Modern Wizardry

In echo of Bethany's post about health care costs, we have Thankful by Mark Stoler over at Things Have Changed.  He is thankful for Big Medicine and Big Pharma

Moneyball

I read the book.  My son told me I would love the movie but I've never seen it. There're a lot of movies I've never seen which I am assured I would like, and that is probably true. I have something that I now distrust about the medium, which is unfair of me.  Because I am sucked in by its charms so easily, I am aware how powerfully it can mislead. But that is true of all art.  Art can condense an idea, even a subtle one, and teach it better than the strict truth. If you want to give a sense of the British Raj and espionage during the Great Game in India, you write Kim.  It's better than a dozen lectures on the subject in terms of staying power and teaching. 

Yet they are all liars, attempting to control how you see a particular perspective to the exclusion of others.

Actual baseball players criticised the movie when it came out because "not a single scene actually happened." For those of us who followed baseball statistics and rejoiced in the 80s as the statheads gradually established their bona fides, making better predictions than the supposed experts in a field where prediction is difficult. It was Yogi Berra, after all , who may have said "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future." Because baseball is a series of separate events, it lends itself to analysis and prediction better than other sports, but even that is fraught with peril. 

This scene captures the essence of the conflict beautifully, but it never happened. Bill James, most famous of the statisticians, willingly conceded that there were things scouts could discover and predict for you about a player that he could not: how hard he worked, whether he was coachable, whether he was going to throw it all away because of poor character.  None of that is in this scene. But because I support the idea, I think it's a great scene.

 

 

N'Ham'sha

There has been a run here on bumpahstickahs and such saying "NAHAMSHA." It's cute, but not quite right.  The first vowel is a schwa or even an inaudible vowel, and there has got to be a stop, a barely detectable P in it.  Accents are tricky, and eye-dialect even more so.

Happy Jack

 

Earendil

 Christ I, or The Advent Lyrics are part of the Exeter Book and date from the late 900s AD. Lyrics, in this case, is closer to the literal meaning of "accompanied by the lyre (harp)" of the ancient Greeks, though Anglo-Saxon poets may not have been directly knowledgeable about that. It is a set of 12 antiphons, and #7 contains a reference to "Earendel," the morning star, associated with a much older root referring to the light of dawn, such as in the word aurora. 

It not only suggests Tolkien's Earendil, he makes the connection explicit. 

When first studying A[nglo]-S[axon] professionally (1913) ... I was struck by the great beauty of this word (or name), entirely coherent with the normal style of A-S, but euphonic to a peculiar degree in that pleasing but not 'delectable' language ... it at least seems certain that it belonged to astronomical-myth, and was the name of a star or star-group. Before 1914, I wrote a 'poem' upon Earendel who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun. I adopted him into my mythology in which he became a prime figure as a mariner, and eventually as a herald star, and a sign of hope to men. Aiya Earendil Elenion Ancalima (II 329) 'hail Earendil brightest of Stars' is derived at long remove from Éala Éarendel engla beorhtast. (Personal letter from 1967)

Earendil was thus one of the first puzzle-pieces in Tolkien's Legendarium.  Additional note: Tolkien thought of himself as a philologist, and Lewis describes him as such, both the man himself and his representation as Elwin Ransom in the 1940s sci-fi series. We would call such a person an historical linguist today. Yet there is a distinction: the former studies word roots and tracings in order to understand texts; the latter hews more to an anthropological line and studies historical language relationships in order to understand humans.

You can learn more about the Advent Lyrics at the Anglo-Saxon England podcast. He is also doing a long series on King Canute, which I will summarise far in the future when he has finished.

 

Stocking Presents

For years I have put a 12 oz container of dry gas in everyone's stocking.  It's just a Dad sort of thing to remind people of. I used to do windshield wipers as well but that has become less necessary. This year Emily became the first granddaughter to get one.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

One will occasionally run across the challenge from liberals - my brother, for example - to conservatives opposing DEI to spell it out, saying "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  Ask them which one they are opposed to."  I have given medium-length, accurate but not rhetorically powerful answers to this, wishing that I had a better.  Today I heard a better:

Voltaire said the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. 

Julbord

The Julbord is a specialised version of a Smorgasbord. Years ago I toyed with the idea of doing an authentic Julbord, as I am partly of Swedish extraction. We had never had one at our house, nor even my grandmother's, yet I felt certain it would take to it naturally. Then I looked it up. I was already not doing well reading the description, but the photos of the rollmopse finished me off.  I'm sure they are quite the delicacy if you like the idea of pickled herring wrapped around an onion and gherkin. 

