Beyond The Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon, 2020

Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be.  No one else should be able to tell you who you are; that’s for you to decide yourself.  45

Amazon Link

The author is a gender non-conforming person, which I believe means that they identify as a man or woman, but their behavior, mannerisms, or dress may not conform with expectations of being a median/prototypical/stereotypical man or woman.

Vaid-Menon argues that the notion of a gender binary (you are either a man or a woman) is harmful to non-binary people (who don’t identify as male or female), to gender non-conforming people (who identify as male or female but behave differently than anticipated for their gender), and to the general population who may have more traditional or conventional gender identities (I’m a man, I’m a woman).

Vaid-Menon argues that the notion of a gender binary leads people who are non-binary or non-conforming to be oppressed and bullied.  It constrains notions of proper behavior in arbitrary and harmful ways.

I place this book in a cluster with two other recent reads: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and Life at the Bottom.  Those two books discuss the changes in social norms, and Rise focuses more specifically on sexuality and gender. 

The current book is against the gender binary, and in that sense is more progressive or liberal than the other works.  It advocates for a very modern notion of self-determination, where how you feel inside is the final determining factor of your identity:

Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be.  No one else should be able to tell you who you are; that’s for you to decide yourself.  45

This really captures the modern self that’s described in “Rise and Triumph”.  In older conceptions of self, your identity was more something that was given to you by your environment, now it’s more of something you construct.

The most convincing part of the book is the argument to treat people well:

The world we want is one in which all people, regardless of their appearances, are treated with dignity and respect—one in which these factors do not have a bearing on safety, employment, and opportunity. 59

And the author’s account of how awful it is when people are mistreated due to their gender identity are terrible:

Boy’s spaces traumatized me because they were where I experienced the most harassment.  I didn’t go to the restroom in middle school and high school because I was so afraid.  As soon as I got home, I would rush to the toilet.  … I was bullied everywhere, and it never stopped. It seemed so all consuming, like there was no escape.  22

Vaid-Menon discusses power, asserting that the maintenance of the gender binary is about power:

The assumption is that being a masculine man or a feminine woman is normal and that being us is an accessory.  Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath we are just men and women playing dress up. The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what’s really going on here: control.  The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power. 17

So they seem to suggest that the notion of the gender binary is about naked power and control, but the idea isn’t really explored.  They seem to suggest that it’s a use of power, so it’s bad.  Or maybe, it’s bad, so it involves power and control. 

They advocate for personal control and power over gender identity, so all power and control is not bad in that sense.  It’s a very short book, so maybe you can excuse it for that reason. 

The author also argues that tolerance is not enough, that society should move to acceptance:

So people might tolerate the existence of gender non-conforming people, but tolerance is not the same thing as acceptance.  Tolerance is always about maintaining distance: “This is about something over that that doesn’t concern me.” Acceptance, on the other hand, is about integrating difference into your own life: “This is about something that I’m a part of, and I need to learn more to better help.”

On some level this seems unobjectionable: wouldn’t acceptance obviously be better than tolerance?  But acceptance seems easy when you’re already convinced your side is right.  How would the author feel if a conservative supporter of a more rigid gender binary argued that they should not only tolerate them, but accept them?

Nassim Taleb tweeted: Being tolerant with the intolerant is an act of intolerance. 

And wrote in an essay:

So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion).

So maybe the author would be right to only advocate tolerance in one direction.

I do think there’s more to the story.  Outside of the culture war context, outside of the horrible experiences of bullying that Vaid-Menon had, I think there’s also a more prosaic explanation for the gender binary.

The median man and woman do have some tendencies that make statements about men and women at the population level meaningful.  At the population level people have behavioral tendencies and physical traits that differentiate them.  And cultural norms can contribute to this.  To frame it so heavily as “power and control” without acknowledging other contributors seemed limited, but understandable if that’s been your personal experience.

I’m afraid my reflection is nearly as long as the book itself.    

