Study Notes: Aug 30-Sep 12, 2015: "Perfect genetic knowledge"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 

• Article, "The V.C.s of B.C.", by Adam Davidson
• Article, "Dark Matter May Be More Complex Than Physicists Thought", by Liz Kruesi
• Article, "Cover of darkness", by Jamie Bartlett
• Article, "Perfect genetic knowledge", by Dawn Field
• Article, "The Limits of Language", by David Auerbach
• Post, "DBT Analysis: Chain Analysis", by Ozy
• Post, "Specific vs. General Foragers & Farmers", by Robin Hanson
• Post, "Identities Are Not Arguments", by Ozy
• Article, "Clothes and daggers", by Rafia Zakaria
• Article, "Think Like A Tree: A New Kind of Eco-Friendly Concrete Inspired By Coral", Shara Tonn
• Article, "How to Write Convincing Death Scenes", by Bianca Nogrady
• Article, "Book Review: Manufacturing Consent", by Scott Alexander

Homework for the future:

• Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
• Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
• Finish the reading for "Notes to: Anarchy: Never Been Tried?"
• Finish the reading for "Notes to 16 Articles on Writing"
• Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
• Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
• Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.

"The V.C.s of B.C."

• "In general, we know few details about economic life before roughly 1000 A.D. But during one 30-year period--between 1890 and 1860 B.C.--for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few hundred traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat roughly at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh's traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults." 
• "In a beautifully detailed new book--'Ancient Kanesh,' written by a scholar of the archive, Mogens Trolle Larsen, to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year--we meet dozens of the traders of Kanesh and their relatives back home in Assur." 
• "The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses." 
• "Over the 30 years covered by the archive, we see an economy built on trade in actual goods--silver, tin, textiles--transform into an economy built on financial speculation, fueling a bubble that then pops. After the financial collapse, there is a period of incessant lawsuits, as a central government in Assur desperately tries to come up with new regulations and ways of holding wrongdoers accountable (though there never seems to be agreement on who the wrongdoers are, exactly). The entire trading system enters a deep recession lasting more than a decade. The traders eventually adopt simpler, more stringent rules, and trade grows again." 
• "The Economist Jan Tinbergen... noted something curious [in 1962]: Trade within and between countries followed a mathematical formula. He called it the Gravity Model... [It] means that trade between two markets will equal the size of the two markets multiplied together and then divided by their distance. (The model gets its name from its mathematical similarity to the equation in physics that describes gravitational pull.)... In extreme cases (for example, trade between warring countries or during periods of sanction), the formula can fail to predict the volume of trade, but over all the model works extremely well." 
• "The model suggests that these deals [GATT, Nafta, TPP] have less impact than either their boosters or their detractors imagine. There is a natural tendency for different regions to trade at fairly predictable volumes. However much politicians might want to change those outcomes, they have only crude tools at their disposal: They can stop trade through blockades, slow it through tariffs or try to jump-start it with trade agreements. What they can't do, at least not reliably, is shape it with precision to achieve their preferred outcomes." 
• "Trade with China and other nations may be all inevitable, but growing wealth inequality and disproportionate pain (blue-collar workers losing their jobs, investors reaping a fortune) are not. There is much we can do within our borders to address the unequal impact of global trade. We can educate children for more competitive careers, train displaced workers for new industries or even directly compensate those who fail to benefit from global trade. That, in fact, is what the people of Assur did, 4,000 years ago, as Barjamovic pointed out to me. Trade brought enormous wealth to a dozen or so families. But rather than hold all of it for themselves, the wealthy were made to redistribute a high percentage of their earnings through taxes and religious foundations that used the money for the public good. This way, the wealth created by trading with Kanesh made nearly everybody--or at least every free citizen--better off." 

"Dark Matter May Be More Complex Than Physicists Thought"

