Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. The Death of Socrates (and His Method)?

Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen offers an eye-opening – and depressing – account of how the Socratic method of teaching has declined at American law schools. For over a century, the Socratic method shaped legal education by prompting students to converse in law classes rather than listen to professors lecture. Yet in recent decades, the pedagogy is in retreat, as teachers have become fearful of making students uncomfortable:

I continue to hear from colleagues at multiple schools who say they are limiting or refraining from teaching topics that are “too hot to handle” in an environment in which teaching might inadvertently injure and not receive the benefit of the doubt. This is disheartening. I hope this moment turns out to be a blip rather than a horrible unintended consequence or sustained feature of coeducation. How the law school classroom handles “hot” topics with a diverse student body is a sign of how well legal education is equipped to train students for difficult conversations in a diverse society.

2. Can We Live Without Wikipedia?

Tyler Cowen interviews Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, probing what could ruin Wikipedia and whether we could live without it. Cowen asks Wales if Wikipedia can “maintain a neutral stand”:

Objectively speaking, yes. But would it be recognized as such? That could be quite hard. We’re in an era where there’s such a decline in respect for traditional journalistic institutions across the board…I think it’s very hard when you have people who have given up on the concept of objectivity, the concept of neutrality. That isn’t necessarily just on the right. Certainly, when we think about postmodernism and some of the critiques of the ideas of neutrality and objectivity that come from that end of the world, it’s a deeper philosophical question.

3. The Culture Created by Moore’s Law

This month, Apple announced its own chip for computers. Venkatesh Rao reflects on Intel’s Moore Law – the idea that the computing power of a chip would double every two or so years even as the chip itself shrunk. He explores how that concept has shaped our culture, especially among Gen-Xers who came to see the world, even the act of writing, through the lens of Moore’s Law:

We got used to the primary thing in our lives getting better and cheaper every single year. We acquired exponential-thinking mindsets. Thinking in terms of compounding gains came naturally to us. For me personally, it has shown up most in my writing. At some level, I like the idea of producing more words per year (instructions per cycle, IPC?) with less effort (watts). This is why anytime a new medium appears that seems to make it easier to pump up quantity — Twitter, Roam research — I jump on it…We are lucky to live in an age when we can expect the fundamental tradeoffs of writing to change several times in a single lifetime. A few centuries ago, you could live an entire lifetime without writing technology changing at all.

4. Not Getting Things Done

In The New Yorker, Cal Newport questions the accepted wisdom of the “personal productivity” movement of “getting things done.” He targets the demi-gods of modern management: Peter Drucker, David Allen, Merlin Mann. Newport argues they ignore the paradox of the modern work environment:

Constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem. A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else; meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work, creating frustration.

5. Japan’s Fitness Mystery

Japan sports high rates of longevity and low rates of obesity. But a recent survey of 1,000 Japanese adults found that half exercise once a month or not at all. Kaki Okumura explains:

Japanese adults walk an average of 6500 steps a day, with male adults in their 20s to 50s walking nearly 8000 steps a day on average, and women in their 20s to 50s about 7000 steps. Okinawans in particular are well-known for their walking culture, being especially mindful about incorporating movement in their daily lifestyle. Nagano, a rural prefecture in Japan, was able to flip their high stroke rate by incorporating over 100 walking routes, and now their citizens enjoy the highest rates of longevity in the country.

6. Beirut’s Big Bang

Der Spiegel has delivered the most riveting, comprehensive, second-by-second account of what happened this summer when 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in the heart of Beirut’s port:

Videos show that the blast wave sped outward faster than the speed of sound.

Initially, it raced toward the city at a speed of up to 2,500 meters per second. Ships were thrown ashore and half of the grain silo was destroyed, despite being built of steel-reinforced concrete. All that was left of Hangar 12 was a crater, perhaps a dozen meters wide, which rapidly filled with seawater.

The blast wave shattered windows, bashed in apartment doors and pushed into hallways inside. It kept going, even breaking windows in neighborhoods located far away from the port.

Websites Worth Reading

Slow Boring: Matthew Yglesias’s New Blog 

NEC PLURIBUS IMPAR: A five-part take on China’s role in the pandemic. From a philosopher.

Interconnected: Jack Ma’s speech on regulation

Feeds We Follow

@noirfoundation: Film noir recommendations for the holiday

@LizEconomy: Indispensable China watcher

@blackfriday: Things you don’t need