Links - 28th October 2019 (1)

Taipei notes - "My other visit here was thirty years ago, and most of all I am surprised by how little has changed.  The architecture now looks all the more retro, the alleyways all the more noir, and the motorbikes have by no means vanished.  Yes there are plenty of new stores, but overall it is recognizably the same city, something you could not say about Seoul.Real wages basically did not rise 2000-2016.  The main story, in a nutshell, is that the domestic capital has flowed to China.  About 9 percent of the Taiwanese population lives in China, and that is typically the more ambitious segment of the workforce.I am still surprised at how little the Taiwanese signal status with their looks and dress.  The steady heat and humidity may account for some of that, though the same is not true in the hotter parts of mainland China... The quality of dining here is high and rising.  Unlike in Hong Kong or Singapore, Taiwan has plenty of farms, its own greens, and thus farm to table dining here is common.  Tainan Tai Tsu Mien Seafood is one recommendation, for an affordable Michelin one-star, emphasis on seafood.  Addiction Aquatic Development has superb sushi and is a first-rate hangout.  At the various Night Markets, it is still possible to get an excellent meal for only a few dollars."

University isn't for everyone – which is why we need more apprenticeships - "There are far too many young people who leave university with huge debts, and no clear sense of how their academic qualification has helped their career. It is also true that we have a desperate shortage in this country of people with the right skills in engineering, in electrics, in construction, in digital technology. We have a mismatch: unsatisfied university graduates, and unsatisfied employers."

How multiculturalism divides us - "a philosophy designed to break down barriers and bring people together has in fact achieved the very opposite. Modern Britain is dotted with monocultural ghettos whose inhabitants often live an utterly parallel existence to their compatriots dwelling in some cases just a few streets away. Is it perhaps because the active promotion of separation and difference – for that, ultimately, is what State-sponsored multiculturalism amounts to – drives wedges between people and is inimical to integration? Might it be that we took a wrong turn when we opted for the salad bowl over the melting pot?... You could travel to Cornwall or Norfolk or the Scottish Highlands and be largely untouched by multiculturalism. What do the inhabitants of these areas feel when they hear politicians and commentators describe their homeland in a way that simply doesn’t resonate with them? It is another example of the elites looking out from their vantage points in the cosmopolitan cities and concluding that the entire country looks the same. These champions of multiculturalism will fiercely upbraid those who argue against their creed. There are the usual insinuations that opponents must be motivated by racism – a logical fallacy which conflates culture and race, and ignores the obvious fact that one can be a committed multiracialist without embracing multiculturalism.In their minds, there is something ignoble and chauvinistic about striving to develop common cultural bonds among the population. But are nations and communities that defend a monoculture any less content than those which don’t? Japan, for example, is no less prosperous or happy for its deep cultural homogeneity. Should the Amish be forced to accept a dose of diversity? Would a Western liberal dream of telling a Native American or Indigenous Australian that their bitterness over cultural erosion was unfounded and ‘nativist’? Proponents of multiculturalism do not seem to see the hypocrisy in respecting ancient cultures and civilisations elsewhere while neglecting and derecognising our own... if we are to promote real integration and overcome the divisions that bedevil our society, we must start by ensuring that every lever of the State is used to cultivate the deepest, unforced cultural consensus among our disparate communities.This would mean, as a simple example, promoting only the common language. It is astonishing that well-meaning people ever thought it was wise for public bodies to translate official documents into dozens of foreign languages. It removes the incentive for newcomers to learn the native tongue, which in turn impacts their ability to find work, to truly integrate, to understand and feel part of the country they now call home."

Acceptance of gay sex in decline in UK for first time since Aids crisis - "The finding, based on a survey of 2,884 people, coincided with the first dip in more than a decade in people saying they think sex before marriage is not at all wrong, with people from non-Christian religious groups the most likely to disapprove... the Christian Institute, an educational charity that believes sex should only happen in a marriage between a man and a woman, said signs of a reversal may be a result of pushback against a “new orthodoxy that not to celebrate same-sex relations is homophobic”."
Premarital sex too

Could homophobia be on the rise? - "I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym... acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships... it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes. For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic). Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?... the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one... Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population"

Why ‘worthless’ humanities degrees may set you up for life - "One recent study of 1,700 people from 30 countries, meanwhile, found that the majority of those in leadership positions had either a social sciences or humanities degree. That was especially true of leaders under 45 years of age; leaders over 45 were more likely to have studied Stem."
Strange how we are told a humanities degree teaches critical thinking and soft skills, but the article didn't provide real evidence for these claims. For example the majority of leaders studying the social sciences or humanities sounds convincing - till you look at the source and realise 44% studied social sciences and only 11% humanities

This is the most regrettable college major in America - "two-thirds said that they had a major regret about their educational experience. The No. 1 regret: student loans, which about one in four grads say they regretted... Your college major can be a big source of regret too, PayScale found. It was the second most regretted thing about the college experience, with more than one in 10 people saying their chosen area of study was their biggest educational regret... the area of study that comes with the biggest side of regret: humanities. Indeed, more than one in five people who majored in humanities — which includes specific majors like English and history — say they regret that choice. Other research bolsters this finding, revealing that English in particular is the most regretted major"