• "[Professor of Physics and Astronomy James] Bullock thinks that dark matter might instead be complex, something that interacts with itself strongly in the way that ordinary matter interacts with itself to form intricate structures like atoms and atomic elements. Such a self-interacting dark matter, Bullock suspects, could exist in a 'dark sector,' somewhat parallel to our own light sector, but detectable only through the way it affects gravity."
• "He and his colleagues have created numerical simulations that predict what the universe would look like if dark matter feels strong interactions. They expected to see the model fail. Instead, they found that it was consistent with what astronomers observe." 
• James Bullock: "When dark matter particles see themselves, there are complex and potentially very strong interactions. There even could be dark atoms and dark photons. Those two worlds--this dark sector and our own [light] sector--only communicate by gravity and perhaps other weak processes, which haven't yet been seen." 
• James Bullock: "Does galaxy formation eject dark matter somehow, or do we need to modify our understanding of dark matter?"
• James Bullock: "Could it be that these little discrepancies we've been seeing in the observational data are actually a clue that there's something interesting and fun going on in the dark sector that we weren't thinking about before?"
• James Bullock: "Imagine a swarm of bees; a cluster of galaxies is sort of like that. Massive collisions, where two galaxy clusters have come at each other and pass through each other, are one place to look for complex dark matter. If the dark matter is strongly interacting, when those massive clusters come together, the galaxies will keep flying right on through, but the dark matter, because it's strongly interacting with itself, will sort of bunch up in the middle."

"Cover of darkness"

• In 1990, "a small band of Californian libertarians, known as 'cypherpunks', began developing tools to keep the net free of state interference. They set up an email list, which doesn't sound all that auspicious, except that this list ultimately ended up predicting, inventing or refining nearly every technique now employed by computer users to avoid government surveillance." 
• "When it comes to matters of privacy, every government reaction has a citizen counter-reaction. This one was known as the 'crypto-wars'. And, in the end, the cypherpunks won. By 2001, anonymous retailers were everywhere, an anonymous browser allowing users to use the web without anyone being able to track them was in development, untraceable black markets had sprung up online, and the whistleblowing site Cryptome was becoming a thorn in the side of intelligence agencies." 
• "There are hundreds of people working on ingenious ways to block censorship and keep secrets online: projects that are designed for the mass market rather than the computer specialist. So, there will soon be a new generation of easy-to-use-auto-encryption email services, such as 'Mailpile' and 'Dark Mail'."
• "Twister [a peer-to-peer Twitter] is part of a trend toward a decentralisation of the net. Another is called 'MaidSafe', which is a UK start-up that aims to redesign the internet infrastructure towards a peer-to-peer communications network, without centralised servers. Its developers are building a network made up of contributing computers, with each one giving up a bit of its unused hard drive. You access the network, and the network accesses the computers. It's all encrypted and bits of data are stored all across the network, which makes hacking or spying harder." 
• "Facebook recently launched a version of its network on Tor--proof indeed that it's becoming mainstream." 
• "The liberal Left fears that state surveillance might encroach on the individual right to privacy. The liberal Right worries about too much power in the hands of state bureaucracy." I like this idea of a liberal Left and a liberal Right. 
• "Because of that powerful combination of public appetite and new technology, the means of staying hidden online will only get easier to use, more widespread and ever more sophisticated. And the cypherpunks have physics on their side: it is easier to encrypt something than to decrypt it. (Encrypting is like cracking an egg; decrypting it without the key is like trying to put it back together again.) It's not an exaggeration to say that the laws of mathematics tend toward secrecy." 
• "Anonymity increases the scope for holding the powerful to account, and if nothing else, the internet has given states an awful lot more power." 
• "Interestingly, in the 19th century, the great liberal thinker John Stuart Mill opposed the secret ballot, preferring that people be forced to stand by their decisions."
• "Anonymity contributes to free expression. In the US, lest we forget, the Federalist Papers were anonymously authored." 

"Perfect genetic knowledge"