Amazon Link

Idea Density  low

Related Books – “Rise and Triumph”,  “Life at the Bottom”

Recommend to others: no

Reread personally: no

Quotes

 The gender binary is a cultural belief that there are only two distinct and opposite genders: man and woman.  This belief is upheld by a system of power that exists to create conflict and division, not to celebrate creativity and diversity. 5

The assumption is that being a masculine man or a feminine woman is normal and that being us is an accessory.  Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath we are just men and women playing dress up. The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what’s really going on here: control.  The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power. 17

Boy’s spaces traumatized me because they were where I experienced the most harassment.  I didn’t go to the restroom in middle school and high school because I was so afraid.  As soon as I got home, I would rush to the toilet.  … I was bullied everywhere, and it never stopped. It seemed so all consuming, like there was no escape.  22

We forget that there is more variety within the categories of women and men than between them.  31

So people might tolerate the existence of gender non-conforming people, but tolerance is not the same thing as acceptance.  Tolerance is always about maintaining distance: “This is about something over that that doesn’t concern me.” Acceptance, on the other hand, is about integrating difference into your own life: “This is about something that I’m a part of, and I need to learn more to better help.”

Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be.  No one else should be able to tell you who you are; that’s for you to decide yourself.  45

The world we want is one in which all people, regardless of their appearances, are treated with dignity and respect—one in which these factors do not have a bearing on safety, employment, and opportunity. 59

We spend so much time trying to make other people comfortable that oftentimes we don’t even know what makes us happy.  62

Paradais, Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Huges, 2021

Amazon Link

A novel.  A poor kid works in landscaping in a luxury housing development in Mexico.  He becomes drinking buddies with a rich kid who lives with his grandparents in the development. 

They both have problems: the poor kid has few job prospects, lives with his mom and pregnant cousin, works all day and sleeps on the floor. The rich kid is obese, has no social skills, and is addicted to pornography.  They both binge drink frequently, around ages 14 and 16.

Eventually, the boys team up to commit a horrible violent crime.  It’s hard to tell what motivated the crime, or how they thought they would benefit, or why it didn’t simply remain a deranged fantasy.

The writing is pretty snappy, there are long sentences and funny descriptions and funny dialogue.  I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but I found the boy’s problems and antics to be darkly comical, and because the story is so extreme it was easy for me not to take it too seriously. 

I think I definitely missed the moral of the story, or the social commentary.  I guess something like “poverty is bad”, and “trust-fund kids” are bad, gang violence, and something about inequality.  But these are mostly stolen from other reviews I read about the book after hearing good recommendations and coming away confused. 

The story reminds me of “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote.  The crime doesn’t make any sense, what they fuck were they thinking, utter stupidity.  And in the same way, some of the stupidity and flaws of the characters is entertaining in its own way.

Recommend to others: No

Reread personally: No

How To Eat, Mark Bittman and David Katz, 2020

In short, you can’t just count on the “nutrients” in fruits and vegetables to do you good.  You count on the actual fruits and vegetables to do you good. Worry about the food, and the nutrients will take care of themselves.  Worry about the nutrients, and you may get it all wrong. 188

Amazon Link

The authors describe a healthy diet.  They base their advice on the dietary patterns of populations who have historically had long lives. 

Apparently the logic is that the diets were a causal factor in the longevity of those populations, and longevity is a proxy for general health during the lifespan. They actually don’t go too much into their logic here, or discuss what other factors (poor record keeping leading to inflated lifespans, exercise, religion, community involvement, climate, pollution, economics, etc.) may have contributed to long lifespans.

The best diets have a lot in common: They focus on foods that are close to nature, minimally processed, and plant predominant 14

Diets of the world’s longest-lived people are rich in veggies, fruits, beans, lentils, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and good fats like olive oil or fats from fish. 16

They quote Michael Pollan: “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much”.  And that seems like a good summary of their recommendations. 

Eat food: try to eat food as close to its natural state as possible.  Apples are better than applesauce, applesauce is better than Apple Jacks cereal.  Oranges are better than orange juice, orange juice is better than orange starbursts.

Mostly plants: they say that we don’t need much fish or dairy in our diets to be healthy.  Fish or seafood is probably a healthier alternative to meat or dairy.  

