Mackenzie Fox

Ph.D. student studying Song Dynasty Intellectual History at @Columbia.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@mattyglesias Unexpected Pleco cameo

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@Scholars_Stage I've always found it deeply strange that so many films/tv shows have focused on the apollo astronauts rather than engineers for this reason. The astronauts are totally uninteresting and borderline irrelevant.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@xwanyex It's clearly true that markets work better than (at least supposedly) altruistically-motivated central planning, but on the surface, they feel less moral. It's not intuitive that markets should actually provide better outcomes for everyone than a kind of pure altruism.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@xwanyex I think that, viscerally, a lot of people recoil at the idea of a system that openly celebrates (or at least instrumentalizes) the pursuit of self-interest. It's genuinely out of sync with the pro-social bias of human moral intuition.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@mattyglesias There needs to be a movement against using "contemporary" in sentences like this. I assume you mean by present-day standards, rather than contemporary standards, i.e., the standards of the 1990's.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@xwanyex You might find Isaiah Berlin’s old essay on foxes and hedgehogs interesting. It takes your premise and extends it a bit, suggesting that people can be roughly sorted into two groups, those that see a single truth and build grand theories and schemes around it and those that don’t

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@mattyglesias I think that you're missing the point here. The idea being expressed is that the moral intuitions that shape our beliefs about what kinds of killing are/are not legitimate are ultimately mysterious and not justifiable in purely rational terms.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@dissproportion All of these apps are probably pretty similar, though....

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@dissproportion I've noticed it usually has my "real" weight several pounds higher than whatever my scale weight is, unless I just went to a party or something the night before and drank a lot, which tends to raise my scale weight back up due to the water consumption I think.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@dissproportion You could try using Macrofactor or a similar app to help track weight if you're not already — I've been using Macrofactor, and it does a good job of controlling for day-to-day weight fluctuations and things like water weight so you know where you're actually at.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@Chris_arnade @wanyeburkett Josh Barro is, but I missed that you were referring to MattY. I'd imagine Matt was still historically far closer to the Dems on cultural issues than he was to Republicans, but again that may be changing given current tendencies in the party.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@Chris_arnade @wanyeburkett I'd imagine that as a gay man, he's probably had some major reasons to feel unwelcome in the republican coalition over the course of those 30 years. I think that the Obama-era democratic party felt a lot closer to Barro's preferences; that might be changing, though.

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@wanyeburkett @Chris_arnade Wouldn't the retort be that republicans aren't exactly doing Reagan-style streamlining of regulation/reduction of spending these days? They've been regularly advocating for increasing government spending/expanding the deficit!

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@DKThomp @CharlesFLehman are those alden's?

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@mattyglesias @MattZeitlin BTW, I skimmed through Spinney after you mentioned it a little while back in a mailbag — don't the Russians have their own version of nationalistic attachment to the source of PIE being in Ukraine/Russia?

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@DouthatNYT This is basically the thesis of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg!

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@AliceFromQueens @emre_mayo @wanyeburkett The problem then becomes what to do when the area near public housing gentrifies, as many areas in NYC near public housing have — do you somehow privatize it to avoid having it stymy development, or is it just there permanently?

[Mackenzie Fox @Thaded]

@MattZeitlin I don't pretend to really understand the details of university finances, but isn't it ultimately the case that much of that money was actually going to the humanities/social sciences by means of the rather massive cuts of these grants universities take for "overhead" and such?