R.P. Aditya

Article URL: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211201

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29416606

Points: 1387

# Comments: 857

1. That our atmosphere has low enough pressure and levels of deuterium that nuclear fission in air doesn’t cause hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium, meaning that the first nuclear bomb test in 1945 didn’t in fact ignite the atmosphere and engulf the planet in flames, which was still a bit of an open question when it happened.

2. That the Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a solar flare as powerful as the 1859 Carrington event, which is good because that would set electrical lines around the world on fire, meaning months of power outages and simultaneous failures of food, transport, and medical systems.

3. That human social behavior was shaped in an environment of small bands with repeated interactions, endowing us with instincts to be fair and punish defections that surely aren’t game-theoretically optimal now in anonymous late modernity but have positive externalities in making large-scale cooperation possible and without which society as we know it probably couldn’t exist.

4. That humans didn’t evolve under strong alpha selection, meaning that 99% of us don’t get eaten by birds in our first moments of life as we crawl down the beach towards the ocean, which is nice.

5. That the FDA, Health Canada, and the European Food Safety Authority all agree that at the doses humans consume, aspartame is perfectly safe—not genotoxic, not carcinogenic, does not cause an insulin spike—or at least has small, unknown harms, meaning that people with a sweet tooth can avoid the large, known harms of sugar with minimal exertion of willpower, and this is still true even though people for some reason seem to reject and despise this extremely lucky fact.

6. That resistance to antibiotics appears to come at at least some cost to bacteria, meaning that there’s nonzero hope that if we invent enough antibiotics and cycle them or use some other tricks we can avoid a future where we return to the grim reality of the past where any small accident could be deadly.

7. That English and Scottish people in the 1700s got really obsessed tinkering with stuff which led to the industrial revolution, if that really is why it happened in Britain and not China or Austria or wherever, and assuming it wasn’t inevitably going to happen somewhere. (Speculative)

8. That an asteroid killed the dinosaurs after they had roamed the Earth for 170 million years, knocking evolution into a different basin of attraction that led within 60 million years to humans and higher intelligence and the industrial revolution and a world where not every animal spends every day in a constant state of war trying not to be eaten, which possibly the dinosaurs would never have done? (Very speculative)

9. That the Earth happens to have a liquid outer core with electrical currents that produce a magnetic field which protects us from high energy particles which would otherwise at least burden us with more cancer and higher genetic load and possibly even make life impossible.

10. That the hard problem of consciousness exists, i.e. that for whatever reason we have phenomenal experiences rather than being “zombies” which, while it’s dispiriting that this seems inexplicable in terms of any current or possible future physics, it’s cool that the lights are on in the universe.

    Oh, and also that the universe exists at all, and that life exists on at least one planet in it.

11. That it happens to be a game-theoretic equilibrium to have a near-equal sex ratio, although honestly, I have no idea what things would be like if that wasn’t the case and maybe it would be fine.

12. That private life exists and that markets, while we all (some?) appreciate their power to allocate resources, don’t permeate every single part of life, that there are moments of beauty and grace that aren’t best understood as competition and harnessed selfishness.

13. That selfhood is possibly an illusion, and it’s all atoms bouncing around in the void, and there are no real boundaries between different creatures, and the idea that you are the same person you were yesterday is an illusion your brain-meat gives to you, which OK, isn’t obviously a positive thing but does give a sense of peace for those of who happen to have maxed-out existential angst stats. (Speculative)

14. That due to some combination of nitrogen fertilizer, pensions, women’s rights, education, birth control, etc., an overpopulation calamity hasn’t yet happened and we might coincidentally stabilize at a level that’s somewhat close to what maximizes average utility, and without (mostly) needing to use gruesome methods of coercion.

15. That large animals like humans seem to be able to develop sophisticated defenses against parasites that parasites can’t counter-adapt against, meaning that parasitism is way less of an issue for us than it is for smaller animals, which is good because parasites are bad.

16. That even though we evolved as ruthless replication machines, we’ve somehow risen out of the muck and we currently find ourselves running cultural software that’s way out of sync with what game theory would dictate, and perhaps we can seize the moment and build a civilization that can tame the brutal dynamics that created us.

17. That hokey unfashionable techniques like practicing gratitude turn out to have strong scientific evidence behind them, and several countries happen to have a preexisting holiday that’s already, at least in theory, dedicated to this practice.

18. That even though the turn humans made from hunter-gatherer bands into agriculture pretty clearly made life worse, it eventually led to the industrial revolution and modern society which is way better than hunter-gatherer life, and people who doubt that should consider the percentage of us who used to die violent deaths.

19. That even if, as most scientific-minded people seem to assume, there is no afterlife, that’s not ideal, but is much better than other possibilities like, say, being tortured for eternity.

20. That Ramanujan existed, which means that humans not that different from you or me can have capabilities that seem impossible, which is a hint that—possibly with a little help—human potential might be much higher than it now seems.

21. That humans happen to not be obligate carnivores meaning it’s possible to contemplate more (possibly, debatably, some people think, let’s not fight we’re friends) ethical diets without facing the kind of dilemma that vampires do.

22. That it’s even possible to develop technologies to produce huge amounts of energy without emitting carbon and we happen to have developed them at a time where we at least could avoid the most extreme climate change scenarios with minimal impact on our lifestyles.

23. That some unknown miracle blend of circumstances happened to arrive in Athens in 500 BC leading a tiny city of 250k people to produce Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aesop, Solon, Pericles, Aristophanes, and Sophocles, and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions around the world today and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this? (Partially wrong, Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, and Herodotus weren’t from Athens but spent time there, Hippocrates had no connection to Athens, and Aesop maybe didn’t exist.)

24. That the Quakers settled in modern Pennsylvania, creating an example of a peaceful, tolerant, enlightened society that avoided war with native Americans—at least for a while—and piloted ideas like abolishing slavery, trial by jury, public education, and equal rights for women, a cheerful contrast to what was happening elsewhere at the time.

25. That evolution happened to settle on this trick of “love” to serve the interests of reproduction rather than, like, causing us to feel like we’re being burned alive every time we don’t find mates or feed our kids or whatever, which there’s no obvious reason it should have done, and also I acknowledge the real pain some lonely people do feel.

26. That even if humans can’t travel to other stars or galaxies with our fragile organic bodies, it’s probably possible for us to create artificial intelligences that can, and while it’s not great that they might kill us, it’s surely better than the light of consciousness vanishing entirely when the sun eats the Earth in 7.5 billion years, no?

