A Goat in a Circle, Gay North Koreans and Genetic Lotteries: Dinner Table Digest № 16
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
The first two pieces have been sitting in my drafts folder for a while, so they’re a couple of months old, but still worth a read. The final essay on progressive responses to genetic lotteries is from the most recent copy of The New Yorker.
A Goat, a Circle and a Messy Mathematical Problem - Steve Nadis - Quanta Magazine
The problem is simple. The answer? After several centuries of trying to find one, a mathematician in Belgium has finally cracked the case. Unfortunately, the answer itself is far from simple. Math and I are sworn enemies, so if this is your thing, I’ll raise a glass and celebrate with you!
Imagine a circular fence that encloses one acre of grass. If you tie a goat to the inside of the fence, how long a rope do you need to allow the animal access to exactly half an acre?
North Korea’s ‘only openly gay defector’ finds love - Julie Yoonnyung Lee - BBC Korean
Imagine living in a place where your existence is not only denied, it is simply not known to exist at all?
"There is no concept of homosexuality in North Korea," he says. If someone is seen running to greet another same sex friend, it's assumed that's just because they have such a close friendship. In fact adults of the same sex often hold hands in the street, he says. "North Korea is a totalitarian society - we have lots of communal life so it's normal for us."
Jang now thinks his experience of being misunderstood was by no means unique.
At one point, Jang was admitted to hospital for a month of tests and got to know some of the other patients. "I figured out many of them had a similar experience to me - people who could not feel anything towards women."
But articulating, or exploring, what it was they did feel, was likely to have been impossible without a frame of reference.
"In North Korea, if a man says he doesn't like a woman, people [just] think he's unwell."
My favourite band, Dutch symphonic metallers Epica, released an album over the pandemic. They also put on a really fun online show called ‘Omega: Alive’ that featured lots and lots of fire. Just the way I like it!
Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters? - Gideon Lewis-Kraus - The New Yorker
This piece explores the uncomfortable relationship that progressives have with coded genetic material. Wishing to avoid scientific racism at all costs, many progressives shy away from suggestions that our genetic make-up matters with respect to determining our place in society, especially when general equality among individuals and communities is a primary goal. A seeming pariah on the left while simultaneously an enemy of the racial determinism of the hard right, Kathryn Paige Harden seems more than capable of handling herself in both fields of psychology and biology, tackling some of the hard questions that many are afraid or unwilling to do. She has my respect, even if I lean more heavily towards Nurture rather than Nature.
The ultimate claim of “The Genetic Lottery” is an extraordinarily ambitious act of moral entrepreneurialism. Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort. She writes, “I think we must dismantle the false distinction between ‘inequalities that society is responsible for addressing’ and ‘inequalities that are caused by differences in biology.’ ” She cites research showing that most people are much more willing to support redistributive policies if differences in opportunity are seen as arbitrarily unfair—and deeply pervasive.
As she put it to me in an e-mail, “Even if we eliminated all inequalities in educational outcomes between sexes, all inequalities by family socioeconomic status, all inequalities between different schools (which as you know are very confounded with inequalities by race), we’ve only eliminated a bit more than a quarter of the inequalities in educational outcomes.” She directed me to a comprehensive World Bank data set, released in 2020, which showed that seventy-two per cent of inequality at the primary-school level in the U.S. is within demographic groups rather than between them. “Common intuitions about the scale of inequality in our society, and our imaginations about how much progress we would make if we eliminated the visible inequalities by race and class, are profoundly wrong,” she wrote. “The science confronts us with a form of inequality that would otherwise be easy to ignore.”
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