Spooky mailbag

Palestinian public opinion, new German political parties, and my process

Save the date! We are going to have a little Slow Boring anniversary party for paid members on November 8 in DC. More details to come soon.

I hope all you fun young people enjoy your weekend Halloween parties! Boring dads, I will be seeing you Tuesday night out trick-or-treating.

In terms of good news, I think the whole debate about why people think the economy is bad and whether they’re wrong or whatever has gotten boring. It’s pretty impressive that we got 4.9 percent real GDP growth in a quarter when unemployment started low and ended low (i.e., productivity must have gone up) while inflation eased. Given the bad state of the economy, rapid growth and low unemployment seem like decent outcomes.

In other good news: The new malaria vaccine could save the lives of tens of thousands of kids each year when fully rolled out (plus more good vaccine news). These guys became the first people to paddle the Northwest Passage, which is a lot less impactful but still pretty cool. El Salvador got a big new source of clean energy, and Tyler Cowen has not a new book but an entirely new kind of book, which is very cool.

Questions!

Morgan Lawless: Why is pointing out hypocrisy a waste of time?

If you call a smart person out on a hypocrisy, they will gin up some more-or-less arbitrary distinguishing factor, and you won’t accomplish anything except maybe talking yourself into your own equal-but-opposite hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, people tend to draw wildly overly broad conclusions from examples of hypocrisy. The way people argue on the internet is as if I told my kid he needs to eat some vegetables to be healthy then he turns to me and says “well, Dad, if you really cared about healthy eating you wouldn’t have had an extra slice of pizza yesterday,” therefore my concern about his vegetable intake is in bad faith and he can ignore me. But it’s not bad faith! I sincerely care about him developing healthy eating habits. And I try to be healthy, too. But I’m a human, and I’m weak, and I don’t always succeed. That’s life. The only way to be totally un-hypocritical in life would be to have no standards.

David: You have written about some of the issues with media come from their audience. How do you try to safeguard your own work from audience pressure that might compromise it?

Discussion of this down-thread immediately turned toward the idea of the ideological content of Slow Boring articles being influenced by the views of Slow Boring readers, but the truth is I don’t really know much about the views of Slow Boring readers.