My unit was Never Crazier than that week
Hidden Data, or perhaps Invisible Data. Opportunity Cost would be an example
The Bicycle Rider We have since learned that his only child, my grandmother, had a child that even my father never heard about his entire life. Not the most respectable side of the family, but I trust I got at least a few good genes from him.
CS Lewis on Pride , the worst of traits
Everything is still High School, based on a Steve Sailer essay
Isabel Cowles Murphy @ The Noble Try
The genius of substack is how much time it encourages me to spend online reading about getting offline.
Europeans Aren't Nearly as Socially Liberal as the American Left Thinks The actual numbers on what European and other international laws and opinions are on abortion, transgender rights, vaccine hesitancy, and immigration.
I am not writing this in an attempt to establish which viewpoints are “correct” or “moral,” but merely as part of my broader ongoing unpaid mission from G-d to educate American progressives, a cohort of people who often fancy themselves uniquely knowledgeable but who in reality are frequently operating from a place of total ignorance. They are often the fools who don’t know what they don’t know and that makes them potentially dangerous. I want them, and everyone else, to be aware of reality so that we can have real discussions about the real world as it actually exists.
Every kid in Europe has a pony, don't they?
One of the new worries that is going to destroy life for all of us is "mankeeping," a form of emotional labor that a Vice writer thinks is at the forefront of women not wanting to have relationships. Instapundit linked to David Thompson's discussion, which includes a link to the original article. Thompson has a touch of Wodhusian style to his writing. The in-style, or perhaps the suckered-in crowd, has the topic on every lip, or so it seems. Yet are they really leaving boyfriends and even husbands over this? Women like to read about such things, but that's hardly the same thing. Isn't this rather a buffet of minor resentments where every woman chooses two or three out of the twenty?
It reminded me immediately of the Groypers, or Christian Nationalists, or whatever they are. People like to read about this. They also approach this buffet style. How many real ones are there?
Are there more women leaving men over mankeeping, or more Groypers? Show your work.
The bass is Isaac Freeman, who first sang with them in the 1940s. I can get down that low, but no one ever asks me to.
Love Beats Hate in elections. Even if you are the also most hated, it doesn't matter
Off With Her Hair Women tell attractive women to cut their hair. The study's authors are all female. I wonder what it is like for women studying female intrasexual competition. Is it harder to get along, or easier? Bethany, you need to get in on researching the women who research women.
One of the papers cited in the Cognitive Dissonance link on Wednesday Nov 12 We've Been Told We Are Living in a Post Truth Age. Don't Believe it.
San Francisco Homelessness The slight decrease might be real, but probably isn't. Getting rid of the tents made people more out-of sight, and thus harder to count. Also, so many people moving out of CA, especially the Bay Area reduced demand, driving down the rents.
Related: Did Prisons Replace Mental Hospitals? The graph is so stark and the possibility so intuitively possible that I fell for this long ago. I did think it was likely only directionally true, because such things are complicated. But it may be even less than that. It may obscure more than it reveals.
The Age of Toys is Over Comical. But is it true?
We tried something new this week Discovery Bible Study It's a group technique. A short passage is read aloud in full, by three successive people. The others can read along or just listen. We are encouraged to give a try to just listening, to attend more fully to the words and the flow rather than our own stray thoughts. I gave that a try. Then three others retell the passage in succession without looking at notes. Everyone remembers different details. Then the group discusses the passage, trying to stay with what is said there, rather other connections we might make. When one person noticed that the text said that Jesus heard the voice, she asked if others present heard it. One of the leaders agreed that it did say that here, but in other gospels it included others. I thought that was as far afield as we should go and refrained from going further and mentioning Paul on the road in The Acts of the Apostles. It is too easy for one such as I to go down such paths.
The study suggests questions.
We did Mark 1:1-15. I noticed that these verses highlight the strangeness of the scene for the listener, almost like the beginning of a movie. There is the reminder that this was prophesied centuries ago - that doesn't happen every day, does it? John is described as a strange, almost storybook character: strange location, strange clothes, strange diet. This alarming figure announces that an even more alarming figure is about to arrive. Heaven is torn open - whatever that means - and something doveish comes into view. God speaks. The second, more alarming figure is baptised and goes out into the wilderness for forty days, with wild animals, angels, and Satan around. In a very few verses we are told "All bets are off in this story. Anything might happen. You are now encountering things you never have before, and it's going to get even more weird."
It was a new way of seeing it for me. I like this approach.
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Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche refers to itself as N-cubed, which is cute, but I will continue to use NNN. It has a regular feature of "12 Things Everyone Should Know About..." which includes Violence, Dark Triad, Evolution and eleven others, and counting. The whole series is here. Without a subscription you only get the first one or two of each, but those are often interesting as standalones. Plus graphs!
