Category Archives: Current Affairs

“I used to think. Now I just read The Economist.” – Larry Ellison

When I read the Economist each week — a task that takes several hours and is worthy of much strategizing for how to tackle such a meaty publication — I realize how much happens in the world that I simply can’t keep up with. This is a central question when I consume news and knowledge: What topics you do think critically about and on what topics do you outsource the critical thinking?

For example, I’ve outsourced critical thinking on Iraq. I have neither the knowledge or interest in the subjects involved to think hard and come to my own opinions on what’s happening there. So I outsource it. I read Jim Fallows, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, and others. And I basically trust their analyses.

I’ve outsourced critical thinking on global warming, on Latin America and Africa, on biotech, and countless other topics. I commit to staying casually informed on these matters, but I don’t commit to thinking hard about them and developing my own opinion.

I don’t outsource critical thinking on everything (I hope!). Topics such as business and entrepreneurship, technology, globalization, travel, religion, life philosophy, Asia, venture capital, journalism, U.S. politics, writing and publishing, and others. For these topics, I still read what smart people have to say — Tyler Cowen on globalization, say, or Jack Shafer on journalism — but I will do my own research and write my own analysis.

Since we don’t have unlimited time, we have to choose what to think hard about. For everything else, we should develop trusted sources for analysis. This fits the “T” model perfectly — go deep in a few things yourself, and be broadly informed on lots of things via other people.

What topics do you think hard about? Who do you trust when forming opinions about topics outside your field of focus?

A couple years ago, after witnessing yet another National Organization for Women announcement at my school, I noted to a friend, "You know, if the people involved in feminist clubs were attractive, I think more people would listen up. Unfortunately, most of the ‘proactively feminist’ are unattractive."

P.J. O’Rourke, who I find hilarious, coined "the babe theory of political movements" some time ago:

"Best of all, there were hardly any beautiful women at the [Housing Now!] rally. I saw a journalist friend of mine in the Mall, and he and I pursued this line of inquiry as assiduously as our happy private lives allow. Practically every female at the march was a bowser. "We’re not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It’s not that looks matter per se. It’s just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed," said my friend. "And this," he looked around him, "isn’t it."

The WILLisms blog amusingly looks at this theory in-depth. Here’s the cartoon that says it all:

(Hat tip: Newmark’s Door)

Amidst all the chaos and blood in Iraq, there are still many inspiring stories. Time magazine journalist Michael Weisskopf, for example, wrote a long piece a few months ago about how he lost his hand covering a grenade while embedded with US troops. Today, Dana Canedy writes in the New York Times a truly moving piece about her husband.

While serving in Iraq and Kuwait, her husband Charles Monroe wrote a 200 page journal to his nine month old son in case he died while in combat. He just died. The journal contains all the life advice he would have imparted as his son grew up, from the trivial (where to hide money while on vacation) to the soulful:

Never be ashamed to cry. No man is too good to get on his knee and humble himself to God. Follow your heart and look for the strength of a woman.

Sgt. Monroe was also a talented artist (educated at the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago) and left his son the below sketch, presumably of himself with wings of an angel. These kinds of stories remind me what true heroism is, and that if I can one day be only half the man Sgt. Monroe was, I have much to be proud of.

(Hat tip: Ramit Sethi)

The New York Times magazine ran their annual Year in Ideas feature, listing 74 ideas which defined 2006. Brief blurbs describe each idea. It’s awesome — read it from head to toe. Here are some of my favorite picks:

Homophily — "Our inexorable tendency to link up with one another in ways that confirm rather than test our core beliefs."

Psychological Neoteny – "The next time you see a mother of three head-banging to death metal or a 50-year-old man sporting a faux-hawk, don’t laugh. According to Bruce Charlton, a doctor and psychology professor at Newcastle University in Britain, what looks like immaturity — or in Charlton’s kinder terms, the “retention of youthful attitudes and behaviors into later adulthood” — is actually a valuable developmental characteristic, which he calls psychological neoteny."

The Visage Problem – "Like other prosopagnosics, Sieghart finds most human faces to be about as distinguishable as stones in a driveway. The disorder was first fully described in the medical literature in the 1940s and has long been viewed as an exceedingly rare, baffling derangement." 2% afflicted with this disease.

The Social Cue Reader – For autistic people: "The Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis, developed by Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind Picard, consists of a small camera mounted on a cap or glasses that monitors a conversation partner’s facial expressions and feeds the data into a hand-held computer."

