I Can't Grow Peaches On A Cherry Tree

 I have sung this one to myself for many years.

 

Recent Links

 The Return of Trade-Offs. Not just in economics.  Trade-offs apply in everything. Also, you can't always fix things.  Trading up is sometimes the best you can do.  And that's fine.

Mass democracy does not create prosperity. In each case, political liberalization came only after state institutions had been established, the economy had become diversified and a broad middle class had emerged. Democracy was not the engine of development. It was the outcome. Something similar happened with gun laws. Europe's homicide rate declined long before the restrictive gun measures came in. 

 Everything is Palestine to the European left.

Physics demonstrates that increasing greenhouse gases cannot cause dangerous warming, extreme weather, or any harm.   Lindzen of MIT has been saying this for years, Happer of Princeton I had not heard of.  I don't have the chops to tell you whether they are completely right, partly right, marginally right, or complete cranks. I only point out that they exist, they have excellent credentials, and to my generalist brain their arguments seems coherent. Related: We can't really think in climate scale, but we talk as if we do. 

Aging

 A young friend thought I might say something like this.  He knows me well. 

 

Part III - But could something just as bad be true?

I now move off the area where I have some experience in sorting through the scientific claims about whether some newfangled thing that we haven't fully thought through is going to cause some people to lose contact with reality. (Answer, for those who haven't read Part I and Part II: I would bet heavily against this. We've been down this road many times before and are only at the "horrible anecdotes" stage.) Whether there will be some other psychological danger from ChatGPT and its cousins I have no special insight into.  I do have the general Assistant Village Idiot card of looking at the obvious and seeing if we have checked that out thoroughly. 

We don't know.  There's nothing obvious yet. We don't even have a consensus about harms of social media in general, even though every fifth-grader has had a device for fifteen years.  I do not neglect the possibility that this could be the one.  The world has to end somehow, and maybe this is The Beast, somehow, though I'm not seeing the connection to the Revelation to John just yet. I worry all the time that we are all going to be that stupid, missing the most important event ever through distraction. I just know I have worried that twenty-leven times before.

Yet do not despair. I have the arts and culture card to play.  I might see something that is being overlooked.

Why does this idea keep arising among us? In fantasy and science fiction, the more usual process of something outside you taking you over is slow, even centuries. Poul Anderson had 1950's sci-fi story "Call Me Joe" about disabled people controlling distant powerful monsters and eventually having their personalities absorbed by them.  Elrond warns It is perilous to study too deeply in the arts of the enemy, referring to Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring, the Mouth of Sauron has been a tool of Sauron for so long he has forgotten his own name, and the Ring itself exercises a horrible influence of the owner of whoever possesses it. Many characters in The Great Divorce have slowly given over control of their personalities for years, as did Scrooge, Milton's Satan, 

Yet we see such unravelings happening quickly in literature as well.  Eustace sleeps a single night on a dragon's hoard, Merlin's coinherence is immediate in That Hideous Strength. It does not take long in "Hamlet" for Ophelia to weep "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown." It is perhaps the time constraints of plays and movies that dictate the speed, but the idea that we have brief contact with something and our personalities are destroyed is common.

We see in the NT that demons can go out quickly and see Jesus sending them rapidly into the pigs, so we assume that they must enter us quickly as well, which is why we get nervous about Hallowe'en or Ouija boards. Are there examples in scripture of the long road of destruction happening to individuals?  That is usually reserved for groups of people who persist in disobedience.

We are ready to believe that personality destruction can happen slowly or quickly. Joining a cult, pornography, or role-playing games, we are quite flexible in whether those will take us down quickly or slowly.  Some of the slow-working ones we do not blame on the subject at all, but only on the person who has chosen the monomania. No one says "we have to regulate the study of WWII becomes so many are obsessed." Becoming obsessed with physical fitness, or collections, or train is on you. In those cases we would be sure that it is the vulnerable personality seeking a target. We suspect they were already OCD, or schizotypal, or schizoid.

The scriptures do say wherever your treasure lies, there will you find your heart. In the OT other gods mean deities, but in the NT Jesus expands it to Mammon and shortly after, the early church to greed for anything. (This can be back-traced into the prophets as well, mostly for groups, but the individuals are also noted.  It is now common in Christian circles to regard many things as little gods that we give our hearts to.  

