The expanding Overton window

The ‘Overton window’ is a term from political science meaning the acceptable range of political thought in a culture at a given moment. It was the creation of Joseph Overton, a think-tank intellectual based in Michigan, who died in 2003 at 43 after a solo plane accident. His crucial insight, one which both emerged from and was central to the work of the think tank Right, was that the window of acceptability can be moved. An idea can start far outside the political mainstream – flat taxes, abolish the IRS, more guns in schools, building a beautiful wall and making Mexico pay – but once it has been stated and argued for, framed and restated, it becomes thinkable. It crosses over from the fringe of right-wing think-tankery to journalistic fellow-travellers; then it crosses over to the fringe of electoral politics; then it becomes a thing people start seriously advocating as a possible policy. The window has moved, and rough beasts come slouching through it to be born.
 

John Lanchester on the roots of Brexit, emphasis mine. The echoes in the rise of Trump in the U.S. are hard to miss.

Kipling asked a good question: ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ But there’s a variation which, today, might be more relevant: ‘What do they know of the UK who only London know?’ The answer to both questions turns out to be the same: ‘Not nearly enough.’ England is so small, geographically, that it is easy to forget that it is also surprisingly big. There is no rich country of equivalent size that is more densely populated. The only country which has both more people than England and more people per square kilometre is Bangladesh. What this means, experientially, is that there is a kind of denseness to England and to Englishness; England is both very similar to itself and significantly different when you move ten miles down the road.
 

Related: this Clay Shirky Tweetstorm to his white liberal friends. Forget the internet filter bubble, if it even exists. Far more dangerous is the geographic filter bubble.

When geography is destiny, inequality is a given, but in certain countries the effect has amplified.

To be born in many places in Britain is to suffer an irreversible lifelong defeat – a truncation of opportunity, of education, of access to power, of life expectancy. The people who grow up in these places come from a cultural background which equipped them for reasonably well-paid manual labour, un- and semi- and skilled. Children left school as soon as they could and went to work in the same industries that had employed their parents. The academically able kids used to go to grammar school and be educated into the middle class. All that has now gone, the jobs and the grammar schools, and the vista instead is a landscape where there is often work – there are pockets of unemployment, but in general there’s no shortage of jobs and the labour force participation rate is the highest it has ever been, a full 15 points higher than in the US – but it’s unsatisfying, insecure and low-paid. This new work doesn’t do what the old work did: it doesn’t offer a sense of identity or community or self-worth. The word ‘precarious’ has as its underlying sense ‘depending on the favour of another person’. Somebody can take away the things you have whenever they feel like it. The precariat, as the new class is called, might not know the etymology, but it doesn’t need to: the reality is all too familiar.
 

This is amazing:

The white working class is correct to feel abandoned: it has been. No political party has anything to offer it except varying levels of benefits. The people in the rich parts of the country pay the taxes which support the poor parts. If I had to pick a single fact which has played no role in political discourse but which sums up the current position of the UK, it would be that most people in the UK receive more from the state, in direct cash transfers and in benefits such as health and education, than they contribute to it. The numbers are eerily similar to the referendum outcome: 48 per cent net contributors, 52 per cent net recipients. It’s a system bitterly resented both by the beneficiaries and by the suppliers of the largesse.
 

So much of communicating well is knowing your audience. Some of this is selection bias, of course, but Trump is the last man standing in the GOP because he is the voice of some large segment of America. When he preens and smirks, punctuating his misogyny and racism with finger jabs and thumbs up gestures, he wraps his hands around the id of the angry white working class and squeezes, like a cardiac surgeon pumping a human heart.

Electing one person, or three thousand?

Interview with the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens:

And if you’re obliged to make the choice upon pondering that, who would the choice be?