Herring in general is prominent, and as many as seven versions of it may make it to the table.  One would think that smorgas, meaning buttered bread, would not have won out in a battle* against seven herrings for naming rights, but there you are. There is also brawn, a head cheese made of cold jellied pigs head; multiple sausages including korv, especially fatty and stretched with potato and onion; Lutfisk, a dried whitefish cured with lye for days, then rehydrated for days in preparation for eating, at which point it is rather gelatinous - add white sauce or mustard; Eels are big in some regions, liver pate in others. Hardtack is ultratraditional, but crispbread is substituted now. The vegetables are brussel sprouts, pickled beets, and sour cabbage. Various dishes that moderns might take to better include smoked salmon, crusted ham, cheeses, and shrimp or mushroom omelets. Aqvavit and glogg are drunk, and the final course is a rice pudding with cinnamon. (There are other desserts. Plenty.)

Oh, and meatballs and other smavarmt, little warm dishes. And coffee, always coffee.  Swedish children even leave coffee out for St. Nicholas.

More modern versions are less fatty and less jellied. The newest versions stress seasonal and local foods. 

 

*There actually was a Battle of the Herrings, when the English were attempting to deliver herring to the siege of Orleans in preparation for Lent but were attacked by the Scots and French. This has nothing to do with smorgasbord, but was remembered for years as an important example of French cowardice costing their allies lots of casualties.

Context Before Condemnation

I don't usually link to Facebook articles, but Dmitry Matousov is an investment advisor by day and only puts his long-form essays up on FB.  That's not the ideal media for essays, but we work with what we have. The Nakba:Context Before Condemnation .  He is arguing for one side in the essay, but does so with some understanding of the POV of his opposition, and some sympathy. He's pretty thorough here.

2013 Links

 Riots in Sweden Increasingly applicable

Absolute Truth. I have said this several times

I discuss the book Bloodlands 

Deliver Us: Concerning Victimhood There is a Feenyite group out in Richmond, NH.  I wrote about their conflicts with the town a few times.  One of the interior links is a great example of people disagreeing with me or my commenters without actually reading the material at all carefully.

The evangelical cliche of "God Will Honor..." 

Whooping Cranes

 We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

Health Care Costs

 As usual, whatever your favorite soap box is, Bethany's new post over at Graph Paper Diaries will give you something.  Increasing Health Care Costs are not Like Other Cost Increases.  I usually find her posts give me new ammunition for some favorite idea but also redirect my thinking away from other, dumber opinions. Comments are already getting good.

The Blood Does Thicken

26 degrees this morning, but sunny and calm and felt like spring. A day like this in October would have me wondering whether I would make it to New Year's Day.

Can Free Will Make Sense?

 For those interested in the free will debate, Eric Rundquist at Book Battles compares "the two most recent, comprehensive and, crucially, the most scientific arguments on each side of this debate: Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: Life without Free Will and Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will."  Right away he is trying to get us to the central point:

 When you make a choice, are you in control of that choice, as an independent causal agent in the universe (even if just a little bit), or are your decisions always fully determined by other things outside of your control? Or, to put it another way: Do your conscious decisions interfere in the unfolding causal chain of the universe, or are they just a part of that chain, like everything else that happens around you in the material world?

An Avalanche of Worthless Non-Studies

Mike Males, a senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice has a nice substack I just discovered.  He is devoted to exposing crap studies pointing to false problems at the expense of real problems we could do something about. Needless to say, I have great sympathy. He especially delights in  showing that social media is not actually bad for teenagers, that researchers dislike the young, especially boys, and that adolescent violence is not on the rise. Here is a representative post: An Avalanche of Worthless Non-Studies on Teens and Social Media 

…this barn-burner MSN headline: “Brain structure changes may partially explain the link between screen time and ADHD”. Screens are wrecking your kids’ brain!

In fact, the study of 10,000 children featured in this scary headline found literally ZERO linkage between increased screen time and “increased ADHD symptoms… and reduced cortical thickness in specific regions (right temporal pole… left superior frontal gyrus… and left rostral middle frontal gyrus)…”

The MAXIMUM β value this study found for any effect was 0.032. NOTHING! Yet, again, that study failed to control for parental abuses/troubles, so: less than nothing.

He uses research and mathematical terms which may throw you at first glance, but it is possible to understand what is going on without knowing them deeply. 

The Woke Are Not Woke

The original idea behind wokeness - what many true believers still pretend is all the meaning there is - is that we should be awake to the effects words and actions might have on groups of people. How would this sound to an older black person?  Does this solution work for disabled people as well? It's a fine idea, a generous idea to remember as many aspects as one can about those within the sound of our voice. It's insensitive for those gathered to complain about their jobs in the presence of the person who just lost theirs. Or worse still, about the foibles of spouses to widows. You don't have to be obsessive about it, but it is good to make sure no one is excluded by how the group photo is posed. If all the white employees are in front and all the Filipino ones are in the back, someone is going to interpret that as a statement.

