigration officials have been unlawfully deporting Eastern European women - many of them sex workers - since 2012.

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As a form of labour comes to be considered "women's work", pay and conditions tend to decrease. So it's no surprise that academics have been increasingly relegated to precarious adjunct roles as the proportion of women in academia (particular in the humanities) increases.

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So the Copyright Term Extension Act in the US is sometimes called the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" because a) Disney lobbied intensively for it; and b) it maintains the character of Mickey Mouse as the exclusive intellectual property of Disney for some time to come.

Question: when was the last time you saw a film produced by the Disney Corporation in which Mickey Mouse was actually featured as a character? Would you say that Disney is making effective use of its exclusive control over this major piece of our common cultural heritage?

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This sounds about right to me