• "The technology [of genetic engineering] appears to be finding its way into the hands of hobbyists: Nature recently reported that members of the 'biohacker' sub-culture have been messing around with CRISPR, though the enthusiast they interviewed didn't appear to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do with it." 
• "Could DNA solve some of our pressing energy issues? One project hopes to engineer trees that glow in the dark... Perhaps the day is not far off when our streets are lined with bioluminescent foliage." 
• "Venter is working on re-engineering pig lungs so that they could be used in human transplants. This could have a much larger impact than is immediately obvious: about one in 10 deaths in Europe is caused by lung disease. Farther afield, Venter is in the race to find life on Mars with DNA sequencers, and is developing methods of 'biological teleportation'--the idea is that you sequence microbial DNA on Mars and then reconstruct the genomes on Earth using 3D printing. The process could work the other way around, too. Venter and Elon Musk are talking of using this technology to terraform Mars with 3D-printed earthly microbes." 
• "By 2020, many hospitals will have genome medicine departments, designing medical therapies based on your genetic constitution. Gene sequencers--machines that can take a blood sample and reel off your entire genetic blueprint--will shrink below the size of USB drives. Supermarkets will have shelves of home DNA tests, perhaps nestled between the cosmetics and medicines, for everything from whether your baby will be good at sports to the breed of cat you just adopted, to whether your kitchen counter harbours enough 'good bacteria'... Personal DNA stories--including the quality of the bugs in your gut--will be the stuff of cocktail party chitchat."
• "Perhaps the most profound long-term societal change will be DNA's contribution towards what the American futurologist and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis calls 'perfect knowledge'. Diamandis seemed to be thinking mainly about omnipresent cameras: 'With a trillion sensors gathering data everywhere (autonomous cars, satellite systems, drones, wearables, cameras), you'll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights." 
• "Some gated communities in the United States require DNA from pets. Owners who let their pets defile shared grounds are fined: the authorities only have to match what they fail to scoop against their entry in the mandatory pet registry. In Hong Kong the same goes for those who litter. Unlawfully drop trash you've touched, licked, or chewed, like gum or a tissue, and you might find a facsimile of your face on a bus stop." 
• "Here's one interesting area in which we have been making progress, for example: we have a significant fraction of the 'panda biocode'. This includes 2 per cent of the genomes of all extant pandas, their primary food, bamboo, and samples of the panda microbiome, a collection of microbes that can digest cellulose and thereby enable this carnivore with canine teeth to live like a vegetarian on its otherwise indigestible plant diet." 
• "Ever since humans evolved, we have been reprogramming the Biocode [of the planet], but the pace is stepping up... Now the pace of extinction alone might be as high as 100 times background rates. In most cases, extinction is like wiping clean a computer's hard drive. The information is irretrievable. Most who worry about the power of genomics fear the spectre of designer babies, bio-terrorism, denial of insurance coverage, discrimination based on DNA, or genetic surveillance. Perhaps we should worry more about the fact that we are rewriting the code of life on Earth at a terrifying pace, usually without even considering that this is what we are doing." 

"The Limits of Language"

• Wittgenstein: "The limits of language are the limits of my world." 
• Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." 
• "They sound great; there are also hopelessly mysterious except in the context of Wittgenstein's entire philosophy. Or more accurately, philosophies. Wittgenstein's writings, broadly speaking, divide into two periods, and in the second he more or less wholly rejected the underlying conception of the first."
• "Alongside Russell's work, it [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] was tremendously influential on logicians, yet Wittgenstein later ended up rejecting one of its central premises: that our linguistic statements depict true or false states of affairs, and that formal logic provided the structure that regulates our construction of these statements. Language and the world share logical form, which is also the form of reality. This attempt to regiment language as formal logic went on to be an article of faith for many computer scientists and cognitive scientists for decades, as well as exerting a foundational influence on Noam Chomsky's linguistics." 
• "The idea of words having relative meanings was not new, but Wittgenstein pioneered the controversial linguistic conception of meaning-as-use, or the idea that the meanings of words, relative or not, cannot be specified in isolation from the life practices in which they are used. Instead, language should be studied from the starting point of its practices, rather [than] from abstractions to syntax and semantics. As Wittgenstein put it, 'Speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life." 
• "Pears' interpretation [of language 'following a rule'] was that following a rule was akin to a judge applying a law in a case: Its validity depends on the past instances of how that rule was used, but also may set a new precedent for how that rule may be used in the future... It means that instead of a word having a fixed definition or referent, a word is an evolving entity that carries its own history with it through time, picking up new nuances and discarding old ones as practices (linguistic and life) shift... But the implications are more troublesome when you get to nouns, especially as they get more abstract. The usage of dog has remained somewhat consistent over the years, but try defining love or heavy or Russia in any kind of complete or precise way. You can't do it, yet we use these words with confidence every day." 
• "The shift to online communication, textual interactions separated from accompanying physical practices, has had a persistent and egregious warping effect on language, and one that most people don't even understand. It has made linguistic practice more limited, more universal, and more ambiguous. More people interact with one another without even realizing they are following different rules for words' usage. There is no time or space to clarify one's self--especially on Twitter." 
• "There's no doubt in the end that Wittgenstein remains a real pain. I wouldn't have read him had I not been convinced that the answers I was getting from every other field, and even from every other philosopher, were unsatisfactory. Wittgenstein didn't give me the answers, but his philosophy did teach me to ask the right questions." 
• Wittgenstein: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." 