BS: Well, you’re asking me the same question twice. My answer is the same. The only person who counts in the administration is the president of the United States, Hugh. That’s the only person who counts. When George W. Bush decided to save the American position in Iraq by going against the advice of all of his wise men, of Jim Baker and the whole Iraq Study Group, and 90% of his administration, that was George W. Bush’s decision. So we have to bear in mind that this isn’t an administration we’re electing. It’s a person that we are electing. Who knows better than you what it means to have a commander-in-chief who lived his entire life, who lived throughout the entire Cold War, and doesn’t know what the nuclear triad is? It’s absolutely astonishing. And so it’s terrific to have Joe Dunford and you know, perhaps John Bolton and other people in positions of trust. But you have to have a president who bothered over the last 70 years to gain a cursory understanding of how the world works. And on so many issues, Hugh, on so many issues, I know not all of the issue, but on so many issues, this guy is just the antithesis of what I’d want a Republican president to be on foreign policy. When it comes to trade, when it comes to standing up to countries like North Korea, when it comes to standing up to guys like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump is not a conservative. If you put…

HH: Bret, you don’t have to, I agree with you on all of that. I know the critique. Nevertheless, what about my argument that civilians owe people who are fighting the war the best of the two candidates for commander-in-chief. We don’t have the option to be conscientious objectors in the one part of the war that is part of our job, which is to pick a commander-in-chief.

BS: Listen, I think that for the United States, Hillary Clinton, as awful as I find her, is a survivable event. I’m not so sure about Donald Trump.
 

I've nothing to add here on Trump, but the idea of whether you're electing 3,000 people or 1 is a relevant question here as it is elsewhere (think about hiring a director, electing a CEO, etc.). Also worth asking if you're trying to hire the 1 person or one of the 3,000.

Romance, after the bloom

Ran across two good essays recently, both on later stage romance.

One, by Heather Havrilesky:

But once you’ve been married for a long time (my tenth anniversary is in a few months!), a whole new kind of romance takes over. It’s not the romance of rom-coms, which are predicated on the question of “Will he/she really love me (which seems impossible), or does he/she actually hate me (which seems far more likely and even a little more sporting)?" Long-married romance is not the romance of watching someone’s every move like a stalker, and wanting to lick his face but trying to restrain yourself. It’s not even the romance of “Whoa, you bought me flowers, you must REALLY love me!” or “Wow, look at us here, as the sun sets, your lips on mine, we REALLY ARE DOING THIS LOVE THING, RIGHT HERE.” That’s dating romance, newlywed romance. You’re still pinching yourself. You’re still fixated on whether it’s really happening. You’re still kind of sort of looking for proof. The little bits of proof bring the romance. The question of whether you’ll get the proof you require brings the romance. (The looking for proof also brings lots of fights, but that’s a subject for another day.)
 
After a decade of marriage, if things go well, you don’t need any more proof. What you have instead — and what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all — is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to be a human being. Because until you feel absolutely sure that you won’t eventually be abandoned, it’s maybe not 100 percent clear that any other human mortal can tolerate another human mortal. The smells. The sounds. The repetitive fixations on the same dumb shit, over and over. Even as you develop a kind of a resigned glaze of oh, this again in, say, marital years one through five, you also feel faintly unnerved by your own terrible mortal humanness.
 

Or you should feel that way.
 

Another, by Alain de Botton:

Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.
 
It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories.
 

Botton proposes a new form of marriage to follow on the previous two ages of marriage which he terms the marriage of reason and then the marriage of romance. He terms this the psychological marriage.

In the age of the marriage of reason, one might have considered the following criteria when marrying:
- who are their parents
- how much land do they have
- how culturally similar are they
 
In the Romantic age, one might have looked out for the following signs to determine rightness:
- one can’t stop thinking of a lover
- one is sexually obsessed
- one thinks they are amazing
- one longs to talk to them all the time
 
We need a new set of criteria. We should wonder:
- how are they mad
- how can one raise children with them
- how can one develop together
- how can one remain friends
 

Romance/marriage, as with many human institutions, is susceptible to human myopia. People are lousy at anticipating long-term consequences, and romance is particularly seductive with its immediate chemical rush. 

Acoustic pest detection

The U.S. Grain Inspection Service, Packers, and Stockyard Admininstration’s (GISPSA) standard quality assessment method involves sieving and visually inspecting a one kilogram sample: their guidelines “consider grains infested if the representative sample contains two or more live weevils, or one live weevil and one or more other live insects injurious to stored grain, or two or more live insects injurious to stored grain.”
 