This is the most regrettable college major in America - "More than half (54.3%) of people who majored in English say they are not satisfied with that choice of major... The English major is closely followed by a fine arts major (51.6%) and a political science major (38.2%) as the most regretted.Meanwhile, accounting is the major people say they are most satisfied with (just 14.8% say they weren't satisfied), followed by computer science (15%) and information technology (21.1%). And people who graduate with degrees in science, math or technology are the least likely to say they’d switch career fields entirely... So what’s going on with those who regret their English major? Some of this may be the earnings that graduates face depending on their major. People with a bachelor’s in English earn a median of $53,000 a year and fine arts $49,000 a year... Meanwhile, an accounting B.A. can earn you a median of $69,000, a computer science degree $83,000 and an IT major $73,000... The likelihood of getting a job may another factor. A 2015 report from Georgetown’s Center of Education and the Workforce found that college grads with experience and a major in the computers, science and math field had an unemployment rate of just 4.3%. Meanwhile, humanities and arts majors with experience saw unemployment at 5.8%. Even worse: The future might not be all the bright for English majors. Some of the jobs many of them desire like reporter or correspondent (the number of jobs in this field will decline by -9% through 2024, according to the government) and editor (-5%) have declining job growth, and other jobs like teacher only have average growth. Meanwhile, accountants will see 11% job growth, and jobs that are popular with computer science majors like software developer (17% growth) and computer systems analyst (up 21%) will boom."

How Prophetic Was Gattaca? - "Gattaca’s depiction of a dystopian society has uneasily informed debate on public policy. For example, in 2003 an Australia Law Reform Commission produced a 1,100-page document in which Gattaca is quoted several times as a starting point for a discussion on “the ethical, legal and social implications of the New Genetics.” In a 2013 speech, US Senator Rand Paul referenced Gattaca as a warning to argue for the passage of legislation he introduced called the Life at Conception Act... According to Mitchell, the manner in which genes go about building an organism is in part affected by what engineers call noise. There is a randomness to neural development, subjecting the process to tiny random perturbation. Identical twins share the same DNA but are not completely identical. Even the two sides of our bodies, based on the same plan but executed independently, reveal slight differences. Mitchell’s claim is that much of what is labeled environmental “is intrinsic to each person, arising from inherent randomness in the process of brain development.” Plomin, for his part, repeatedly uses the word “probabilistic” to describe the effect of our genome on our destiny, contrasting this with “deterministic.”... more than 50 years of behavioral genetics have shown that “…genetic differences between people account for about half of their differences in tests of intelligence.” Mitchell states that “…intelligence is ‘genetic,’ in the sense that it relies on a complex program encoded in our genomes and can be seriously affected by mutations that compromise that program.”So Gattaca was prophetic, but not quite in the way Niccol intended. He created a dystopia that was based on what he thought of as a misunderstanding about the influence genes have on our destinies. But in fact, it wasn’t a misunderstanding; it’s been borne out by genetic research. The overlords of the society Niccol depicts are actually right about the science and he was wrong. What Niccol got wrong is that a society in which parents decide to fertilize numerous embryos and decide which one to implant and take to term, as they do in Gattaca, won’t be as dystopic as he imagines because genetically-engineered inequality won’t necessarily lead to unequal treatment, any more than randomly-generated genetic inequality will. As Plomin says, “[T]he American founders did not mean that all people are created identical…equal does not mean identical. If everyone were identical, there would be no need to worry about equal rights or equal opportunity. The essence of democracy is that people are treated fairly despite their difference.”"

The Hate-Crime Epidemic That Never Was: A Seattle Case Study - "most of the situations contained in the 500-plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all. Out of 521 confrontations or other incidents reported to the police at some point during the year, 181 (35 percent) were deemed insufficiently serious to qualify as crimes of any kind. Another 215 (41 percent) turned out to involve some minor element of bias (i.e., an ethnic slur used during a fight), but did not rise to the definition of hate crime. Only 125, or 24 percent, qualified as potential hate crimes—i.e., alleged “criminal incidents directly motivated by bias.” For purposes of comparison: There are 745,000 people living in Seattle, and 3.5-million in the metro area. Even that 125 figure represents an overestimate, at least as compared to what most of us imagine to be the stereotypical hate crime (of, say, a gang of white racists beating up someone of a different skin color). Seattle’s remarkably broad municipal hate-crime policies cover not only attacks motivated by racial or sexual animus, but also those related to “homelessness, marital status, political ideology, age and parental status.”Indeed, if there is a single archetypal Seattle hate incident that emerges from this data, it would seem to involve a mentally ill homeless man yelling slurs at someone. According to the City Auditor, 22 percent of hate perps were “living unsheltered” at the time of their crime, 20 percent were mentally ill, and 20 percent were severely intoxicated. The conviction rate in cases such as these has been very low. As Beekman notes, 398 reports of actual hate crime, i.e. instances of “malicious harassment” that were “verified by the Department,” occurred between 2012 and 2017. Of these, 128 were referred for prosecution, indicating authorities’ baseline belief that the accusation was not a hoax and that the police had managed to identify and apprehend a viable suspect. But not all of those cases were prosecuted. And only 37 of those that were prosecuted resulted in a conviction for malicious harassment between 2012 and 2017. That is an average of about six per year—fewer than half of which likely involved a sane, sober, non-homeless offender. That’s hardly an epidemic of hate. So why is this report getting so much publicity? Beekman notes in passing that in 2015, Seattle’s police department hired a full-time Bias Crimes Coordinator, who made it a priority to engage in “community outreach.”... a cynic might argue that the coordinator has had every reason to generate more hate-crime reports—since the existence of such reports helps justify the newly created position. One rather remarkable result is that Seattle has, during some recent years, reported more hate crimes than most U.S. states—including Florida... The scope of hate crime often gets exaggerated all over the United States. In my research, I’ve found that widely reported “surges” in hate crime often turn out to be mere artifacts of new reporting techniques, with actual conviction rates remaining low... many supposed hate crimes are probable hoaxes—and those which are not hoaxes often turn out to be un-prosecutable incidents of anonymous graffiti or shouted slurs."