"DBT Analysis: Chain Analysis"

• "So you do something that you want to stop doing. Maybe you procrastinate, or have suicidal thoughts, or you hate yourself. How do you fix this? The DBT answer is 'chain analysis.' Chain analysis is a lot of what you do with your individual therapist (as opposed to your skills trainer) in dialectical behavioral therapy." 
• "Instead of talking about what you actually wanted to talk about in therapy, you have to spend fifteen minutes going over in excruciating detail one of the most unpleasant and embarrassing things that happened to you all week. This is clearly a form of therapy designed by a behaviorist." 
• "My first tip is to write this down; don't just go over it in your head. I have forms that I fill out, but I think a piece of paper can do just as well. Writing it down makes it feel a lot more real, and if you have a pile of chain analysis papers it's easier to notice trends than if you are keeping track of it inside your head." 
• "The first step in a chain analysis is to describe very clearly the behavior you're trying to fix... The second step is to describe what prompted the behavior. It's often hard to think about what prompted my behaviors--my natural impulse is to go 'it wasn't caused by anything! I just started feeling bad for no reason!' However, as I talked about here, one of the basic assumptions of DBT is that there is no such thing as an event without a cause... You should be at least able to identify some potential prompting events; over time, you can track them and notice whether something has changed.. The third step is to talk about what made you vulnerable to doing the behavior... The fourth step is to describe in excruciating detail the chain of events that connected the prompting event to the behavior... If you're doing this on your own you will have to be very careful to make sure each item follows logically from the previous item and you aren't leaving anything out. The fifth step is to describe all the consequences of your behavior. Be sure to include both positive and negative, short-term and long-term, and on you and on others. The positive consequences are particularly important: after all, you wouldn't do this shit if you didn't get something out of it. If you know what the positive consequences are, you can work on making sure you get them in a less costly and more desirable way... The sixth step is to look at your nice chain of events. For each link in the chain,describe something better you could have done... It's particularly important to figure out which links have the potential to break the chain... Basically the idea here is to complete fucking overkill... The seventh step is to look at the factors that made you vulnerable, back in step three. How can you make sure those aren't a factor?... This is further complete fucking overkill; it's trying to make sure you don't need those plans by keeping the prompting event from affecting you so much in the first place... The eighth  and final step is thinking about how to repair the consequences of your behavior."
• "Repairing what you broke is also an important rule for yourself: if you hurt yourself by missing an important job interview, the way you repair the consequence is by being on time next time, not by berating yourself." 
• "Now, sometimes you're trying to do a behavior, rather than not do one. Can chain analyses still work? Yep! After the first step, where you describe what you didn't do, think about why you didn't do it." 

"Specific vs. General Foragers & Farmers"

• Scott Alexander: "Rightism is what happens when you're optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you're optimized for thriving in a safe environment." 
• "As foragers our attitudes and inclinations were well adapted to our environment, but the farming environment was so different that to become effective farmers we had to drastically change such things in a short time. So we cranked up the pressure on social conformity, religion, etc. in order to enforce strong new social norms favoring new farming behaviors. But because these were built on fear, and went somewhat against our deeper nature, rich safe elites have often drifted back toward forager styles, and the whole world has drifted that way together since we've all gotten rich and safe with industry. This view makes sense of many long term trends over the last few decades, such as trends toward more leisure, travel, product variety, egalitarianism, democracy, peace, and slavery aversion." 
• "Specific farming norms were typically effective ways to avoid specific bad things in the farming world. It isn't so much that farmers had a general norm that said 'we must do whatever is necessary to survive.' Instead, they lived in a harsh world and their specific norms helped them to survive in that world." 
• "If we try to generalize as far as possible from the specific forager and farmer attitudes, we might find the general forager saying that what is important is how you feel inside, which you should hold fast to. The world is mostly a rich and pliable place, and so you and society should focus on trying to arrange that world so that we can each feel good inside. In contrast, we might find the general farmer saying that the world is a harsh place and hard to change, and so we should focus more on figuring out how to change ourselves to best deal with that world, to survive in the face of harsh obstacles and competition. Both of these general positions are substantially different from the typical left and right positions we see in our world." 
• "If we focus on the two general positions, then, as Scott says, the key issue is: how harsh is your world? If your world is harsh, it makes more sense to take on the general farming position of changing ourselves to survive in that harsh world. But if the world is mild and safe, it makes more sense to focus on changing the world to make us feel better."
• "How harsh the world looks depends greatly on the timescales that you care about. The longer the time duration over which you look, the more strongly that selection pressures shape future outcomes. Selection doesn't go away just because we are rich... If you see being selected against as 'not surviving', then on longer time scales the world is just more intrinsically harsh, all else being equal. Thus all else equal people who care more about the more distant future, and who are choosing between the two general positions on the basis of how harsh is the world, should more prefer the general farmer position to the general forager position." 
• "Left-leaning futurists who understand this issue tend to double-down and say this all shows how important it is that we create a strong world government capable of controlling or preventing this long term selection that makes the world seem harsh on long time scales... Me, I'd say it[']s not so much that trying to take control of future selection is a bad idea in principle, and more that we are very far from being able to coordinate well enough to create a world government that does well at that task... So I accept that selection will long continue, and thus see the general farmer position as making more sense than the general forager position on long time scales... If you care about your descendants not being selected out over the long run, then you must focus less on how to change the world to make you feel better, and more on how to change you and your descendants to survive in the long run. The universe doesn't ask us what we want, but we might want to ask what the universe will reward. Or to put it another way, with selection the long run always becomes a zombie apocalypse." 

