The Universe began not with a whimper, but with a bang! At least, that’s what you’re commonly told: the Universe and everything in it came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang. Space, time, and all the matter and energy within began from a singular point, and then expanded and cooled, giving rise over billions of years to the atoms, stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies spread out across the billions of light years that make up our observable Universe. It’s a compelling, beautiful picture that explains so much of what we see, from the present large-scale structure of the Universe’s two trillion galaxies to the leftover glow of radiation permeating all of existence. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong, and scientists have known this for almost 40 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/09/21/the-big-bang-wasnt-the-beginning-after-all/

This is a fun read. What can economists learn about urbanization from Burning Man?

“To be a little grandiose about it, this is a really unique moment in human history,” Mr. Romer told me last year. “We’re likely to decide in this time frame what people are going to live with forever.”

Urbanization in the developed world has largely come to an end; nearly everyone who would move from farmland toward cities already has. This century, the same mass migration will run its course across the rest of the world. And if no one prepares for it — if we leave it to developers to claim one field at a time, or to migrants to make their way with no structure — it will be nearly impossible to superimpose some order later.

It will take vast expense, and sweeping acts of eminent domain, to create arterial roads, bus service, trash routes, public parks, basic connectivity.

That prospect agitates Mr. Romer, because the power of cities to lift people out of poverty dissipates when cities don’t work. To economists, cities are labor markets. And labor markets can’t function when there are no roads leading workers out of their favelas, or when would-be inventors never meet because they live in gridlock.

Mr. Romer’s answer is to do with this moment what Burning Man does every summer: Stake out the street grid; separate public from private space; and leave room for what’s to come. Then let the free market take over. No market mechanism can ever create the road network that connects everyone. The government must do that first.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/upshot/paul-romer-burning-man-nobel-economist.html

From Warren Ellis’ Normal:

“Money,” Clough declaimed, “is the dark unknown god driving us all towards certain bloody doom. A giant formless thing from beyond space with a million genitals. It’s the thing in the horror films that you should not directly look at lest you go mad and all that bollocks. It’s crushed the world into new shapes and all we want to do is drink its dark milk because that is the nature of its horrible fucking magic.

All that prelude is to say, coming in to the Hong Kong protests from a
less developed country like the United States is disorienting. If you
have never visited one of the Zeroth World cities of Asia, like Taipei
or Singapore, it can be hard to convey their mix of high density,
mazelike design, utterly reliable public services, and high social
cohesion, any more than it was possible for me or my parents to imagine a
real American city, no matter how many movies we saw. And then to have
to write about protests on top of it!

It’s hard to write articulately about the Five Demands when one
keeps getting brought up short by basic things, like the existence of
clean public bathrooms.

The time and location of protests are set via social media
alchemy; once you get notified about one, you descend through a spotless
mall onto a bright and clean train platform, get whisked away by a
train that arrives almost immediately, step out into another mall, then
finally walk outside into overwhelming heat and a gathering group of
demonstrators.

When it’s over, whether the demonstrators have dispersed of their
own will, or are running from rubber bullets and tear gas, you duck
into another mall, and another train, and within minutes are back in a
land of infinite hypercommerce, tiny alleys and posh hotels with their
lobby on the 40th floor of a skyscraper.

https://idlewords.com/2019/08/a_walk_in_hong_kong.htm

A pair of excellent articles by artist and writer Molly crabapple post-disaster Puerto Rico and the networks of solidarity and change that people are building there:

I arrived in San Juan on July 26, four days after Rosselló had
announced his resignation, and everyone seemed convinced that a new
Puerto Rico was being born. “I had nearly given up,” said José, a
restaurant manager whose design studio went bankrupt after Hurricane
Maria. “The citizens of a colony are now teaching the citizens of the
empire what people power can do,” wrote my friend Christine Nieves, an
organizer on the island’s eastern end. Sugeily Rodríguez Lebrón, a
performer with the radical artistic collective AgitArte, told me she had waited for this moment her entire life.

The protesters had done more than boot Rosselló from office. They
wanted the head of every politician that had cheated and mocked the
island, whether or not they had taken part in the recently leaked texts
and chat messages between the governor and senior officials. “Clean the
house,” the slogan went, and by the day, protesters improvised new
chants savaging each potential Rosselló heir apparent. Protesters
repudiated Puerto Rico’s two-party system as a corrupt Punch-and-Judy
show in which each side took turns to build their patronage networks and
made empty promises of either statehood or greater autonomy; and they
rejected, too, the neocolonial Fiscal Control Board imposed by Congress
in Washington, D.C., that has been wrecking the island’s economy with
austerity measures in order to service unpayable, possibly illegal
debts.

The protests had revealed, in the words of Puerto Rican writer Ana Teresa Toro, “the true social animal that we are: a beast that is joyous, wild, indocile and untamed, that has slept… until now.”

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/09/a-peoples-cry-of-indignation-a-dispatch-from-puerto-rico/

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/17/puerto-ricos-diy-disaster-relief/

Tons of good info here! Sorry about the overused and annoying page design.

Source: Here’s How America Uses Its Land

I found this extremely thought-provoking, and I feel like I see this dynamic in some aspects of social activism. It’s really hard for people to accept that something has genuinely improved, and they don’t need to fight so hard for it anymore (and can turn more attention to things that haven’t improved).

Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al.
show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for
becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her
definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it
is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level
judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and
judgmental standards to “creep” when they ought not to. For example,
when blue dots become rare, participants start calling purple dots blue,
and when threatening faces become rare, participants start calling
neutral faces threatening. This phenomenon has broad implications that
may help explain why people whose job is to find and eliminate problems
in the world often cannot tell when their work is done.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/1465

This is actually a pretty compelling read! I have to confess I haven’t read the entirety of the Mueller report.

It feels as if nobody read the Mueller report. That’s a shame, because it’s an important document, depicting possible crimes by a sitting US president.

But not reading it makes sense. As a narrative, the document is a disaster. And at 448 pages, it’s too long to grind through. For long stretches, it reads less like a story and more like a terms-of-service agreement. The instinct to click “next” is strong.

And yet, buried within the Mueller report, there is a narrative that reads in parts like a thriller, like a comedy, like a tragedy — and, most important — like an indictment. The facts are compelling, all the more so because they come not from President Donald Trump’s critics or “fake news” reports, but from Trump’s own handpicked colleagues and associates. The story just needed to be rearranged in a better form.

So we hired Mark Bowden, a journalist and author known for his brilliant works of narrative nonfiction like “Black Hawk Down,” “Killing Pablo,” and “Hue 1968.”

Our assignment for him was simple. Use the interviews and facts laid out in the Mueller report (plus those from reliable, fact-checked sources and published firsthand accounts) to do what he does best: Tell a story recounting Mueller’s report that’s so gripping it will hold your attention (and maybe your congressional representative’s).

https://www.insider.com/mueller-report-rewritten-trump-russia-mark-bowden-archer-2019-7

Fascinating stuff. I got embarrassingly many of the questions wrong.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/world/gapminder-us-ignorance-survey/

I thought this was nicely put:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start
explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without
discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this
(the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so
common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”.
Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor,
Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he
heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two
sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — “Oh you say
that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us,
“there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is
no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and
explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove
that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or
right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the
wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth
Century.

[…]

Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance
at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of
mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by
examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is
to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my
figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance
or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring
about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If
you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain
psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the
doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant — but only after you
have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely
arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems
of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating
about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of
yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of
them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go
on and discover the psychological causes of the error.

From the comments on:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/