Alan Jacobs

Megan McArdle, arguing that trying to use social media’s moderators to crack down on misinformation isn’t a good idea:

For one thing, moderators aren’t good at determining what constitutes actual misinformation. A lot of the dangerous nonsense about covid that circulated on social media came from the same public health experts social media companies were using as arbiters.

It was public health experts who initially told us masks don’t work, an assertion they knew to be false. It was public health experts who insisted, without good evidence, that covid wasn’t airborne. And many public health experts helped support prolonged school closures that have been proven to undermine learning.

That is not to say that public health experts are the moral or intellectual equivalent of quacks peddling balderdash about vaccine side effects. The public health community eventually recognized its most egregious errors, while the quacks doubled down. But free and open debate on social media assisted that process of course correction, and cracking down on what the experts then deemed false information would actually have slowed the pace of adjustment.

A game of unforced and amateurish errors by 🇺🇸 ⚽️ — oh well.

Where’s Brian McBride when you need him? 🇺🇸 ⚽️

A wonderful idea from Zeynep Tufekci: donate to Partners In Health in memory of the great Paul Farmer. I’ve just done it.

Much talk in the past 24 hours about Luis Suarez’s deliberate handball against Ghana in the 2010 World Cup. At Brian Phillips’ much-missed Run of Play, I wrote about it when it happened. ⚽️

Foggy morning in the canyon.

A wonderful list of books for Christmas presents by my friend John Wilson, the most imaginatively omnivorous reader I know.

The Guardian:

But there is power in reading slowly, something the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li tells her creative writing students at Princeton University. “They say, ‘I can read 100 pages an hour’,” she says. “But I say, ‘I don’t want you to read 100 pages an hour. I want you to read three pages an hour’.”

That’s the speed Li is happy to read at, even if she is re-reading a familiar text. “People often say they devoured a book in one sitting. But I want to savour a book, which means I give myself just 10 pages a day of any book.” On an average day, Li … reads 10 different books, spending half an hour on each title.

At that pace it can take Li up to three weeks to finish a novel. “When you spend two to three weeks with a book, you live in that world,” she says. “I think reading slowly is such an important skill. Nobody has ever talked about it, or taught me that. I’m a very patient reader. Even if it’s a very compelling book. I don’t want to rush from the beginning to the end.”

Consider a story by one of the great weirdos of American literature, R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002). It’s called “Primary Education of the Camiroi,” and it concerns a PTA delegation from Dubuque who visit another planet to investigate an alien society’s educational methods. After one little boy crashes into a member of the delegation, knocking her down and breaking her glasses, and then immediately grinds new lenses for her and repairs the spectacles — a disconcerting moment for the Iowans — they interview a girl and ask her how fast she reads. She replies that she reads 120 words per minute. One of the Iowans proudly announces that she knows students of the same age in Dubuque who read five hundred words per minute. (As Stanislas Dehaene explains, that’s pretty close to our maximum speed.)

“When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at a rate of four thousand words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”

Slow enough, that is, to remember verbatim everything she has read. “We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth,” one of the adults says. “We cannot afford to waste time on forgetting or reviewing, or pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”