Progressive Paradox, Performative Reading, Robot Therapists
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my latest conversation with journalist Meghan Daum and clinical psychologist Andrew Hartz, Ph.D. on the Open Therapy podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
The Washington Post:
I wrote a piece about why upper-middle-class progressives give their children traditional names.
The latest data on baby names reveals a progressive paradox
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:
Performative reading is good for literary culture by ARX-Han
A Contrarian Call for Divided Government by Roy Baumeister
Where Hannah Arendt Began by Suzanna Murawski
No, We Don’t Need to Ban Caste Discrimination by Lee Jussim, Danit Finkelstein, Colin Wright
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. People are 75 percent more likely to become divorced if a friend is divorced and 33% more likely to divorce if a friend of a friend is divorced. The contagion of divorce can spread through a social network, affecting friends up to two degrees removed. (source).
2. 24% of very liberal Americans say it is “always or usually acceptable” for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose, compared with just 3% of very conservative Americans. (source).
3. Research consistently shows that men are treated more harshly than women in the criminal justice system: They receive longer sentences for the same crime, even taking into account factors such as criminal history, type of offense, seriousness of offense, marital status, and childcare responsibilities. Interestingly, male judges are more likely than female ones to go easy on female defendants. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
Rob,
I've read a number of studies related to liberal vs conservative vs progressive attitudes towards political violence, and it seems to me that something's missing, at least in what I've read. What if there are people who tolerate or support political violence, but don't tolerate or support public statements expressing such tolerance or support? I'd imagine there's some number of people who think along the lines of, "I'd love it if someone assassinated that politician I hate, but would never say so in public discourse, because that would be in poor taste and might encourage a broader climate of political violence that isn't limited to the politicians I, personally, would like to see shot in the head." It seems to me, someone like that might engage in preference falsification when answering survey questions for a study on attitudes towards political violence for the same reasons they might refrain from making such comments in public discourse. (I'm assuming you're familiar with "preference falsification" as described by economist Timur Kuran, having heard a number of your heterodox social science contemporaries mention it.) It might also be true that one political orientation or another is more or less likely to include people who'd falsify preferences related to political violence. Not sure how to address that issue when considering existing data sets, but ever since reading Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies at Glenn Loury's recommendation, I've been thinking about how preference falsification might be distorting social science research, and it's troubling. I heard about a study that asked Republicans if they thought the Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump, and asked Democrats if they supported defunding the police. After getting participants' responses, the researchers talked to them some more, essentially asking if they really believed what they'd said. I don't remember the exact figures, but the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who'd initially falsified their preferences was significantly larger than those who'd given the same responses truthfully. Not sure what can be done about this. You've posted some articles recently that have discussed hypergamy in the dating market. I imagine that's a topic about which people might be less than entirely truthful when stating preferences.
Please examine the current state of American education and whether it will ever recover from declining and woke thinking