news_opinion_readings.md

layout	title	category
notes	solidity terms	web3

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2022

• Opinion | I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead. - The New York Times
• Opinion | Laundered Money Could Be Putin’s Achilles’ Heel - The New York Times
  • The Europeans, unfortunately, have fecklessly allowed themselves to become highly dependent on imports of Russian natural gas.
  • can go after the vast overseas wealth of the oligarchs who surround Putin and help him stay in power.
• Opinion | Wealth Inequality Drives the Appeal of Crypto - The New York Times
  • "The only way a technology that solves a problem that no one knows they have — a “disruptive” technology — becomes culturally powerful is that someone has to subsidize it until it becomes profitable"
• China's Covid-Era Controls May Outlast the Coronavirus - The New York Times
• Opinion | When I Applied to College, I Didn’t Want to ‘Sell My Pain’ - The New York Times
• The myth of the "great resignation" - Slow Boring
  • "The quits rate is unusually high, but the hires rate is also unusually high, and the ratio of hires to quits is very normal."
• Opinion | You Know What Would Help Exhausted Doctors and Nurses? More Money. - The New York Times

2021

• Web3 is Bullshit
  • three technical issues of the narrative are:
    1. Compute Problem - blockchain networks don't scale
    2. Bandwidth Problem
       1. Who will pay for the global data centers to serve content?
       2. Whose lawyers will respond to the DMCA requests?
    3. Storage Problem - who owns / can edit the data?
• Opinion | The End of Roe Is Coming, and It Is Coming Soon - The New York Times
• Opinion | Here’s a Fact: We’re Routinely Asked to Use Leftist Fictions - The New York Times
  • That selective schools regularly admit Black students with adjusted standards is undeniable
• Opinion | ‘Woke’ Went the Way of ‘P.C.’ and ‘Liberal’ - The New York Times
  • “Politically correct,” unsurprisingly, went from describing a way of seeing the world to describing the people who saw the world that way to describing the way other people felt about the people who saw the world that way
• Opinion | The Suburbs Are Poorer and More Diverse Than We Realize - The New York Times
  • in the 1990s, over 80 percent of Loudoun County’s students were white
  • today that number has dropped to 43 percent
• What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?
  • core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies
  • Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity
• The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them - The New York Times
• Opinion | Why ‘Evangelical’ Is Becoming Another Word for ‘Republican’ - The New York Times
• The True Cost of Upgrading Your Phone - The New York Times
• Opinion | Chappelle's Netflix Show Just Isn't Funny - The New York Times
• A ‘Pacemaker for the Brain’: No Treatment Helped Her Depression — Until This - The New York Times
• Opinion | Why Sex-Positive Feminism Is Falling Out of Fashion - The New York Times
  • “demisexual” refers to those attracted only to people with whom they share an emotional connection
  • Somehow, as sex positivity went mainstream and fused with a culture shaped by pornography, attention to emotion got lost
• Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized excerpt: The media’s role - Vox
  • “News emerges not from individuals seeking to improve the functioning of democracy but from readers seeking diversion, reporters forging careers, and owners searching for profits.”
• Opinion | What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human - The New York Times
• More Is More: The End of Minimalism | The Walrus
  • Marie Kondo's decluttering dominance is over. Make way for maximalism, where the more stuff, the merrier
• The Climate-Change Agenda Goes Out With a Bang - WSJ
• The Movies Are Back. But What Are Movies Now? - The New York Times
  • Global blockbusters, engineered to appeal to the widest possible mass audience, are conversation-stoppers by definition, offering vague themes and superficially complex plots
• Opinion | Post-Covid Happiness Comes in Groups - The New York Times
  • Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity.
• How Indian Americans Came to Love the Spelling Bee - The New York Times
• Hahaha vs. Hehehe | The New Yorker
• Opinion | The Jeff Bezos Paradox - The New York Times - As the fortunes of the company and its founder have increased, their public images have taken a beating
• Opinion | Maybe Trump Wasn’t the Worst President Ever? - The New York Times
• Opinion | Why Is It OK to Be Mean to the Ugly? - The New York Times
• Placebo pills can help treat people in pain. But how? - Vox
• An American Epidemic of ‘Covid Mania’ - WSJ
• Opinion | There Could Never Be a Female Andrew Yang - The New York Times - "Male candidates can embody possibility and run as repositories for people’s diffuse hopes. Women usually have to pay their dues"
• How to Answer the ‘Trap Question’ - WSJ
  • “the social purpose of a company is to find profitable solutions to the challenges of people and planet”
  • “Driving broad economic growth is perhaps the biggest thing that a company can do,” Mr. Nadella added.
  • “In order to have the pie distributed evenly, the pie should first grow.”
• What I Wouldn’t Give for a Shave That Isn’t Woke - WSJ
  • "Many companies take Republican customers for granted. Perhaps they’re right."
• Opinion | Texas, Land of Wind and Lies - The New York Times
  • Republican politicians and right-wing media, not content with run-of-the-mill blame-shifting, have coalesced around a malicious falsehood instead — the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people are freezing in the dark, even though conservative Republicans have run the state for a generation.
• Opinion | The Plot to Help America’s Children - The New York Times
• Lionel Messi, Barcelona and the Crippling Cost of Success - The New York Times
• Opinion | The Science of Changing Someone's Mind - The New York Times - ask and listen rather than debate
  • asking people how their preferred political policies might work in practice, rather than asking why they favor those approaches, was more effective in opening their minds
• The Stock Traders of Reddit and TikTok - The New York Times
• Opinion | Children Need to Be Back in School Tomorrow - The New York Times
• Opinion | What Kamala Harris Means For Girls - The New York Times
• Opinion | The Extraordinary Courage of Aleksei Navalny - The New York Times
• Why Eric Lander’s Controversial Paper “The Heroes of CRISPR” Is Not Solid Historical Research | American Scientist
• Why Aren't We Wearing Better Masks? - The Atlantic
• Opinion | This Is When the Fever Breaks - The New York Times (David Brooks)
• A Rebuttal to some CS Academics’ “Free Speech” Open Letter to the ACM | by David Karger | Jan, 2021 | Medium - cancel culture needs calibrate its threshold to balance false positives and false negatives
• Does Class Warfare Have A Free-Rider Problem? | Slate Star Codex
  • Too Much Dark Money In Almonds | Slate Star Codex - many don't donate for fear that others won't, leading to a surprisingly low amount of political donations

