New Yorker magazine alert thread

clearest red flag of them all in second para

he was a competitive ballroom dancer

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds?mbid=social_twitter

great article!

if you're into evolutionary psychology, yes - if not, you might find this description of rationality... funny:

It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

for me the premise of the article is backwards, and I'd be more curious to trace and understand the notion of contemporary society and citizens as rational, than to understand why natural science hasn't by now turned us all into rational robots

yeah i often find the hunter-gatherer evolutionary psych conclusions a bit specious but the research is interesting

I mean why is it still so important to preface discussions of our limited cognitive capabilities with "1. assume animal origins" IT'S TWENTY SEVENTEEN

I'd be more curious to trace and understand the notion of contemporary society and citizens as rational

I agree, but isn't that really "why we still cling to weird theistic concepts that we were designed and why we find it so infuriatingly necessary to explain that they aren't true" but I guess that's kind of what the article is about, in a way, so there's that snake eating itself again

i thought the research that elucidated how little we really understand things, how we outsource knowledge to others and form (flimsy) opinions based on that trust, was really spot on. it's a ubiquitous phenomenon and i don't think many people are really aware of it. i tried to make a similar point at various points last year in the politics thread in particular and no one seemed to care for it

the description of the research, rather

we outsource knowledge to others and form (flimsy) opinions based on that trust, was really spot on

I agree that this is a deep question, but there is one satisfying, rational answer to it that applies in many but not all cases.

Why do we 'believe' scientists to tell us the truth about results if we can't parse the evidence ourselves? Because we have created institutions within academia such that the incentives of individual scientists are to over-turn false results. So collectively, if a false result becomes public or widespread believed, there is immediately an incentive for another scientist to replicate that study, to critique it, to hopefully over-turn it. So in the medium- to long-term (sometimes long-term is too long, see Andrew Gelman & co. debunking decades of psychology research), there is a strong tendency to self-correct to the truth. So we don't have to independently verify results that have been upheld in a scientific community for a long time.

also, idk if they talk about this in the nyorker piece (haven't read but will assap) but there is a pretty large theoretical literature (spans fields of Decision Theory, economics, statistics, math) on what it means to convince someone, to what extent it is possible, whether beliefs will converge, and whether they will converge to the truth, that was started by this paper by Robert Aumann called "Agreeing to Disagree" http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/~raumann/pdf/Agreeing%20to%20Disagree.pdf

xp to myself- another version of that is, we can rationally believe in the science behind the technologies we use every day. if I drive over a bridge every day in my car, and every day the car starts and every day the bridge does not collapse, I can justify my faith (via Law of Large Numbers arguments) that the science used by mechanical engineers and civil engineers is correct

xp Kevin yup agree the experiments described are interesting

how little we really understand things, how we outsource knowledge to others and form (flimsy) opinions

I think that men are particularly prone to this but have a lesser sense of flimsiness than women, and that this is a significant driver of mansplaining.

My problem with "evolutionary psychology" is not that we don't have evolutionary origins, it's just that in practice these little bits of speculative narrative about how various mental behaviors might or might not have been adaptive under certain situations don't really add anything to the experimental results. Having a plausible-sounding evolution story doesn't make a result any stronger, and not being able to think of a plausible-sounding story doesn't make it any weaker. In terms of empirical method, they seem irrelevant, though perhaps fun to think about.

otm

Did I see correctly that Grann is back?

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-marked-woman

awwww Shit

my in-laws got me a print subscription for christmas. the amount of good writing is overwhelming tbh, the issues arrive faster than i can read them. it's only march and already there are a bunch of issues on my shelf that i don't even remember opening

Yep, that is the system.

Yeah, soon you'll have piles all over, each with one article you've been meaning to get around to for years.

The article about the utility of contacting congressmen frustrated me (Don't email, call; but when you call, don't follow a script).

marcos' description makes me get nostalgic - i kind of want to re-up my subscription.

it's weird though because i still feel impatience for the next one to come! "why isn't it here yet, it's been a few days!"

I catch up by reading a couple articles a week at work (I rarely read the fiction).

i think if i read 1) a little bit of the talk of the town; 2) maybe one feature, and; 3) a piece of criticism then that would be pretty good. even that's hard though

I look forward to the fiction issue every year, because it means two weeks off.

