Aella reports on what type of music people find most danceable based on personality and dance background. There’s a confounder that some of the music she surveyed is considered to be danceable by particular personality types not necessarily because of their intrinsic properties, but because they are often danced to within niche scenes, like Meshuggah (moshing) or Aventura (Bachata).
Jacob Falkovich has advice for women on what to optimize if you are already hot. There’s something that annoys me about red-pill and dating frameworks in general, in that it feels like an attempt to turn everyone into the same person. The highest percentage improvement comes from being more extroverted (edit: Divya Ven has an interesting thread on this topic), but if during courtship you pretend to be someone who you aren’t, that doesn’t bode well for the longevity of the actual relationship; so if you want to succeed, you have to actually become extroverted. But presumably there are some women who aren’t into that type, and many men would also prefer to remain introverted. Rather than trying to fit everyone along one standard axis, there should be alternative strategies and frameworks which work for them. I get there are evopsych explanations for the dominance of the expansive pursuit strategy, yet the continual existence of introversion implies that there are benefits to it, and at least historically, that alternative strategies existed. That you can go beyond the maxim of slim and agreeable for women gives me some hope that dating discourse might be evolving to more nuanced or alternative methods.
On the topic of self-improvement, Cate Hall also has interesting advice, suggesting that if you are having trouble figuring out what the highest leverage improvement is, you should look into what you are purposely avoiding. It’s an interesting principle which sounds very general, but it occurs to me that it might not be, because the personality types which are always searching for things to optimize might all have very similar deepest fears.
On the topic of psychology, Seeds of Science has an article by Ethan Ludwin-Peery noting that the current state of psychology is primitive and poses some possible new paradigms for research. Personally, it seems clear to me that what is required is closing the loop between personality type and evolutionary psychology, directly leapfrogging the medical field’s turn to personalized medicine: association of by which I mean firstly stratifying results of interventions by personality type, as proposed by Wood From Eden; then associating different genotypes with different personality traits. Joined together, you can use something like this model by SlimeMoldTimeMold to determine the biological mechanics behind personality traits, and therefore use it to model for how macro interventions might affect biological micro-mechanics.
Clearer Thinking podcast interview on OCPD, apparently the most common personality disorder in the United States. For an alternative take, see Aether Mug on kodawari.
Sam Harsimony poses the question of when to stop carbon sequestration. It’s not clear to me that this is something where agreement can be found, and we might have an interesting future where Russia is purposely releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while equatorial islands are running unilateral carbon capture programs. Tangentially related, Matt Yglesias on how climate can’t be the central pillar of the Democratic platform.
Noah Smith calls the hollowing out of the middle class a myth. I haven’t been around the country, but the narrative that certain regions like Detroit or Appalachia have been stagnant or regressing is so widespread, I’m a little suspicious that this might be one of those cases where aggregating data is hiding important information. An alternative explanation might be that even if they are doing well relative to the rest of the world, they are falling behind other regions of the United States, which feels like a decline: since a common default assumption in the US is that growth occurs by default, this means you need to look around for someone to blame this underperformance on.
Jodi Ettenberg linkthread.