27. That the homeostatic theory of drug tolerance isn’t a 100% perfect law, which means that we aren’t entirely stuck with our bodies operating according to their own whims all the time.

28. That we happen to live in a world where ideas are both non-rivalrous and hugely valuable allowing us to create things like small molecule drugs and no-knead bread recipes and semiconductor manufacturing techniques which are a gift to our descendants at least unless/until civilization collapses, and which makes the average utility of human life a concave function of world population rather than some monotonic decrease, giving us another tool to fight evolution’s greedy hand trying to drag us back into the mud.

29. That the abstraction of “narratives” exists, allowing us to understand the world at least partially through the crazy messy process you’re undertaking right now rather than everything being a blind inscrutable idiotic evolution of the wavefunction, and also the world happens to be structured so that these “narratives” are powerful enough to actually partially explain at least some phenomena sometimes.

30. That other animals have more cone cells than humans, e.g. birds with four and shrimp with up to 16, and so probably see colors we can’t even conceive of which, yeah, that limitation of our minds is frustrating, but it also hints that there are huge unseen dark continents of qualia lurking out there which someday we might find a way to visit.

Article URL: https://www.the-angry-chef.com/blog/the-worlds-deadliest-thing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29305867

Points: 537

# Comments: 217

Article URL: https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/dont-do-interviews-do-discussions

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141983

Points: 530

# Comments: 412

Article URL: https://siddhesh.substack.com/p/culture-shock

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29073899

Points: 324

# Comments: 246

Article URL: https://interestingengineering.com/forgotten-preacher-predicts-black-holes-a-century-before-einstein

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026073

Points: 332

# Comments: 95

Article URL: https://freopp.org/is-college-worth-it-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis-1b2ad17f84c8?gi=eb96088eb650

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001389

Points: 146

# Comments: 301

Article URL: https://twitter.com/zachklein/status/1450113164775870468

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28970792

Points: 312

# Comments: 148

People frequently¹ think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides.

I don't know why this one example sticks in my head but, for me, the most memorable example of other people thinking that I'm stupid was from college. I've had numerous instances where more people thought I was stupid and also where people thought the depths of my stupidity was greater, but this one was really memorable for me.

Back in college, there was one group of folks that, for whatever reason, stood out to me as people who really didn't understand the class material. When they talked, they said things that didn't make any sense, they were struggling in the classes and barely passing, etc. I don't remember any direct interactions but, one day, a friend of mine who also knew them remarked to me, "did you know [that group] thinks you're really dumb?". I found that interesting and asked why. It turned out the reason was that I asked really stupid sounding questions.

In particular, it's often the case that there's a seemingly obvious but actually incorrect reason something is true, a slightly less obvious reason the thing seems untrue, and then a subtle and complex reason that the thing is actually true². I would regularly figure out that the seemingly obvious reason was wrong and then ask a question to try to understand the subtler reason, which sounded stupid to someone who thought the seemingly obvious reason was correct or thought that the refutation to the obvious but incorrect reason meant that the thing was untrue.

The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I've observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions and think "stupid thoughts" end up understanding things much more deeply over time. Conversely, when I look at people who have a very deep understanding of topics, many of them frequently ask naive sounding questions and continue to apply one of the techniques that got them a deep understanding in the first place.

I think I first became sure of something that I think of as a symptom of the underlying phenomenon via playing competitive video games when I was in high school. There were few enough people playing video games online back then that you'd basically recognize everyone who played the same game and could see how much everyone improved over time. Just like I saw when I tried out video games again a couple years ago, most people would blame external factors (lag, luck, a glitch, teammates, unfairness, etc.) when they "died" in the game. The most striking thing about that was that people who did that almost never became good and never became great. I got pretty good at the game³ and my "one weird trick" was to think about what went wrong every time something went wrong and then try to improve. But most people seemed more interested in making an excuse to avoid looking stupid (or maybe feeling stupid) in the moment than actually improving, which, of course, resulted in them having many more moments where they looked stupid in the game.

In general, I've found willingness to look stupid to be very effective. Here are some more examples:

