Hard writing means easy reading

The easier something is to read the harder it was to write. This is counterintuitive. We assume easy reading means easy writing, but the opposite is the case. Authors need to get in this mindset of doing the work of cutting the clutter, making clear, and rendering intelligible their sentences so that their readers don’t have to. From a utilitarian point of view, this is ethically preferable since sentences are generally read more times than they are written.

Smoking and Socialism

The arguments for socialism are like arguments for smoking—they depend on anecdotes. There’s the person who just started smoking who is nonetheless healthy, leading many to proclaim the virtues of smoking until the moment the person falls deathly ill (like Venezuelan socialism). There’s the person who smoked heavily, got really sick, and so cut back to a pack a month and now is seen as the model of a healthy smoker (like Swedish socialism). And then, of course, there are all the people who just smoked and died (like Soviet socialism), to which we can always say, “They just weren’t smoking the right way.” As with socialism, the best way to know the effect of smoking is to run a regression analysis. When we do, we find that—controlling for other variables—the more smoking the less healthy the body, and the more socialism the less healthy the economy. Until we can find a correlation between socialism and positive economic outcomes, I’ll be considering smoking and socialism in the same light.

The New Orthodoxy summarized in two slogans

“Latest is greatest,” and “Might makes wrong.”

The Boy Who Wolf Cried

We are all aware of the “crying wolf” phenomenon: past lies destroy credibility when real threats arise. But isn’t there a related and opposite phenomenon that past truths can create credibility for false threats? Just because there was no wolf twice in the past, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a wolf the third time; but just because there were wolves twice in the past, that doesn’t mean there is a wolf this time. People cried racism in the past and there was racism, but the “Boy Who Wolf Cried” principle means that, because of past racism, we are far more likely to have a lower threshold of evidence when people cry racism in the present (even accusing those who ask for evidence of themselves being “Racist”). The Boy Cried Wolf when it came to Covid suppression (don’t wear masks! Masks can end the pandemic! Lockdown for two weeks! Lockdown indefinitely to reach zero COVID) and now people don’t believe public health officials when they are telling the truth about vaccination. Similarly, The Boy Wolf Cried when there was slavery and Jim Crow, but that shouldn’t lead us to throw out standards of evidence about racism in the present and often times claims of “systemic racism” simply use the word “systemic” as a stand-in for “invisible” (i.e., lack of evidence). Take claims of racism seriously but demand regular standards of evidence lest we become like the Boy Who Wolf Cried.