2020

• Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police - The New York Times

  • a better term for "abolish the police" would be "make the police obsolete"

• China is What Orwell Feared (The Atlantic)

  • China's surveillance is very far along

• Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise (Quillete)

• Fake News Comes to Academia

  • Liberal-leaning PC studies got through peer review bc no one wanted to question them.

• Why Do Chinese Liberals Embrace American Conservatives?

  • For some Chinese liberals, Mr. Trump’s strident opposition to the Chinese Communist Party automatically made him seem like an ally. True for Jimmy Lai

• Liberalism and Its Discontents (Francis Fukuyama)

  • Classical liberalism can best be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity
  • most fundamental principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance
  • newer understanding: liberalism is not simply a mechanism for pragmatically avoiding violent conflict, but also a means of protecting fundamental human dignity
  • liberalism and democracy are different: Liberalism is allied to democracy through its protection of individual autonomy
  • from 1950-1970s, liberal democracy flourished
  • first discontent: economic
    • neoliberalism - pejorative, overly free markets
      • aggregate incomes rise, but so does inequality
  • second discontent: cultural
    • liberal state does not tell you how to live your life, often filled with consumerism etc.
    • stress on individualism contradicts biological social nature of people
    • critics of liberalism on the right feel that it has undervalued the nation and traditional national identity
    • critics on left: doesn't do enough to root out deep-seated racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, so politics must go beyond liberalism-- want the deeper bonding and personal satisfaction of associating—in this case, with people who have suffered from similar indignities.
  • effects
    • shifts politics towards identities
    • fails to define boundaries of citizenship and rights: if rights are fundamental to all humans, how can we deny citizenship / rights to migrants?