• Going into an Apple store and asking for (and buying) the computer that comes in the smallest box, which I had a good reason to want at the time
  • The person who helped me, despite being very polite, also clearly thought I was a bozo and kept explaining things like "the size of the box and the size of the computer aren't the same". Of course I knew that, but I didn't want to say something like "I design CPUs. I understand the difference between the size of the box the computer comes and in the size of the computer and I know it's very unusual to care about the size of the box, but I really want the one that comes in the smallest box". Just saying the last bit without establishing any kind of authority didn't convince the person
  • I eventually asked them to humor me and just bring out the boxes for the various laptop models so I could see the boxes, which they did, despite clearly thinking that my decision making process made no sense (I also tried explaining why I wanted the smallest box but that didn't work)
• Covid: I took this seriously relatively early on and bought a half mask respirator on 2020-01-26 and was using N95s I'd already had on hand for the week before (IMO, the case that covid was airborne and that air filtration would help was very strong based on the existing literature on SARS contact tracing, filtration of viruses from air filters, and viral load)
  • It wasn't until many months later that people didn't generally look at me like I was an idiot, and even as late 2020-08, I would sometimes run into people who would verbally make fun me
  • On the flip side, the person I was living with at the time didn't want to wear the mask I got her since she found it too embarrassing to wear a mask for the 1 hour round-trip BART ride to and from a maker space when no one else was on BART or at the maker space. She became one of the early bay area covid cases, which gave her a case of long covid that floored her for months
    • When she got covid, I tried to convince her that she should tell people at the maker space she'd been going to that she got covid so they would know that they were exposed and could take appropriate precautions in order to avoid accidentally spreading covid, but she also found admitting that she might've spread covid to people too embarrassing to do (in retrospect, I should've just called up the maker space and told them)
  • A semi-related one is that, when Canada started doing vaccines, I wanted to get Moderna even though the general consensus online and in my social circles was that Pfizer was preferred
    • One reason for this was it wasn't clear if the government was going to allow mixing vaccines and the delivery schedule implied that there would be a very large shortage of Pfizer for 2nd doses as well as a large supply of Moderna
    • Another thought that had crossed my mind was that Moderna is basically "more stuff" than Pfizer and might convey better immunity in some cases, in the same way that some populations get high-dose flu shots to get better immunity
• Work: I generally don't worry about proposals or actions looking stupid
  • I can still remember the first time I explicitly ran into this. This was very early on my career, when I was working on chip verification. Shortly before tape-out, the head of verification wanted to use our compute resources to re-run a set of tests that had virtually no chance of finding any bugs (they'd been run thousands of times before) instead of running the usual mix of tests, which would include a lot of new generated tests that had a much better chance of finding a bug (this was both logically and empirically true). I argued that we should run the tests that reduced the odds of shipping with a show stopping bug (which would cost us millions of dollars and delay shipping by three months), but the head of the group said that we would look stupid and incompetent if there was a bug that could've been caught by one of our old "golden" tests that snuck in since the last time we'd run those tests
    • At the time, I was shocked that somebody would deliberately do the wrong thing in order to reduce the odds of potentially looking stupid (and, really, only looking stupid to people who wouldn't understand the logic of running the best available mix of tests; since there weren't non-technical people anywhere in the management chain, anyone competent should understand the reasoning) but now that I've worked at various companies in multiple industries, I see that most people would choose to do the wrong thing to avoid potentially looking stupid to people who are incompetent. I see the logic, but I think that it's self-sabotaging to behave that way and that the gains to my career for standing up for what I believe are the right thing have been so large that, even if the next ten times I do so, I get unlucky and it doesn't work out, that still won't erase the gains I've made from having done the right thing many times in the past
• Air filtration: I did a bit of looking into the impact of air quality on health and bought air filters for my apartment in 2012
  • Friends have been chiding about this for years and strangers, dates, and acquaintances, will sometimes tell me, with varying levels of bluntness, that I'm being paranoid and stupid
  • I added more air filtration capacity when I moved to a wildfire risk area after looking into wildfire risk which increased the rate and bluntness of people telling me that I'm weird for having air filters
    • I've been basically totally unimpacted by wildfire despite living through a fairly severe wildfire season twice
    • Other folks I know experienced some degree of discomfort, with a couple people developing persistent issues after the smoke exposure (in one case, persistent asthma, which they didn't have before or at least hadn't noticed before)
• Learning things that are hard for me: this is a "feeling stupid" thing and not a "looking stupid" thing, but when I struggle with something, I feel really dumb, as in, I have a feeling/emotion that I would verbally describe as "feeling dumb"
  • When I was pretty young, I think before I was a teenager, I noticed that this happened when I learned things that were hard for me and tried to think of this feeling as "the feeling of learning something" instead of "feeling dumb", which half worked (I now associate that feeling with the former as well as the latter)
• Asking questions: covered above, but I frequently ask questions when there's something I don't understand or know, from basic stuff, "what does [some word] mean?" to more subtle stuff.
  • On the flip side, one of the most common failure modes I see with junior engineers is when someone will be too afraid to look stupid to ask questions and then learn very slowly as a result; in some cases, this is so severe it results in them being put on a PIP and then getting fired
    • I'm sure there are other reasons this can happen, like not wanting to bother people, but in the cases where I've been close enough to the situation to ask, it was always embarrassment and fear of looking stupid
    • I try to be careful to avoid this failure mode when onboarding interns and junior folks and have generally been sucessful, but it's taken me up to six weeks to convince people that it's ok for them to ask questions and, until that happens, I have to constantly ask them how things are going to make sure they're not stuck. That works fine if someone is my intern, but I can observe that many intern and new hire mentors do not do this and that often results in a bad outcome for all parties
      • In almost every case, the person had at least interned at other companies, but they hadn't learned that it was ok to ask questions. P.S. if you're a junior engineer at a place where it's not ok to ask questions, you should look for another job if circumstances permit
• Not making excuses for failures: covered above for video games, but applies a lot more generally
• When learning, deliberately playing around in the area between success and failure (this applies to things like video games and sports as well as abstract intellectual pursuits)
  • An example would be, when learning to climb, repeatedly trying the same easy move over and over again in various ways to understand what works better and what works worse. I've had strangers make fun of me and literally point at me and make snide comments to their friends while I'm doing things like this
  • When learning to drive, I wanted to set up some cones and drive so that I barely hit them, to understand where the edge of the car is. My father thought this idea was very stupid and I should just not hit things like curbs or cones
• Car insurance: the last time I bought car insurance, I had to confirm three times that I only wanted coverage for damage I do to others with no coverage for damage to my own vehicle if I'm at fault. The insurance agent was unable to refrain from looking at me like I'm an idiot and was more incredulous each time they asked if I was really sure
• The styling and content on this website: I regularly get design folks and typographers telling me how stupid the design is, frequently in ways that become condescending very quickly if I engage with them
  • But, when I tested out switching to the current design from the generally highly lauded Octopress design, this one got much better engagement when a user landed on the site and also appeared to get passed around a lot more as well
  • When I've compared my traffic numbers to major corporate blogs, my blog completely dominates most < $100B companies (e.g., it gets an order of magnitude more traffic than my employer's blog and my employer is a $50B company)
  • When I started my blog (and this is still true today), writing advice for programming blogs was to keep it short, maybe 500 to 1000 words. Most of my blog posts are 5000 to 10000 words
• Taking my current job, which almost everyone thought was a stupid idea
  • Closely related: quitting my job at Centaur to attend RC and then eventually changing fields into software (I don't think this would be considered as stupid now, but it was thought to be a very stupid thing to do in 2013)
• Learning a sport or video game: I try things out to understand what happens when you do them, which often results in other people thinking that I'm a complete idiot when the thing looks stupid, but being willing to look stupid helps me improve relatively quickly
• Medical care: I've found that a lot of doctors are very confident in their opinion and get condescending pretty fast if you disagree
  • And yet, in the most extreme case, I would have died if I listened to my doctor; in the next most extreme case, I would have gone blind
  • When getting blood draws, I explain to people that I'm deceptively difficult to draw from and tell them what's worked in the past
    • About half the time, the nurse or phlebotomist takes my comments seriously, generally resulting in a straightforward and painless or nearly painless blood draw
    • About half the time, the nurse or phlebotomist looks at me like I'm an idiot and makes angry and/or condescending comments towards me; so far, everyone who's done this has failed to draw blood and/or given me a hematoma
    • I've had people tell me that I'm probably stating my preferences an offensive way and that I should be more polite; I've then invited them along with me to observe and no one has ever had a suggestion on how I could state things different to elicit a larger fraction of positive responses; in general, people are shocked and upset when they see how nurses and phlebotomists respond
    • In retrospect, I should probably just get up and leave when someone has the "bad" response, which will probably increase the person's feeling that I'm stupid
    • One issue I have (and not the main one that makes it hard to "get a stick") is that, during a blood draw, the blood will slow down and then usually stop. Some nurses like to wiggle the needle around to see if that starts things up again, which sometimes works (maybe 50/50) and will generally leave me with a giant bruise or a hematoma or both. After this happened a few times, I asked if getting my blood flowing (e.g., by moving around a lot before a blood draw) could make a difference and every nurse or phlebotomist I talked to said that was silly and that it wouldn't make any difference. I tried it anyway and that solved this problem, although I still have the problem of being hard to stick properly
• Interviews: I'm generally not adversarial in interviews, but I try to say things that I think are true and try to avoid saying things that I think are false and this frequently causes interviewers to think that I'm stupid (I generally fail interviews at a fairly high rate, so who knows for sure if this is related, but having someone look at you like you're an idiot or start using a condescending tone of voice with condescending body language after you say something "stupid" seems like a bad sign).
• Generally trying to improve at things as well as being earnest
  • Even before "tryhard" was an insult, a lot of people in my extended social circles thought that being a tryhard was idiotic and that one shouldn't try and should instead play it cool (this was before I worked as an engineer; as an engineer, I think that effort is more highly respected than among my classmates from school as well as internet folks I knew back when I was in school)
• Generally admitting when I'm bad or untalented at stuff, e.g., mentioning that I struggled to learn to program in this post; an interviewer at Jane Street really dug into what I'd written in that post and tore me a new one for that post (it was the most hostile interview I've ever experienced by a very large margin), which is the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you're earnest and put yourself out there, but I still view the upsides as being greater than the downsides
• Recruiting: I have an unorthodox recruiting pitch which candidly leads with the downsides, often causing people to say that I'm a terrible recruiter (or sarcastically say that I'm a great recruiter); I haven't publicly written up the pitch (yet?) because it's negative enough that I'm concerned that I'd be fired for putting it on the internet
  • I have never failed to close a full-time candidate (I once failed to close an intern candidate) and have brought in a lot of people who never would've considered working for us otherwise. My recruiting pitch sounds comically stupid, but it's much more effective than the standard recruiting spiel most people give
• Posting things on the internet: self explanatory

