If you had run across this theory and wondered if there were something to it, Scott Alexander explains why he thinks it doesn't hold up. Contra Skolnick on Schizophrenia Microbes. The usual style at ACX. Point 1, Point 1A, possible objection considered and answered, Point 2 brief point with promise of later discussion, Point 3 referring to previous post...
Sterphen Skolnick answers in the comments. Not very effectively, to my eyes, but I admit I was already unsympathetic at that point.
Watch this kid with the memorable name. 17 y/o Gout Gout with the Australian 200m record. Goes under 20 wind-aided with a tentative start.
Jakob Ingebrigtsen World indoor mile.
The overall sentiment is true, and important. "Sparing the wolf is shallow, not deep empathy." But as we have covered here, and Grim covered in some detail, empathy is not the word Musk is looking for. The simple word "kindness" would have been better, and in line with the advice to use a simple word rather than a complicated one. That someone as smart as Musk uses "empathy" in that manner tells me that it is already well on its way to being a mere mild synonym for kindness, fellow-feeling, goodness. It's a shame when a useful word with distinct meaning gets watered down to a vague approval. We have plenty of those already.
Other words will rise to take the place of the weak ones.
Once again, I find that I know very little. Much More Than You Wanted to Know over at ACX. I hope my 20 years of misleading you has been much less than half. It is as long an article as you would predict ACX would devote to it. But as it flips everything up in the air and we are still waiting for the fried goods to come down, it would sort of have to be.
There is a whole new group of Anti-Hereditarians over the last decade or so, who have applied very strict standards to what we can predict from genes, causing our previous estimates to look much more fragile.
It seems like we have to accept one of three possibilities:
Either something is wrong with twin studies.
Or something is wrong with Sib-Regression and RDR (and then we can explain away GWAS and GREML by saying they’re missing rare variants).
Or something is wrong with how we’re thinking about this topic and comparing things.
The hereditarians are fighting back with some compelling evidence that there are some things we do know by gross measurement, even if we are unable to make that more granular. Dr. Alexander gives a good personal example.
During residency, I spent a few months working in a child psychiatric hospital for the worst of the worst - kids who committed murder or rape or something before age 18. Many of these children had similar stories: they were taken from their parents just after birth because the parents were criminals/drug addicts/in jail/abusing them. Then they were adopted out to some extremely nice Christian family whose church told them that God wanted them to help poor little children in need. Then they promptly proceeded to commit crime / get addicted to drugs / go to jail / abuse people, all while those families’ biological children were goody-goodies who never got so much as a school detention. When I met with the families, they would always be surprised that things had gone so badly, insisting that they’d raised them exactly like their own son/daughter and taught them good Christian morals. I had to resist the urge to shove a pile of twin studies in their face. This has left me convinced that behavioral traits are highly heritable to a level that it would be hard for any study to contradict.
The Anti-Hereditarians strike back!
Sib-Regression is a clever way of avoiding most biases. Its independent variable - the degree to which some sibling pairs end up with slightly more shared genes than others - is even more random and exogenous than the difference between fraternal and identical twins. It can sometimes have biases related to assortative mating (which would falsely push heritability down), but otherwise it’s pretty good. RDR has many of the same advantages, and allows more diverse relationships and so larger sample sizes. It’s hard to think of ways these methods could be wildly off.
And the "maybe we are just looking at this all wrong" group has some power in it as well. Some traits like intelligence (IQ) and educational attainment (EA), where we (think we) can easily see how they must be related, but also can easily see they would have some wild variance may be related just about as much as we have been measuring, but for completely different reasons, so that our further testing is leading us down false paths.
Each of those possibilities would mean we have a lot of humble thinking to do. So I will start by learning more humility, as that is one thing that is going to clearly be needed.
For a moment as she started, I could smell the interior of the guitar. Unfinished wood. I don't know if it was the appearance, or expectations, or maybe even something about the musician. I am not usually noted for intensity of sensory experience. But as I get older I find uncomfortable sensory input such as brightness, echo, and skin irritation* are more noticeable, so perhaps this is related.
*Autistic children are sometimes upset by the feel of their clothing labels, especially shirts. I could not recall that ever happening to me as a child. But recently it has started happening. I notice the feel of the label on my neck and don't like it. Interesting.
Let's add this one in, because I found it along the way and liked it.
From Amy Coney Barret's majority opinion:
"JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: '[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.' Ibid. That goes for judges too."
When it comes to intelligence reports showing up in the media, there are always feints and double-feints. Sometimes the intended audience to be fooled is not the general public but another country's general public, or its intelligence service, or some intricate balancing act many audiences. It causes me to forget my role as the person pointing out the obvious. The chorus in the ancient Greek dramas was usually supposed to represent to what the audience wanted to say, or what the community would wish to ask. It's a useful part of the play.
There are reports that the American bombs destroyed nearly everything of importance at the Iranian nuclear sites. Then there are reports that much of the good stuff was taken away in the nick of time and it was merely a flesh wound. All reports are careful to say that they are being cautious because it's all way underground and it hasn't been analysed yet, then they are not the least bit cautious at all and make some pretty declarative statements.
