Status Cues, Escalating Signals, Luck
Links and recommendations
You can now listen to my recent discussion with Charles Fain Lehman, Jesse Arm, John Ketcham on the City Journal Podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
My latest in City Journal:
Why do older generations surrender moral authority to the most narcissistic, impulsive, and dishonest age group?
Wisdom Still Comes With Age—Not Youth
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 passage 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:
Trans Criminals: The Problem We Refuse to Define by Hannah E. Meyers
Podcast Bros and Brain Rot by Nathan Cofnas
What to Do by Paul Graham
Men Need Romantic Relationships More Than Women Do by Charlie Huntington
Escalating Signals Cut Fertility by Robin Hanson
Family Structure Matters for Rich Kids, Too by Grant Bailey and Wendy Wang
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. Across cultures and throughout history, mothers and fathers have acted on the assumption that if their children got into trouble, other adults—even strangers—would step in to help. But when adults stop supporting one another in raising children, parenting becomes harder. (source: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt).
2. Men tend to overestimate how much women care about physical appearance, while women tend to overestimate how much men care about status cues. Each sex projects its own preferences onto the other, acting on the mistaken belief that the opposite sex values the same things they do. (source: The Red Queen by Matt Ridley).
3. PTSD rates are higher in affluent countries than in those with greater adversity and violence—for example, Canada’s PTSD rate is 6 times higher than Mexico’s. As living conditions improve, people often become more psychologically susceptible to possible suffering. (source: Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics by Kurt Gray).
"Men tend to overestimate how much women care about physical appearance, while women tend to overestimate how much men care about status cues. Each sex projects its own preferences onto the other, acting on the mistaken belief that the opposite sex values the same things they do."
This makes perfect sense and reflects what I see out in the world among women of my cohort and younger (millennial, professional class). I have often wondered how much men are affected by how "put together" a woman looks. E.g., are cosmetic procedures for attracting men or are they to meet an instagram aesthetic that women compete with each other to reach? Experience tells me that it's likely the latter.
“As living conditions improve, people often become more psychologically susceptible to possible suffering.”
This is what we observed with Covid. Most of the population became overwhelmed by fear, and still is in fear mode (masking, distancing, fear mongering, Nazi Trump, etc, etc)