2024-10-01
learning
Here’s a Psmith review of Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers. In regards to my preference, this review probably has too much focus on what Zvonkin’s actual methods were, and less of the web of interconnecting big ideas that makes the PSmith formula so compelling. The fact that you can trace clusters of high performance often to a single source while at the same time we have mass involution indicates to me that education has been somehow trapped in a local optima. In an ideal world, that effort should be creating a marketplace of parenting methods, all with their own comparative advantage. Instead, Bryan Caplan can credibly claim that results are barely affected by parenting effort and are primarily genetic. Perhaps homeschooling is a solution, although it’s also possible that as homeschooling and AI-assisted education becomes more common they too become standardized.
Henry Oliver reviews Mating by Norman Rush. There’s one additional reason I think the novel is so popular, in that the author is a self-acknowledged neurotic, which perfectly suits our age of anxiety. Speaking of neuroticism, after reading Karen Horney, I feel like the neuroticism described by the OCEAN model is actually composed of two separate natures. One side is the emotional volatility, a measure of the degree of dissatisfaction necessary in order to cause an emotional outburst. The other side describes excessive idealism, which raises baseline dissatisfaction and causes fast hedonic adaptation. Among intellectuals, the latter is often very high, which eventually causes explosion even though the former is typically low.
Wood From Eden synopsizes Yanoama - The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians. Particularly interesting in that you can read the influence of evopsych theories behind every sentence (this is probably intentional).
Paul Bloom on the uses and limits of emotional storytelling.
Scott Alexander is crowdsourcing a ACX slate of candidates for election. It’s interesting, because I don’t regard this as a partisan action, is that because I share the ACX worldview and therefore presumably its politics? I don’t think so, but I’m not sure.