I gasped with relief three weeks ago when I saw the last issue was a double.

I let my subscription lapse last month, but until then I read (most of) every issue from 2010 to 2016. Yeah, it can be a relief when stuff you know you can skip comes around: "15 fiction writers reminiscing about about the smell of their mothers' kitchens? Oh yeah!"

i'm convinced that's intentional on their part

This is possibly too pedantic, but every week I mark the articles I want to read with a red X in the index, which makes it easier figuring out when to trash/recycle them.

my system is something like

-always read first section of Talk of the Town (the subsequent ones are always gossipy quiddities and agonies of the ruling class trash imo)

-always read Surowieckie, James Wood, Schjejdaal, and the music criticism

-always read the comics

-never read fiction unless it's someone whose name I recognize or if it got bigupped itt or on twitter somewhere

-never read theatre criticism. never read tv critic unless I've watched the show

also, i almost always skim 'goings on about town' (even though I don't live in NYC, it's just nice, the images are beautiful, and you can find out about interesting things) and the 'briefly noted' book reviews. and i read the first two or three lines of every poem

and then for the longform stuff, I just go by what interests me or writers I like. try to do one a week minimum

oh and i always read Anthony Lane but not Denby on film

also never read Gopnik

why do you guys get print? the kindle subscription is much cheaper and it doesn't pile up (physically)
i make it through an issue in a day or two but i'm pretty merciless about skipping articles i'm not interested in, even if they're important

kindle version also shows up first thing monday morning, no wait for it to show up in the mail

print is more fun to read, always

Print + ipad is the same price as just print iirc. I usually read the e-issue on Monday and my wife too the print to read on the train.

also all my books are in our attic in storage right now i so don't mind having physical issues pile up

i spend 8 hours a day looking at a computer screen, probably an additional hour looking at my phone, if i can avoid a screen for some of my leisure reading then i am better off

i wonder to what extent young talent will continue to draw from Gawker (Chen, Tolentino), pitchfork (Carrie Battan), n+1 (Blumenkranz, Batuman) in the next decade

never read Gopnik

otm

he wrote one of the worst new yorker articles i've ever seen, just a few days ago. not sure it counts as a true "article" or not because it was short and only posted online i guess, but it was about the idea that we're living in a simulation (which prompts seriously eye rolls from ILX i know but is actually fascinating) ...combined with the oscar best picture fuck-up, standing in for proof that the simulation had gone off the rails. i kept waiting for him to make a joke but it seems like he was half serious? but also that he just really wanted to write something about how surreal the shittiness of the last year has been in the context of the simulation argument, but wanted to wait for a new "crazy" event to occur in order to publish it, but then overreacted to the spectacle of the oscars thing and blew his wad too early? anyway it was the worst thing i've seen in the new yorker in a long time, other than borowitz

man people fuckin LOVE borowitz

borowitz is the worstowitz

patricia marx shopping articles are my personal bugbear, but i don't think they've published one in a while

ugh fuckin hate patricia marx

― congratulations (n/a), Wednesday, February 2, 2011 2:14 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I skipped a ton of stuff this week. Patricia Marx (ugh), Muslim brotherhood (feel guilty about this but I'm tired of these pieces), John McPhee (not in the mood for long personal reminisces). Pedophilia piece was good but I skimmed some because it was so hard to read.

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, January 7, 2013 8:42 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ugh I hate Patricia Marx so much. Her shopping updates were dumb enough, but this week she writes about taking a trip on a freighter, which is potentially interesting, but her writing is so self-centered and cutesy and trite that the piece is totally worthless.

― Immediate Follower (NA), Wednesday, January 29, 2014 9:20 AM (three years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha how many times has this thread had the shouts and murmurs/Patricia Marx/denby conversation

― max, Sunday, August 12, 2012 8:27 AM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Karl otm, that simulation piece by Gopnik was abysmal. In more competent hands etc.. because it truly is an interesting topic. But you have got to do better than 'omg first trump won and now a wrong enveloppe at the oscars: the people running our simulation are losing it!1!'

what's weird is that they already published two pieces about it relatively recently!

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom
http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-are-the-odds-we-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation

haven't read the rothman one, but the bostrom profile was good, i thought. so it's weird that gopnik was itching to write about the same subject again, without adding anything of any value to it!