Links and quotes for May 22, 2017: Intellectuals and dictators, partisanship at work, and more

Research: Political Polarization Is Changing How Americans Work and Shop – HBR

In our survey experiment, three-quarters of the subjects refused a higher monetary payment to avoid helping the other party —  in other words, they preferred to make themselves worse off so that they would not benefit the other party. Taken together, these results clearly indicate that the trends we highlighted earlier are unlikely to be isolated incidents. The impact of party attachments on economic choices is likely to be stronger and more widespread than generally recognized.

Our results highlight another point about partisanship in contemporary society: It has become an important social identity. It extends beyond particular policy beliefs or support for specific politicians.

Google’s Perfect Future Will Always Be Just Around The Corner – Wired

The bizarre naming trends that modern startups follow –  TechCrunch

Why do intellectuals fall in love with dictators and totalitarians? – City Journal

The fact that the most educated part of a modern society supports such-and-such a policy is no evidence that it is right. It would be a logical error, however, to conclude from this that the uneducated are always right. The contrary of error need not be truth: it is often merely a different error. Likewise, ad hoc dictators—those whose main purpose is to maintain themselves and their cronies in power, such as Basher al-Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein of Iraq—may have their apologists, but seldom their enthusiasts. To excite intellectuals, dictators must embody, or claim to embody, some utopian ideal.

The special ability to see beyond appearances that intellectuals like to congratulate themselves for possessing is, indeed, their raison d’être: for if they cannot perceive what others cannot perceive, what is their role? Whereas the simple-minded see in a massacre of priests only a massacre of priests, for example, intellectuals discern in it the operation of the dialectic of history, the imagined future denouement of which is more real to them than the actual deaths themselves, merely eggshells on the way to the omelette.

Though Hollander does not claim that there is a single explanation for intellectuals’ attraction to dictatorships such as those of Stalin, Mao, and Castro (or Khomeini, in the case of Foucault), let alone to have found it, he nevertheless believes, in my view plausibly, that the longing for quasi-religious belief in an age when actual religion has largely been rejected is a significant part of the explanation. The totalitarian dictators were not the typical politicians of democratic systems who, whatever their rhetoric, seem mainly to tinker at the edges of human existence, are ready or forced to make grubby compromises with their opponents, reveal themselves to be morally and financially corrupt, are more impressive in opposition than in office, have no overarching ideas for the redemption of humanity, and make no claims to be panjandrums of all human knowledge and wisdom. Rather, those dictators were religious leaders who claimed the power to answer all human questions at once and to lead humanity into a land of perpetual milk, honey, and peace. They were omniscient, omnicompetent, loving, and kind, infinitely concerned for the welfare of their people; yet at the same time they were modest, humble, and supposedly embarrassed by the adulation they received. The intellectuals, then, sought in them not men but messiahs.

Google Reveals a Powerful New AI Chip and Supercomputer –  Tech Review

Innovation Policy in a Networked World – NBER

Although publication and, more recently, the availability of open access journals and research repositories have broadened access to research results, the flow of certain sorts of information remains largely locked in social circles. 22 Consider non-results and negative findings. These failed innovations carry a great deal of information value, as suggested above. But researchers rarely publish them. They may tell their friends and close colleagues about them, allowing those researchers to avoid these intellectual dead-ends. But the larger community often remains unaware of these issues.