I only mention this, I preach no sermon on it. For today, I am wondering whether there is something unusual about interacting with AI. I have read (about) studies which show that humans prefer AI therapists to live ones. More generally, we begin to prefer AI for information and slowly, slowly, prefer it for conversation. This is unlikely to unravel us quickly (see Parts I & II). But the long road of distraction that Screwtape reminds Wormwood of just as much a part of our imagination, and likely for good historical reasons.

British Accent

I learned today from John McWhorter at Lexicon Valley that British and American accents were indistinguishable during the Revolution. The American Accent Came First.  This seems impossible to me, given how different British accents are from each other, as far back as we can trace. So perhaps it means the type of British people who ruled and policed America up until 1775.  But colonists speaking to each other about the possibility of spies note often that they can't tell whether someone is British or American by listening to them. The British accent distinct from American did not start differentiating until after 1800.

Wouldn't the Scots-Irish and English Borderers in Appalachia sound different?  Oh wait, if the coastal accents of both countries were that similar, then people on the frontier would detect even less difference between them. I do recall hearing that the coastal colonial accent was consistent up and down the Eastern Seaboard.  I trust McWhorter, but I'm having a hard time getting my head around this one. 

Carol Burnett

 She did this a lot with her audiences, and was very good at it.

ChatGPT Psychosis - Part II

The story was originally published in Futurism People Are Being Involuntarily Committed... on 6/28/2025 a followup on an article they had run on 6/10/2025, People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling into Severe Delusions. It is a publication of the World Future Society which has been focused for decades on making us into a better society able to handle our technological progress. Like, um, all those other civilisations there are in the universe  They believe in measuring planets by the Kardashev Scale, made popular(?) by Carl Sagan.  So yes, they are cranks, but intelligent ones, and mostly harmless. It is a fun rabbit hole. We have not even made it to being a Type I civilisation yet, measuring out at a Type 0.72 planet.

Other publications that jumped on this quickly include Mad in America, an alt-psychology publication that is very much on the anti-medication side of things and written by people who disagree with the diagnoses and/or treatments they have received in the past; Public Health Policy Journal, a general anti-vaxx site; Entangled States, a physicist who is now Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island; Drudge has it; and then of course there is NIK from Part I. 

Such sources are the yeast of society. They are only occasionally food in themselves, but we need them to make the actual food work right. They believe many things that are highly speculative on inflated evidence, but sometimes they are right. At least they are right enough that we should be following those lines of thought. 

The supermarket tabloids are still out there, the National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the Star, the Sun, the Globe. These sources aren't those. But it pays to remember that these sorts of news outlets have existed for a long time whenever we get worried about how much worse this is today "with all that chatbot and AI and Lord knows what else those young people are doing today." 

Another parallel before I look at this particular claim of ChatGPT causing psychosis. We said this about social media, though more about depression and anxiety than psychosis. Before that we worried about video games stealing the lives of children and otherwise healthy adults. Easily accessible porn, Dungeons and Dragons, TV, Hollywood, and comic books have been blamed for much.  Romances have been ruining women for so long that we should probably just write all women off as unreliable at this point, right? All of these destructors have done evil on us, both as individuals and a society. None of them are as innocent as we pretend and they have sucked some life out of us. Yet none of them were as bad as feared, either. 

Something like the five paragraphs above goes through my head whenever some new thing comes along that threatens to o'erthrow us. Human beings have persevered through many terrible things that have done damage to our personalities but have not caused us to become untethered from reality. Is this worse than being invaded, watching your family killed before you? Is this worse than an unexplained disease that kills 90% of the village? I had patients who had been kidnapped for a year as a child, grown up with psychotic parents, or suddenly gone blind or paralyzed and they were indeed mentally damaged by these.  Yet not this. Not psychotic. Drugs or head injury might do it, directly attacking the brain, or some virus or combination of genes and prenatal effects, but not experiences.

Reading the above article it follows a familiar pattern. There is a frightening anecdote that would seem to have no other explanation but the theory that the reporter is putting forward. He was fine until this came along. He held a responsible job, she was a loving mother and talented artist, his twin didn't turn out like this at all. We are told that therapists and mental health professionals all over the country are suddenly seeing lots of cases like this - but no research numbers are included. Just lots and lots, though.  People are concerned and some politicians have gotten involved and are working on legislation for this. And here's another anecdote.  This could be you. 

