August/September Links

Ocean floor mining may finally happen, though plenty of people are having their usual reaction to any suggestion that technological civilization might need natural resources to continue operation.

Scott Alexander: The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life. I'm not sure how to describe this, but definitely recommend reading it.

Mental health research: treating the prodrome.

New from LessWrong: Strategies for Personal Growth. Old from LessWrong: Reason as a memetic immune disorder.

Arguably related: Duncan Sabien on the representativeness heuristic and Bryan Caplan discussing understated cultural differences.

Russia plans to stop transporting US astronauts starting early next year. Given the recent Soyuz leak, that might not be the worst thing, but it's unclear whether commercial crew capsules will be flying by that date.

American Enterprise Institute reports that the middle class is shrinking, but because household inflation-adjusted income is rising. Their data suggests that the number of households making less than $35,000 has also been falling over the last fifty years.

On the subject of increasing your income: here's the College Info Geek podcast on how to start investing, even in debt.

Writing: Always Harder Than I Think It Will Be

I'd hoped to write a proper post for my longform blog about Atlas Shrugged day, but it's not really coming together adequately. I'm not ruling out making that post at some point in the future, but it's not going to happen today.

The post I want(ed) to write is an explanation that Atlas Shrugged is not a conservative novel. It's not even really a libertarian novel, either, but that's besides the point. Actually, it's not. Not entirely. The problem I'm running up against is explaining complex philosophical distinctions in language which I can expect my non-philosophical friends and family to understand. I could launch into a rundown of the different epistemological and ethical schools of thought underpinning Objectivism and the various strains of conservatism in post-war America, but that's not really the sort of thing that will fit in a medium-length blog post.

Or at least, not at my current writing level. I need a lot more practice (and more feedback) before I'll feel comfortable making that sort of attempt on such short-order. I would have liked to have written that post over the course of several days, but the circumstances this week did not really permit it.

Complicating the matter for me personally, today marks two years since my parents announced their decision to join America in throwing all caution and sanity to the wind. Because that decision dramatically affected my last two years of schooling, and because the incident which prompted the blog post's original idea also happened at school, it's all quite tied together in my brain. I'm not sure I'll be able to unwrap it all until I'm less tired, and I'm not sure if that will really happen until I get a job or finish that interminable project.

Hence, an underlying theme of my writing attempts over the past eighteen months or so has been trying in vain to communicate the concept of a self-interest beyond immediate vanity and status-seeking. This concept is entirely absent from the conservative (and liberal) vocabulary—Protestant work ethic was born of contradiction—and my efforts to introduce a more consistent alternative have not gone over particularly well.

There's really no reason to expect a blog post explaining that a book where the protagonists have a lot of extra-marital sex and practice extreme civil disobedience maybe isn't the most conservative thing would go over any better.