• Opinion | 2020 Was the Year Reaganism Died - The New York Times (Paul Krugman) - this year, we saw gov. aid to unemployed works lead to very good outcomes with essentially no drawbacks

misc old

• How to be anti-racist
  • Racism can be defined generally as anything which perpetuates racist acts (so apathy can be racist)
• Op-Ed: How Indian Americans came to dominate the National Spelling Bee
  • similar language
• Do artifacts have Politics?
• Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets

workism

• Opinion | 'Lying Flat': Tired Workers Are Opting Out of Careers and Capitalism - The New York Times (cassady rosenblum, 2021)
  • These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy - The New York Times (elsie chen, 2021)
  • ‘Lie Flat’ If You Want, But Be Ready to Pay the Price - Bloomberg (schrager, 2021)
    • people in the developed world have never worked so little
    • one study estimates that between 1965 and 2003, American men gained an extra six to eight hours of leisure time a week; women gained four to eight
    • since 2003, leisure time has increased further
• How to escape the 'productivity trap' - BBC Worklife
  • humankind’s peculiar preoccupation with time – and, in particular, whether we spend it “productively” – became much greater with the common usage of the clock and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution
• **The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable - The Atlantic **(derek thompson, 2019)
  • For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver.
  • "In a 1957 article in The New York Times, the writer Erik Barnouw predicted that, as work became easier, our identity would be defined by our hobbies, or our family life."
  • the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings
  • Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? - The New York Times (erin griffith, 2019)
• Less Work For Mother? | AMERICAN HERITAGE (ruth schwartz cowan, 1987)

racism

• The Casteism I See in America - The Atlantic
  • A 2016 study by Equality Labs, an American civil-rights organization focused on caste, found that 41 percent of South-Asian Americans who identify as lower-caste reported facing caste discrimination in U.S. schools and universities, compared with 3 percent of upper-caste respondents
  • In July 2020, California regulators sued the tech company Cisco Systems over alleged discrimination toward an Indian engineer by his Indian colleagues while all of them were working in the state
• Opinion | Can Religion Guide the Ethics of A.I.? - The New York Times
• Officer who stood by as George Floyd died highlights complex Asian American, black relations
• Opinion | What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America - The New York Times
  • some Asian-Americans were outraged by recent incidents of anti-Asian violence, but since the perpetrators in these cases were Black, many others felt deeply uncomfortable with contributing to the criminalization of African-Americans
• Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. - The New York Times
• A Sociologist Examines the “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism

ai

• Timnit Gebru was critical of Google’s approach to ethical AI
• Disembodied Machine Learning: On the Illusion of Objectivity in NLP
• Stop talking about AI ethics. It’s time to talk about power. | MIT Technology Review

tech

• Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever - The Verge
  • some students don't understand the concept of directories, likely bc they are used to the search-engine model
• Opinion | Google’s Privacy Backpedal Shows Why It’s So Hard Not to Be Evil - The New York Times
  • "So it was that Google executives were dismayed over a most inconvenient discovery: When they made it simpler to halt digital location tracking, far too many customers did so."
• Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. Call Them Tech Frenemies for Life. - WSJ
• Opinion | We're Google Workers. And We're Forming a Union. - The New York Times - union of ~200 workers forms in Google
• The Tech Cold War’s ‘Most Complicated Machine’ That’s Out of China’s Reach - The New York Times

economy

• Where Have All the Houses Gone? - The New York Times
  • way fewer houses for sale during pandemic (less houses for sale = less houses for )
  • government-backed loans prevented some foreclosures (and corresponded to less houses for sale)
  • since housing crash, less housing has been built relative to historical averages
• Big Tech and Big Finance Breed Hubris - WSJ
  • BlackRock has ~$9 trillion under management (along w/ 2 closest rivals, exerts around 25% voting control over most publicly traded companies)
  • this allows it to impose its beliefs on economy

sports

• Opinion | The N.F.L. Bets on Betting - The New York Times

humor

• Learning the Ropes | The New Yorker

emotions

• attending to the other
  • “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”
  • Wittgenstein said that “you cannot enter worlds for which you do not have the language.”
  • Hartmut Rosa calls a similar mode of relating resonance. Instead of viewing ourselves as closed off, independent systems bent on controlling the other, we should leave ourselves open to being affected by the world

speeches

• This Is Water by David Foster Wallace Full Speech - YouTube
  • learning how to think is about reconsidering your default believes and deciding how you see things
  • everything you experience has you at the center of it
  • everyone worships something (e.g. money, success)
    • the problem with many of these are that they are unconscious
  • One way to practice attention is to notice the non-logical aspects of communication