The stakes of an issue ≠ the stakes of an argument over it 🔗

We get angry or distraught in conversations about religious and political issues partly because we feel the stakes are very high. People on both sides of culture war debates think that lives and livelihoods are on the line; that they, their loved ones, and/or many innocent strangers are in danger of great injustices if the wrong side wins. But the stakes of any given conversation about an issue are usually far lower than the stakes of the issue itself:

• Truth itself is never at stake. The facts remain the facts no matter who is perceived to win an argument. (Gendlin: “What is true is already so.”) A persuasive Christian can’t summon God into existence, nor can a persuasive atheist obliterate him; he’s there or he isn’t.
• Government policy is rarely stake. Whether the secret Nazi at your dinner party convinces everyone else at the table to vote for neo-Hitler in the next election, or you convince them all not to, is extremely unlikely to have any impact on whether he wins or not. To what extent trans women will be allowed to participate in women’s sports does not hinge on whether you win a facebook argument with your uncle. Most people have no control, and little influence, over the contentious social issues that dominate the public consciousness.
• Even the opinions of the people you’re talking to are not usually at stake—or only are in a limited way. Their beliefs have been formed from a lifetime of influences and experiences and trying to make sense of the world and their place in it. Any new information or arguments you present are just a few drops into that ocean; it’s unrealistic and unreasonable to expect a quick or radical change to result.

What is at stake is whether the people you’re speaking with feel heard and feel like they can have an ongoing relationship with you. Anger, denigration, and aggressive demands for immediate change can quickly convince them there’s no point in further discussion. When the person is someone close to you, this often creates senseless pain—what’s the point of destroying a relationship over a disagreement on something neither of you can actually do much about? But to whatever extent someone’s views do make a difference and are worth changing, pushing the person away is counterproductive; they’ll only be further radicalized by retreating into an echo chamber. Patient listening, civility, and empathy give you far more chance of influencing them in the long run.

Two overdue PNW trips 🔗

Why did it take me seven years to get around to making the 3-hour drive from Seattle to visit Portland? 🤷‍♂️. But I finally made time for a short trip this month and had a good time. I spent half the day walking up to Council Crest Park and feeling jealous of all the charming houses nestled among lush trees along the winding roads up the hills. (Apparently this park lies along the “4T Trail”; if I'd known about that beforehand I'd have made time to do the “tram” leg of it because, well, aerial trams are super cool. Next time!) I also spent two or three hours at Powell's Books which fully lives up to the hype. I was very happy with my room at Northrup Station.

Vancouver is also only a 3 hour drive and I still haven't been there, but I can at least say I've visited British Columbia now: family pulled me along for a trip to Butchart Gardens in Victoria. It's very pretty! Doing it as a day trip involved a higher ratio of time-spent-traveling to time-at-destination than I'd normally like, but most of that time was on a boat so it's fine. (Also, shout-out to the Victoria Clipper for having a not-disgusting vegan breakfast sandwich available on board.)

Brief reviews 🔗

• Would I have had any interest in seeing Coyote vs Acme if the Internet hadn’t primed me with some vague sense that its un-cancellation represented a victory of the common people over corporate soullessness? Possibly not. But I certainly had a good time watching it. The movie mostly trades on nostalgia, but it’s nostalgia for a franchise that (unlike, say, Star Wars) hasn’t been exploited to death (yet). I kind of want to go watch some old Road Runner cartoons now.

• The Internet says you’re supposed to read Brandon Sanderson’s novella Edgedancer between the second and third Stormlight Archive novels, so, I did. Or rather, I listened to the Graphic Audio dramatization of it. At first, the way the audiobook plays up the protagonist’s whimsical-street-urchin schtick felt cheesy/overdone, but it sucked me in before too long. Sanderson is a reliable source of fun, easily-digestible adventures. Aside: as a person who has at least once stopped going to a favorite restaurant because I was freaked out by the staff starting to recognize me, I was rather embarrassed to recognize a bit of myself in one of Lift’s mental monologues about her fear of staying so long in a place that people start to have expectations of her.

• The Fifth Science is a collection of sci-fi short stories about mind/consciousness, loosely connected by a shared universe. It’s less of a hard-sci-fi exploration of the topic than I thought it was going to be, but it’s pretty entertaining. Some of the more memorable entries: “For Every Dove a Bullet” features a being that can skim across time and space taking over other minds; “And the Leaves All Sing of God” poses the specter of a kind of forbidden knowledge that mysteriously drives anyone who studies it to suicide; “The Want Machine” explores the impact of technology that allows people to arbitrarily change their own desires; “Water for Lunch” is set in an extreme totalitarian state where even thoughts are continuously monitored.

