You can now listen to my recent conversation with Colin Campbell on the CamBro Conversations podcast:
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
From the archives
Here I’m resurfacing a piece I wrote for The Free Press about why the U.S. military is having difficulty with recruitment.
Links and recommendations
Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation by Manvir Singh
No ‘Hippie Ape’: Bonobos Are Often Aggressive, Study Finds by Carl Zimmer
How American Parents Turn Their Daughters Out. by Peachy Keenan
Some echoes of The Last Psychiatrist in this one
Generation Z is unprecedentedly rich (The Economist)
Beyond IQ: The consequences of ignoring talent by Matthew Archer
Being smart is necessary but not sufficient to academically excel. Without the proper resources, support, inputs, investment, guidance, mentorship, and so on, even very bright people can flounder
Superlinear Returns by Paul Graham
Three interesting findings
1. From a paper titled “One’s Better Half: Romantic Partners Function as Social Signals,” the authors find that people think men with attractive partners have higher status, relative to men with less attractive partners. The authors suggest that attractive romantic partners function similarly to high-quality luxury goods. When you have an attractive partner or an expensive watch, people infer that you have desirable underlying attributes. As always, it’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily imply that people are consciously and deliberately attempting to signal things about themselves (though sometimes people do this). Most of the time we do things like buy expensive stuff and seek attractive partners not to impress others, but largely because they make us feel good. But from an evolutionary perspective, effortful actions can’t evolve just because they happen to feel good. The good feelings evolved to motivate the behavior which must have some hidden benefit. This behavior is usually unconscious. More here.
2. Psychologist Paul Bloom (who was my undergrad advisor at Yale back in the day) in his superb book Against Empathy:
“It is one of the ironies of modern intellectual life that many scholars insist that rationality is impotent, that our efforts at reasoning are at best a smokescreen to justify selfish motivations and irrational feelings. And to make this point, these scholars write books and articles complete with complex chains of logic, citations of data, and carefully reasoned argument. It’s like insisting that there is no such thing as poetry—and making this case in the form of a poem.”
I strongly recommend Paul’s Substack.
3. Why do people make anonymous donations? Buried signals. (source).
Many people eventually find out who the donor is. Anonymity adds to perception of the donor's goodness
Only certain people find out. These are the people that matter to the donor
Relatedly, this is why people with lots of positive attributes can afford to be modest. Odds are that at least one of their good traits will be uncovered. People with only one particular strength, though, will be eager to show it, because it's all they have. Very successful people can afford to countersignal (and depending on the context, perhaps they should, to avoid envy), but countersignaling is not the optimal approach for most people.
One reason for the anonymous donation is because you do not want to have an on-going relationship with the recipient. If they need more money, you don't want them to bother you. And you don't want to end up in a database shared with those who see themselves as like-minded and want money for similar causes.
For the source of the anonymous donor bit I was hoping it would say “Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 6 Episode 2.”