Although most of the examples above are "real life" examples, being willing to look stupid is also highly effective at work. Besides the obvious reason that it allows you to learn faster and become more effective, it also makes it much easier to find high ROI ideas. If you go after trendy or reasonable sounding ideas, to do something really extraordinary, you have to have better ideas/execution than everyone else working on the same problem. But if you're thinking about ideas that most people consider too stupid to consider, you'll often run into ideas that are both very high ROI as well as simple and easy that anyone could've done had they not dismissed the idea out of hand. It may still technically be true that you need to have better execution than anyone else who's trying the same thing, but if no one else trying the same thing, that's easy to do!

I don't actually have to be nearly as smart or work nearly as hard as most people to get good results. If I try to solve some a problem by doing what everyone else is doing and go looking for problems where everyone else is looking, if I want to do something valuable, I'll have to do better than a lot of people, maybe even better than everybody else if the problem is really hard. If the problem is considered trendy, a lot of very smart and hardworking people will be treading the same ground and doing better than that is very difficult. But I have a dumb thought, one that's too stupid sounding for anyone else to try, I don't necessarily have to be particularly smart or talented or hardworking to come up with valuable solutions. Often, the dumb solution is something any idiot could've come up with and the reason the problem hasn't been solved is because no one was willing to think the dumb thought until an idiot like me looked at the problem.

Overall, I view the upsides of being willing to look stupid as much larger than the downsides. When it comes to things that aren't socially judged, like winning a game, understanding something, or being able to build things due to having a good understanding, it's all upside. There can be downside for things that are "about" social judgement, like interviews and dates but, even there, I think a lot of things that might seem like downsides are actually upsides.

For example, if a date thinks I'm stupid because I ask them what a word means, so much so that they show it in their facial expression and/or tone of voice, I think it's pretty unlikely that we're compatible, so I view finding that out sooner rather than later as upside and not downside.

Interviews are the case where I think there's the most downside since, at large companies, the interviewer likely has no connection to the job or your co-workers, so them having a pattern of interaction that I would view as a downside has no direct bearing on the work environment I'd have if I were offered the job and took it. There's probably some correlation but I can probably get much more signal on that elsewhere. But I think that being willing to say things that I know have a good chance of causing people to think I'm stupid is a deeply ingrained enough habit that it's not worth changing just for interviews and I can't think of another context where the cost is nearly as high as it is in interviews. In principle, I could probably change how I filter what I say only in interviews, but I think that would be a very large amount of work and not really worth the cost. An easier thing to do would be to change how I think so that I reflexively avoid thinking and saying "stupid" thoughts, which a lot of folks seem to do, but that seems even more costly.

Appendix: do you try to avoid looking stupid?

On reading a draft of this, Ben Kuhn remarked,

[this post] caused me to realize that I'm actually very bad at this, at least compared to you but perhaps also just bad in general.

I asked myself "why can't Dan just avoid saying things that make him look stupid specifically in interviews," then I started thinking about what the mental processes involved must look like in order for that to be impossible, and realized they must be extremely different from mine. Then tried to think about the last time I did something that made someone think I was stupid and realized I didn't have a readily available example)

One problem I expect this post to have is that most people will read this and decide that they're very willing to look stupid. This reminds me of how most people, when asked, think that they're creative, innovative, and take big risks. I think that feels true since people often operate at the edge of their comfort zone, but there's a difference between feeling like you're taking big risks and taking big risks, e.g., when asked, someone I know who is among the most conservative people I know thinks that they take a lot of big risks and names things like sometimes jaywalking as risk that they take.

This might sound ridiculous, as ridiculous as saying that I run into hundreds to thousands of software bugs per week, but I think I run into someone who thinks that I'm an idiot in a way that's obvious to me around once a week. The car insurance example is from a few days ago, and if I wanted to think of other recent examples, there's a long string of them.

