The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea

I posted a link to the above title Revisited in my Links to Keep You Busy While I'm Gone last week. I kept the tab up because I keep grabbing quotes from it for replies in emails and on other sites. I have liked it so much that I was about to repost it just a week later, but realised I had not published the original by the same author at Unfashionable Truths, Edward Campbell The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea That Won't Die, which came out just after the election of Mamdani. 

If socialism fails everywhere it’s tried, why does it keep coming back—even in rich societies that should know better? Because it appeals to emotion more than economics. It offers moral clarity in a messy world: victims and villains, righteous poor, evil billionaires. It turns resentment into righteousness and politics into redemption. For people disillusioned with complexity, it feels better to blame than to build.

It also sells the oldest illusion in politics—the promise of something for nothing. Socialism sounds like a “free lunch” because it hides the cost. It treats wealth as if it appears by magic, ready to be divided up. People want fairness, but they forget scarcity. Capitalism may be harsh, but it tells the truth: everything has a cost, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make it disappear.

For those who worry that he is a cheerleader for capitalist excess, he also recently wrote The Corruption of Capitalism - How America Killed Market Discipline.  We'll come back to that soon as well.

 

Yes Minister

 Humorous in its cynicism and accuracy.  But there are times when it is painful and frightening to watch.

 

Intelligence and Liberalism

 Why are Intelligent People More Liberal? by Noah Carl at Aporia. I recommend the comments - including Noah's - over the article itself. 

Things, People, Ideas

We tend to major in one of these categories and minor in another, neglecting the third.  I am an ideas and people person - or the other way around.  I am less interested in things and less good with them.

That this has a heritable component is hardly surprising: we tend to go into fields we are good at. A northern European study looks at choice of fields by individuals. Genetic Associations with Educational Fields. Yes there is a sex difference, but that is not the only thing happening.

We May Already Has The Fossils

 One of the interesting bits in terms of studying ancient fossils with new techniques is that we have a bunch already, sitting around in museum drawers worldwide, often compromised by study techniques that did not anticipate modern DNA detection (like liking old bones to estimate how old they were). Now that we have been estimates for the age of Neanderthals, know that Denisovans existed, and are quite certain there are further ghost populations that did not survive as groups but contributed to our genetic hoard, trying to get information out of those teeth and bones is likely important. John Hawks talks about what's new and what's old new/new-old, and old - plus what we should be looking for.  

Half a hominin mandible was discovered in 1969, which would draw archaeologists’ attention to this part of the quarry, where they found the cave. By 2011, teams had uncovered many stone tools and ancient animal remains from the ThI-GH sediments. Under the leadership of Jean-Paul Raynal they reported some isolated hominin teeth in 2012, and in 2016, they described a human femur shaft fragment that had been chewed by a large carnivore, likely a hyena.

Other hominin remains recovered in the excavations from before 2011 are reported in the new study by Hublin and coworkers. They include a complete mandible excavated in 2008, ThI-GH-10717, and a series of vertebrae found near it that may represent the same individual. They also include a small section of juvenile mandible and teeth, ThI-GH-10978.

Kiss the Frog

 Earl is at it again, but this time with a completed story rather than in progress. Fun. characters. Kiss the Frog.

Happiness Lessons

From The Free Press by Arthur Brooks, a happiness researcher who turned his magnifying glass back on himself.  Happiness Lessons From a Miserable Wretch.  He was a statistics wonk as a professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs - you may know him from his work at the American Enterprise Institute or his several books.  I commented on Who Really Cares in 2006. 

Anger, stress, sadness, and worry have reached historic highs. Americans are increasingly “not too happy” about their lives. Young people are plagued with ever-rising rates of mental illness. We have become a whole nation of miserable, ungrateful wretches.

Why? The causes are complex. Among them: the decline of faith, marriage, childbearing, friendship, and meaningful careers; the mobile phones and apps that turned life into a simulation; the polarization fomented by political parties and exacerbated by the media; and the policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which left a generation of Americans suffering from loneliness and isolation that may, for many, prove permanent.

Spoiler alert for his weekly column. Meaning figures prominently. 

It includes reference to a few assessment and self-assessment tools, but in his teaching and journalistic like he is more focused on discussing the concepts. I find that I often rate myself higher in happiness when looked at globally, scoring something like an 8 out of 10 overall, but then rating individual aspects lower, at 6 or 7 with an occasional 9. It is likely related that in dark moods I rate myself a 5 or 6 overall, but the individual aspects remain somewhat stable with 6s or 7s punctuated by an occasional 4.

Classical Statues

 Classical Statues Were Not Painted Horribly at Works in Progress.  The new colors may be accurate in terms of the scrapings detected, but they are flat and unsubtle.  There is no reason to think that those who were so subtle in carving statues would be coarse and rudimentary in the painting of them.  Shading and tone are more likely.

