Digest, 2/13/2022: The Gig Bame
the thirty-eighth digest post
I’ve been writing about how a lot of people seem to want to use Covid as a floating excuse to remake society in the way they would like. Occasionally they just come right out and say it.
I kind of like going out and doing things with other people without feeling afraid of contracting or spreading a respiratory infection, personally. Call me crazy. More to the point, I think progressive people have to actually convince the country that our agenda is better for all of us, rather than trying to use a crisis as an excuse to get what we want.
I was on the podcast Public Theologians recently and thought we had a good conversation, check it out.
This Week’s Posts
Monday, February 7th - To Popularize a Movement, There Needs to Be a Movement in the First Place
“Breadtube” epitomizes a current problem within the socialist left - too many entertainers, not enough substance.
I've Been Underwhelmed by the Upright GO S Posture Trainer (subscriber only)
A product review.
Tuesdsay, February 8th - White Journalists Are Terrified of Appearing to Criticize BlackLivesMatter, Obviously
Large social movements need the accountability an adversarial press can create. BLM has no such pressure and thus no such accountability.
Thursday, February 9th - Statistical Significance, in Plain Language (subscriber only)
A little primer for subscribers.
Friday, February 10th - This is the World in Which We Live
Harassment complaints are, I’m afraid, just another thing online that’s all about popularity rather than principle.
From the Archives
Forgive me for using a deepity but the only constant is change.
Song of the Week
Substack of the Week
This is more of a “watch this space” recommendation, but Christian Lorentzen is one of my favorite writers on my favorite topic, books, so I’m definitely going to be following his Substack. In particular I tend to find that he stands outside of (and frequently looks askance at) much of the worst of online literary culture, which for me is worth my attention in and of itself.
NFL Picks of the Week
Let’s get to .500 for the year, and let’s do it by taking the Cincinnati Bengals +4. Matt Stafford is good, but I don’t trust him in the biggest game, Sean McVay the same - he’s had too many big losses where he should have won in his career. While Cooper Kupp and OBJ are a lights-out duo, I like Chase and Higgins even more, and the fact that the Rams signed and are giving real minutes to 37-year-old Eric Weddle doesn’t fill me with confidence. And while I don’t think analytics speaks to a significantly better Bengals rushing game, I don’t see much there with the Rams to fear. Of course, one thing that I absolutely do fear is the Los Angeles pass rush against that Cincinnati offensive line. But I like underdogs, and I like the points in what’s likely to be a weird game. Let’s go.
Win-Loss-Push: 16-17-0
Book Recommendation
Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever, Robin Wigglesworth, 2021
I suppose it sounds fairly demented to call a book about the invention of passive investing “fun,” but I found this to be a surprisingly enjoyable book, a well-packaged history about a surprisingly monumental change in finance. I know very little about finance, but I know enough to know that individual suckers like me can’t beat the market by picking individual stocks, so our best bet is to buy into index funds that try to capture the performance of the market as a whole. But I never really understood why before I read this book. The book also is a fair and sober articulation of some of the problems with index funds, in particular how they don’t perform the task of rationally pricing stocks for the market. (If you’re buying everything, after all, you’re not really separating good from bad.) Definitely a surprise pick for me, but one I got a lot out of.
Comment of the Week
Suppose you collect a bunch of data and then wonder whether there is any hypothesis that this data set supports. You try out forty different plausible but independent hypotheses. If you are using a significant level of 0.05, then, even if your data are purely random, you can expect two of the hypotheses to be significant at that level. You carefully select the most plausible of the two hypotheses (or perhaps the one most likely to please the editors) and submit just that one hypothesis, the data, and the supporting number crunching. Voila! You have a brand new paper. - George Hariton
That’s it! See you tomorrow. Enjoy the game tonight.
When I see things like that deranged tweet they always make me think of Trotsky. While facing his imminent death due to his arch-enemy having an assassin bury an icepick in his head, he still writes the line "Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full."
Say what you will about Trotskyism but I'd rather sign up for the politics of that quote than the politics of "normal sucked balls."
The "normalcy sucked balls" tweet is wrong in at least two ways. First of all, as Freddie correctly notes, just because you want to be able to socialize freely doesn't mean you want to "cover up cracks" in society. I don't want to "cover up cracks," I just want to return to my in-person karate practice (Zoom karate just isn't the same) and visit my parents in Canada for the first time in over two years.
But secondly, the tweet implies that the people who want to return to normalcy are privileged, elite oppressors. Don't working-class people want normalcy too? And I'm not talking about the protesting truckers in Ottawa; I'm talking about a single mother who relies on her child's school not being shut down due to Covid.