Ben Landau-Taylor

@benlandautaylor

Analysis of power and society, now and historically. Please don't get your ought all over my is.

Joined June 2018

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  1. Jan 31

    The difference between """peer review""" and review by one's peers.

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  2. Retweeted
    Jan 23

    Benjamin Franklin noticed that receiving a favor from someone makes them more positively disposed towards you. Psychologists call this “Franklin Effect” a cognitive bias, but argues that is a rational response.

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  3. Retweeted
    Jan 22

    thanks to libgen alone, in this part of history, one has more worthwhile information readily available than in any phase previous. it validates all those old romantic notions of what good the internet could do, & smashes up the information barriers around fields of study

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  4. Retweeted
    Jan 13

    This is the kind of art Americans made, when we understood and believed in real industry, as opposed to financial speculation, debt, offshoring, vapid media, and antisocial electronic toys (Facebook, I'm looking at you.)

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  5. Jan 8

    I wonder how much labor mobility is hurt by the growing “How the hell do I make new friends now that I'm out of school” problem.

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  6. Jan 2

    The examples I could give would be rude, so I’m not gonna do that in public, but I bet you can find cases on your own. Please remember that identifying child groups you belong to is more useful than identifying parent groups you belong to.

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  7. Jan 2

    The child is convinced that there’s a rivalry between the groups, and that they’re winning handily. Meanwhile, when the parent group thinks about the child group (which is rarely), they think of them with fondness and affection, tinged with a bit of frustration at their antics.

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  8. Jan 2

    Then the child group starts talking about how they’re superior to the parent group, how the parent’s whole purpose is dumb and misguided, and also we’re better at achieving the parent group’s purpose anyway.

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  9. Jan 2

    There’s a funny pattern I see sometimes in relations between communities, which I like to call You’re Not My Dad. It starts when a child group splits off from a parent group.

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  10. Retweeted
    31 Dec 2019
    Replying to

    Co-authorship is better.

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  11. Followers with PhDs: consider making a practice of summarizing and endorsing uncredentialed people's work, so that it becomes legible to wikipedia and other mainstream sources. For now, this is the best way for fringe intellectual work to enter the public eye.

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  12. This thread is illuminating Real-time credential-washing Guzey's independent research gets removed, and Gelman's summary of Guzey gets linked instead. The editors are very clear about why. Without Gelman's summary the criticism would have been removed entirely.

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  13. This tweet prompted by seeing someone say "That company doesn't seem to exist" when they mean "I put the company's name into Google and didn't find them." (He had misspelled the company's name.)

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  14. It's striking how any organization without a slick landing page gets viewed as nonexistent or fake. This is frustrating for people who want visibility but don't have the money for web designers. It's useful for people who want to hide.

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  15. Retweeted
    30 Dec 2019

    How Heaven sends disasters to punish bad regimes: Big weather events roll off the back of a high-function regime like light rain. You barely notice, because it is handled well. But if you're dysfunctional and decaying, normal variation becomes disasterous.

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  16. Like some other apparently insoluble problems, "have kids while doing great things" has very obvious solutions, and only looks hard because of optional constraints that many people take for granted.

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  17. A good description of the real tradeoff! My one quibble is that it's not only *historical* great people who fit this pattern. Those unfashionable options are still options, and contemporary great people (male and female) still take them!

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  18. Heuristic: If I wouldn't say it in front of my mom, I probably shouldn't say it online. More people should follow this rule. To be clear, I mean you should imagine *my* mom vetting your tweets. She's great.

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  19. A lot of my ambitious male friends are hesitant to have kids because they think a family will make it harder to do great things. But the great people they admire—magnates, statesmen, scientists, etc—almost always have kids! The tradeoff isn't real!

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  20. This thread was mostly about how to do anthropology through fiction, but for more on the role of friendship between business partners as a load-bearing social technology, check out Samo’s thread: 9/9

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