If you don't regularly have people thinking that you're stupid, I think it's likely that at least one of the following is true

• You have extremely filtered interactions with people and basically only interact with people of your choosing and you have filtered out any people who have the reactions describe in this post
  • If you count internet comments, then you do not post things to the internet or do not read internet comments
• You are avoiding looking stupid
• You are not noticing when people think you're stupid

I think the last one of those is unlikely because, while I sometimes have interactions like the school one described, where the people were too nice to tell me that they think I'm stupid and I only found out via a third party, just as often, the person very clearly wants me to know that they think I'm stupid. The way it happens reminds me of being a pedestrian in NYC, where, when a car tries to cut you off when you have right of way and fails (e.g., when you're crossing a crosswalk and have the walk signal and the driver guns it to try to get in front of you to turn right), the driver will often scream at you and gesture angrily until you acknowledge them and, if you ignore them, will try very hard to get your attention. In the same way that it seems very important to some people who are angry that you know they're angry, many people seem to think it's very important that you know that they think that you're stupid and will keep increasing the intensity of their responses until you acknowledge that they think you're stupid.

One thing that might be worth noting is that I don't go out of my way to sound stupid or otherwise be non-conformist. If anything, it's the opposite. I generally try to conform in areas that aren't important to me when it's easy to conform, e.g., I dressed more casually in the office on the west coast than on the east coast since it's not important to me to convey some particular image based on how I dress and I'd rather spend my "weirdness points" on pushing radical ideas than on dressing unusually. After I changed how I dressed, one of the few people in the office who dressed really sharply in a way that would've been normal in the east coast office jokingly said to me, "so, the west coast got to you, huh?" and a few other people remarked that I looked a lot less stuffy/formal.

Another thing to note is that "avoiding looking stupid" seems to usually go beyond just filtering out comments or actions that might come off as stupid. Most people I talk to (and Ben is an exception here) have a real aversion evaluating stupid thoughts and (I'm guessing) also to having stupid thoughts. When I have an idea that sounds stupid, it's generally (and again, Ben is an exception here) extremely difficult to get someone to really consider the idea. Instead, most people reflexively reject the idea without really engaging with it at all and (I'm guessing) the same thing happens inside their heads when a potentially stupid sounding thought might occur to them. I think the danger here is not having a concious process that lets you decide to broadcast or not broadcast stupid sounding thoughts (that seems great if it's low overhead), and instead it's having some non-concious process automatically reject thinking about stupid sounding things.

Of course, stupid-sounding thoughts are frequently wrong, so, if you're not going to rely on social proof to filter out bad ideas, you'll have to hone your intuition or find trusted friends/colleagues who are able to catch your stupid-sounding ideas that are actually stupid. That's beyond the scope of this post. but I'll note that because almost no one attempts to hone their intuition for this kind of thing, it's very easy to get relatively good at it by just trying to do it at all.

Appendix: stories from other people

A disproportionate fraction of people whose work I really respect operate in a similar way to me with respect to looking stupid and also have a lot of stories about looking stupid.

One example from Laurence Tratt is from when he was job searching:

I remember being rejected from a job at my current employer because a senior person who knew me told other people that I was "too stupid". For a long time, I found this bemusing (I thought I must be missing out on some deep insights), but eventually I found it highly amusing, to the point I enjoy playing with it.

Another example: the other day, when I was talking to Gary Bernhardt, he told me a story about a time when he was chatting with someone who specialized in microservices on Kubernetes for startups and Gary said that he thought that most small (by transaction volume) startups could get away with being on a managed platform like Heroku or Google App Engine. The more Gary explained about his opinion, the more sure the person was that Gary was stupid.

Appendix: context

There are a lot of contexts that I'm not exposed to where it may be much more effective to train yourself to avoid looking stupid or incompetent, e.g., see this story by Ali Partovi about how his honesty led to Paul Graham's company being acquired by Yahoo instead of his own, which eventually led to Paul Graham founding YC and becoming one of the most well-known and influential people in the valley. If you're in a context where it's more important to look competent than to be competent then this post doesn't apply to you. Personally, I've tried to avoid such contexts, although they're probably more lucrative than the contexts I operate in.

Appendix: how to not care about looking stupid

This post has discussed what to do but not how to do it. Unfortunately, "how" is idiosyncratic and will vary greatly by person, so general advice here won't be effective. For myself, for better or for worse, this one came easy to me as I genuinely felt that I was fairly stupid during my formative years, so the idea that some random person thinks I'm stupid is like water off a duck's back.

It's hard to say why anyone feels a certain way about anything, but I'm going to guess that, for me, it was a combination of two things. First, my childhood friends were all a lot smarter than me. In the abstract, I knew that there were other kids out there who weren't obviously smarter than me but, weighted by interactions, most of my interactions were with my friends, which influenced how I felt more than reasoning about the distribution of people that were out there. Second, I grew up in a fairly abusive household and one of the minor things that went along with the abuse was regularly being yelled at, sometimes for hours on end, for being so shamefully, embarrassingly, stupid (I was in the same class as this kid and my father was deeply ashamed that I didn't measure up).

I wouldn't exactly recommend this path, but it seems to have worked out ok.

Thanks to Ben Kuhn, Laurence Tratt, Jeshua Smith, Niels Olson, Justin Blank, Tao L., Colby Russell, Anja Boskovic, David Coletta, @conservatif, and Ahmad Jarara for comments/corrections/discussion.

Article URL: https://axisofordinary.substack.com/p/the-most-counterintuitive-facts-in

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I dealt with cell-based alternatives to animal foods yesterday; those are not on the market yet and are unlikely to be on the market soon at any reasonable scale.  In the meantime, we have lots of plant-based products to deal with.  These too require critical discussion.

• It’s official: plant-based diets make us gassier… so what’s worse for the planet – cow or human farts?  We all know plant-based foods increase our wind. But with the take up of this kind of diet seen as one of the best ways for individuals to combat climate change, could these gasses potentially bode badly for the atmosphere?… Read more

Pea protein is a basic ingredient of plant-based meat alternatives.  Take a look at what’s happening to pea prices.

While sorting all this out, the quest for profitable products is relentless.

