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Chat Roulette has given us so much. Go to the related videos to see the original stuff.

This is Ewing Theory

This is Ewing Theory Science

Apparently Generation Y (born in the 80s) is more status and money hungry than GenX or Boomer Kids were in their youth.

Is this a “the kids these days with their rock music” load of BS? I’d love to verify the data.

Because it counters my priors.

He makes a wildly celebrated advance in mathematics, gets awarded the Fields Medal and says (according to Wikipedia):

[the prize] was completely irrelevant for me. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.

Um, ok.
How about a bunch of money and the Millennium Prize?

On 18 March, 2010, Perelman was awarded a Millennium Prize for solving the problem.^[14] He had previously stated that “I’m not going to decide whether to accept the prize until it is offered.”^[3]

What motivates this guy? He’s quit his job because some guy says he’s not all he’s cracked up to be and now lives with his mom, unemployed. What’s the most interesting potential narrative? What would Robin Hanson think of this? Tyler Cowen no doubt thinks this guy is a raging autistic. Maybe that’s the answer.

Oh, wait, maybe he’ll enlighten us:

“Either to make some ugly thing”—a fuss about the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”

Huh?!

Ah, here it is. Tyler’s right:

Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes is showing weakness.”

Is it more surprising that you can fill the tank or that you can empty the tank?

The attentional myopia model of booze

Yep, it’s Barker again.

I’ve really backed off on the Op-Eds since immersing myself in the blogosphere. One of my few remaining ‘go-to’s has been David Brooks. Today he irritates me. A summary quote:

The United States is becoming a broken society.

The article is full of similarly broad “the kids these days!”- style whining about how society is changing, etc. Impossible to verify rigorously. This kind of loose thinking is at the foundation of political bias and, in my view, creates exactly the sorts of problems that he’s complaining about.

I’m even sympathetic to some of the conclusion, which basically boils down to devolving power to lower levels of government. But I get there a completely different way. Ugh.

Update: I am, unsurprisingly, much closer to Arnold Kling on this, whose commentary caricatures Brooks’ column less than mine. I’m not sure about this elite conspiracy thing, but that might be because he loved Halberstam’s the Best and the Brightest and I put it down out of boredom. It was written 40 years ago or something…

Update 2: Brooks fleshes out his pessimism

There is no other place in which I feel quite so powerless.

No, I don’t go to the ghetto. Obviously.

I love this guy’s stuff.

He conducts a Quixotic debate with Krugman, in which Krugman appears to react to his posts, but rarely responds directly.

I read just about everything Krugman writes but I’m less of a fan of his than I was 7 or 8 years ago. It’s a stylistic thing. He can just be SO nasty!

Sumner is King Sh** on the two most interesting questions of the day: how macroeconomics can fail and China. He’s at his best in the piece linked to above. It’s always long, though.

For appreciations, try this