Gongol.com Archives: November 2022
November 28, 2022
Chinese police are forcing private citizens to delete photos from their phones
You don't have to be knee-deep in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill to know how anyone, anywhere, is likely to feel after being pushed around by police who snatch their phones and delete their pictures. People understand intuitively when they're being repressed.
Research on important matters is often boring
Rachael Meager: "One thing academics have to be disciplined about is focusing on the problems we are in the middle of solving rather than distracting ourselves with problems that seem more fun and interesting purely because we haven’t got stuck into them yet [...] Every really serious intellectual exercise is dumb, boring, stupid, frustrating, and disappointing. Learn to recognize the signs of success and rejoice!" Even academic research has to steer clear of just gravitating to whatever is shiny and new so it can actually answer the big questions -- which are inevitably hard and frustrating.
Sometimes talking like a local requires more than just pronouncing place names correctly. WCCO's use of a snow forecast map "translated into Minnesotan" is both hilarious and spot-on. Just remember: Even a "No, yeah, no" can turn into an "Aw, jeez" if there's an unexpected change in winds aloft, so stay tuned just in case there's an "Oopsie daisy".
Daily podcast listenership is at 28%
Among American adults ages 18 to 49. If anything, the numbers are probably far under-stated: It's time-consuming to report on that listenership.
"Think Occam's Razor, not evil genius"
Advice on watching Chinese policy-making, and it's believable. There's a widely-circulated myth that there's some magical 100-year plan behind what the Chinese Communist Party is doing. It looks and smells a lot more like a system based upon millions of apparatchiks desperately trying to avoid being imprisoned for wrongthink.
