Why are so many young people single these days? Pooja Arora (@LaulPatricia): So my last question: I wanted to talk about why people are single nowadays. I would have asked about human nature, but that’s for another day. I sent you an article—how do you think common knowledge fits into that area? Why do you think so many youngsters are single? Me: Yes, it’s a good question. I’m not sure that common knowledge is an important part of the answer, but some of it is that women no longer depend on the economic contributions of men for their livelihood, as was true, say, in my mother’s era, when women were not professionally trained. To pay the rent, they had to be married. Now, not only are women better educated, but the economy has shifted to favor the kinds of skills that women, as opposed to men, have. And just as women have been rising, men have been sinking because of the decline in blue-collar work. There have also been cultural trends that favor women’s temperaments. Men have been distracted by internet gaming, gambling, and pornography and are less desirable as marriage partners. Women with more economic power are more likely to raise their standards for what they want in a man. In my parents’ generation, it was not uncommon for a woman to marry a man with much less education and, sometimes, less intelligence. This was not unusual among my parents’ friends. The men often had a high school degree and then went immediately into a small business—sometimes a family business, sometimes one he started himself. The criterion was: does he make a living? No one cared about education. That has changed, with the result that there are fewer men who satisfy the criteria women now have. This was mentioned in the article you shared with me. Also, with more sexual freedom, people don’t have to get married simply to have sex, which was again true in my parents’ generation. There’s a process that has been in place since the baby boomers and has accelerated among millennials and Generation Z. For other reasons, I think a generation of men may also be incapable of socially skilled interaction, partly because they’ve grown up with screens instead of face-to-face contact. There is some fear that a sexual encounter could result in an accusation of rape or sexual harassment. There is so much pornography that, for an increasing number of men, it serves as an outlet for what in the past would have required actual human contact. There are many factors. The article from The Economist lists them, I think, quite skillfully. It’s not clear how to reverse the trend. Increasing the economic prospects of men and creating an educational system that is less feminized and more encouraging of male achievement might help. Another could be changing norms—and here common knowledge comes in. Among women, is it a sign of low status to be with a man who has less education than you? Men, from time immemorial, have been happy to marry women with less education than themselves. Women don't. That immediately reduces the marriage pool. Maybe that’s a norm that could change. Go back to the norm in my parents’ generation? Pooja Arora: No, let’s not do that. Me: Okay, let's not do that. Pooja Arora: We’re happy to marry men who are not as educated as us. It’s fine. They just have to be nice and kind at this point in time. Me: Well, yes—exactly. Nice and kind.

The autism epidemic is a myth: The increase is only in expansive overdiagnosis of kids "on the spectrum," e.g. "Would rather be alone than with others,” “Has difficulty making friends,” and “Is regarded by other children as odd or weird.” Severe cases (no language, socially unresponsive, etc.) have decreased. By my former grad student @AdamOmaryPhD washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

Me: I try to look at data and trends rather than headlines, because headlines can give you a misleading picture of the state of the world. Something goes wrong every day — that’s guaranteed — and if you just look at something goes wrong and say, oh, things are getting worse, you might be forgetting all the things that went wrong in the past. Andrew Marr: And what we call the news is a long litany of all the things that are getting worse or going wrong. Me: Well, yes, it’s much easier for something bad to happen suddenly than for something good to happen. Good things either creep up on you a few percentage points a year, and sometimes can compound. So the fact that, for example, extreme poverty in the world has been declining and a billion people have escaped extreme poverty over the last 30 years — but not on Thursday — so it was never an event from the news. One of the biggest events in human history is something that most people have never even heard of. @AndrewMarr9 @LBC

I think the philosopher Dan Williams has it right: Social media are not destroying democracy, but reinforcing its worst feature. Elite gatekeeping, an accident of expensive media channels, bundled access with at least minimal standards of truth-seeking. Open them up, and you get epistemic chaos. "Most voters are shockingly ignorant and misinformed, with many approaching politics more in the manner of sports hooligans and religious fanatics than the rational deliberators of liberal fantasies." conspicuouscognition.com/p/i…