Fairness, Cost of Glory, Bullying
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my recent conversation with Alex Petkas on the Cost of Glory podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
My latest for The Boston Globe:
Extremism goes from an inside joke to a terrible reality
The Only Reading App I Use:
I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:
These screenshots come from my Readwise app.
Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.
Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.
Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use this link → https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).
I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.
Links and recommendations:
Who Was to Blame for Pandemic School Closures? by Adam Lehodey
Different Kinds of Fairness by Roy Baumeister
Superintelligence and the Decline of Human Interdependence by
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Lower-skilled male players in Halo 3 tended to direct more hostile comments toward female players, especially when those female players performed poorly. In contrast, higher-skilled male players were more likely to offer female players supportive comments. (source). Consistent with many studies on bullying which show a predictable pattern: High-status boys bully low-status boys. In turn, low-status boys bully high-status girls.
2. People with higher IQs are substantially less likely to get into physical fights or deliberately hit someone. Sixteen percent of individuals with IQs in the 70-79 range reported violent behavior, compared with just 2.9% of those with IQs of 120-129. (source; h/t Steve Stewart-Williams). This rings true to me. Those of you who read Troubled know I got into plenty of fights as a kid (so many that I couldn’t include all of them). I noticed that as I passed through institutions that screen for intelligence, physical violence became increasingly rare. First the military, where fights occasionally broke out but nothing like what I witnessed where I grew up. Then college and grad school, where physical violence was nonexistent. No doubt much of this is due to official and unofficial rules, as well as class-based norms around violence. Still, the pattern is clear to me.
3. Compared with young conservatives, young liberals are 4 times more likely to endorse using physical violence to stop a person from engaging in public speech. (source).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
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Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
The juxtaposition of item #2 and 3 is interesting. Does that mean liberals are less intelligent since they are more likely to endorse resorting to violence?
Any way for your Substack subscribers to get access to your Globe columns without paying?