The article does raise the question of whether this is mentally ill people seeking out AI Chat functions, and predictably, finds an expert to say "It's probably some of both." But that is only true in a small way. ChatGPT might turn out to be bad for us, and any extra strain on an unstable mind might be the thing that pushes it over. There are likely people on the margin who would not have descended into psychosis but for some unfortunately-timed or unfortunately-constructed incident.  There may also may be some of us who just escaped one of the few things that might have brought us down. Those with autism, or anxiety, or a fondness for weed might be more terribly susceptible than we anticipated.  But usually not. The circumstances surrounding a person's schizophrenia seem of key importance to the family. When that girl broke up with him it just destroyed him and he was never the same. Not He was becoming psychotic, so she left him.  

Part III will be But What if Something Just as Bad Were True? Science fiction and fantasy will be mentioned.

Teach This In Highschool

 ...and no one will forget it.  It's a good start.

 

Counteraccusations

I do not have all the facts and I am no expert. But I am wondering what we expect the people at the National Weather Service to do.  The first complaints I saw were that Trump's cuts had impaired their ability to respond. Then it quickly came out that no, they had extra people, and working extra hours. Their warnings were questioned.  No, they had major warnings twelve hours before and three hours before. Now the complaint is that they cry wolf so many times that people ignore them. So we want them to know a few days before that this is going to be the one where the river rises with unbelievable speed, and don't tell us about the others.

People in Florida ignore evacuation orders, or defy them, and even tell others "Oh, they always say that. I'm sick of evacuations. Did you know that sometimes people put themselves in more danger..." Up here, people make trips during blizzard warnings.  I've done it myself. Heck, I'm resourceful (not really). I can size things up in the moment pretty well. (Maybe average.) Tornadoes. High seas. So some people are always going to resist acting.  Others are going to panic and evacuate too easily.  Some are going to get sick of the warnings, some are going to insist they were never properly warned. Different people respond to different warning signals.  What is the warning schedule when the range of results is wide and people hear the same message differently?

What on earth do we expect them to do? 

ChatGPT Psychosis - Part I

 A friend sent the following tweet from NIK on X, wondering what my take was on the whole topic. I started small. 

NIK

@ns123abc

CHATGPT IS A SYCOPHANT CAUSING USERS TO SPIRAL INTO PSYCHOSIS  

"ChatGPT psychosis" 

> users are spiralling into sever mental health crises 

> paranoia delusions and psychosis 

> ChatGPT has led to loss of jobs and become homeless 

>and caused the breakup of marriages and families

> "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."

NIK's X account is mostly about what can go wrong with AI - how the CEO's are power-hungry jerks who haven't thought things through, how their decisions are going awry, how the whole enterprise is more dangerous than we suspect. As you can imagine, there's plenty of material out there for him to draw from. So I went looking for where NIK gets his news, and that led me to fields I used to wander in years ago but had mostly forgotten. 

The short version is that AI may turn out to have terrible effects on us, individually, as societies, and even as a species. It may be the downfall of us all. But it's not going to have this particular effect. 

Crow

 

Keffiyeh Fashion

 Why the Keffiyah is a Timeless Accessory from Al-Aniq.  Okay, everyone's gotta make a living, right?  I shouldn't be so critical.

The keffiyeh/shemagh is a must-have for your wardrobe, as it can be effortlessly styled with everything. It will always stay in fashion and is easy to maintain. It will elevate your outfit and make you stand out in style.

BC/AD; BCE/CE

I got into an argument that Jews and Jewish scholars, however much they may have resented the preference in Western society for BC/AD, it was now more an issue mostly for secular academics who did not want as strong a religious foundation for our dating system. The issue is now that it is religious, not that its use is perceived as antisemitic. I based this on both online and live discussions, with both everyday and academic Jews, who tended to shrug off BC/AD. They do not regard it as antisemitic.  They likely would if someone were to make a big deal about it, such as if Donald Trump were to declare that all government documents, no matter the context, were required to be in the old form. That would arouse suspicions.  I am guessing about that, but I think it likely.

