Interesting News & Game Theory of Sex | Q3 2024
Today’s article gathers news across topics I’ve touched on in Uncharted Territories, with a big section on the Game Theory of Sex & Relationships series:
Visualizing the woke pendulum
Are bee colonies collapsing?
How to reduce home rental prices
A key overlooked reason why wages have stagnated since 1973
Do self-driving cars drive better?
Should we ban car seats?
We can make glass walls now
Remote work trends
The military industry has a serious problem
The US government steals more than thieves do—not accounting for taxes
The latest on the loneliness epidemic
Do trigger warnings work?
Should trans women and biological women share bathrooms?
Does breastfeeding increase IQ?
Male and female differences
Are differences in household work justified?
Do we look for the best partner, or just good enough?
Do women tolerate pain less than men?
Fashion trends that will die soon, according to evolutionary psychology
Who needs to make more efforts to be attractive, men or women?
What makes a man attractive?
Interesting News
The Woke Pendulum, Visualized
I’m starting to have a track record of The Economist following one of my pieces with their own on the same topic. This time, it was on the woke pendulum. Here, they visualized it:
According to these numbers, wokism peaked around 2021-2022. The data is even starker when we look at data from academia and employers:
The End of the Nation State: Wealth Taxes
I’ve said in the past that nation-states are doomed in the age of the Internet, because their scope is geographic in nature, and the Internet transcends geographies. This will make taxation harder.
This will be truest for the taxes on the most liquid types of assets, and the most liquid of all is wealth. Indeed, wealth can move around, and it will if you tax it too much.
Case in point today: Norway. Its recent wealth tax increase was expected to bring an additional $146 M in yearly tax revenue. Instead, individuals worth $54 B left the country, leading to a lost $594 M in yearly wealth tax revenue.
A net decrease of $450M!
Bee Colonies Aren’t Collapsing
A few years ago, honey bee colonies started dying from colony collapse disorder. The media flew into a buzz. But beekeepers rebuilt lost colonies and the disorder soon diminished. Now, there are more bees alive than at any other point in human history!
From 1990 to 2021, the United Nation’s FAO calculated that the worldwide number of honeybee colonies increased 47%, reaching 102 million—FAO
The Best Way to Reduce Rental Prices Is Freeing the Market
When Argentina’s President Javier Milei removed rent controls:
Supply increased by >170% (nearly triple the number of apartments in the market!)
40% drop in rental prices
Rentals became easier to find
Argentina is an example for officials from the U.S. to Europe who have sought to curb surging housing costs with rent controls.
None of this is a surprise. Remember that it's not just "landlords" who oppose rent controls. Science, history and academia oppose rent controls even more loudly and more credibly.
If we want to get serious about improving rental affordability, we need to get more serious about building a lot more housing. Anything else is just noise distracting from the root issues. And distractions make it less likely that we’ll deal with the root issues.
One Key Reason Why Wages Have Stagnated since 1973
Gender equality!
This would mean that as females have entered the workforce and gender bias has declined, the pay gap has shrunk. The added supply of women might have reduced the growth of wages for men. If that were true, it would be good news because it would mean that, now that the gap is much smaller, it’s more likely that male wages will start growing again.
Who Drives Better, Self-Driving Cars or Humans?
Waymo self-driving cars have 73% fewer accidents with injuries than human-driven ones!
Because human-driven cars are more dangerous, the right to drive will soon become more expensive. Maybe we’ll start taxing it more, or limiting speeds of human-driven cars much more aggressively than self-driving cars?
Should We Ban Car Seats after a Certain Age?
After 2.5 years old, car seats barely reduce children’s deaths compared to just using the seatbelt—about 57 lives in 2017. This means that since 1980, about 2,000 lives of children 2.5 and older have been saved1 by car seats.
However, mandated child seats have prevented 145,000 babies from being born into families who already have two young children because the parents’ car didn’t have room for a third car seat!2
Glass Walls
Why do houses need walls? Can’t they just have windows? No: Our houses would break, because building load is borne by the walls, while the windows just hang there, bearing no weight besides their own. If they did, they would break immediately.
But what if walls could be made of glass? How much more diaphanous could spaces be with glass bricks?
We might soon find out, because MIT researchers have designed glass bricks that can withstand loads similar to normal bricks!
Remote Work
On one side, we hear that Amazon will require all employees to go to the office to work. On the other, we get these stats from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Some people swear working from home (WFH) is disappearing, others that it’s here to stay. After looking into this for 2 years now, I reach the conclusion that WFH is here to stay, although it might still shrink a bit in the aftermath of COVID. This can be seen in the shrinking numbers of jobs that are fully remote, while at the same time people spending more time working from home on any given day—hence why the number of days worked from home is stable at 35%, according to the chart above.
The Military Industry Is Fucked Up
It took 22 years from the start of the F-35 aircraft project to initial operation. I’m hearing this type of problem got much worse after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the military budget fell and all the military contractors started merging with each other, reducing competition.
That’s why I’m a big fan of Silicon Valley companies disrupting military tech, including SpaceX, Palantir3, Anduril, and Shield AI.
Who Is the Real Thief?
The Loneliness Epidemic That Isn’t
In A Mental Epidemic, I destroyed the idea that we feel lonelier now than we used to. We do spend more time alone, but we like it. Recently, there has been a trend of more online searches on how to find friends:
But that can be attributed to more of our lives moving online (and with them our tools and instincts to interact socially) or COVID, for example.
Suicide attempts have increased since 2012, especially in young anglosphere women. The idea is that social media caused this—which is weird because why would that impact anglosphere women more than others?
A new paper states that the association between social media use and psychological distress and anxiety disappeared when social media use was measured objectively.
I thought social media could be it, but it ain’t. We remain clueless as to why more young women have mental anxiety. Time for new hypotheses: Maybe bullying is easier and more common with social media, but the amount of social media doesn’t matter, just its existence?
BE CAREFUL! THIS SECTION IS VERY DANGEROUS, PLEASE DON’T READ
You still here? Shocker!
I’ve been going back and forth on trigger warnings. Some people claim they’re useful, but then the data disagrees: They don’t prevent people from reading triggering content, and when they do, they’re not any less triggered.
From this meta-analysis on trigger warnings:
They don’t increase or reduce distress when consuming the content
Trigger warnings don’t appear to prevent people from reading the triggering materials:
What trigger warnings do achieve is increase anticipatory anxiety
Once people read the content, they have the same anxiety as before. So with trigger warnings, people don’t stop reading, they have the same anxiety while reading, but they also have more anxiety after reading the trigger warning.
Based on all this, I don’t feel very strongly about trigger warnings. I’m leaning against them, and might or might not use them in the future, it will depend on my mood.4
Next:
Should trans women and biological women share bathrooms?
Does breastfeeding increase IQ?
Male and female differences
Are differences in household work justified?
Do we look for the best partner, or just good enough?
Do women tolerate pain less than men?
Fashion trends that will die soon, according to evolutionary psychology
Who needs to make more efforts to be attractive, men or women?
What makes a man attractive?
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