/u/flyingkumot on love

https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/14ydf8f/whose_abuelita_is_this/

Met an elderly hispanic lady at a bus stop in Albuquerque. We went back and forth in Spanish for a bit (I’m a white guy so she was pleasantly surprised) and she told me about her travel plans to go to her son’s wedding–a real cute story involving him and his high school sweetheart finding each other after a long time being broken up.

I had recently been dumped, and said something a bit mopey like “I wish I could find love like that someday.”

She smiled, shook her head and said “Chico, love like that isn’t just found. It’s built. How many perfect, decorated temples do you think my ancestors stumbled across in Tikal or Tenochtitlan? No. They found a good, level spot, maybe some water nearby, and said ‘Here. We can build something here.’ Look for a clearing in the forest, young man. Not a hidden city.”

That one will stick with me for years.

How to Blow Up a Timeline

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline

One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson.

However, inertia works both before and after product-market fit. Once a group has formed, it tends to persist even after the collective good it came together to provide is no longer needed.

The same is true of social networks. As anyone who has tried to start one knows, it’s not easy to jump-start a social graph. But if you manage by some miracle to conjure one from the void, and if you provide that group with a reasonable set of ways for everyone to hang out, network effects can keep the party going long after last call. The group inertia that is your enemy before you’ve coalesced a community is your friend after it’s formed. Anyone who’s ever hosted a party and provided booze knows it’s often hard to get the last stragglers to leave. We are a social species.

Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-champions-of-affirmative-action-had-to-leave-asian-americans-behind

Affirmative action, in my view, was doomed from that moment forward because it had been stripped of its moral force. It is one thing to argue that slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and centuries of theft demand an educational system that factors in the effects of those atrocities. If that principle were to express itself in, say, a Black student who was descended from slaves and had grown up in poverty in an American inner city receiving a bump on his application when compared with a rich private-school kid from the suburbs, so be it. But that is not, in fact, how affirmative action usually plays out at élite schools. Most reporting on the subject—including my own, as well as a story in the Harvard Crimson—shows that descendants of slaves are relatively underrepresented among Black students at Harvard, compared with students from upwardly mobile Black immigrant families. It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used