"Identities Are Not Arguments"

• "If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the social justice movement, it would be to get everyone to stop fucking using group membership as an argument... This is a terrible argument and all of you should stop. ('All of you' includes anti-social-justice people, by the way. Don't like this post and turn around and reblog a 'twenty people of color say cultural appropriation is stupid!' picset.)"
• "If we say 'I'm a woman; I know what's sexist and what isn't', how can we respond to a woman who says that what's really sexist is denying women's essential feminine nature which limits her to marriage and babies?"
• "Members of marginalized groups have the same diversity of opinion that people who aren't members of marginalized groups do. This is because members of marginalized groups are people, with people's tendency to have their own opinions, rather than members of the Oppression Borg. In fact, the whole argument is oppressive, I think; it pedestalizes oppressed people by assuming they are always correct, and erases the differences and diversity among marginalized people, presenting them as a stereotyped group that all shares the same opinions." 
• "Some arguments are similar to the argument that you shouldn't chew with your mouth open because it will disgust people at the dinner table; they are about some small matter, easily avoided, that predictably upsets people... Such common courtesies make up the stuff of civilized life." 
• "There are good reasons to deliberately cause offense, most notably protest." 
• "At best, an opinion poll of marginalized people provides slight evidence about what may or may not be harmful to them--but this evidence can be clearly outweighed." 
• "Treat people you're arguing with as though they came to their opinions through a disinterested process of pure reason; psychologize those not involved in the conversation." 
• "The other reason [besides using it for Bulverism] a lot of people dislike the concpt of internalized -isms is that it has so often been used to delegitimize people's preferences."
• "Women are fifty percent of the population. Sexism could not last long unless there was considerable buy-in from women. There was a point when the majority of American women didn't want the vote, because it would tarnish their purity and anyway they had the real power through influencing men... Was denying women the vote unsexist until it ticked over and 50.1% of women thought they ought to have the right to vote? And, of course, if you buy that logic, how would women ever get the vote at all? How could you convince half of women that it was sexist, if you don't think it's sexist until half of women agree?" 
• "Those institutions did not survive over the opposition of women... Patriarchy survived because women believed, women were taught, patriarchy was right, and just, and the way things ought to be." 
• "I confess I don't know how to deal with internalized sexism; I expect 'oh, you don't know what's good for you, you poor thing' to be as ineffective and offensive directed at the footbound Chinese woman as it is directed at the modern sexual submissive. Indeed, that thought process seems oppressive in itself; the allegedly benevolent denial of autonomy, the assumption that others know better than the individual what is good for them, is at the core of much sexism (particularly that direct[ed] at white women) and ableism. But not knowing how to deal with internalized isms doesn't mean we should pretend internalized isms don't exist." 
• "It is possible for women to be sexist against themselves, to believe sexist things, things that cause them tremendous pain. Indeed, this is the normal condition for members of oppressed groups, and correctly identifying that it is unfair when people hurt you and they should stop is the exception."

"Clothes and daggers"