It occurs to me that if they weren't destroyed the Israelis would want every one to know that so they could bomb them some more. Heck, they might want everyone to think they weren't destroyed even if they were, for the same purpose of public opinion about more bombing. Am I just being naive here?
Hot take from Magatte Wade Director of Atlas Network's Center for African Prosperity, at her substack, Africa's Bright Future.
The results speak volumes.
From one of Africa's poorest countries to middle-income status in a generation.
Consistent growth while socialist experiments collapsed around them.
ACX runs an essay contest every year, not revealing the authors until after the judging. This entry reviews "Alpha School," this year's magic educational fix. He seems both as skeptical as we would be, except he has tried it out on his own children. He faults the program for not describing what they are doing quite accurately. He worries that it will not scale up, as other methods have not. It is not only 2 hours a day. It is not teacher-free. It does not use AI. However...
…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.
That would be worth studying with more effort than a lot of things we are studying about education now.
IDF soldiers ordered to fire upon unarmed Gazans. Much was made of Hamas killing Palestinians coming to humanitarian aid sites of the US-Israeli food outreach. Now it looks like some Israeli officers are ordering the same thing. I would have more doubt about the story if it came from a Palestinian-favoring site, but this is Haaretz. The IDF promises to investigate. Chilling.
Soldiers quoted in the report called the locations a "killing field," saying commanders authorised the use of heavy machine-guns, grenade launchers, mortars and tank fire rather than non-lethal crowd-control methods. One soldier said between one and five people were killed every day in the sector where he served, an operation informally dubbed "Salted Fish".
I must have been reading widely on the Internet that month.
Liz Warren's Authentic Cherokee Gefilte Fish. At No Oil For Pacifists
Dave Barry's Best Ever The Story of Roger and Elaine.
Fairytale - 2009 Eurovision Winner
The Proverbs 31 Woman Not as well-written as I would like, but the concept holds.
Sort of.
It was a relief to find this. I had been bothered all afternoon wondering if Leg Before Wicket was a rule before Lexington and Concord or after.
Have I posted her before? I watch female comedians in binges, men intermittently. I have no explanation why the difference.
The Oklahoma City Thunder just won the NBA title. Would we consider this their first championship or their second? Their precursor Seattle Supersonics won in 1979. They left Seattle in 2008.
This is an opinion question, though there are purported official answers. And it's a setup for me to get snippy.
Update: The answer, of course, is no, or even hell, no. This isOKC's first championship, Seattle is irrelevant. Why, then, do we insist that the five championships of the Minneapolis Lakers count toward LA's total?
There is a lot of worrying about the corrupt Andrew Cuomo and the socialist empty suit Zohran Mamdani duking it out over the likely mayoralty in NYC. It's mostly the city's problem, though anything that affects the country's and the world's largest economic center does have trickle down effects. And the uniqueness of New York does bring ideas into a cleaner abstract focus for us to discuss.
If Mamdani were some kind of Northern European socialist I might spring for that. But for everywhere else in the world, the socialist is going to become corrupt anyway, it is only a matter of time (or ability to disguise). That would bring us to competence. Cuomo has little, Momdani none known, advantage Cuomo. A practiced corrupt politician can really double down if they get encouraged, as in Joe Biden. Momdani might at least graduate to being a basically honest fool.
The outcome will not be good for NYC. But what kind of Not Good, and what people learn from it might matter. I haven't a clue about that.
This article and the next suggested by Rob Henderson.
When A Progressive Utopia Burned by Johann Kurtz at the wonderfully-named substack Becoming Noble.
Note that the incident described comes from 1991, not 2024. There was a town destroying fire in California, and a feminist anthropologist is honest but distressed about the reversion of all those progressives to traditional gender roles. Her comments in italics, Kurt's in plaintext.
With the domicile gone, women on the other hand found themselves thrown into utter domesticity… A constant topic in my women’s group was how to deal with food needs, where to get meals, what to feed the family, how to maintain some semblance of a proper balanced diet.
Hoffman never quite manages to offer an explanation as to why this should be so, resorting to vague abstractions like tasks ‘fell to women’. She seems unwilling to contemplate that these women - most of whom were intelligent, experienced, and successful - sensed that they were better suited to take on these duties; that they might want to take on these roles, finding satisfaction, consolation, and purpose in them.
Men’s rapid psychological recovery from the fire (most returned to work within a week) is presented within a critical frame, as if they were uncaring. There is an implication that their lack of sympathy might underpin the heightened and lasting emotional distress of the women:
…the women, uprooted from or severely diminished in their venues, outwardly suffered more depression and longer recovery periods. The Alameda Health Department tallied a far greater use of health services and recommendations for therapy and therapy groups for women than men…
Mental-health lessons in schools sound like a great idea. The trouble is, they don’t work Lucy Foulkes
And from the Guardian, no less!
I have now reached the conclusion that we should stop these all-class mental-health lessons. My view is that the only information we should teach en masse is where a young person should get help, both inside and outside school, if they’re struggling. That’s it. Then we should focus the time, energy and money on supporting the smaller group of young people who are actually unwell. (Her research at the internal link.)