Gatorland

We visited Gatorland when we were in Florida. The girls liked going in to feed the birds and feeding chicken to the alligators.  My wife liked reading about the albino and leucistic alligators. Part way along I noticed that the piped in music was very much old country style, very Tammy Wynette and George Jones, which is appropriate for a roadside attraction that started in 1949. I think this was the newest tune in the repertoire.

 

Return

Back from Orlando, and got to see the Romanian sons and the women who love them. They got along better than I have ever seen. Chris and Maria landed in Miami on Jan 6, but SAS (Scandinavian Airline Systems) still hasn't got either sets of luggage to the US. 

I continue to be embarrassed by how bad NH drivers are compared to other states I encounter. Florida has some jerks, just like everyone, but fewer. They do have slow reaction times when the light turns green, which I can't think of a reason for.

More Links to Keep You Busy While I'm Gone

 Universal Healthcare: The American Way  Embracing free market solutions.  It sounds great.  I don't see who could sell the package without ceasing to be elected, though

Changing Norms to Fit The Narrative  Tom Golden at Men Are Good, last of a four-part series on psychological research being bent to serve ideological needs.  I had not heard of this particular inventory, but man, does it ring true. 

Steve Stewart-Williams at NNN When Wokeness Kills. Links to the longer article by Megan McArdle

A Graveyard of Bad NYC Mayoral Narratives  Musa al-Gharbi demonstrates that the narratives of both parties and sub-parties do not explain what was in. fact a banal election. 

For those close enough to North Central MA, there is a Lenten study of The Return of the King at the CS Lewis Study Center in Feb-Mar on Wednesdays at 7. I may also go to the Thornton Wilder weekend conference in June.  It surprised me to see it, because even though Wilder often uses Christian themes (especially in "The Skin of Our Teeth,") he is not usually regarded as a Christian writer.  A bit heterodox at minimum.  Outside the tent is more likely.

AI and Theoretical Physics

Steve Hsu assures us that all but the last 20 minutes should be comprehensible to non-physicists.  I didn't get that far. Five years ago, and for the fifty years before that I would have been interested, but somehow I am less so.  Perhaps my thinking is less flexible, or I care less about the answers.

Hsu considers AI to be a "brilliant but unreliable genius colleague."

Theoretical Physics and AI 

2013 Links

 Taking Up Emotional Space We have more influence than we think, just in places we didn't expect.

How Big a Problem?  A shortcut problem-solving technique, and a discussion of what this would mean for acknowledging racial differences in IQ

Professional Jurors  Some difficulties that would show pretty quickly

Cow Accents   NPR repeated the urban legend that they got from the BBC. We got it right in the comments

Trivia Study Vs Memory  At what point does playing trivia become gaming the system?  I have a friend who still plays on Tuesday who tells me he has just picked up things like the birthstone for each month.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

 

Links to Keep You Busy While I am Gone

We leave early on the 5th to meet sons John-Adrian and Jocie, Chris and Maria (Nome and Tromso respectively) and the three youngest granddaughters in Orlando.  I am not much interested in Mouseworld or Universal, but I am interested in them.

Suggested by Razib 

An Apology for Philology Philology used to be the core of Classics, which has now been taken over by people who write things like "Through a combination of Audre Lorde’s Black queer lens and Paul Preciado’s trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced." Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz push back.  The criticisms of philology seem to be "Neutrality is impossible, it's all whiteness, and we'd rather talk about ourselves being fashionable." 

Religion in America has stopped declining, but is not rebounding, according to Pew Research 

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Peggy Sastre at Quillette has a three part series Darwinian Hereises about the longstanding crusades to cancel Napolean Chagnon, E.O. Wilson, and Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer.  This includes death threat and kicking them out of academic societies as well as delisting their scholarship in hopes of making them invisible. 

 The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea Revisited. Edward Campbell at Unfashionable Truths replies to the comments on his socialism essay.  I linked to the last part of this previously.

As I explained in the original essay, the Nordics are not the examples many American socialists imagine. They aren’t evidence of socialism’s success; they’re evidence of capitalism’s success paired with unusually strong social cohesion.

Long before Scandinavia built modern welfare states, it spent centuries developing strong property rights, independent courts, high institutional trust, and vibrant trade networks. These countries built globally competitive private industries—shipping, timber, energy, engineering, technology—and produced companies like Maersk, IKEA, Volvo, Ericsson, and Novo Nordisk. They got rich first. Only after generations of market-driven prosperity did they construct generous social welfare systems. 

The Sweden Syndrome  What Swedes will deny is happening - except when it can't be ignored.