I would just call that politeness, but you do you. 

Odd, then, that the woke so consistently and gratuitously throw in insults about privileged groups. It's almost as if... 

Well, here's an example.  On Holidays . It finishes on a fine sentiment, though it is a bit milk-and-water for my taste. Common humanity. Showing kindness. Connecting with others. The comments are gushing about how deeply moved people are. Except for my comment, of course.

Because...

The first seven paragraphs are unnecessary to those supposedly central ideas, yet pointlessly insulting to people celebrating Christmas. It gets the historical facts wrong (yes Virginia, Christmas was important to Americans before WWII); it blithely and confidently misreads the motives of those complaining about the "war on Christmas;" it instructs the main group of people actually showing seasonal generosity in how they should observe their religion if they really meant it. Sure.  There are lots of Kwanzaa groups going out caroling at nursing homes. Wiccans everywhere are standing in the cold ringing bells to request donations for the poor in the spirit of Solstice. 

Episcopalians and Fundamentalists are at odds with each other about many things, but they are both doing food distributions, winter clothing drives, and all Angel Tree/Samaritan's Purse toy collections. They do things like this all year, too. And as near as I can tell, dude, you are not. 

I wouldn't be so annoyed if it weren't all so cliched and tiring, the people who went to church when young and think they therefore know all about what it's like there. It is not usually the atheists who write these things, it is the post-Christians.  Jews came up with a good solution.  They took a minor holiday of their own and elevated it to higher status, imitating the things from the surrounding culture that they liked (or could at least stand, like a Chanuka Bush) and pointedly leaving out the rest. When they protested it was about limited and specific aspects of community observance at schools and government areas that they couldn't go along with. 

The post-Christians say their point is to include everybody (not like you bigots), but are then quite clear about who they are excluding. So kind, so sweet.  So community oriented. It is parallel to that large fraction of antiwar protestors who revealed over time that they weren't so much antiwar, but on the other side. When you understand this, you see why these essays are not streams of clear water into which a measure of unavoidable poison creeps in. If you lead with the poison gratuitously, then the poison is the real point. The clear water is the cover, the disguise. 

Now consider what that means for all the gushing comments.  Most are people who like the clear water - we hope. But so many of them seem to like it better when it has that taste of poison in it. Tangy.  Sophisticated.

Two weeks ago I noticed that I was not reprinting The Sadness of NPR Christmas this year and couldn't see a reason to. Ah well, maybe next year.

Four Autism Subtypes

Princeton University announced a study and subsequent paper in Nature Genetics about four distinct autism subtypes.  I missed it at the time.  I don't follow things as assiduously as I used to. 

It is gratifying to see something I predicted start to come to pass. Because autism shows clear symptoms and collections of symptoms, it has long been known that there is a strong biological component. Family studies and genetic evidence show that it is in fact largely heritable.  But it has been elusive - expected symptoms are simply not there sometimes, and some co-occurring conditions are frequent enough to make one wonder if an individual presentation is some variant of OCD or ADHD, or how the clear depressive/anxiety symptoms fit into the explanation.  For this reason I started saying a decade ago that there must be subtypes clouding the picture. I didn't have the knowledge to do more than wave my hands at what those subtypes might be, but there was clearly something that had more OCD elements and something that had more impairment of theory of mind/inability to consider alternative explanations. Common symptoms like demand avoidance have a variety of presentations, sometimes are not present, and sometimes are found just as strongly in people who have not a hint of autism elsewhere. That should suggest it is a useless category, but it isn't. When you work with patients it is prominent and you develop techniques for working around them.  (Unfortunately, these techniques do not work on theoretically higher-functioning people like your supervisor.)

Though I conceded that there was a spectrum to the condition, I thought it was not only a spectrum. The idea of a wheel/pie chart of symptoms, and the older multipolar theories still had explanatory power for me. The most serious cases, which require significant intervention and resemble what we have always called autism, or in Europe, Asperger's Syndrome were not only more severe, but somehow qualitatively different, as if some further thing was broken - yet not always the same thing. The Princeton study identifies a reason for two of the categories having more serious presentations: de novo mutations for one and rare variants for the other. De novo mutations usually have little effect, though more often negative. Changing your genetic programming at one tiny location usually just gets overrun by redundancy effects in development.  However, just the wrong change at just the wrong place can be catastrophic. The effect for rare variants is similar but usually milder. The parent who passed it to you and all those before who passed it to them survived and had fertile young, after all. 