• "Ending sati or widow immolation in 19th-century India, and founding women's shelters to protect women from honour killings in 21st-century Afghanistan: these campaigns bookend two centuries of Anglo-Americans standing squarely against horrific local customs. Specifically: protecting brown women from barbaric local customs." 
• "More than a decade after President Bush celebrated their liberation and US feminists asked for the valiant campaign to continue Afghan women are not free. Between 2012 and 2013, violence against women in Afghanistan increased by 25 per cent. US agencies entrusted with hundreds of millions of dollars for Afghan women are unable to say how they were used to empower them."
• "So why the particular focus on saving native women? Do women, their freedom, their clothes and their marriages provide some crucial avenue into establishing hegemony, a method of representing the foreign invaders as good? The most compelling reason for this enquiry is that South Asian and Afghan feminisms are tainted by an imagined complicity with colonialism and imperialism." 
• "For the Anglo missionaries who spread across 19th-century India, Indian women's clothing became a consistent preoccupation. In the Indian state of Kerala, missionaries and the colonial administration found the fact that the women did not cover their breasts proof of immorality... Working together, Protestant missionaries and British colonial administrators urged women of the Nadar caste to wear longer, more 'modest' clothes. Anglo officials in India were especially concerned that native women who had converted to Christianity conceal their breasts." 
• "Women's freedom, when it comes to the burqa, means wearing what 'the empire' wants... In 2001, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan stated that the end of the mandatory burqa 'was in no way an indication of women's rights and liberties in Afghanistan'. However, the thoughts of Afghan women about their lives have been less important in the West than burqa as a symbolic moral justification of war and imperial control. For a colonising mission to have moral weight, it must appear to 'better' the lives of the colonised. The agents of empire, whether they are officers of the British East India Company or US soldiers in Afghanistan, must believe in the incontrovertible righteousness of their cause." 
• "In the British colonial imagination, sati was a mysterious process, driven forward by a 'religion' and 'culture' as unalterable as gravity. Hindus were imagined as hypnotised by Brahmanic texts and hence incapable of disobeying them. This conception of Hindus, dominated by a scriptural Hinduism, was a British construction. It was the British who, in order to establish themselves as the righteous successors of the defeated Mughal Empire, ordered the mass translation of Vedic and Hindu texts and ordered their codification as 'law' to govern their Hindu subjects. In actuality, the British translations were often poor ones that, in addition, omitted key elements of Hindu cosmology that the British considered irrelevant to jurisprudence." 
• "Testimonials from Hindu women call into question the religious basis of sati, and even suggest that the concerns of widows were predominantly material and social, and not religious... However, the colonial conception of religion as 'the structuring principle' of the Hindu society left no room for a wider consideration of the material hardship and social dimensions of widowhood." 
• "Much like the 'problem Hindu', the evil Afghan male stands in contrast to the persecute Afghan female and is lazy, brutal, unfeeling. He is driven by a medieval moral code that endorses the persecution of women. This crude perspective takes the place of thinking about the more than 100,000 Afghan civilian casualties caused by the US invasion since 2001. Just a stories of rescuing Indian women from sati distracted from the violence of British colonialism, so focusing on the violence of honour-crime stories deflects attention from the raids, bombings, illegal and indefinite detentions, torture and general brutality of the US war in Afghanistan." 
• "Any honest analysis of honour crimes in Afghanistan would have to begin by acknowledging a society whose familial and institutional structures have been broken by five decades of Soviet and US foreign intervention... It could also acknowledge that the intimate violence committed by men against women in Afghanistan has hundreds of thousands of counterparts committed by men against women in the US."
• "Representing 'honour killing' as an exotic, gruesomely brutal, incomprehensible phenomenon driven by mysterious cultural imperatives makes the US occupation seem urgent and righteous, even heroic. Acknowledging that 'honour killing' in Afghanistan could be comparable to all the other crimes that men perpetuate against women everywhere else would cast into doubt one of the main moral edifices of the imperial endeavour." 
• "When the Hindu women puts on a long-sleeved blouse and a petticoat, or when an Afghan woman throws off her burqa, it equals conquest and success of the colonial venture." 
• "The singling out of gendered crimes, sati in India and honour killings in Afghanistan, dramatises the otherness of the Hindu or Afghan male. He becomes an indigenous evil requiring heroic foreign intervention. The sophistication of this kind of enemy-making is that it renders one half of the local population--the victims of these crimes--allies of the occupation. Actual Hindu widows and Afghan women are rarely, if ever, heard from, as their experiences and perspective might complicate a silence that the Anglo-American empire can imagine as gratitude." 
• "The peculiar persistence of the Anglo empire's preoccupation with women's clothing and social roles reveal that domination cannot rely solely on battles and bombs. The popularisation of gross caricatures of native gender roles, in particular the passive, oppressed female, helps create popular support for the conquerors, and their enablers, as good and brave. In the process, a society's moral basis is rebuilt to rationalise subjugation to the foreign power." 