Not too much: they don’t really discuss portion or calorie restriction per se.  They frame it more in terms of general dietary composition than amounts.  You’re going to be eating anyway, so the questions is more “what should I include in my diet” than “how much should I eat”.  If you eat food, and mostly plants, it will be easier not to overeat.

If you’re thinking of what would be a healthier diet, a good question is “what are you replacing?”.  You’re never really building a diet from scratch, so your choices are relative to your current habits.  If you replace potato chips (more processed) with potatoes (less processed), that’s probably a healthier replacement.  If you eat broccoli and want to replace it with carrots, both are healthy choices so just choose what you like more, or what goes better with that meal.  

They emphasize choosing food instead of vitamins or macronutrients (carb, fat, protein) because the long-lived populations ate certain foods, not eat certain nutrients , and because the foods have properties that individual nutrients don’t have.

As far as I know, their advice is pretty conventional.  I was surprised that they said canola oil is good.  

Idea Density lots of details, but main ideas simple

Related Books  Food Rules by Michael Pollan

Recommend to others: probably Food Rules first, or Atomic Habits because changing shopping/eating/cooking habits is probably more important for compliance than knowledge of good diet

Reread personally: no

Quotes

The best diets have a lot in common: They focus on foods that are close to nature, minimally processed, and plant predominant 14

Diets of the world’s longest-lived people are rich in veggies, fruits, beans, lentils, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and good fats like olive oil or fats from fish. 16

High-fructose corn syrup doesn’t occur in any natural food, s it is always a marker of a highly processed food.  That food is apt to be bad for you for any number of reasons, the high sugar (fructose) content among them. The same is true of any added sugar, like sucrose, in a processed food… 174

But whole fruit is good for us, and the fructose in it does not change that.  We don’t extract nutrients from food and live on those; we eat food and then the body processes all the nutrients in them.  Eating fruit is not eating fructose; it’s eating fruit. 174

An apple isn’t a “carb”; it’s an apple. 159

In short, you can’t just count on the “nutrients” in fruits and vegetables to do you good.  You count on the actual fruits and vegetables to do you good. Worry about the food, and the nutrients will take care of themselves.  Worry about the nutrients, and you may get it all wrong. 188

A low-carb diet can be a diet that’s rich in highly nutritious food.  A low-carb diet can also be unhealthy and full of ultraprocessed fat and added sugars, or a diet that is all fatty meats and completely devoid of fruits, vegetables, beans, lentils, whole grains, and all the most nutritious foods.  198

Drawing information from generations of people is so much more robust than a relatively short-term randomized controlled trial.  When we combine what we do know from randomized trials with what we can only know from observing whole populations over a span of generations, the combination is incredibly powerful.  218

Favorite Books 2022

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Byard

The Dictator’s Handbook by Mesquita and Smith

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman

(search this blog for reviews)

The Voltage Effect, John List, 2022

You should start by imagining what success would look like at scale, apply to the entire population with their varying situations, over a long period of time. To accomplish this goal, you need to identify your non-negotiables from the start. For example, if an education project relies on having 50,000 teachers at scale, you should not cherry-pick the 10 best teachers for the pilot study; top-tier teachers will not be representative of the  49,990 additional second and third-tier teachers who will ultimately have to hire. Similarly, if the likes of Albert Einstein are necessary to make the curriculum work, then develop a technology that can scale Einstein caliber teaching, because the curriculum won’t scale otherwise. 87 

Amazon Link

List, an economist, considers the problems that companies and organizations face as they scale (provide a product or service to a larger number of customers).

A first broad principle is to avoid non-representative sampling as you consider expanding.  Your current customers might be different from potential customers in a way that will make your expansion fail.  If all of your current customers are skiers in Colorado, your business might not scale in places without ski hills, or with people who aren’t active, or with people who don’t have lots of disposable income, etc.

A second broad principle is that some things are just generally easier to replicate.  If there are key components of your operation that are hard to duplicate, it will be difficult to scale.  If a comedy club succeed while Jerry Seinfeld has a contract to perform there once a week, you will probably have trouble replicating that success at a second location where he doesn’t perform.  