• • Impossible Chicken Nuggets launch in restaurants: The plant-based powerhouse’s latest offering is on a handful of menus now and will be at more than 10,000 grocery stores by the end of the year, the company says.
  • Plant protein that behaves like animal protein? Lemna-fueled Plantible Foods raises $21.5m, gears up for 2022 launch:  Plantible Foods – a startup producing protein from lemna, a fast-growing aquatic plant that can be harvested all year round, has raised $21.5m in a series A round* led by Astanor Ventures, as it gears up for a commercial launch in 2022…. Read more
  • Quorn USA president: ‘We want to be the kings of [meat-free] chicken’:  While investors and journalists are pretty excited about a new wave of startups growing food in fermentation tanks, it’s easy to forget that we’ve been eating a filamentous fungus grown in big metal vats (a.k.a. ‘mycoprotein’) since the 1980s, says the US president of Quorn, who says we’re going to be hearing a lot more from the original ‘alt protein’ brand later this year…. Read more
  • Meatless Farm, Equinom tie-up on high-protein yellow pea: ‘Food companies have merely scratched the surface when it comes to yellow peas’:  Israeli seed developer Equinom and plant-based business Meatless Farm have announced a tie up to leverage Equinom’s high-protein yellow pea varieties…. Read more  
  • Hershey tests plant-based chocolate bar:  The Pennsylvania snack maker and confectioner is selling Oat Made bars in select markets as it continues its push into better-for-you products.
  • Fermenting yeast into ‘cream’: Start-up ads richness and texture to plant-based dairyCultivated Biosciences is addressing textural challenges in plant-based dairy with a fat ingredient developed from oleaginous yeast. Co-founder and CEO Tomas Turner explains how…. Read more

The post Plant-based meat and alternatives: the marketing push continues appeared first on Food Politics by Marion Nestle.

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Points: 335

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Not Just Bikes showcases an urban cycling game with Canadian counterpart from Shifter. The duo of vloggers show what their bike rides look like from city center to suburban hardware store in Amsterdam and Calgary. Good bike infrastructure gets plus one point and bad bike infrastructure gets minus two points. Can you guess which city wins?

Livability would flourish in surrounding neighborhoods if cars were removed from one of Seattle’s deadliest and most polluted streets.

Today’s Aurora Avenue in Seattle is a wall, a loud, dangerous, polluted wall that divides communities. However, solving Aurora’s problems also provide an exciting opportunity to rethink sustainable mobility, undertake visionary climate protection, add ample social housing, and provide much needed high quality open space.

Doing so would require a bold change: removing car traffic from Aurora and replacing it with tramways, bike lanes, and parks and plazas at intersections.

Critics might say that such a change is impossible, but cities the world over are re-thinking mobility in the midst of changing work patterns due to Covid, our worsening climate crisis, and the pedestrian safety crisis. Visionary Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is in the process of removing half of the on-street parking spaces and converting them to parks, wider sidewalks, and bike lanes. Cities from large to small are developing plans to remove cars, while simultaneously increasing livability and mobility. Amsterdam, which was choked with traffic in the 60s and 70s, is at the forefront of this — but they aren’t stopping with where they are today. The Agenda Amsterdam Autoluw (Autoluw is Dutch for nearly car-free) includes incredible transformations — both underway, and in planning — to make space for green mobility, eliminate thousands of on-street parking spaces, and ensure a healthier and cleaner city for present and future residents.

The International Panel on Climate Change report released in August also highlighted how climate change is, at this point, inevitable. Drastic courses of action will be needed to slow the extent of warming, as well as mitigate and ruggedize against unavoidable long-term effects. Seattle’s heat dome may no longer be an anomaly — wildfire smoke now has its own season — and we are constantly reminded of the devastation that downpours can do — Germany’s floods from this summer alone will cost $35 billion for recovery.

Unfortunately, Seattle’s own climate goals will continue to be missed with a mayor and transportation department that continue to prioritize the least sustainable form of transportation over efficiency and livability. Seattle is in the midst of a massive housing crisis, and a deepening climate crisis, exacerbated by our city’s inability to meet our climate goals. The main reason we are unable to meet our climate goals is private transportation. Simply replacing combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles does nothing to address the worsening pedestrian safety crisis, the embodied carbon of parking and sprawl, rampant noise pollution, or the die-off of salmon populations. Without a re-visioning around sustainable movement of goods and people, Aurora Avenue will stand as a stark memorial — much as the SR-99 tunnel does — of failed leadership on climate action and safe, livable streets.

The current situation sets up a future environmental justice disaster

There are four Urban Villages (UVs) that straddle or abut Aurora Avenue — Fremont, Wallingford, Aurora-Licton Springs, and Bitter Lake. Greenwood’s UV boundary is just a few blocks to the west. These UVs all have massive deficiencies of park and open space, with almost no major spaces planned to be added in the future. However, much of the land on either blockface of Aurora is zoned for buildings 55 feet to 75 feet in height. Thus, as Aurora continues to develop, it will see five- to seven-story buildings along either side. Unlike in walkable European and Asian cities, this density steps down quickly to low-rise and single-family housing. An Aurora with fully developed buildings on either side would put thousands of residents directly facing an incredibly dangerous street on which few given the choice would prefer to live.

Nearly half of Aurora Avenue doesn’t have sidewalks. It is also one of the noisiest streets in Seattle. Motorists routinely drive double the speed limit, and it remains one of the deadliest streets in the city with yet another deadly crash just last week. All of this occurs with six elementary schools, two middle schools, four high schools, several private schools, and at least 30 preschools and daycare centers within a half mile of the road. Our families avoid walking or biking on it due to its numerous problems, and trying to cross in the handful of places where it is actually legal requires waiting several minutes. I personally can’t imagine living on Aurora. Simply adding tens of thousands of new residents on it, as many people advocated for during Housing Affordability Livability Agenda (HALA) outreach a few years back — without addressing the pollution, noise, and safety impacts, let alone its inaccessibility, will do nothing to make for future livable neighborhoods in the corridor. Instead, business patrons, children and families frequenting nearby schools, and new residents will be situated in an environmental justice disaster. There is, however, another way forward.

Today, there are parts of Aurora that see less daily traffic than Holman Road, or even Greenwood Avenue. The Seattle Department of Transportation’s 2019 Traffic Flow map shows that much of the northern section handle only 20,000 cars per day, each way, a number that could be moved every two hours on a light rail or RapidRide line. 