My disputant stated that BC/AD was considered antisemitic among Jewish academics.  The argument went to related places but we did not go much longer on that in specific. I felt he was not understanding a distinction I was making, but no matter.  That bears on this discussion only slightly.  He is an academic and knows more Jewish academics than I do, and it would come up in his specialty.  I know psychology researchers, med school researchers, and online I have heard academics in genetics, history, literature and other liberal arts. His numbers would be greater.  

Yet it occurs to me that even outside of the cross-understanding, I may have been wrong in my original premise.  What do you know from your own experience.  Granted that it may have been Jewish scholars who originally pushed for the change and both secular and practicing Christians who led the acceptance, what is the situation in 2025?  Is there any energy in popular intellectual or academic discussion on the topic now? 

 

I kept thinking of the ban on Brown Bag Lunches because they were supposedly offensive to black people because of the exclusive clubs where you had to be lighter than a brown bag to get in decades ago.  No black people actually made that association, it was white people showing off. I may be imposing that fraud on this unfairly. 

Armenian Script

Before I research it myself, I wanted to put this out there in case any of you already knew the answers. We were at the cemetery today and because we entered by a different gate, took different routes to get to our 6 sites (13 relatives) to plant flowers. This brought us by headstones we had never seen before.  A large mill-city cemetery is interesting as it exposes you to previous names and burial customs from groups you know little about. 

We saw this and neither of us recognised the script.  At first glance I suspect it is not how it would have been written on paper, but based on letters made more angular for ease of carving. It is not Greek but I wonder if it is related. Latin seems farther away. I know that Cyrillic is related to Greek letters, but this looks farther away.  I know there is a Coptic alphabet, but I can't recall ever seeing it, and this Armenian alphabet does not look Arabic to me. I guess that fits the geography and the trading routes pretty well. 

Take your guesses, and if you actually know something, so much the better.

Best rabbit hole so far: The Zok language. The Caucasus has an unusual concentration of languages, largely because it is mountainous and here are so many adjoining valleys that have little contact across the ridges.  They go downstream to larger communities to trade, and have contact there, but are just as likely to trade with someone from the city, or any of the other valleys that flow into it. Though descended from related languages, they are isolated from each other and do not influence each other much, becoming unintelligible to each other over time. 

The above may be in the Armeno-Turkish script, daughter to Armenian.  The last three letters could be "-yan" and -ian is a common ending for Armenian surnames, so that fits. The letters before that might be the -dz- sound, which would fit with the cymbal makers Zil-djian, who were Armenian. Work in progress.

Update:  Nothing much to add.  I learned a lot about Armenian scripts and headstones, but nothing further about the two together.  Before WWII, most Armenians coming to America came to the northeastern cities, especially NYC, Philadelphia, and around Boston. In Massachusetts they spread to other mill towns.  After WWII Los Angeles became the destination of choice. 

When I go back I will have to find it again and look at the other side rather than just stopping by the road.  There may be other Armenian stones nearby that give a clue.  I have seen occasional Armenian names growing upo here, but never the old script.

Graph Paper Diaries

Bsking's blog has been inactive for three years, in which time I have taken it off my sidebar. She has a new post up comparing wait times and health outcomes under the medical systems of English-speaking countries.  Some NHS thoughts on the 4th of July. She has a great deal more information on the subject and I hope she will continue along these lines. If so, back on the sidebar she goes.

I am also hoping she will weigh in on the Karen Read case - she sent me the link I just posted, and one of her commenters has already asked for a COVID stats retrospective now that the dust has settled. We'll see if she nibbles at either one.

Varied Links Again

 Would you be nervous if your son were dating a girl who reads so much of this?

Karen Read Did It.  "What I want to do in this last post is explain, comprehensively and for posterity, why Karen Read is one of those lucky 10 guilty people who gets to go free." It is long and very thorough.  The interesting question is why so many originally uninvolved middle-aged women supported her vehemently, frequently mentioning how pretty she is.

The Hit Job  The NYT covers Skrmetti and gender transitioning clinics for children.

Orwell on Gandhi  I must have seen parts of this, as a few sentences seemed familiar.  But I am quite certain I had not seen the whole thing.