"Think Like A Tree"

• "Concrete is the most popular building material in the world. Construction teams use twice as much of it as all other building materials combined--wood, steel, plastic, aluminum--and for good reason. It's strong, durable, weather and fire resistant, and pretty cheap. The catch: The process of making cement--one of the main ingredients for concrete--is responsible for about six percent of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions."
• "The oceans are huge carbon dioxide sinks, pulling in enormous quantities of the gas from the atmosphere. Corals can use some of that dissolved carbon dioxide, called carbonate, to build the largest biological structures on earth. Think of corals in two parts: the animal--the actual coral polyp--on top, and the skeleton on the bottom. In between those exists a tiny space filled with fluid. Here, corals control their own little microenvironment, manipulating the pH of the fluid to make it more basic. When calcium and carbonate meet in these conditions, they crystallize into the skeleton." 
• Article says a company called Calera is working on a cement substitute which operates in the same way. 

"How to Write Convincing Death Scenes"

• "Watching a life end is like watching a life begin. Sometimes it's a calm, peaceful, even beautiful experience. Sometimes it's a horrible bloody mess. Mostly, it's a bit of both." 
• "Cheyne-Stokes respiration is a characteristic breathing pattern that often heralds death, although it is also encountered when sleeping at very high altitudes (which can lead to some unintended alarm on the part of the sleeper's companions!). The person's breathing gets deeper--and sometimes faster--but then gets shallower and shallower until it appears to stop altogether...and then it resumes."
• "Death often comes as one long, last exhalation, but one thing that many people report is a very sudden change in skin appearance of the person who's died; as the circulation stops, the skin very quickly--in a matter of a minute or two--takes on a waxy appearance as blood stops moving through the skin."
• "Agonal gasps, as they're called, sound a lot worse than they actually are (at least for the person who has died). They're considerably less pleasant for the people sitting by the bedside who have begun to mourn. It doesn't mean the dead have returned to life--agonal gasps are thought to be a final reflex as the brain seeks one last burst of oxygen, but they are also a very clear sign that death has occurred." 
• "An equally surprising but much more welcome event that can occur just before death is called terminal lucidity, or 'lightening up'. Many tell stories of people with dementia, Alzheimer's disease, or brain tumours: in the final minutes of life, whatever fog has clouded their minds seems to lift. For a brief, shining moment, they are themselves again. They might acknowledge a loved one they have not recognized for years, or crack a joke that gives a glimpse of the person they once were. However this moment is all too brief, and usually only happens within minutes of death. We still don't really understand why or how it happens..."

"Book Review"

• "I decided to read Manufacturing Consent because of this basic puzzle: how can both the Left and the Right be so certain that the media is biased against them?" 
• The argument of the book is that the media bias is not to the Left, nor to the Right, but "pro- a conservative establishment in which both Republicans and Democrats collude, and anti- the real left, which it treats as a lunatic fringe too powerless to even be worth mentioning" and "enforces conformity with the Overton Window against both the right and left flanks. Both the rightward and leftward fringes notice the same set of dirty tricks in the media, and describe them in almost exactly the same terms." 
• "Chomsky and Herman are both academics, and they're both relentless. When they try to prove something, by golly, it stays proved."
• "Now that I have read Manufacturing Consent, it seems obvious that removing Saddam would cause Iraq to descend into blood-soaked death squads. It is like a law of the universe that Third World countries will descend into blood-soaked death squads at the drop of a pin. Every time the United States has tried to change the government of a Third World nation, the end result has been blood-soaked death squads. Expecting to remove a regime from power without thinking about the blood-soaked death squads seems less like an excusable error and more like missing the very heart of the issue, like expecting to use a nuke without thinking about radiation damage." 
• "I am left with a greatly increased respect for the view that it was Western colonialism, broadly defined, that has caused Third World countries all their grief. The problem wasn't just British people coming in and telling them to work on banana plantations for a while, the problem was the total destruction of the country's usual rule of law, hierarchies, civic traditions, and social fabric by successive attempts by western-backed dictators to retain power. A couple of decades assassinating anyone who looks out of place and doesn't do exactly what they're told, of tearing apart any organization or community that looks strong enough to serve as an alternative to the State or offer resistance--the question is less why Third World countries are so screwed up, and more that they're not screwed up even worse." 
• "Through all of this, the US media could always be counted on to condemn the victims, excuse the aggressors, and totally fail to mention our role in anything." 
• "There are ways to be rigorous and dishonest at the same time." 
• "C&H never lie per se, but they leave out things as significant as a giant foreign invasion happening during the middle of the events they're describing." 
• "I went into this book with more or less the attitude mentioned above: the classic story of America being great was a bit exaggerated and overenthusiastic, and in fact we did a lot of morally ambiguous things. I came out of it with more of a primal horror that we spent a lot of the 20th century being moral monsters, and feeling like we have the same sort of indelible black mark on our name as Germany or Russia or Belgium."
• Chomsky, Herman: "As we have stressed throughout this book, the U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit--indeed, encourage--spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness."