A third broad principle is that things don’t scale linearly.  Let’s say a company spends $5 on ads, and their sales go up by $10.  They can’t expect this trend to continue forever (if we simply spend 5 million on ads, we’re sure to make 10 million). After a certain point, it doesn’t make sense to spend more on ads. 

A fourth broad principle is that the more you scale, the more likely it is that something unexpected will happen.  If your franchise has one location, the odds of a fire are probably low.  If you have 35,000 locations (Starbucks), the odds that one location will burn are higher.

I was sort of expecting something a bit more applied, or more like a checklist for making things scale well.  It’s a bit more of an overview and more general, though there are some interesting real-life examples.  I understand why a popular book wouldn’t get into the weeds of the how to do forecasting and projections, but I was hoping for something a bit more informative about the actual steps of deciding if an operation might scale.  But maybe it would be easier to apply if I had already worked in an expanding business.

Idea Density – medium

Related Books: in some sense, Scale by Geoffery West

Recommend to others: No

Reread personally: no

Quotes

“to scale” means to achieve a desired outcome when you take an idea from a small group of customers, students, or citizens, for example – to a much larger one. 6

And samples are sometimes not representative of an entire population, meaning that sometimes the results you get from your sample will not be true for the entire population. 26

Forcing a consensus is not the same as building a consensus 31

You have to take the concept of replication one step further and seek an independent replication of your result. 35

Do everything you can in order to uncover and examine hidden differences in the people you eventually hope to serve at scale, not only because this will likely yield valuable insights about the scalability of your idea but also because it will set you apart from competitors. 64

Does your success at small-scale rest largely on the people indispensable to your idea or product – say, the engineer who build the platform your business runs on, or the celebrity spokesperson who fund raises for your nonprofit – or is it the idea or product itself? If it involves people, a key piece to understand is whether those responsible for implementing the idea will be faithful to its ingredients 75

Because the profit motives for big  pharmaceutical companies are immense, those companies have a strong vested interest in getting people to take their meds. 78

With program dress, the non-negotiables are not fulfilled at scale either because of organizational constraints that weren’t present in the small scale or because implementer either won’t or can’t replicate the program Faithfully. This causes an entirely different program to be provided at scale. Program drift is akin to a restaurant chain putting a lobster dish on the menu at its first few location, then continuing to offer the item at new locations nationwide – only instead of lobster the dishes made with crab. Four more consequential example of program drift, we can look at the US government’s National Head Start program. 81

You should start by imagining what success would look like at scale, apply to the entire population with their varying situations, over a long period of time. To accomplish this goal, you need to identify your non-negotiables from the start. For example, if an education project relies on having 50,000 teachers at scale, you should not cherry-pick the 10 best teachers for the pilot study; top-tier teachers will not be representative of the  49,990 additional second and third-tier teachers who will ultimately have to hire. Similarly, if the likes of Albert Einstein are necessary to make the curriculum work, then develop a technology that can scale Einstein caliber teaching, because the curriculum won’t scale otherwise. 87 

People who have coverage engage in Risky Behavior than those without coverage, a phenomenon known as moral hazard. Clearly, this pattern of human behavior has potentially huge implications when taken to scale. 91

Something unexpected has a much higher probability of occurring at scale than not at scale. 91

Because the fair increase made driving for Uber a more attractive proposition, which incentivised existing Uber drivers to offer more rides, while also attracting new drivers. As a result, the supply side of the market became more competitive, which meant that on average each individual driver got fewer trips overall, erasing the intended games from the wage bump. The unintended consequence – or spillover – of the increased base fare on drivers at scale awarded the well-intentioned deed by Uber. 93 

Just hearing about the program from those parents motivated them to get creative and look for ways to independently support their children’s cognitive and non cognitive development perhaps through after-school programs are other supplementary support, or by implementing techniques they heard about from adults who participated in Parent Academy. 103

The extra time those parents were investing in the education of the child in the program had to come from somewhere, and our data showed that it often came from time spent with the child’s siblings. So one unintended consequence was that siblings received much less parental attention. 104

