Saturday Links

 The Monks In the Casino for, um, one meaning of the word "monks"

The dark side of the rainbow: Homosexuals and bisexuals have higher Dark Triad traits than heterosexuals. Aporia notes that this is strong evidence against the Sociosexual Hypothesis. I don't have numbers, but I do have a career of observation of a subset on the group. Borderline and Antisocial personalities have high percentages of bisexuality that I used to characterise as omnisexuality, pansexuality.  Both sexes, children, animals, fleshlights, vacuum cleaner hoses...anything. They were often traumatised by relatives, which brings in questions of environment vs genetics again. Were those parents also antisocial/borderline? Is there more than one wheel turning here? Should we take them out of the studies or are they the far extreme of the same spectrum? I do not have an opinion.

That was a serious subject, so lets be insensitive and consider it from a light perspective by that beloved children's author Shel Silverstein. 

Copycat effect of mass shootings.  Like plane crashes versus auto deaths or drowning in a flood vs a bathtub, we fear things that are much less likely to happen.  Mass shootings take up an enormous amount of media space, fundraising, and legislative time, but the odds of you dying in one are vanishingly small. Because they often involve (seemingly) random victims who are entirely innocent, it offends our sense of justice and control over our worlds as well as our realistic fear. B ut paradoxically, our obsession with keeping them in the news makes them more likely. 

The survival of Swiss watches Quartz watches were cheaper and more precise, but a small number of watchmakers kept Swiss watches alive after two-thirds of the watchmakers had already gone out of business.

Maxfield Parrish

 The Culturist picks some favorites 

 

Too Good to Check

I saw Steven Pinker's tweet about Oliver Sacks making up enormous amounts of his case studies, symbolically projecting his own life's obstacles onto his patients, and thought about this throughout the day at odd moments. When I got home I read the whole article in the New Yorker. I found it fully sickening while reading it, the sheer range of his dishonesty in his writing staggering for one who was trained to treat a clinical record with literalist accuracy. Anything subjective had to be identified, such as an interpretation by a community clinician of what has been happening. "Her community psychiatrist identifies having to move to a less-supervised setting as the primary stressor." Anything in the chart is subject to be entered into a court record. When a particular case is discussed outside the circle of confidentiality, such as at a conference, the name and any identifying details have to be disguised sufficiently to prevent disclosure. Yet one cannot disguise them by changing them, saying "a young black male" when it is a young black female. It is simply not allowed to pretend that someone who has political paranoia has religious paranoia for purpose of discussion.

To describe twin autistic patients as having an obsession with prime numbers and uncanny abilities to discover them, spending their day trading them playfully back and forth when they don't do anything like this is an enormous breach of trust. To further claim to have brought a lengthy prime into discussion with them, so that they make a place for you in their little world would be grounds for immediate firing. 

I believed every one of the cases Sacks described. If you told me that Witty Ticcy Ray was a actually bass player rather than a drummer, I would have felt deceived. 

It speaks to the power of the fantasy of the magical healer that readers and publishers accepted Sacks’s stories as literal truth. In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.” He explained that “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” He added that Marcus would likely call them “confabulations”—a phenomenon Sacks explores in a chapter about a patient who could retain memories for only a few seconds and must “make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses,” but the “bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance . . . cannot do service for reality.”

Sacks was startled by the success of the book, which he had dedicated to Shengold, “my own mentor and physician.” It became an international best-seller, routinely assigned in medical schools. Sacks wrote in his journal,

    Guilt has been much greater since ‘Hat’ because of (among other things)

    My lies,

    falsification

He pondered the phrase “art is the lie that tells the truth,” often attributed to Picasso, but he seemed unconvinced. “I think I have to thrash this out with Shengold (ed. his psychoanalyst)—it is killing me, soul-killing me,” he wrote. “My ‘cast of characters’ (for this is what they become) take on an almost Dickensian quality.”

Who was harmed?

The patient is potentially harmed, but in many of these cases the patient experienced the doctor's attention and even projected interpretation as a positive. For people abandoned by the world, someone simply showing up and showing consistent focus would be precious. Oliver Sacks rather obviously cared about these people and tried to see something special in each, to the point of overidentification. That matters.  That counts. But the subsequent storytelling to the world is not a necessary part of that. A sincere and kindly person with no clinical training could do the same. Being seen inaccurately is not as good as being seen truly, but it must be better than remaining invisible. This comes up in the discussion of AI therapists which reflect back to you what you want to hear.  Is that good for you? We crave being understood deeply - an imitation of that might well meet the craving.  I thought of Ray Bradbury's The Man In The Rorschach Shirt. Couldn't the doctor have just done that instead? No, despite his very real compassion, Dr. Sacks was in it to "work through" (vacuous phrase) his own issues. It might have kept his nose to the grindstone, to his patients' benefit, but the risk of spilling his own pathology into them would be real.  Treatment decisions, including independence, medication, and legal status are decided on the basis of reported information. It could matter. I have seen entire treatment approaches to a patient reversed on the basis of discovering some new information, or the disproving of old information. Not often, but it happens.