  I wonder, if we all divorced ourselves in two, what would be the result? One half the observer, one half the doer. I doubt we’d be impressed with what we found. (p. 19)

• Ithaca is the third Claire North novel I’ve read and it further confirms my high opinion of her. I was pretty ambivalent about whether I actually wanted to spend any more time in the world of the Odyssey after the past two months, and I only picked this retelling up because it was on sale cheap at libro.fm, but North’s eloquent prose drew me in. Her telling focuses on the impossible situation of the women of Ithaca, whose society demands men be the leaders and defenders even though the war with Troy has robbed them of all the competent men; on the pervasive mistreatment of women, even queens and goddesses; and on how the culture’s expectations push its leaders into awful dilemmas. My favorite scene is the confrontation between Orestes and Electra and their mother Clytemnestra. The goddess Hera grieves and rages at the impending murder of this queen she sees so much splendor in, and also gives a tragically beautiful description of the reluctant Orestes:

  …and of all of us who stand upon the shore, he is perhaps the only one for whom mercy may be uttered, for whom the word is familiar as the taste of water, the kiss of sun. Mercy, say his eyes, and mercy, beats his heart, and mercy is written in every part of him, and yet he knows—he knows he knows he knows… (track 46, 21:54)

• I was worried I might have trouble getting into the latest Murderbot novel, Platform Decay, because it’s been a while since I read the previous ones in the series and—unlike the protagonist—I’m terrible at remembering the details of media I’ve consumed in the past. (Or much else about the past, really, unless it involved me embarrassing myself. Maybe if I want to commit important facts to memory I should try reciting them while doing something humiliating.) My worry was unfounded; the story had no trouble sucking me in even if I never did remember who Leonide was or what happened on the ”Hell Plague Planet”. Also, I enjoyed that this one was set on a megastructure: a planet-encircling torus divided amongst numerous governing bodies.

  Relatable quote:

  I realized I needed to say something. I hate it when that happens. (p. 150)

• I picked up Soma at Powell’s while visiting Portland because the staff recommendation described it as something like ~“the cutest graphic novel I’ve read recently”. It is, indeed, insanely cute. I absolutely love the art style and will have to look up some more of Carles Dalmau’s work (which apparently also includes the delightful game Cult of the Lamb).

• We Solve Murders doesn’t establish quite as memorable a cast of characters as Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, but it’s still a fun read with some touching moments and folksy humor that made me smile a lot and laugh out loud at least once.

Notes on Poor Economics 🔗

What’s the best way to help poor people? Do they need programs that give them resources and assistance to escape “poverty traps”? Or do they just need rich countries and governments to leave them alone and get out of the way, so that market forces and their own ingenuity can drive them to prosperity (see: Moyo’s Dead Aid (review))? Or—as Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail (review) might leave you worrying—are the systems that keep them oppressed so stubbornly self-perpetuating that we basically have to wait for rare miraculous events to change them?

Banerjee & Duflo’s Poor Economics argues we should set aside all such sweeping theories and take things on a case-by-case basis. They think there’s good evidence that some interventions genuinely help the poor, but also that the precise circumstances and implementation details matter a lot.

Some of the more interesting claims to me:

• Quantity of food is probably not a real limiting factor for most poor people, though better nutrition—especially in childhood—could be very helpful. (see p. 23, p. 29) (Claude notes, however, that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization still reports hundreds of millions of people as undernourished.)

• Poor parents often concentrate resources in educating just one child because they think the benefits of education only really kick in when you reach high levels of it. But that’s not true; evidence suggests fairly linear returns to each increment of education. (see p. 88) (Claude agrees the concentration is real, cautions against being too confident this belief is the cause of the concentration, and adds some nuance regarding how true/false the belief is.)

• Formal loans to poor people have a high default rate but informal loans have a low default rate. Part of why informal loans have shockingly high interest rates is that the lenders have to do a lot of work to ensure that low default rate (vetting clients, pushing them to pay, etc). There’s a “multiplier effect” that pushes the rates higher: higher interest creates greater incentive to default ➡️ lender invests more in trying to reduce default rate ➡️ lender raises interest to cover those costs. (see p. 163)

• Poor people may save less money than they could partly because saving enough to achieve any major goals seems hopeless. Recipients of microloans spent less on stuff like tea and cigarettes. (see pp. 201-203)

• Government policies targeted at creating more stable jobs may be worthwhile even if they’re economically inefficient. (see p. 233)

• We shouldn’t be too fatalistic about corruption and bad national institutions. An example given in the book: Uganda had a high level of embezzlement of funds intended for schools, but media attention was successful in drastically reducing this. (see p. 237)

• The authors say the evidence for benefits of cash transfers has gotten stronger since the original publication of the book—including evidence that people often start working more hours when they receive cash transfers. (see p. 270)

• We may be underinvesting in climate change adaptation compared to mitigation:

  Internationally, funding targeted to poor countries mainly finances projects that will help to mitigate climate change, perhaps because the impact of efforts to do so has returns for the whole world, while adaptation would produce mainly local effects. (p. 290)

I appreciated this reminder that we shouldn’t dismiss proposed interventions just because we catch a whiff of paternalism from them:

Aren’t we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it? (p. 70)

We live in houses where clean water gets piped in—we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own—we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. We have no choice but to get our children immunized—public schools will not take them if they aren’t—and even if we somehow manage to fail to do it, our children will probably be safe because everyone else is immunized. … And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so. (p. 68)