Worth Your Time – Page 15 – The one-handed economist

Listen: Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It
Watch: “Chinatown” architecture in the West is not authentic. Instead, it’s aimed at avoiding discrimination.
Read: What is the Dutch obsession with pavement cafes all about?
Listen: If you treat discussions and debates like a soldier (“defend the position!”) rather than a scout (“what’s interesting over here?”), then you are likely to feel right but be wrong over the long term.
Read: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism
Read: Reusable plastic shopping bags are actually making the problem worse
Read: The bad science behind “wash hands and keep distance but ignore masks”
Read: Internet 1.0 was freedom and exploration. Internet 2.0 was exploitation via algorithms. Internet 3.0 will put everything behind paywalls.
Listen: The weird origins of Daylight “Savings” Time and other time trivia
Read: How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body: “What Zuboff observed was that as intellectual engagement with the work went down, the necessity of concentration and attention went up. What the computer did was make the work so routine, so boring, so mindless, clerical workers had to physically exert themselves to be able to focus on what they were even doing. This transition, from work being about the application of knowledge to work being about the application of attention, turned out to have profound physical and psychological impact on the clerical workers themselves.”

H/T to PB

Interesting stuff

Read: Predictable shenanigans with carbon offsets in California: “Mark Trexler, a former offsets developer who worked in earlier U.S. and European carbon markets, said the board should have anticipated the perverse incentives created by its program. “When people write offset rules, they always ignore the fact that there are 1,000 smart people next door that will try to game them,” he said. Since the board set up a system that “incentivizes people to find the areas that are high-density, or high-carbon, that’s what they’re going to do.””
Listen: The birth of techno in Berlin
Watch: In this 1983 video, Grandmaster flash explains how to mix records. History!
Read: It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a massive reassessment of work in America
Listen: (Negative) carbon credits are getting more attention, but can they work?
Watch: Tracking down the other 99% of plastics that are NOT floating in the middle of the ocean
Read: Finally! “Indigenous leaders launch $2.1 billion class-action lawsuits against Canada over lack of drinking water“
Read: Are dentists making money on unnecessary procedures? Sadly, yes.
Read: Louisiana’s refineries, chemical plants and other polluting locations are typically located in areas where freed slaves lived — areas that are still predominately Black. Coincidence? No, systemic racism.
Read: Social Justice Groupthink: Liberalism and science, Pluckrose and Lindsay remind us, are “systems—not just neat little theories—because they are self-skeptical rather than self-certain . . . They are self-correcting.” Enlightenment empiricism encourages us to critique our own beliefs and modify them, however reluctantly we may do so. “People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they’re free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.” Social Justice dogma, which demands uncritical adherence, is the opposite of liberal, although the political right has muddied the waters for years by grouping us all into a collective rubric of “liberal,” “the left” or “radical.”

H/T to BZ