Miscellaneous

• "Better ways to pay for college": ""Under Rubio's plan, private investors would pay for a student's education in return for a claim on a chunk of his future earnings... Just as dividends accruing to a shareholder depend on a firm's profits, so a student's subsequent payments to the investor would rise and fall with his income. Equity financing would lead to more informed choices because investors would be less willing to fund courses and colleges that offer low returns. And it would squeeze costs because unpopular courses would have to trim their spending... Nonetheless, the idea of equity financing for college is controversial... The more substantive problems involve information asymmetries and moral hazard. Prospective students know better than any investor what they plan to do with their lives. A lawyer who financed his study by issuing equity could, on graduating, afford to choose whether to join a well-paying law firm or to become a public defender without having that decision influenced by the need to repay a mound of debt. From society's point of view, that freedom to choose has benefits: a debt-laden graduate is less likely to take a risk on setting up a new company and more likely to head for Wall Street instead." Interesting, but a little disturbing at first glance.
• Ilya Somin, "Nations can and do exist without immigration restrictions": "The history of the United States also shows that borders--and nations--can exist without immigration restrictions. Until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the federal government did not forbid voluntary immigration. Indeed, the original meaning of the Constitution did not give Congress the power to do so, allowing it to restrict eligibility for citizenship, but not to forbid migration. Some state governments had laws excluding immigrants, but not the federal government (and migrants excluded by one state could still potentially enter through another)." 
• Sprocket J Cogswell, "Talk" page for "Ethical Altruism" on RationalWiki: "From the earliest days of online discussion, a common signoff was 'hope this helps.' Why bother posting, unless someone else may benefit from the reading?" 
• "Ethical Altruism" page on RationalWiki: "It's impossible not to fail at utilitarianism, but you can fail less hard." 
• Joy Williams: "The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it." 
• Dhonielle Clayton: "One of the biggest roadblocks I have in the drafting process is self-doubt. I beat myself up about how sloppy the pages are or how cliche the plot might be or how my concept in another author's hands would be executed better. I am my own worst enemy. A perfection monster. These evil thoughts creep in every three days or so, and I become paralyzed with doubt. I forget that first drafts are messy. My head becomes a storm of negative thoughts. Can I really write this draft? Will readers like it? Is there anything salvable in this manuscript? When I fall into that dark place, I know it's time for a pep talk or time to find a part of the book that I'm proud of. But forgive yourself. First drafts aren't supposed to be perfect." 
• Scott Alexander, "If You Can't Make Predictions, You're Still in a Crisis": "Barret states that psychology is not in crisis, because it's in a position similar to physics, where gravity applies at the macroscopic level but not the microscopic level. But if you ask a physicist to predict whether an apple will fall up or down, she will say 'Down, obviously, because we're talking about the macroscopic level.' If you ask a psychologist to predict whether priming a student with the thought of a brilliant professor will make them do better on an exam or not, the psychologist will have no idea, because she won't know what factors cause the prime to work sometimes and fail other times, or even whether it really works at all." 
• Chuck Wendig: "When in doubt, the rule of threes is a rule that plays well with all of storytelling. When describing a thing? No more than three details. A character's arc? Three beats. A story? Three acts. An act? Three sequences. A plot point culminating in a mystery of [sic or?] a twist? At least three mentions throughout the tale. This is an old rule, and a good one. It's not universal--but it's a good place to start."  
• Ozy, "Book Post for August": "The thesis [of No Future] is that a lot of ideologies reflect what Edelman calls 'reproductive futurism', the idea of progress and an inevitably improving future, symbolized by the Child. That's the reason that 'protecting our children' and 'protecting our families' is an applause light. The culture ends up shoving everything that troubles reproductive futurism into the idea of the Queer, who has non-reproductive sex and is thus inherently opposed to the Child... Edelman argues that modern LGBT politics is trying to better reflect reproductive futurism--for instance, by showing off gay parents and by talking about how bright the future of gay rights is. But that just means society is going to shove everything that troubles reproductive futurism into some other figure. Instead, Edelman argues, we should embrace being against reproductive futurism, never making the world better, but instead concentrating on finding moments of individual joissance, finding joys in an infinite series of present moments rather than in the infinite and joyous future... This book is evil, but very engagingly so. Basically, this book is what would happen if the Dark Knight's Joker read queer theory instead of blowing buildings."
• Natalie Goldberg: "Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open."