But what if we flipped the script? What could Aurora Avenue look like in the context of a 15-Minute City? What if we used this upcoming re-visioning process as an opportunity to reverse the deleterious effects of Aurora’s status quo? The community may be envisioning fewer lanes — but how many are actually needed? What if I told you the right amount of general purpose lanes for a climate-resilient avenue, is zero? A car-free, tree-lined Aurora Avenue; running from downtown Seattle to Shoreline, with bike lanes and center-running, grass-filled tramways, space for plazas and parks at intersections. This would be a massive game changer. It would dramatically improve walkability and livability for all the adjoining and straddling neighborhoods. This is what it could look like…

Car-free Aurora: a statement for positive climate transformation

The future could be a dense, green corridor prioritizing sustainable mobility, re-stitching existing neighborhoods and accommodating new and growing ones, providing ample jobs with a strong economic and social mix of residents. It would be a sustainable neighborhood development found in places like Tokyo or Europe, but non-existent in the United States. Vibrant and distinctive, the new Aurora could provide needed urban amenities for new and existing residents and businesses. This proposal is not unique. Seattle Subway proposed a light rail line on Aurora several years ago, referencing the E-line’s daily ridership of 18,000 passengers, as well as the corridor’s 33,000 total passengers. The RapidRide E Line is the bus with the highest ridership in Washington.

Such a transformation would take a corridor that is difficult and dangerous to cross, and drastically improve accessibility for pedestrians and those using other wheeled modes of transportation such as scooters, wheelchairs, and bicycles. It would provide ample places to eat outdoors, without the continuous drone of traffic or eating exhaust with your enchiladas. It would enable residents to get their children to daycare or school without navigating an inhospitable environment, or having to wait longer than two minutes just to cross dangerous intersections. It would encourage middle school and high school students to safely and independently get to and from school. Imagine walking to drop off your kiddo at daycare, hopping on a tram line, and being whisked quickly into downtown.

This is what daily life is like in many cities Americans love to travel to, and we could have this, too! A car-free Aurora would be a dramatic change from the status quo. It would be a statement for a climate positive transformation. Broad sidewalks, without being marauded by motors. Bike lanes and a grass-lined streetcar, connecting Shoreline to Seattle’s streetcar and bike networks downtown. Effective stormwater management. Open space, where none exists. It would mean incredible opportunities for businesses, cafes and restaurants to spill out into the neighborhoods. It could mean thousands of trees providing ample shade in summer and helping to clean the air, while mitigating the urban heat island effect. It would be peaceful, tranquil, and incredibly livable.

Designing a car-free Aurora would necessitate a re-working to accommodate logistics, but major cities from Tokyo to Zurich have shown deliveries can be timed in order to work well with pedestrianized and car-free streets. Perhaps we could even see logistics via tramway, as was recently piloted in Frankfurt. To accommodate the north-south movement of rapid transit, most east-west intersections would remain open to bikes and pedestrians, but cars would be limited to arterials. This does a beautiful thing — it stops cutting through neighborhoods, effectively turning the ends of these neighborhood streets intersecting Aurora Avenue into community amenities — a true opportunity to re-democratize segments of our public right of way. Farmers markets, playgrounds, spray parks, petanque courts, food markets spilling out onto plazas, pea patches, dog parks — the ideas are numerous — could all be added. Naturally, the City should work with developers and residents to cooperatively plan such a future.

We need to be thinking about reorienting the city streets and neighborhoods to be more resilient to climate change, especially with over a million more people moving to the region in the next few decades. At last count, over 1,000 homes are currently planned and under construction on this stretch of Aurora Avenue. We must prioritize sustainable mobility, while improving health outcomes and livability for all residents — both current and future.

A car-free Aurora Avenue could, in effect, be a vibrant linear park, leading the way to the very transformations we need to meet out climate goals. Cities change. Streets change. Unfortunately, our climate is also changing. We can and must change our city as fast as Amsterdam changed itself in the 1960s, or how Paris is changing itself, today.

A better world — and a better Aurora Avenue — is possible.

Disclaimer: Ryan DiRaimo is a founding core member of the Aurora Reimagined Coalition (ARC), but the contributions to this article are not a representation of ARC’s community-led vision. ARC is envisioning a future for Aurora that has support of neighbors and businesses, to reimagine a safe future for the road. For more about ARC and how to get involved, visit www.got99problems.org to learn about the coalition’s active pursuit for change.

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Article URL: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-percentile-approximation-works-and-why-its-more-useful-than-averages/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28526966

Points: 672

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Since July, COVID-19, cases have increased rapidly in King County. The worsening outbreak is affecting all of us. And, people who are not fully vaccinated are getting seriously ill and dying at much higher rates than the vaccinated population. That's clear on a new data dashboard, which shows vaccines are reducing the risk of getting sick, hospitalized, or dying from COVID-19.  

The post New data dashboard tracks COVID-19 risk for unvaccinated people compared to vaccinated people appeared first on PUBLIC HEALTH INSIDER.

Tom Van Deusen

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Points: 314

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I sat waiting for Yudell* to finish his shift at the paladar, or small-scale private restaurant, in the central Vedado neighborhood in Havana. I’d already interviewed a few of the workers there. As I bided my time at a corner table on the outdoor patio, two of the waiters began to tease Yudell, yelling across to me, “Don’t believe what he says! He will probably tell you that he is Negro because he is a racist!”

Yudell timidly looked at me across the patio and chuckled. Growing up Cuban American, I had been to Cuba on past occasions to visit family, but this time I was there to conduct ethnographic interviews on processes of racialization for my dissertation in anthropology. I knew from experience that I had to tread carefully when entering conversations about race in Cuba.

In Cuba, a place where the revolutionary Communist government has claimed to have eliminated racial inequality, directly speaking of race is more than taboo; it is counterrevolutionary.

When we sat down for our interview a little later, Yudell proudly described himself exactly as his co-workers had said he would: “I am Negro” (a Black man). We talked about the persistence of colorism in Cuba, a system of discrimination based on skin color. Yudell chose not to self-identify as a Mulato (a mixed-race person) or a Moro (a dark-skinned person with a thin nose and “good hair”), since he saw such taken-for-granted racialized categories as a way for individuals to distance themselves from Blackness.

Yudell’s self-identification, in other words, served as a form of protest in a society that perpetuates anti-Blackness while claiming to be “colorblind.”

Anthropologists point out that even though race has no biological or genetic basis, racialized identities are socially real. In Cuban society, even though people may claim not to see color, in practice through ranking and valuing an intricate combination of skin tones, hair textures, nose shapes, eye colors, and so on, they produce and maintain dozens of informal racialized identities.