The public was harmed. New Yorker writer  Rachel Aviv stresses the importance of the compassion and (ahem) empathy people might feel for damaged individuals.  That's fine. Keeping up general fascination with the brain and research could have good effect.  I draw the line at clinicians.  Teaching therapists, prescribers, and outreach workers false information must in the end be bad for their patients. I did not read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat thinking "How inspired I am to see the ultimate value of every human being," I was looking for brain understanding, thinking how wonderful it was that we are learning such intricacies on the basis of these oddities. We now know looking back that Postwar psychology was more a literature than a science - which would have been fine if everyone had been clear about that. The Stanford Prison Experiment, Kinsey's mythology of sexual behavior, delayed gratification prediction, priming, stereotype threat - all pretty much useless.  But it would be so cool if this were true.  Let's all talk about what it would mean if it were true. No thanks. These are people's lives we are screwing with. 

My title was "Too Good to Check" but how would I have checked?  It would be more accurate to say "Too Cool to Question," and I didn't.  I am quite distressed about what this means in general for my standards. I have been wondering if this is another time of upending for me, one of those periods that comes along every decade or so from which I emerge with my mind changed about things. I find I have been unable to force this to happen and also, only recognise it when I am more than halfway through.  Hey! I might be halfway through! I wonder what has changed?

 

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in the 1950s

 Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, as viewed from the 1950s from David Foster's Substack.  I kept meaning to put that on my sidebar and finally did it. 

Given the recent advances of AI and robotics in our own era–and the positive and negative forecasts about the implications–I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at two short story collections on this general theme: Thinking Machines, edited by Groff Conklin, and The Robot and the Man, edited by Martin Greenberg. Both books date from around 1954. Here are some of the stories I thought were most interesting, mostly from the above sources but also a couple of them from other places.

Nice summaries of some classic early sci-fi stories on the subject 

Ben Ruthe - One to Watch

 I didn't expect to be seeing any outdoor track, but it's Australia. Six races in one weekend.

 

Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming

 Probably my favorite music at Christmas

 

Somebody Else's Problem

When I was a young man I put things off until the last minute.  It was lack of discipline, certainly, but there is also a rush one gets from pulling chestnuts out of the fire, whether yours or another's. It came in handy later when I worked in emergency situations to be inspired rather than daunted by the task.  Toward the end of my career I would say to my office-mate "Fred, this is why they hired us. If it was easy, anyone could do it."

By that time I had learned not to put things off, because emergencies have a way of occurring at inconvenient times, such as while you are already fixing another emergency.  I am now a fan of getting things off my desk as soon as possible. Read it, reply to it, send it.  Pick it up, fix something you see wrong, and send it back. Your goal is to make this SEP - Somebody Else's Problem. Get it off your desk and on to the next. 

Tolkien's Christmas Poem

 

If you would rather hear it read, you will find it here. 

Thursday Links

 The Dirty Secret of the Muslim World.  It's slavery, and it is and is not a secret. It is long-known to people who read about the last ten centuries of the Middle East at all. But it is mostly unknown in the popular imagination, and it is mostly unstudied in any detail by academics. 

How to Measure Competition It has examples in industries we are all familiar with 

 In short, we want to measure whether markets are rewarding excellence or sclerosis. It turns out that such a measure exists: what is called the Olley-Pakes decomposition. The decomposition measures whether customers are switching to more productive companies. If productive companies are gaining market share, we might judge that the market is competitive and working well. If they’re not, and more productive businesses are not doing better than less productive ones, something is wrong, and intervention could be necessary.

People who have a spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder.  The British results are slightly different from the usual American results.  I have arrow-of-causation questions here, but it's interesting.

Why are there so many Chinese people?  Psmiths again.

Thinking About Crime at 50 

Like many crime researchers, Wilson saw a society’s crime level as shaped chiefly by the degree of restraint exercised by the community in which offenders operate. More than the police or courts, a community’s informal systems of social control—the norms and rules defining not only criminal behavior but also “orderliness”—play the central role. The idea of a community keeping the peace has roots in an older legal tradition that Wilson at times sought to evoke. Recovering it sheds light on today’s crime debates and sets the stage for a renewed appreciation of Wilson’s continued relevance.

"Predatory crime does not merely victimize individuals; it impedes and, in the extreme case, prevents the formation and maintenance of community.”  