However, since the larvae of many stored product pests grow inside grain kernels, where, Fleurat-Lessard notes, their “population density may be ten times more numerous than free-living adults,” a visually-inspected“clean” sample may actually be completely infested with rice weevil larvae. To look inside grains, laboratories use X-rays or resonance spectroscopy, but these techniques are too expensive and impractical to deploy in bulk grain lots.
 
But while rice weevil larvae are invisible, they are not inaudible: the “mean sound pressure” of rice weevil larvae feeding inside a wheat kernel is 23 dB, according to the USDA Agricultural Research Service. The idea, then, is that if you could somehow design sensitive-enough acoustic probes, combined with software to match the probes’ input against a database of field recordings, you might be able to monitor insect activity in stored grain automatically and detect infestations at the larval stage.
 

I had no clue such a thing as acoustic pest detection existed. Amazing.

Building a sound library of stored food insects was equally important – the field recordings on that Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs CD actually form the core of current acoustic pest detection databases. Years of research have gone into classifying the characteristic sonic signatures of different pest species at different stages in their lifecycles, to the point that a computer can now compare input from a grain silo’s acoustic sensor system against a library field recordings and tell you whether the rice weevil larvae eating your wheat kernels are sixteen or eighteen days old.
 

The smartphone is a form of human augmentation, the latest version of the “bicycle for the brain” metaphor from Steve Jobs or whoever it originated with. I'm looking forward to more sensory augmentation in compact form factors in my lifetime. The ability to increase the sensitivity of my hearing and have it plug into a database of sounds for enhanced recognition would open up a whole new world. Camping would never be the same again.

Process vs results in creative work

In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds. Ninety-eight percent of the children scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject at five year increments. When the same children were 10 years old, only 30% scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12% by age 15 and just 2% by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”
 
Similar trends have been discovered by other researchers. For example, one study of 272,599 students found that although IQ scores have risen since 1990, creative thinking scores have decreased.
 
This is not to say that creativity is 100% learned. Genetics do play a role. According to psychology professor Barbara Kerr, “approximately 22% of the variance [in creativity] is due to the influence of genes.” This discovery was made by studying the differences in creative thinking between sets of twins.
 
All of this to say, claiming that “I’m just not the creative type” is a pretty weak excuse for avoiding creative thinking.
 

From James Clear.

If you've been following all the recent popular thinking about parenting, the recommendations that follow for improving your creativity won't be a surprise. As embodied in Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success or Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (how perfect is it that a book on grit is written by an author named Paul Tough, who sounds like a hard boiled detective), the vogue in self-help is sustained effort over innate talent, repeated practice over any one result.

If the path to creative breakthroughs is a probabilistic one, than an approach of sustained effort is more likely to yield success, and one's understanding that outcomes are not necessarily deterministic should render failure less psychologically crippling. A good combination for people, and entrepreneurs especially, is a small short-term memory, so you can move on from your mistakes, and an ample long-term one, so you can learn from them.

I learned the hard way as an undergrad the danger of waiting for inspiration when it came to my creative writing classes, or even just any form of writing which might be regarded as “creative” work. That's just a recipe for having a deadline scare you across the finish line in a frenzied late night of work, and it's hard to generate great work under such stress or fatigue, even if it's a great motivator.

I've come to see the simple act of writing here on my blog as a form of meditation. At some point it became a habit, one I've felt a true guilt for neglecting these past few months while I try to ramp up at a new job, and while it can seem like a maddening and arbitrary task I hold myself to, if even for just 15 minutes a day, the process bears long-term fruit. Writing forces me to clarify my thinking, and getting my thoughts out of my head and into a written piece frees CPU cycles in my head. The inspiration comes in the perspiration, as writers say, even if there usually isn't much sweat involved.

The secondary effects of writing have increased in this age, too. Readers have easier ways of finding and responding to my work, and that interaction has been not only intellectually rewarding but socially and professionally, too.