The most recent is Conspiracy. Few people endorse even all the conspiracies on their own "side."
But the single strongest personality predictor is narcissism. Narcissists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories because they have a strong need for uniqueness, are prone to paranoia, and can also be remarkably gullible.
He breaks them down into those liberals check the box for and those conservatives do, along a continuum. So I guess I likely have narcissism held in check, because I looked at some of those conspiracies and said "OK, not really true, but hey, based on a true story. There's evidence for some of that!" My sons are forbidden to comment about the narcissism.
Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it. Mike Tyson
Quoted by Mike Woodruff at The Friday Update
Several hundred years ago, after 17th-century British Bible commentator Matthew Henry was mugged, he wrote the following in his journal: “Let me be thankful: first, because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because although they took all I had, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.”
The is a lot of attention being paid to Rod Dreher's recent discussion of left-right extremism including antisemitism at The Critic," Welcome back to Weimar." This includes a statement that 30 to 40 percent of conservative political and think tank staffers under 30 are followers or fellow travelers of Fuentes.
Grokipedia has an extended article about Groypers, the decentralised group under Fuentes's America First banner. Whether you read it now or come back to it at the end, I recommend it.
Meanwhile, look, it's Rod Dreher, Jake. I used to like him, three or four Rod Drehers ago, but he has a long history of enthusiasms, plausibly sounding an alarm but then crashing and burning and embracing some extreme for a year or two. I would describe most of these claims as Based on a True Story, but there are a few here who I know would describe that as too generous. You are free to weigh in in this space to remind the others of your reasons. When last I heard of Dreher he was trying to convince us that Hungary was a deeply Catholic country, which faith undergirded its "traditionalism," for which they were unfairly maligned. Maybe based on a true story. But not true.
But, dissident alt right Groypers. How worried should we be about their numbers and influence? If you look at Dreher's claim in context it keeps weakening with every return glance. Conservative staffers under 30. How many is that? - and that is the group most dedicated to trying to take those jobs to shift things its way. What does "fellow travelers" mean? We know that in the past lots of real antisemites kept trying to hide behind claiming "no, we're just anti-Zionist," or were "isolationists who thought that Israel received disproportionate attention but didn't claim that the number should be zero." Some of those really meant it even then, though when the chips were down most revealed that they just hated Jews. Yet this is a different generation, farther removed from the Holocaust and so counting it for less. For comparable distance, not many people cared about the Belgian Congo Genocide when I was young. Not quite the same for cultural importance in America, I'll admit. But it gives an added perspective. At least some of the "fellow travelers" are concerned more about isolationism than anything, because I have heard them. If you look at the amount of military action even antiwar presidents like Clinton, Bush, and Obama have engaged in, you can see why that might be high on their list of expensive things to get rid of. Such people at least give a listen to other versions of isolationism. Those fellow travelers?
Next, look how much of Dreher's evidence comes from alt-right antisemites in Europe - and even then it's in the form of "I talked to some guys who really know about this, trust me." I wrote about the real story behind "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe" over a decade ago. Color me unconvinced. He is also worried that they might undermine Vance.
I'm convinced the Groypers are bad enough. I'm not convinced they are numerous enough. Startup groups are often good at trying to create an impression of bigger numbers than they warrant. Thousands of listeners to a daily show, you say? These noise and disruption tactics might well give them outsize influence, and such things can build. But how many agree with them on an issue or two, not everything? Dreher retreats to the idea that some of the supporters just want to "burn it all down?" Meaning what, exactly? Real burning? Restarting conservative definition from scratch? Getting rid of some Washington insiders pulling strings?
They can do real damage, especially if they have wealthy backers behind the scenes who want to use them for their own purposes though they don't agree with the goals. Think Russian and Chinese support for Western environmental groups, or Middle Eastern countries which hate the Palestinians but find them useful tactically.
So tell what you know and what you guess. How many are there?
Art Deco Trains. Love this
Peebo Preboskenes takes back everything negative he said about AI
The Shrinking Middle Class There are problems with this, but the new phrase is that it is "directionally correct"
I told you so. Long Walks . Of course, now that the word has been getting out, I am doing less of it.
For those of you who want to spend $2.60/oz on potato chips. No, I have not tried them.
You may remember that I had this podcast on my sidebar for a long time. I will be forever grateful to them for guiding me through Till We Have Faces after I had been unable to even like it my first two tries. (I now agree it is Lewis's best, ahead of The Great Divorce.) But in the early seasons they took five minutes of chitchat at the beginning of every episode, which grew to ten minutes and then twelve. It's not that I couldn't reliably just jump ahead, but that landing at eight minutes they sounded like they were just about to get into content, and at ten minutes, and eleven. The irritation was not worth it.