 

 

At Least You Had Something...

In the Gen-Z-has-it-hard argument I stepped back from the overall statistics and even the comparative prices and income to zoom in on what were their particular sticking points. Housing is nearly always mentioned, college is usually in there, affording an unspecified car and the difference in wages for an entry-level job get mentioned. I tried to look back on those both as one who was there and knows the story behind the story but also how it does look now.  

Let's start with the housing. There is a common complaint that there are no small homes on small lots being built these days, because contractors are leaving money on the table if they don't build big.  It's true, and because there are fewer small houses all the time, they are not the bargain they should be. But that's only the beginning. Pretty much any house and most apartments have a dishwasher, a dryer, a far better stove and refrigerator, decent windows, wiring, and plumbing (compared to my childhood).  Those add up. The small houses themselves have grown. This is the house I moved into when I was two, in 1955.

It didn't have the garage or breezeway then, nor that addition on the front, just that cape with slanted ceilings on the 2nd floor bedrooms. The first house my wife and I bought was even smaller and less impressive.  Originally a 1906 one-room summer home, every room was a separate addition, including the bathroom and kitchen. Knob and tube wiring.  Stone foundation and some crawl space. About 900sf, $29,500 in 1978. It's one thing to be a defensive Boomer about how hard we had it, dear child, but to them "At least you had a house." 

And they're right. That was how we looked at it then, too.  Lots of young couples would never touch such primitiveness today even if it were available. Yet some would, but they can't. 

If you want to buy property and gradually build over three years, as some friends who went the log cabin route did, the town won't let you. They expect completion within a certain time period. If you can't build it to code, you don't get occupancy. None of these improvements - and they are improvements - destroys the market in itself.  But it's like a game of Jenga, and the tower is falling in a lot of areas. 

I always drove beaters for cars and was fine with it. Obama pretty much killed that for the next generation. In the 60s people had one car per family or none. Some guys hitched to work, even when they had families when I was a boy, and being in a city, we knew plenty of families that had no car at all. I knew rural people with no car, too, mostly old people who had someone drive them into town to shop once a week. 

We can sneer at devices and laptops and tell young people they can live without those, but a lot of them need them just to do their jobs.  You have to make a conscious effort to step away from that and embrace an entirely different life. We took a half a stab at it when we were first married and didn't like it.  Not everyone wants to grind their own flour now, either. Mother Earth News had lots of ways to building with rammed earth or aluminum cans stacked in mud, but try getting permission for that. You usually have to go well into the wild to find a place where the county will say "Hey, do what you want," and if you are that far out you and your wife had both better have reliable vehicles with 4WD. 

Medical care and insurance was less of an issue because it wasn't much damn good anyway. Health insurance was nice if you could get it, but people paid out of pocket, hoping nothing major would hit. If you got cancer or had a heart attack you were probably going to die soon with even the best of care, so people just didn't bother.  My grandfather was prosperous in his last decades, but when he got prostate cancer in 1969 at 73 he just said there was no point in getting the surgery and died a few months later. You can say that sucks but notice: when you don't have good things you also don't have to pay for them. 

I originally told myself that this ratcheting up of what you had to pay for included college, but that's only half true.  Both Doglas2 and bsking have pointed out to me that you can pay a lot less by not going the American Dream route of 4-year residential with nice cafeterias, gyms, and student centers. When my oldest looked at Asbury on his own, he said "Tell Dad it looks like a real college." That was still important to me in 1996. Not now. You probably can't do lab sciences entirely online, but plenty of things work fine.  Son #3 started at a 4-year school, switched to local, and eventually finished in accounting online. From Nome. Credential ratcheting means lots more jobs need a graduate degree now, just to get your resume read. If you've got a lot of student loan debt, that's going to cut into affording a house.

And before we go all kids-these-days on them taking out those loans to begin with, even though they'd been warned, I worked with lots of people who were told to save for retirement too, but didn't.  

December Weather

Not for me. It would be cool to say that one had done a season there at one time in our life, but there are a hundred things that's true of but we never choose to do. 

I've climbed up there, but never in winter.  Our nephew Doug has done all 48 NH 4,000 footers in the winter, I think, so he must have at one point. You can see this mountain a hundred miles away on a clear day from a few spots around here on a clear day, including the cupola on the barn on the property where commenter bsking grew up and Mike still lives. 

La! Thaet Waes Blithe Willspell

Old English translations usually go in the other direction, so I am not used to seeing this, and am used to seeing the older form in alliterative verse.  This has a feeling of being overliteral, very one-to-one from a dictionary, but I have no expertise in such things. I certainly would not try to offer a better version.

