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Suggested readings, 22 November 2020

Here are some interesting articles I've read over the past week that I think are worth checking out.

John McWhorter, “The Black People Who Voted for Trump Know He’s Racist.” 16 Nov, The Atlantic. 
Why did so many racial minorities vote for Donald Trump in the US presidential election? John McWhorter offers some reasons.

"Black or Latino Trump voters may know quite well that racism exists, or that Trump is racist, yet not prioritize it to the degree that the woke consensus assumes any sensible person would."  

Results of a universal basic income experiment in Kenya: (1) most people who received some money experienced less hunger, sickness and depression; (2) cash supplements encouraged people to make business investments.

Corinne Purtill, “How Close Is Humanity to the Edge?” 21 Nov, New Yorker. 
Profile of Toby Ord, a philosopher at the Future of Humanity Institute and author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. 

"Ord places the risk of our extinction during the twenty-first century at one in six -- the odds of an unlucky shot in Russian roulette. Should we manage to avoid a tumble off the precipice, he thinks, it will be our era’s defining achievement. The book catalogues many possible catastrophes. There are the natural risks we’ve always lived with, such as asteroids, super-volcanic eruptions, and stellar explosions. 'None of them keep me awake at night,' Ord writes. Then there are the large-scale threats we have created for ourselves: nuclear war, climate change, pandemics (which are made more likely by our way of life), and other novel methods of man-made destruction still to come. Ord is most concerned about two possibilities: empowered artificial intelligence unaligned with human values (he gives it a one-in-ten chance of ending humanity within the next hundred years) and engineered pandemics (he thinks they have a one-in-thirty chance of bringing down the curtain). The pandemic we are currently experiencing is the sort of event that Ord describes as a 'warning shot' -- a smaller-scale catastrophe that, though frightening, tragic, and disruptive, might also spur attempts to prevent disasters of greater magnitude in the future."

Tom Chivers, “Should Big Pharma profit from Covid?” 17 Nov, UnHerd. 
"You want pharma companies to distribute their products in as equitable a way as possible, but you also want them to continue to make those products. And taking away their profits when they make a good one will not encourage them to do the same next time."

John Lewis-Stempel, “Factory farming will kill us all.” 16 Nov, UnHerd. 
"[T]he Danish mink episode is just one more proof that factory farms are ticking time-bombs of zoonotic disease -- those which leap from animals to humans -- and petri-dishes of bacterial infections"

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