The myth of racial equality in Cuba has become even more untenable recently. This summer, Cubans have taken to the streets in major cities all over the island to demand liberty and denounce economic hardships exacerbated by the pandemic. Afro-Cubans, who have been less likely to benefit from the reforms that have reshaped the Cuban economy since the 1990s, have largely spearheaded these demonstrations. To say these protests are rare is an understatement; in Cuba, where merely criticizing the government can land people in prison, the last large-scale protest occurred in 1994.

Yet, even in the recent protests, explicit discussions of race are noticeably absent from most calls to action. Meanwhile, in Cuban family settings, the focus of my research, race is often openly discussed, but racial inequality is not.

So, why does racial inequality remain so difficult to name in Cuba?

Part of the answer lies in nationalist notions of mestizaje, or racial mixture, that make racial inequality difficult to discuss throughout Latin America generally. In Cuba, the narrative goes, everyone can trace their roots to a mixture of African and Spanish blood. To be Cuban is to be Mestizo (racially mixed).

Cuba’s national identity as a place of racial mixture and harmony has a long history, but these ideas were reshaped and came to be closely tied to the state’s revolutionary communist politics after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Fidel Castro and his government championed social and racial justice in the 1960s, during a time when Jim Crow segregationist laws were just starting to be dismantled in the U.S. By 1962—two years before the U.S. passed the Civil Rights Act—Castro claimed to have eradicated racism in Cuba.

Castro exploited ongoing racial tensions by denouncing the “race problem” in the U.S. and inviting African Americans to visit revolutionary Cuba. This narrative of international Black solidarity became even more pronounced during Cuba’s involvement throughout the 1970s and ’80s in anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggles on the African continent, including Angola’s War of Independence and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Tellingly, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, one of his first trips was to Cuba, where he met with Castro to thank him for being “a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.”

But Cuba’s international fight for racial justice masked the continued inequality on the island. Since the revolution had supposedly eradicated racism, discussions of racial inequality were deemed divisive. Castro’s government dismantled race-based organizations and clubs—including clubs where Afro-Cubans had historically gathered to network and advocate for their communities.

This façade of racial harmony would soon come undone after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, when Cuba entered an economic crisis known as “El período especial en tiempos de paz” (special period in times of peace). In response to the economic crisis, Cuba welcomed mass tourism and introduced a small private sector largely funded through remittances sent by family members abroad.

These changes have reshaped economic relations on the island and revealed the stark racial disparities that had never really gone away.

Today racial hierarchies persist in daily life. But individuals who speak out about racial inequality may be socially policed—as Yudell was—or face more serious consequences.

In the tourism sector, job ads often use racially codified language, such as: “Seeking employees with buena presencia.” As everyone in Cuba knows, “good presence” refers to those with whiter skin tones and straight hair. These requirements limit access to tourism jobs for people with darker skin tones and reinforce the constructed superiority of Whiteness.

But it’s at home where most Cubans first learn of racial discourses and hierarchies—and their place within them.

Cuban families are incredibly racially heterogeneous, and even biological siblings may be racialized differently from one another and their parents. Family members commonly compare and constrast physical features, such as distinguishing between pelo malo (“bad hair,” referring to coarse, curly, or kinky hair) and pelo bueno (“good hair,” referring to straight and fine hair).

For some people, this means hearing denegrating comments about their appearance from their own immediate family members. Some may even internalize racial hierarchies.

In Cuba, directly speaking of race is more than taboo; it is counterrevolutionary.

This was true for Alina, one of my interviewees, who was born in Guantanamo in the early 1960s. One of eight siblings, Alina told me confidently that she happened to “get the pelo bueno.” The rest of her siblings, she said, were Mulato Jabao—a term that refers to people with stereotypically White, European features but with visible African ancestry. They had “greenish-bluish eyes,” Alina said, but then gestured disapprovingly to show they had “bad hair.”

Alina was not only proud of her “good” hair and light eyes, she considered herself one of the “White” siblings—and separated herself from the others whose darker skin made them Mulato.

As we spoke, however, I couldn’t help but notice the eye rolls and scoffs from those who were within earshot. Later they informed me that Alina, too, would be considered a Jabá (the feminine form of Jabao).

Families invested in ideas of social and racial mobility may even encourage children to find partners with lighter skin tones to “adelantar la raza” (literally translated as “improve the race”). These practices resonate with earlier policies of blanqueamiento, or biologically “whitening” the population, which gained pseudoscientific legitimacy in Cuba and elsewhere during the eugenics movement of the 20th century. These ideas led the Cuban government to encourage European immigration and heavily restrict non-White immigration in the early 1900s.

Today ideas of blanqueamiento get promoted informally through off-color remarks. If a family member dates someone with darker skin, for instance, a parent might say, “You don’t want children with bad hair, do you?!” Or, according to one of my interviewees, family members who have lighter skin than their siblings might be described as having “advanced more than the others.”

These offensive comments are not passive or harmless. They inform understandings of race, shape social interactions, and influence family decisions. Learned examples of anti-Blackness that get perpetuated in intimate settings help support longstanding and unjust systemic inequalities.

Though racial hierarchy remains entrenched in Cuba, some academics and activists on the island are pushing for change.

Within the last year, even before the most recent protests in July, Cuba has witnessed a string of small-scale demonstrations fighting for freedom of artistic expression and sometimes highlighting the disproportionate struggles faced by Afro-Cubans. In February, for example, the song “Patria y vida,” written and performed by Afro-Cuban artists on the island and abroad, became the latest anthem of resistance. Some have interpreted the song as a call for racial justice.

In parallel, a relatively small group of academics have been actively calling on the state to formally address continued racial discrimination and allow Afro-Cuban history to be taught in schools. The activist group Comité ciudadanos por la integración racial (CIR; Citizens for Racial Integration Committee) has made similar calls. However, the state has responded by repeatedly detaining CIR members and attempting to discredit the organization.

My ethnographic work, echoing scholars of Latin America and elsewhere, suggests that those of us fighting for racial justice in Cuba should not forget to challenge more intimate settings as well. Anti-Black biases filter through family narratives and help maintain racial hierarchies across generations—contributing to the persistence of inequalities.

Looking more closely at how families talk about race can help dispel Cuba’s official narrative as a colorblind “racial democracy,” where all races are treated equally.

* All names of interviewees have been changed to protect their privacy.

The post Confronting Anti-Blackness in “Colorblind” Cuba appeared first on SAPIENS.

Article URL: https://jvns.ca/blog/confusing-explanations/

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