Hyperopia – "Kivetz interviewed 63 subjects and asked half of them to recall a time in the previous week when they had to choose between work or pleasure — and then to rank how they felt about their decision on a scale from “no regret at all” to “a lot of regret.” Then Kivetz asked the other half to do the same for a similar decision five years in the past. When the moment in question was a week before, those who worked industriously reported that they were glad they had. Those who partied said they regretted it. But when the subjects considered the decision from five years in the past, the propositions reversed: those who toiled regretted it; those who relaxed were happy with their choice."

Empty Stomach Intelligence – "Horvath says we can use the hormonal discoveries to our cognitive advantage. Facing the LSAT, a final exam or a half-day job interview? Go in mildly hungry, not carbo-loaded for endurance, and snack to maintain that edgy state."

The Eyes of Honesty – How do you get people to leave 50 cents on the honor system for a soda in the office? "During one week, it was a picture of flowers; during the other, it was a pair of staring eyes. Then they sat back to watch what would happen."

The Aerotropolis – "Traditionally, of course, airports have served cities, but in the past few years airports have started to become cities unto themselves, giving rise to a new urban form: the aerotropolis."

Negativity Friendships – "If you ask a random sample of friends how they became friends, they will probably tell you that they like a lot of the same things and, perhaps more important, that they like the same people. So they may. But one of the surest routes to friendship is disliking the same things about other people, according to Jennifer Bosson and three colleagues, who published “Interpersonal Chemistry Through Negativity: Bonding by Sharing Negative Attitudes About Others”

Paul Tough had a superbly written article in Sunday’s NYT magazine on the state of youth education in America and, more specifically, the troubling achievement gap between the poor and the well-off.

My favorite quote, on the subject of differing parenting styles between poor and middle class parents, was:  "As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite — but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society."

If you want to spend 15 minutes and get a solid briefing on the state of U.S. education, the succeses and failures of charter schooling, parenting styles that work, and what various people are trying to do about our problems, print out the article and read it carefully. Excerpts:

The academics have demonstrated just how deeply pervasive and ingrained are the intellectual and academic disadvantages that poor and minority students must overcome to compete with their white and middle-class peers. The divisions between black and white and rich and poor begin almost at birth, and they are reinforced every day of a child’s life….

There had, in fact, been evidence for a long time that poor children fell behind rich and middle-class children early, and stayed behind. But researchers had been unable to isolate the reasons for the divergence. Did rich parents have better genes? Did they value education more? Was it that rich parents bought more books and educational toys for their children? Was it because they were more likely to stay married than poor parents? Or was it that rich children ate more nutritious food? Moved less often? Watched less TV? Got more sleep? Without being able to identify the important factors and eliminate the irrelevant ones, there was no way even to begin to find a strategy to shrink the gap.  

Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children….

They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79.

When Hart and Risley then addressed the question of just what caused those variations, the answer they arrived at was startling. By comparing the vocabulary scores with their observations of each child’s home life, they were able to conclude that the size of each child’s vocabulary correlated most closely to one simple factor: the number of words the parents spoke to the child. That varied greatly across the homes they visited, and again, it varied by class. In the professional homes, parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” — anything from a one-word command to a full soliloquy — to their children each hour. In welfare homes, the children heard 178 utterances per hour.  

What’s more, the kinds of words and statements that children heard varied by class. The most basic difference was in the number of “discouragements” a child heard — prohibitions and words of disapproval — compared with the number of encouragements, or words of praise and approval. By age 3, the average child of a professional heard about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. For the welfare children, the situation was reversed: they heard, on average, about 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. Hart and Risley found that as the number of words a child heard increased, the complexity of that language increased as well. As conversation moved beyond simple instructions, it blossomed into discussions of the past and future, of feelings, of abstractions, of the way one thing causes another — all of which stimulated intellectual development.  

Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up…

Another researcher, an anthropologist named Annette Lareau, has investigated the same question from a cultural perspective. Over the course of several years, Lareau and her research assistants observed a variety of families from different class backgrounds, basically moving in to each home for three weeks of intensive scrutiny. Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children’s development — piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.  

The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose — playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends — but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.  

In her book “Unequal Childhoods,” published in 2003, Lareau described the costs and benefits of each approach and concluded that the natural-growth method had many advantages. Concerted cultivation, she wrote, “places intense labor demands on busy parents. … Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents’ incompetence and disparage parents’ decisions.” Working-class and poor children, by contrast, “learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize.” But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of “natural growth” disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.    

…However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite — but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.