Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Internet addiction may not be as bad as some other forms of addiction, but it’s more common (and more personal). I have young children now and wanted to learn more about it, so I included some questions in last year’s ACX survey. The sample was 5,981 ACX readers (obviously non-random in terms of Internet use level!). I don’t think the results were very helpful, but I post them here for the sake of completeness. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/indulge-your-internet-addiction-by 

Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House). This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules. But most of the critics aren’t Platonists - they don’t believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong? Most of the comments discussion devolved into analogies - some friendly to the idea of “superior taste”, others hostile. Here are some that I find especially helpful: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/friendly-and-hostile-analogies-for

Like most people, Tom Wolfe didn’t like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes. Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win? How Did Modern Architecture Start? European art in the 1800s might have seemed a bit conservative. It was typically sponsored by kings, dukes, and rich businessmen, via national artistic guilds that demanded strict compliance with classical styles and heroic themes. The Continent’s new progressive intellectual class started to get antsy, culminating in the Vienna Secession of 1897. Some of Vienna’s avante-garde artists officially split from the local guild to pursue their unique transgressive vision. The point wasn’t that the Vienna Secession itself was particularly modern… https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house 

Do longer prison sentences reduce crime? It seems obvious that they should. Even if they don’t deter anyone, they at least keep criminals locked up where they can’t hurt law-abiding citizens. If, as the studies suggest, 1% of people commit 63% of the crime, locking up that 1% should dramatically decrease crime rates regardless of whether it scares anyone else. And blue state soft-on-crime policies have been followed by increasing theft and disorder. On the other hand, people in the field keep saying there’s no relationship. For example, criminal justice nonprofit Vera Institute says that Research Shows That Long Prison Sentences Don’t Actually Improve Safety. And this seems to be a common position; William Chambliss, one of the nation’s top criminologists, said in 1999 that “virtually everyone who studies or works in the criminal justice system agrees that putting people in prison is costly and ineffective.” This essay is an attempt to figure out what’s going on, who’s right, whether prison works, and whether other things work better/worse than prison. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you