Some interesting links

These are meant to be some examples of the importance of balance.

1. Genuinely interesting piece about the Trump administration behind the scenes.

2. Interestingly well-balanced piece from the BBC about the risks of nuclear power. I have noticed a few examples recently of the BBC making a real effort to look at both sides of an issue. They proved with Brexit that they are capable of this, unlike so much of the rest of the media.

3. Car seats as contraception: a third child means a third child seat, and that means a new car, and that means no third child. An example of the need to balance the different effects that government policies can have.

4. A good letter in the LRB: "A bummer, I know, but we have to entertain the possibility that there is no neat lesson from the pandemic". (Also here.)

5. Does it surprise you to hear that "people are more positively disposed toward women than men — the so-called “women-are-wonderful effect” — and research into people’s attitudes toward things as diverse as criminal sentences, academic hiring, essay grading, and research into sex and gender differences bears this out"? I doubt it. The quotation comes from this piece, reviewing Entitled from a left-of-centre perspective (but very aggressively - must have been written by a man), perhaps injecting some balance into a debate. 

6. Well, this, about the potentially culturally-determined experience of emotions, is interesting. "Barrett’s point is that if you understand that “fear” is a cultural concept, a way of overlaying meaning on to high arousal and high unpleasantness, then it’s possible to experience it differently." This is an idea that I independently developed as a child. If you find yourself in a stressful or worrying situation it is (to some extent) possible to re-interpret it to yourself as an exciting or fun one. Think about what happens to you on a rollercoaster. But perhaps one can take it too far: "Barrett tells the story of a date she reluctantly agreed to go on, which took an unexpected turn as her stomach flipped while she was having coffee with the guy. “OK, I realised, I was wrong,” she writes. “I must be attracted to him.” A few hours later she found herself in bed with ... the flu. What had happened over coffee was that her brain had made a prediction of “infatuation” based on sensory information from her gut combined with her culture’s understanding of that emotion and how it is supposed to unfold."

7. The Spectator in defence of 'wokeness'. And quite right too. Gove, with his Gramsci references, would never make the mistake that Leith ascribes to others. 

8. Women don't like to compete ... against men. But against women? A different story. But still, don't extrapolate to the workplace too quickly: "Gender wage gaps appear even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely. Uber driver’s for example are assigned trips using a gender-blind algorithm and earn according to a known formula based on time and distance of trip. Yet, a small but persistent gender gap of about 7% exists ...", it says here, giving reasons for the gender gap (e.g. men drive faster).