For example, children in the Broadly Affected group showed the highest proportion of damaging de novo mutations — those not inherited from either parent — while only the Mixed ASD with Developmental Delay group was more likely to carry rare inherited genetic variants. While children in both of these subtypes share some important traits like developmental delays and intellectual disability, these genetic differences suggest distinct mechanisms behind superficially similar clinical presentations.  

This also made immediate sense to me. In other psychiatric conditions symptoms do not always show at birth. They may activate under the hormonal influences of puberty and proceed slowly. Late-onset paranoid schizophrenia comes on so gradually that symptoms are not clear until the late thirties or beyond.  We can sometimes retrospectively see that the illness was present in the early 30s, some few quirks that no one thought much about at the time. In such patients, development was normal for a considerable time, and many cognitive systems are entirely intact. That this is also true for autism adds up. 

 The team also found that autism subtypes differ in the timing of genetic disruptions’ effects on brain development. Genes switch on and off at specific times, guiding different stages of development. While much of the genetic impact of autism was thought to occur before birth, in the Social and Behavioral Challenges subtype — which typically has substantial social and psychiatric challenges, no developmental delays, and a later diagnosis — mutations were found in genes that become active later in childhood. This suggests that, for these children, the biological mechanisms of autism may emerge after birth, aligning with their later clinical presentation.

 

Wachet Auf

 

A Small Star

In the artwork, the Star of Bethlehem is pictured as some big can't-miss-it item. But if it was a dramatic star (planet/comet) then everyone would be talking about it, and Herod would be consulting his own astrologers. There might be word from Rome commanding everyone what to think about it.  The Romans didn't like wild cards and unrest. You over there.  Simmer down or I'll know what to do with you. It had to be something of a surprise, something that only specialists might notice. It might only be visible on the clearest of nights, far from even campfires. I can still only see it moving in and out.  I'm taking your word for it here.

The star would be in the west for the Magi.  We let the word order fool us on "we have seen his star in the east."  The star wasn't in the east, they were in the east.* If you were in the east and you saw a star further east, you would not say "Hey, let's head west to find it." Nor would you know when to stop.  Not that far past Bethlehem you would hit the Mediterranean - about 12 miles. What do we do if we get to the sea and the star is still out in front of us? Get on a boat?  Wait? Whatever that little star did to "come to rest" would have been a relief to them. 

No, Herod was taken by surprised and this idea of prophesied kings in the stars was unnerving.  His wise men said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and the Magi jumped on that as the first place to check.  Herod may have thought they were cranks who didn't really know anything and we looking for favors or influence.  He didn't believe them enough to send them with escorts. But he wasn't going to let them wander over the countryside talking about heirs to the throne, either.

Mary and Joseph may never have heard anything about a star identifying their boy, either. Heck, there's no guarantee they heard the company of angels, either.  That might have been for the shepherds alone.  If everyone had seen them the last people they would have asked about it would be shepherds.  They would have headed out to Bethlehem themselves, crowding the place up and making the Romans nervous in the middle of the night.  The shepherds would not have gotten near it.  

*And maybe not that much east.  The East Road went SSE for long way before turning SE, then East. The Magi may not have come over days of desert. Roads are preferred. Due east would have been the Dead Sea, then days and days of desert.

The Maid-Servant at the Inn

Earl at Wind Off The Hill sent along this poem by Dorothy Parker with the comment "she wasn't always wittily bitter"

What's Wrong With The West?

 Rob Henderson interviews Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom and many, many essays: What's Wrong With the West, in The Spectator. Henderson has written a new introduction for the 25th anniversary edition of the book. I have linked to or written about Dalrymple a score of times if you are interested in my experience with his work. He was an inner-city psychiatrist in England and saw much of what I did in my career.  I usually agree with him.

 I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.

Even people who are answering off-the-cuff will mention that there is less community in America and the West than there once was, and less than they observe in other cultures. Much of this is perception. As Garrison Keillor once said and I have repeated many times "We think times were simpler then because we were children and our needs were attended to by others." We remember getting together with cousins - or even siblings - but that doesn't happen anymore. We generalise that into believing that the culture as a whole has lost something. But we don't see the cousins because they now have other people that they love - spouses, children, grandchildren. It is the natural order of things for cousin closeness to be recreated in every generation. Similarly, we don't share a home with our siblings anymore.

When we view other cultures and the closeness and camaraderie they have, we are seeing a survivor bias of those who stayed in the village or neighborhood. Yet they also have young people who moved to the city. 

Yet with all that said, there might be something to it. The fragmentation of culture may not all be illusion. 

It's a good thing to comment on at Christmas, I think, when you were thinking about similar topics already. 

Merry Christmas

 

The Gospel of John in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

John 1: 1-5; 9-10 in Narnia

Aslan: 

It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.  Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.  But if she could have looked a little further back, into the darkness and stillness before Time dawned she would have read there a different incantation.