This meant resisting the temptation to rig the pilot program with the best teachers. We knew the results of the pilot would be less dazzling, which might cost us publicity and grants in the short-term, but we also knew it was essential to the program’s long-term success. 125

The teachers in the loss group saw tremendous gains in their students test scores. Their desire not to lose the bonus they had already been given head indeed incentivized teachers to work harder even harder than the teachers who were promised a bonus of equal value later. On top of all of this, the teachers in the clawback group seem to have developed some good habits: in looking at teacher quality for the next five years after our experiment ended, we found evidence that their improved performance in the classroom lasted, even in the absence of incentives – which meant that students who had one of these teachers up to 5 years later experienced considerable gains above other students. 155

Specifically, I noticed that not every dollar spent on a single policy had equal value; for example, the first 50 million dollars spent on a clean energy plan might reduce emissions by much more than the second 50 million dollars spent. 164

Much more money has been invested in the law enforcement and Military side of the drug war even though the marginal benefits are much greater from the last dollar spent on prevention and substance abuse recovery. Naturally, when you missed calculate marginal benefit that scale, the amount of money that gets squandered increases exponentially. This is why cost-benefit analysis for government needs to focus not just on average utility but on utility at the margins, too. 166

Once you clear these five hurdles, however, there is more you can do to improve your probability of success at scale. You can design the right incentives, use marginal thinking to make the most of your resources, and stay clean and effective as you grow. You can make decisions based on the opportunity cost of your time, discover your comparative advantage, and learn to quit optimally, allowing you to unapologetically cut your losses and move on to new and better ideas when appropriate. And you can build a diverse and dynamic organizational culture based on trust and cooperation, rather than competition and individualism. 232

How The World Really Works, Vaclav Smil, 2022

So, the evidence is inescapable: our food supply – be it staple grains, clucking Birds, favorite vegetables, or seafood praised for its nutritious quality – has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels. This fundamental reality is commonly ignored by those who do not try to understand how our world really works and who are now predicting rapid decarbonization. Those same people would be shocked to know that our present situation cannot be changed easily or rapidly: as we saw in the preceding chapter, the ubiquity and the scale of the dependence are too large for that. 64

Amazon Link

Smil, an academic who’s written and published widely on a variety of topics, discusses a few key inputs to modern society that allow the world to function: energy production, agriculture, concrete, plastic, fertilizer, and transistors (can’t remember the main way he categorizes).   

His basic argument is that a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is impossible.  The modern global civilization requires a certain amount of energy, and renewables cannot provide that and other key inputs in a short timeframe.  If you forced the transition anyway, the main result would be a huge decrease in standard of living for many people, including extreme poverty.

So that’s the main argument: we cannot quickly switch to renewables, due to the material inputs we need to make the global system run.  But another message he repeats loudly and clearly is that people who think a quick transition is possible are fundamentally ignorant of key facts on the ground, or are trying to push an agenda for their own financial or political gain.

Some of the quotes featured below were interesting, but for the most part the book was a bit dry and I probably should have abandoned it.  I also didn’t like the tone of distain for people who think a quick transition is possible.  Maybe he’s an expert, and it’s frustrating to hear people with delusions that don’t match with what’s really in the realm of the possible, but that doesn’t mean I need to enjoy reading that tone.

Overall, it’s probably good background knowledge for anyone to have about what makes the world go round, but I didn’t think this was the most interesting way to show it.

Idea Density – lots of factoids, so high in that sense, but main ideas are two: we need fossil fuels, people who don’t get that are dumb or utopian, etc.

Related Books: ??