It is sung in that deep, ragged tone that everyone seems to want to use for Anglo-Saxons. For the ancient Irish, people want to go high and ethereal. 

And I loved the refrain.  I would keep it even if it proves to not be authentic.

Tuesday Links

The other argument I am seeing a lot of is the affordability "crisis," which may be a crisis of perception, or anxiety, or values instead. David Foster and bsking have also had things to say on it. My wife's mother had a cleaning lady who came in once or twice a week for years, and people have nannies now. Before that, lots of people had maids or cooks that put in a lot of hours. With larger and multigenerational families and big Victorian houses there was more work per household. Many labor saving devices were not yet invented.  But Matthew Iglesias points out that the reason people don't have servants now is not because their wages are less, but because servants wages are more. 

Lyman Stone links to two problems for the hereditarians 

Dizygotic twins reared apart 

There has been actual fraud, excused by prominent researchers 

and comments himself that we have in fact modified real-world phenotypic intelligence  with things right under our noses. He analogises to better visit because of glasses, contacts, and surgery even though genotypic eyesight isn't any better

Maybe Y'all Really Do Need Jesus by the always controversial and entertaining Cartoon Hate Her.  She is a one of the rare adult converts who had no religious upbringing whatsoever.

The Great Downzoning "It was once legal to build almost anything, everywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?"

Has an English Civil War Already Begun?  

 

For Unto Us

 

Fuentes Astroturf

 Nick Fuentes' fame and stats look to have been manipulated.  His followers are manufacturing his retweets with foreign and/or anonymous accounts. 

Mainstream media thought they were tracking organic sentiment on the right. In reality, it was reacting to manufactured noise. Fuentes is an extremist entertainer with a niche following. But coordinated amplification networks have artificially pushed him into the center of national discourse.

 This is going to be harder to discern every year - what photos, videos, and statistics are real and which have been faked.

Links from 2013

 Opinion, Fact Schoolchildren can make a distinction that sometimes eludes those with advanced degrees

Is Confidence Better Than Correctness?  

Jason Collins: "I'm a Basketball Player." My little sendup of an already obscure player coming out in 2013 is even more distant now.  It continues to be the case that few male professional athletes are gay, while very high percentages of female professionals are lesbians.

Teaching the Opposite Lesson. I still think of this sometimes. 

World's Largest  Two of the photos are unavailable, but the Moxie Bottle House is now in Union, ME - we visited it on our puffin trip this summer, and not only the giant Milk Bottle but lots of other roadside architecture is at this wonderful site.

 

Monday Links

 There is a lot more debate, or at least debate between people I have heard about, on hereditatrianism.  It is getting rancorous and I am finding that part unpleasant. There is no practical reason why I need to follow the debate, I am just fascinated by it and have been for a few decades. But I am also only in it for pleasure now, and can drop it if it is less...fun...entertaining...something. I don't need the grief.  But I will continue following it for now.  I usually put up posts on controversial topics if I mostly agree with them, less often if they are simply interesting new looks. But I am duty bound to post more of both sides on this one now, because of my own uncertainty. I will say that there is not only new evidence, but new arguments on the field, and keeping up will mean some updating for everyone. 

I won't hit you with all of them at once. There was ACX on 12/3, two mixed in today and 2.5 tomorrow. After that we'll see.  

 The return of psychiatric eugenics Thomas Reilly at Rational Psychiatry shows how it is not only a hateful idea, it won't won't work.  It's been tried. Sasha Gusev, who I have not been fond of, gets this one exactly right, so perhaps I am on my way to revising my opinion about him.

Twins Reared Apart Do Not Exist Another essay attacking one of my central hereditarian beliefs. We'll see if the ground continues to shift. 

Inventing the Dishwasher 

Europe is Under Siege  I wanted to argue with parts of this, but some of it is uncomfortably true.

Of course motherhood drives the gender wage gap by Ruxandra Teslo.  Lyman Stone gives credit to Camille Landais and Henrik Levin rather than Claudia Grondin for the heavy lifting on this, even though Grondin won the Nobel Prize for it. 

O Helga Natt

 Effortless

 

In The Bleak Midwinter

As I covered earlier this year, it is called Midwinter even though it is at the beginning of winter because Autumn and Winter were generally lumped together as one season called Winter, Spring and Summer lumped together and called Summer.

 

Caps

There were cap pistols in the early 60s, but we didn't see those often.  They malfunctioned too easily and had to be replaced, so only rich kids from other neighborhoods had those. We just had the paper tape, which you hit with a hammer, or more likely just a rock. Some kids thought these were amazingly exciting, hearing the little explosion. My friends and I weren't so interested.  We might bang out a dozen of them once in a while. You couldn't bring them to school.  Big trouble for that.

 I can still smell them.