Pun Salad

Sabine Hossenfelder highlights recent speculation: Consciousness Comes From Quantum Processes, Physicist Claims.

It's a point I've made before, but will nevertheless repeat: this doesn't say anything about "free will". Some misguided souls (for example, me, back when I was a college student) think that quantum behavior can give rise to "free will"; it doesn't. It just adds some (unproven) speculation about quantum-level unpredictable coin-flipping in your brain. But this doesn't put "you" in charge of your actions, determinists (correctly) point out.

And, for the record, Sabine classifies this particular speculation as "bullshit" in any case. Still, it's fun to hear her explain it with a German accent.

Also of note:

• Just around $3 million per job. Joe Lancaster notes a very expensive stretch of the Road to Serfdom: Michigan spent $1.8 billion and only created 602 jobs.

  One of the great economic myths that never seems to die is the idea that giving taxpayer money to a private company will yield a windfall, incentivizing the company to create jobs and generate wealth that otherwise would not exist.

  And yet time and time again, the benefits fall far short of what was promised, if they materialize at all. A new report suggests the state of Michigan is the latest to learn that lesson the hard way.

  "Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer offered billions of taxpayer dollars to select companies in an effort to create jobs during her eight-year term," writes James M. Hohman, director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. "Overall, she has authorized $6.9 billion for business subsidies since gaining office in 2019."

  In a new report, Hohman examined eight major projects—"those that offered $100 million in payments and received significant media attention"—totaling $2.7 billion in promised incentives. Hohman then assessed how the investments paid off.

  Governments have a terrible track record of picking winners and losers, and it turns out that Michigan, under Whitmer, did not break the trend.

  When it comes to government spending, overpromising and underdelivering is the way to bet.

Recently on the book blog:

A couple months back I was sufficiently impressed with Mark Manson's rant about intellectuals to add his substack to my reading list and (eventually) to check out his 2016 book on the topic of …

Well, you can read the title as well as I can. Reader, the blotted-out word on the jacket is not asterisked or otherwise obscured anywhere else in the book. And Mark uses it a lot, usually gratuitously. In his defense, that's become kind of common these days, and the word has lost a lot of its power to shock.

Worse, the title does not accurately reflect Mark's main thesis. When he urges the reader to not give a you-know-what about something, he's asking you to not care strongly about that thing. There are broad classes of things like that: basically, things that are outside your control.

But he further observes that there are things you should care strongly about. Specifically, living in tune with your carefully selected values, like honesty, temperance, courage, justice, etc.

So a better title for the book would have been The Subtle Art of Knowing What to Care About, and What Not to Care About.

It didn't take me long to say: Hey, this sounds a lot like stoicism. I don't think Mark says that directly, though. To be fair, I might have missed it. Mark's prose style does not encourage careful reading; it comes across, at times, as a transcription of a slightly-drunken rant.

So an even better title for the book might have been Stoicism, Loosely Described With Dirty Words.

For what it's worth, one of the back-cover blurbs is from Ryan Holiday, who is an explicit Stoic advocate. I read his book Stillness Is the Key a few years back, and thought it was decent. If you're looking for self-help with a Stoic twist, I'd recommend Ryan over Mark.