Recommend to others: no

Reread personally: no

Quotes

 In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than 2 seconds. 51

Most of the admired and undoubtedly remarkable technical advances that have transformed Industries, Transportation, communication, and everyday living would have been impossible if more than 80% of all people had to remain in the countryside in order to produce their daily bread (the share of the US population who were farmers in 1800 with 83%) or their daily bowl of rice (in Japan, close to 90% of people lived in villages in 1800 close parentheses. The road to the modern world began with inexpensive steel plows and inorganic fertilizers, and a closer look is needed to explain these indispensable inputs that have made us take a well-fed civilization for granted. 51

…In US cities, the average price of a kilogram of white bread is only about 5% lower than the average price per kilogram of whole chicken (and whole wheat bread is 35% more expensive!), while in France a kilogram of standard whole chicken costs only about 25% more than the average price of bread. This helps to explain the rapid rise of chicken to become the dominant me and all Western countries (globally, pork still leads, thanks to China’s enormous demand). 58

So, the evidence is inescapable: our food supply – be it staple grains, clucking Birds, favorite vegetables, or seafood praised for its nutritious quality – has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels. This fundamental reality is commonly ignored by those who do not try to understand how our world really works and who are now predicting rapid decarbonization. Those same people would be shocked to know that our present situation cannot be changed easily or rapidly: as we saw in the preceding chapter, the ubiquity and the scale of the dependence are too large for that. 64

This means that at least half of recent global crop harvest have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds, and without them it would be impossible to produce the prevailing diets for even half of today’s nearly eight billion people. While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and wasting less food, replacing the global input of about 110 pounds of nitrogen in synthetic compounds buy organic sources could be done only in theory. 68

American food balances show that the Nationwide share of wasted food has remained stable during the past 40 years, despite perennial calls for improvement. And higher food waste accompanied China’s improving nutrition as the country moved from the precarious food supply that prevailed until the early 1980s 2 averaging per capita rates that are now higher than in Japan. 72

This means that between 1971 and 2019 microprocessor power increased by 7 orders of magnitude – 17.1 billion times, to be exact. These advances were more than enough to accommodate new demands for massive data transfers (from Earth observation, spy and communication satellites, and among Financial Centers and  data storage) , instant email and voice calls and highly accurate navigation. 128

The covid-19 pandemic provided additional powerful arguments based on irrefutable concerns about the state’s fundamental role in protecting the lives of its citizens. That role is hard to play when 70% of the world’s rubber gloves are made in a single Factory, and when similar or even higher shares of not just other pieces of personal protective equipment but also of principle drug components and common medications (antibiotics, antihypertensive drugs) come from a very small number of suppliers in China and India. Such dependence might fulfill an economist’s dream of mass output at the lowest possible unit cost, but it makes for a extremely irresponsible – if not criminal – governance when doctors and nurses have to face a pandemic without adequate PPE when States dependent on foreign production engage dismaying competition for limited supplies, and when patients around the world cannot renew their prescriptions because of the slowdowns foreclosures in Asian factories. 133

Japanese eating has a slight Edge, but an only slightly inferior outcome can be had by eating as they do in Valencia. 140

Regardless of the perceived (or modeled) severity of Global Environmental challenges, there are no Swift, Universal, and widely affordable solutions to Tropical deforestation or biodiversity loss, to soil erosion 4 to global warming. But global warming presents and uncommonly difficult challenge precisely because it is a truly Global phenomenon, and because it’s largest anthropogenic cause is the combustion of fuels that constitute the massive energetic foundations of modern civilization. As a result, non-carbon energies could completely displace fossil carbon in a matter of one to three decades ONLY if we were willing to take substantial cuts to the standard of living in all affluent countries and deny the modernizing nations of Asia and Africa improvements in their Collective blocks by even a fraction of what China has done since 1980. 200

[for 2007-8 financial crisis] Who has been found responsible for this systemic near-collapse of the financial order? What fundamental departures (besides enormous injections of new monies) were taken to reform questionable practices or to reduce economic inequality? 221

…nobody will ever be found responsible for any of the many strategic lapses that guaranteed the mismanagement of the pandemic even before it began. 221

Governments will not ensure adequate provisions of needed supplies for a future pandemic, and their response will be as inconsistent – if not as incoherent – as ever. The profits of mass scale single-source manufacturing will not be changed 4 Less vulnerable but more expensive decentralized production. And people will resume their constant Global mingling as they return to InterContinental flights and cruises to Nowhere, although it is hard to imagine a better virus think you better than a ship with 3000 crew, and 5000 passengers who are often mostly Elderly with many preexisting health conditions. 221