Thursday Night Links

• There’s also something in evangelicalism that’s just off-putting to a lot of people like Vance. It’s not just the working class Pentecostal congregations like the one I was raised in (which was very similar to Vance’s experience). The average suburban megachurch is also incredibly cringe. I like to distinguish between middle class and striver class. Evangelicalism appeals to the middle class, but much less so to the striver class. And the elites of our society are either people from the upper classes, or strivers like Vance. [Aaron Renn]
• Priests ordained since 2010 “are clearly the most conservative cohort of priests we’ve seen in a long time,” said Brad Vermurlen, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, who has studied the rightward shift of the American priesthood. Surveys tracking the opinions of priests have found that, starting in the 1980s, each new wave of priests in the United States is noticeably more conservative than the one before it, Dr. Vermurlen said. [NY Times]
  
• Everyone gets married young. Women constantly have children without committed men. Men beat and cheat on their partners. Women stay with their abusive partners, at least until the men get bored and leave. Everyone eats junk food and drinks soda for every meal. Everyone screams all the time, or they punch each other. People buy stuff they can’t afford. Everyone heavily drinks. Drug abuse is everywhere, especially of prescription painkillers. Few people want to work, and those who do are terrible employees. Yet nothing is ever anyone’s fault. Or rather, every bad thing is the fault of the economy, the government, Obama, the industrial companies, the Japanese, the Chinese, or some other mysterious malevolent force somewhere in the universe. [Matt Lakeman]
• I wonder why this became so popular? The message of the book is that Appalachian whites are totally hopeless. It is true that they behave very differently than Germanic or Scandinavian whites (e.g. Minnesota and Wisconsin, see Sailer): more violent and less future oriented. But rural whites would be doing much better if the country had not been deliberately deindustrialized. All the more reason for Trump's tariff program. The problem is that for reindustrialization to occur, tariffs would need to be perceived as permanent, and Trump will be gone after one term. (Also, Trump is not smart enough to win Oval Office debates about this against his globalist staffers.) So, the 2019 crash will be blamed on Trump (because he was desperate to claim credit for the final years of bubble), and therefore blamed on populism and nationalism. [CBS]
• The good news is there are lots of opportunities to find great value outside of the mega-caps currently (see a few examples in my recent archives). I think there is an interesting valuation gap emerging between the largest 25-50 stocks and everything else. This has happened numerous times in the past where the large high-quality stocks became expensive while bargains existed elsewhere, most famously in the early 1970’s and the late 1990’s. Both of these periods were followed by a multi-year correction where the expensive stocks fell and the cheapest stocks soared. [John Huber]
• In early days some argued that the obligations of the Constitution operated directly on the conscience of the legislature, and only in that manner, and that it was to be conclusively presumed that whatever was done by the legislature was constitutional. But such a view did not obtain with our hard-headed, courageous, and far-sighted statesmen and judges, and it was soon settled that it was the duty of judges in cases properly arising before them to apply the law and so to declare what was the law, and that if what purported to be statutory law was at variance with the fundamental law, i.e., the Constitution, the seeming statute was not law at all, was not binding on the courts, the individuals, or any branch of the Government, and that it was the duty of the judges so to decide. This power conferred on the judiciary in our form of government is unique in the history of governments, and its operation has attracted and deserved the admiration and commendation of the world. [William Howard Taft]
• In materials science, a disappearing polymorph is a form of a crystal structure that is suddenly unable to be produced, instead transforming into a different crystal structure with the same chemical composition (a polymorph) during nucleation. Sometimes the resulting transformation is extremely hard or impractical to reverse, because the new polymorph may be more stable. It is hypothesized that contact with a single microscopic seed crystal of the new polymorph can be enough to start a chain reaction causing the transformation of a much larger mass of material. Widespread contamination with such microscopic seed crystals may lead to the impression that the original polymorph has "disappeared." [wiki]
• We’ve been looking for historic cases of discontinuously fast technological progress, to help with reasoning about the likelihood and consequences of abrupt progress in AI capabilities. We recently finished expanding this investigation to 37 technological trends. This blog post is a quick update on our findings. See the main page on the research and its outgoing links for more details. We found ten events in history that abruptly and clearly contributed more to progress on some technological metric than another century would have seen on the previous trend. Or as we say, we found ten events that produced ‘large’, ‘robust’ ‘discontinuities’. [Less Wrong]