Here’s links and commentary on what I found most interesting to read this week.
1. Amazon HQ2 enters the realm of farce. Since September 2017, Amazon has held an ongoing contest to decide which city would get their new second headquarters. Now it turns out there won’t be a second headquarters. Instead Amazon will open two smaller office complexes, one in Queens and the other in Crystal City, just outside of Washington D.C. In January I said:
Amazon’s new HQ location debate is a brilliant marketing move, especially with rising tech reg risks. It’s American Idol for pundits, with Amazon as the idol…. In my view the Amazon HQ2 show was and has always been a long game to grow Amazon’s soft power over federal tech regulators. An investment that will pay off handsomely as tech monopoly concerns continue to grow over the next decade. I’ll claim victory for my cynicism on the HQ2 contest if any D.C. area location is chosen. And really. You have to hand it to Jeff Bezos regardless of where HQ2 is finally winds up. It’s been an absolutely brilliant and successful marketing campaign already. Genius.
Crystal City is a DC location, so I’ll claim my prediction came true. In some ways I think Amazon played people so badly there may be a backlash. New York Times: In Superstar Cities, the Rich Get Richer, and They Get Amazon. Vox: The tragedy of Amazon’s HQ2 selections, explained. Recode: Amazon’s HQ2 was a con, not a contest. Slate’s Will Oremus: the reason Amazon’s HQ2 was a farce…. What’s a little more clear now than in January is why the media was so clueless. In January I thought the overblown amount of press was driven by it being such an easy horse race story to write. So many cities prostrating themselves with tax breaks! Who will win? But now it’s more clear why (some) journalists got it wrong. They imposed their own view on how Amazon worked, assuming it was similar to a news organization. One built around consensus based teams, who value saying you aren’t in it to win it, and aren’t in it for the money. It’s about giving back. Think the culture of academia. But Amazon is a lean, laser focused, hyper competitive tech monopoly winner. They believe they hired smarter than anyone else. They play for keeps. Every move around HQ2 was precisely calculated to maximize Amazon PR. The only surprise is how many people were surprised.
2. Ancient DNA from the Americas. Prior to this week, 6 people from the Americas had their ancient DNA sequenced. With two new papers this week (1 and 2), now there’s 64 more, for a total of 71. With dates ranging from 500 to 10,900 year ago. There’s nothing shockingly new here in the broadest strokes, but plenty of new details. In particular once people made it across into Alaska, the Americas were populated rapidly. On the order of 100s of years for North America, and a few 1000 years for South America.
The oddest question still not resolved is why some ancient Amazonians seem to have a trace of Australasian ancestry, which is quite distinct from the Siberian source populations which peopled the Americas. This trace has been found before, and was confirmed again in one (but not both) of the new papers. It’s possible this is a signal from an earlier group of humans who migrated into the Americans but then were mostly replaced. Or it could be just a subtle model artifact. Or maybe we should blame Doctor Who’s TARDIS.
With more aDNA coming online, this mystery will eventually get solved. Those how soon is unclear. I’d recommend Lizzie Wade’s article as the best to read if you want to learn more: Ancient DNA confirms Native Americans’ deep roots in North and South America.
3. Head Start preschool programs seem to help, but not academically. From the start of Kelsey Piper’s article:
There’s a bizarre-seeming paradox sitting at the heart of research into early childhood education. On the one hand, there’s a sizable body of research suggesting that kids who go through intensive education at the ages of 3 and 4 don’t really come out ahead in terms of academic abilities. By kindergarten much of their advantage has receded, and by second grade researchers typically can’t detect it at all.
On the other hand, there’s an equally substantive body of research suggesting that early childhood education produces a profound, lifelong advantage. Kids who enter intensive preschool programs are less likely to be arrested, more likely to graduate, and less likely to struggle with substance abuse as adults. One study with a followup when the students were in their mid-30s found that they were likelier to have eventually attended and completed college.
then later the possible explanation:
In other words, early childhood education may change children’s lives not by teaching them things they’ll retain in elementary school, but simply by being in a safe, predictable, and consistent environment for them to play in — and by providing their parents with the stability to get and keep better jobs.
Here’s Piper’s article, plus also see Scott Alexander’s post for a slightly more skeptical look. If you only follow this casually, the main take away is preschool improves your life outcome by helping you socially, not (as one might assume) academically.
4. Do not summon the doxxing demon. Every tech wave births both new opportunities and new demons. Cheaper printing launched great newspapers and gossip tabloids. Movies begat Charlie Chaplin and The Birth of a Nation. Automobiles led to middle class mobility and the chance of owning your own home, but also to air pollution and drunk driving. The internet tech wave has been especially great for infovores (yep, that’s me). But also birthed doxxing, giving out someone’s personal information to incite retaliation. Of this tech wave’s new demons, doxxing is perhaps the most seductively evil.
Why? Well we could notice how Christine Blasey Ford, since the Kavanaugh hearings, has moved four times due to harassment, and can’t return to her job. The idea that Ford testified for personal gain is ridiculous.
But what I think exemplifies the seductive evil of doxxing best is what happened with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and then in turn to Matt Yglesias. Protesters targeted Carlson’s home, demonstrating and knocking on his door, chanting “Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night”, and spray painting his driveway. Then on twitter Matt Yglesias said “I honestly cannot empathize with Tucker Carlson’s wife at all – I agree that protesting at her house was tactically unwise and shouldn’t be done – but I am utterly unable to identify with her plight on any level.” I’ve read Yglesias for years. So at one level, I get it. As a progressive, Yglesias believes Trump is destroying the institutions of our country. So by supporting him, Carlson is hurting millions. I can feel the temptation of bringing home to the evildoer a taste of the pain they’ve wrought. And as a side bonus, yes, pleasing my ingroup followers on twitter.
Here’s a ThinkPogress story (former employer of Yglesias) arguing the protest was no big deal. But that is wrong wrong wrong! Banging on the door of your political opponent’s home is playing with fire. It should be declared completely off limits by all sides. Only a fool believes this tactic, once unleashed, won’t be used and abused by enemies. And so Yglesias became a target. His home address was doxxed on twitter, along with threats of violence. Yglesias deleted all his tweets. Unsurprisingly, twitter was slow in taking down the doxxing tweet. Read Will Oremus for details.
What’s even more terrible is I don’t think we’ve bottomed out. The more the doxxing demon is summoned, the more your own side feels tempted by its power.
5. Jurassic Art. I listened to this 99% Invisible podcast a while ago, but it stuck in my mind. It’s about how dinosaurs were originally thought to be sluggish, primitive beasts. So were drawn that way. I remember having an old T-Rex plastic toy when I was a kid. The T-Rex stood nearly straight up. So it could plod along.
But Bob Bakker and a few others came to believe dinosaurs were far more active and birdlike. Running positioned more like a road runner. The watershed change in view happened when Jon Ostrom used an illustration from Bakker in his 1969 paper defining the new species Deinonychus. That illustration became iconic, and was instrumental in changing our views of what dinosaurs were.
It’s a fun an interesting story. All about the power of an image to persuade. Recommended.
And that’s all for this week! Thank you for reading.
Praxtime by Nathan Taylor 
needs feathers!
Dude. That illustration is from 1969. Cutting edge for the time.
And to be honest, not clear if Bakker thought it needed feathers back then or not. He might in fact have thought so, but was too much too soon.