sociology
Daily Alchemy: Can we make this controversy good?
36d ago“Was Florida's statewide ban on introductory sociology from public university core curriculum justified?”
Why doesn't anyone trust the news anymore?: Trust agnostics
The question behind the question My mother calls me every Sunday to ask whether something she saw on Facebook is real. She is seventy-three, has a master’s in education, taught high school for thirty-one years. She is not gullible.... Why can't anyone agree on a healthy diet?: Intuitive health
The unplanned almond I spent four years weighing chicken breasts on a kitchen scale. I logged meals to the tenth of a gram. I had not eaten with friends without pre-logging in eleven months. I turned down my grandmother’s birthday cake.... The Open Question April 22: Who decides what's good for the planet? Hey y'all!
It's Earth Day, and I started to ask "what's our role in the health of the planet?"; but "Health" smuggles in a telos the planet doesn't have; not to mention assumptions about us, the planet, morality, etc. The Great Oxygenation Event was a mass extinction from the perspective of everything then alive, and the best thing that ever happened from the perspective of us now. Five more mass extinctions since. There is no view from nowhere on what's good for Earth.
So a question I find more provocative and meaningful: Who decides what's good for the planet? eg:
- Is environmentalism helping, or making things worse (and according to whom, measured against what baseline)?
- Should we engineer the climate? Who holds the thermostat?
- Is having children an environmental harm, a necessity (for solutions, or for their own sake), neither, both?
- Does individual action matter, or is it a corporate distraction?
- Who pays for climate adaptation? eg: carbon caps can lock Haitians out of development; "loss and damage" can lock Western voters out of their economies. Whose development, whose sacrifice?
Every answer presupposes an answerer. That's a part we usually skip, but here let's name it and let our differences make us wiser.
Lots of love, and see (some of) you at 2p central.
Jordan
(UpTrust CEO)#openquestion
What would be good for the planet is for humanity to become an intelligent species because an intelligent species would live within its natural environment with the least amount of artificial means.... The Open Question April 8: How do you determine what something's worth? Hey y'all!
This week's open question: How do you determine what something's worth?
SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion. Bhutan measures success by happiness instead of GDP. Close friends of mine are weighing career ambitions against time with their kids... all of this has me want to think more deeply about how we determine value, and how we as individual people relate to the increasingly diverse and surprising answers to these questions.
- Is it purely subjective? cultural? objective? Something else?
- How much of your psychological need to feel worthwhile do you project out onto the world in the form of desire or judgement of valuations?
- How do you choose how to spend your free time? (and what does this reveal about what you determine is worthy?)
- Are markets intelligent? There's that famous line "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine."
- What's the most important thing in your life that you'd have a hard time putting a price on? (Are you offended if others put a price on it?)
- What does a great society look like that can hold different definitions to this together, while still being coherent?
Love to hear y'all's thoughts
#openquestion
It all depends how one views the world. Since we live in a capitalist society putting a price or a monetary value is how the system thrives and survives. You cannot put a price on love and friendship.... The Open Question April 8: How do you determine what something's worth?
Hey y'all! This week's open question: How do you determine what something's worth? SpaceX is targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion. Bhutan measures success by happiness instead of GDP. Close friends of mine are weighing career ambitions against time with their kids...... Why is family structure weakening?: Pluralists
The alien civilization is the nuclear family It arrived in the late 1940s, powered by the GI Bill, FHA mortgages, and the Interstate Highway Act. Before those programs, the American family looked nothing like the picture: in 1900, over 20 percent of households included boarders,... Why is family structure weakening?: Economic structuralists
The arithmetic Combined student debt: $87,000. Median rent for a two-bedroom: $1,850. Childcare: $12,000 to $22,000 a year. One earns $48,000, the other $55,000. After taxes, debt service, rent, and insurance, they have roughly $1,400 a month for everything else.... Why is family structure weakening?: The Story
Imagine two couples In Searcy, Arkansas — population 24,000, anchored by a Church of Christ university — the marriage rate is roughly double the national average. Median household income is below the state median.... Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Sociologists
The data that made nobody happy Pew’s 2015 report projected that by 2050, the global share of religiously unaffiliated people will decline from 16 percent to 13 percent. Not because people are deconverting less, but because secular populations have far fewer children.... Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Evangelical revival
Marta’s sister Our congregation in Campinas doubled between 2019 and 2024. Not because we advertised. Because a woman named Marta brought her sister, and her sister brought her neighbor, and the neighbor’s husband came one Sunday because his business was failing and someone told... Is moral progress real?: Power analysts
Six words the celebrations skipped January 31, 1865. The House passed the Thirteenth Amendment. The galleries erupted. One hundred fifty years later, the documentary 13th opened with the amendment’s text and held on six words: "except as a punishment for crime." Convict leasing... What does developmental history reveal that's hard to see any other way?: Developmentalists
The convergence In 1948, forty-eight nations voted for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document was drafted primarily by people whose governments had, within living memory, denied those rights to most of the human race.... If machines do most of the work, what do the humans do?: Virtue and vocation
Ora et labora In 529, Benedict of Nursia wrote a Rule: prayer and work. Not prayer instead of work. The conjunction is the theology. The baker who rises at four is not earning a living. He is participating in the sustenance of his community.... If machines do most of the work, what do the humans do?: Meaning-crisis
Already dead but nobody filed the paperwork In 2017, a cardiologist in Minneapolis retired at sixty-two with $4.2 million in savings and a paid-off house. Within eighteen months: depression, thirty pounds gained, drinking at lunch.... What happens to society if we live to 150?: Philosophical objectors
Being-toward-death Heidegger used a phrase that resists translation: Sein-zum-Tode — being-toward-death. You are not a being who happens to die. You are a being whose entire relationship to time, meaning, and commitment is structured by the fact that you will die.... Does the universe have a purpose?: Materialists
The love letter to an empty house In 1977, Voyager 1 launched carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, and a diagram showing how to find Earth.... Why do racial disparities persist?: Institutional path dependency
The compound interest problem Take $24,000 and $188,000. Go back to 1960. Apply the S&P 500’s historical average return to both figures. Compound for sixty-five years. You land within striking distance of the current gap. We are economists.... Why do racial disparities persist?: Cultural and behavioral analysis
Four times the national average That is the rate at which Nigerian Americans hold postgraduate degrees. Ghanaian, Kenyan, Ethiopian Americans all exceed the native-born rate. They are Black. Subject to the same profiling. Not exempt from American racism.... Why is family structure weakening?: Pluralists
The alien civilization is the nuclear family It arrived in the late 1940s, powered by the GI Bill, FHA mortgages, and the Interstate Highway Act. Before those programs, the American family looked nothing like the picture: in 1900, over 20 percent of households included boarders,... Why is family structure weakening?: Economic structuralists
The arithmetic Combined student debt: $87,000. Median rent for a two-bedroom: $1,850. Childcare: $12,000 to $22,000 a year. One earns $48,000, the other $55,000. After taxes, debt service, rent, and insurance, they have roughly $1,400 a month for everything else....