- Doc Searls: Smart is as Smart Does. On the deficiencies of IQ as a metric, and I wholeheartedly agree.
- Damon Linker: The Most Moving TV Show I’ve Ever Seen. Which is The Leftovers, of course, and I agree. Bonus article: last year’s NYT interview with the showrunners. (ᔥTipsy Teetotaler)
- Andrew Gelman: Conflicting statistical evidence on the long-term effects of children on being whacked by their parents. How one feels about spanking depends greatly in their own experience of it as a child, as the comments to this blog post show.
- Joseph Heath: Populism Fast and Slow. An aside from this article did more to dissuade me from spanking (sorry, “whacking”) as a teaching method than anything Gelman cited. Its main point is also important, and I will quote it here:
People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world.
As a card-carrying member of the cognitive elite, I fully support the rebellion.