Eric Levitz

As with a lot of David's stuff, I think the conceptual framework here is brilliant but his case for it is undermined by wild overstatement + dubious examples. The argument that people don't earnestly believe, deep down, that education confers economically useful skills (rather than merely credentials with signaling value) seems very weak on a variety of levels. For one thing, formal education obviously does confer such skills; it is not coincidence that the spread of public education coincided with gains in literacy. And although some of pre-med/pre-law education consists of filtering mechanisms to maintain labor scarcity, it seems clear that doctors and lawyers rely on skills acquired in school to practice their trade. For another, the Caplan argument is very silly. It implies: 1) That people sincerely believe that a somewhat tedious and effortful activity would be good for them in the long run, they'll never have a positive emotional reaction to gaining reprieve from that activity in the short term. It's like saying that, if someone feels happy when their dentist appointment is cancelled and their afternoon is suddenly freed up, they must not really believe that dental cleanings are good for their teeth. 2) That students' reacting happily to a single class session being cancelled suggests that they would be similarly enthused if every session of all their classes were cancelled -- such that their tuition bought them no actual pedagogy -- so long as they still received a diploma. This does not seem like a sound inference!

It's happening

Those alleging that El-Sayed supports the Muslim Brotherhood often point to a 2012 editorial he wrote, calling on America to support Egypt's democratic revolution. It is telling that this is the best they can do. In that piece, El-Sayed makes clear that his sympathies lie with democracy, not Islamist movements, which he describes as a "symptom" of dysfunctional government; people generally do not describe their own ideologies as regrettable markers of a disease huffpost.com/entry/why-the-u…

A few months ago, I wrote about a similar issue to the one that Joe flags here. When prompted in languages spoken primarily in an authoritarian state, LLMs tend to give more pro-regime answers, partly because state media produces so much paywall-free text vox.com/politics/489191/chat…

Credit cards are good. They help people weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes. And they cost money to provide. But America's swipe fees are higher than they need to be. Other rich countries maintain credit card systems with much lower rates. vox.com/politics/506417/cred…

Your credit card rewards are funded by a de-facto tax on the poor. Rewards are financed by "swipe fees" -- the fee stores pay to banks when you use credit. To offset these costs, stores typically raise prices -- even for low-income customers who tend to pay in cash (and get no rewards). Thus, the system channels money from low-income Americans to the affluent. We can mitigate this injustice by following the EU's lead and capping swipe fees. vox.com/politics/506417/cred…

I wrote about this concern last year. One answer is that many elites today advocate for progressive redistribution, out of a desire for meaning and/or social esteem. But yeah, I share Cassie's unease (paywall free link: vox.com/the-highlight/466025…)

Gonna do fiction and nonfiction separately

Reading Hofstadter on intellectuals' horror at Eisenhower's election, it was hard not think "how quaint"

Are AI companies hyping up their technology's catastrophic tail-risks to distract media attention from its actual harms? Probably not. And if so, the strategy is failing. vox.com/politics/505834/ai-d…