The Takes

Four thoughts on the new “your brain on ChatGPT” study. One: all brain-scan studies are, in some essential sense, totally fake — closely related to my standing objection to psychology as a field. Two: none of this is surprising; as you get more assistance (even just Google) your brain’s activity goes down in proportion to how strong the assistance is. Three: using ChatGPT to write an essay is one of the single worst uses of it now and for the foreseeable future — that thing cannot write. Four: the history of humanity is the history of making tools that fundamentally transform us. Written text killed off whole skills we had around oral communication; the calculator did the same for calculation.  computer

On free buses, the place I agree with Matt Bruenig is the technical case. But I see this more like school lunch than the school bus: it’s just absurd to collect part of the tax for a service at the point of use. The data on bus performance and quality improvements isn’t as good as Matt suggests — for me it’s simpler than that. We already have a tax-collecting entity. Let’s use it.  not computer

I’ve been reading about COVID lately — a lot of basically reasonable people are mad about the decision-making, so I’ve been trying to get their perspective. Which brought me to a Vox piece I’ll complain about in two parts (take this as a complaint, not a verdict on the whole thing; my overall thoughts remain strategically ambiguous). One: this bit about the Recode piece making fun of tech people. Are you really telling me the reason people are mad is that they didn’t like what was said about them? Two: the protests thing. Fauci himself called them “a perfect set-up” for spreading COVID. Also — one of the sources links to a crazy right-wing Indian site that lies regularly, so I’d double-check that one.  not computer

The VaccinateCA story is a good microcosm of something I feel deeply crosspressured about. Patrick is plainly right — trading more lives for a differential impact is stupid, and the only real fix is the underlying disparity. But no one is actually interested in that. The people who’d make Patrick’s correct point tend to be curiously absent, or opposed, the moment society-upturning egalitarian changes come up. So it feels shitty: you decline to hurt the collective for in-group gains at every turn, only to be rewarded with the base case of “society doing anything will be differentially worse for people like you.” Redlining-for-justice is on the path to “fuck you, I’ve got mine,” which I despise at a level fundamental to my politics. But it also feels like cooperating in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma over and over and getting consistent defection back. The good leftist critique: don’t be sad, because your allies on this counterproductive stuff are often not interested in the big stuff anyway. California liberals will help you pass a dubious inclusionary zoning ordinance but put your head on a pike for broad upzoning and public housing.  not computer

I like this Bruenig piece a lot: NAFTA really did hurt Democrats through means other than the China shock — a recurring theme of modern politics is that the people least affected by something are the maddest. (Quibble: there is real literature on a material free-trade backlash; I think Yglesias overstates it, but that’s not the central point.) At the same time, I get frustrated with the “blue-city governance is why Dems lost 2024” crowd — the NYT’s data suggests that’s mostly an artifact of the geographic distribution of race, and the people loudest about it are upscale whites, hardly a slipping Democratic demographic. The honest synthesis: both my eagerness to tell neolibs to cool it on free trade and their eagerness to blame blue-city governance are really just calls for Democrats to be better at the practice of politics — wielding power effectively and building a majority. Our discourse hides the ball to avoid arguing about the principles of politics earnestly. This very inconsistency in myself is an example, and it’s good to consciously shift out of that frame.  not computer

A lot of people blame PMC libs for long COVID school closures. A different group correctly points out it was the teachers and their unions who wanted them closed. But both elide an inconvenient demographic fact: poorer and nonwhite parents were quite associated with remote schooling too (I remember this clearly from the NYC reopening fight). Blaming unions coheres nicely to a certain center-left worldview, but noting that the people most likely to benefit from open schools were least likely to support it makes the cute “PMC-leftist apparatus on racial bases” story much harder to tell — and there’s a separate angle about public-sector unions in Black American politics. Before I get smug about another neoliberal owned, this is a problem for my own leftist politics too: the same pattern hits universal pre-K in NYC, where a policy I love to close the gap ends up looking like another PMC lifestyle subsidy. (I think that’s actually fine in practice, but that’s a take for another day.) Let this warn me and others: neat, ideologically convenient stories are often not so neat.  not computer

A tweet floated across my timeline and handed me the perfect pithy answer (Jesus Christ, I should log off): psychoanalysis doesn’t work, but the good news — or bad news — is that neither does the rest of psychology. What can ya do.  not computer