But it is still suggested now and again on my phone, and the topic was going to be Till We Have Faces at the Annual Petoskey CS Lewis Conference, which I have considered going to the last few years.
At 22 minutes of talking about what beer or tea they were having or chatting with the guests about how they had all met, I gave up. Still not recommended.
In case you wanted to know what the worst of leftist radicals are advocating.
Why ChatGPT sounds the way it does
Singal on the Great Feminisation Theory Part II - Soft Spots
Honest Debate by Scott Alexander in 2017. I no longer have much confidence. But it's nice to read someone more hopeful. I think that one of the problems is that people are sure they are willing to listen and fight fair, but quickly aren't. Maybe you first have a series of debates about other subjects, with secret ballots of which of the two is arguing more fairly. After a few rounds you should have a better pool to draw from.
Of the 103 who were asked by a sixth-grade class, only Kurt Vonnegut answered with advice.
"The way to use chatbots is not to ask them what’s true but to tell them what you think is true and then ask them for feedback. This lets you learn without eroding your ability to think for yourself."
"Lessons learned are quickly forgotten unless they were learned in terror, or sorrow, or shame. Wisdom can always be rented for free, but it must be purchased with pain."
" ...while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing."
Steve Hsu interviews Scott Horton (transcript available) author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine . Horton is a libertarian and antiwar activist and discusses the War in Ukraine at the beginning and end of the podcast, but the bulk of the discussion is about the accumulation of evidence that the Russia Hoax was coordinated by the FBI and CIA feeding information to media sources under the direction of the White House. Particularly disturbing was the amount of information coming from the bottom up, with agents reporting there was nothing to it, only to be told by their highest authorities to keep the investigation going anyway.
We adopted a small terrier mix and renamed her Maggie. I mostly just call her "Fish Breath" which made me think of Sweet Molly Malone.
I always think I won't like the Sinead O'Connor versions, and then she just knocks me flat.
I saw them once in the 80s while camping in the north country in the middle of the night. Despite many attempts I had never seen them again, and my wife had never seen them. Over the last few years, the most likely night have turned out to be cloudy. Our sons and their families on the Arctic Circle see them often, including absolutely spectacular sightings.
A FB posting from only minutes before sent us out into the cold, and we did get to see them. One can often see them better through the camera lens, and if one can keep the camera still (I cannot - I have always had tremble) with the aperture open the effect is multiplied. My wife got this shot last night. Not spectacular, but real.
Everything is Television Social media is becoming constant short form video. "In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol."
Cognitive Dissonance It has happened again. A new paper, based on a tranche of unsealed historical documents, casts serious doubt on a piece of social psychology research from the mid-20th Century. Shocker!
Herodotus Validated The Scythians used human leather on their quivers. I never trusted those guys.
How the Letter E Almost Ruined English Poetry It includes good descriptions of the loss of grammatical endings in Germanic languages and even more in English and how that influenced the accenting of syllables.
Jesse Singal on the "Feminization" Discourse - Part 1 This provides some context on how even mild versions of Helen Andrews claim are utterly rejected in many fields of the academy, with shockingly little evidence. I know, I know, in our section of the blogosphere we've known this for years. But it is still new to some people. Part II discusses how Singal thinks Andrews's overall argument still has holes. (Leah Libresco Sargeant at The Free Press points out that if the theory were entirely true, highly feminized professions like Pharmacist and Veterinary Medicine would have collapsed. )
Early Social Media roping you in. You had to know "the count and the amount" in Dialing for Dollars.
I wondered when it had gone off the air, because I associated it with the 1970s, and it turns out it hung on for a long time, with some descendants even today. Our memories of the cut-ins will likely be different, because it was local programming with regional variations.
A Review of Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert
Ruxandra Teslo on AI and Drug Discovery. Transformative new drugs are already declining, and AI may not help much. A bit depressing.
In Defense of Men by Will Storr. The part that continues to surprise and irritate me about this is that I have been reading this for years, but most of America, especially women, seems to find this new. Of those who have heard it, many think it is untrue and an example of men whining to even mention it. We don't understand that women have it so much harder that the struggles of men do not even bear mentioning.
Speaking of Organ Donation, this from Sensible Medicine. The Ultimate Medical Drama. One cousin of mine donated a kidney to a sister who has PKD. I am no longer close to either and don't know if the "tyranny of the gift" applied in their case.
Jonathan Smith at The Orthosphere glares over the top of his glasses at Pope Leo's new "Mass for the Care of the World." Quite the heated discussion follows. You might want to make a stiffish brandy and soda before settling down to this one.
