Twin Studies

Reading the Ron Unz essay from July (via Steve Sailer) was interesting enough in itself, pointing out the rural/urban split in IQ scores worldwide that seems to disappear quickly when the country mouse becomes a city mouse.* But it included, almost in passing, a weakness in twin studies I had never noticed.  And I should have.

Much is made of the fact that identical twins reared apart have IQ's much more similar to each other than to the others in the family they grew up in.  This has been solid evidence for the "hard-genetic" folks for decades, and I have relied on it myself at times.  Yet it neglects the evidence that the separated environments are still quite similar in most cases. We can note that one family has many books, the other few; one family is composed of garrulous researchers while the other of silent, morose, neglectful unemployed - but the children were the same age and grew up in the same country.  Their media exposure and general stimulation might have been similar, the same popular songs, popular TV shows, even same school curriculum.  Ideas would have been introduced at the same age.  From within our own culture, the homes might appear divergent.  But imagine running into an an age-mate from rural Laos and trying to find a point of connection in childhood reminiscence.

I have switched to soft-to-medium-genetic pretty quickly.  Certain minima of stimulation and ideas introduced at critical periods must be present before we are comparing apples to apples.  I still believe that some of the apples will tend to be bigger because of their DNA, year after year, and differences will remain no matter how equally all are tended and fed.  But the comparisons can only be made within certain parameters.

BTW, Unz kicks Stephen Jay Gould pretty hard, which is always fun.

*It's more complicated than that, as it doesn't seem to always work and especially not always work fully; and expanding media culture available to rural areas seems to have dampened the effect -  yes, yes.  But the effect is still dramatic in comparing say Greece 1961 to Greece 1979, a span that should certainly not show any genetic effect.

The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg.

Halfway through this book, I was still going to give it four stars.  There is some good science in the first section, explained in a way you can make use of.  I dropped to three stars, and maybe to two, by the end.

Perhaps it was when he listed, on page 59, health habits we needed to acquire.

We should watch our salt and drink more water.  We should eat more vegetables and fewer fats. We should take more vitamins and apply sunscreen.  The facts could not be more clear...

Except, of course, that all six are questionable. Even the strongest of them, the vegetables, is a statistical average, not a given for everyone.

Or it may have been when he lauded Rhode Island Hospital for showing its commitment to safety by sending everyone to a day-long workshop on teamwork.  I felt sorry for the poor bastards - I've been to that sort of thing for thirty years, but have never seen one  stray number to suggest that the method works.  A psychiatrist friend who got a special fellowship to study and teach teamwork was among the worst at actually listening to team members I have ever seen.  Perhaps he wrote the curriculum for Rhode Island Hospital, eh?

But by the time he was quoting Rahm Emanuel's comment about never letting a crisis go to waste, noting approvingly all that Obama had been able to accomplish, I realised that Duhigg just believes the conventional wisdom of what people in his circle tell him, without stepping back in any way.  That might not invalidate his understanding of how the power of habit was important at Alcoa, or Montgomery Alabama, or the London Underground, but it certainly calls all these examples into question.

He likes a nice, tight narrative where the example he chooses illustrates his point about habit without loose ends.  He occasionally mentions that it's more complicated than that, but... And the "but" is always that his little anecdote about the power of habit is the overwhelming factor.  Regarding Montgomery and the boycott, no less an authority than Thurgood Marshall said it was unnecessary, but Charles Duhigg dismisses that. 

Experimental evidence - now including fMRI's! - suggests that you have a better chance of losing a bad habit if you replace it with something else.  Sometimes it's hard to find what you are really craving and what a good replacement would be, but think about it hard and try some different things.  Next, It helps if you have a plan what you will do when the hard times come, as they inevitably will.  There.  That's the book. The rest is cheerleading for people who like anecdotes aimed at a somewhat higher educational level than an Amway speaker. There's no hint of firing you up, here, just patient explanation.

Get it from the library, as we did, and read the first 150 pages.  It will inspire you to try a few things, and give you good tools for getting started.  Maybe that is worth four stars.

Another Train Song

It may take me a while to get this out of my system

Train Song

You Didn't Build That

(Not Quite Top Shelf)

I would like to start where I ended my GDP post, with Justice Hand, because I think something in here is the dividing line between liberal and conservative views of individuals and government.

Justice Learned Hand in 1934 when he was on the 2^nd Circuit

Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.

 The courts ruled “over and over again” because over and over again, government reaches, believing that the money actually belongs to “society” and thus to it.  It treats tax avoidance as equivalent to tax evasion, as if money is being stolen from The People.  Liberals are absolutely on board with this idea, believing that there is indeed something sinister, something unpatriotic, about sending your money away from the tax bite, to Switzerland or the Caymans.  They simply don’t get that theirs is the unamerican idea.  The People is not Society is not The Government.  These are not interchangeable concepts, however blurry the lines between them are.  Red is not blue is not yellow just because green and orange exist.

***

But more foundationally, there are only a few roads that can lead one to a place where one thinks that it is sinister and unpatriotic.  You either have to believe that the money ultimately belongs to the government and/or you have to believe that the money was acquired by luck, help by others, or exploitation.  Those seem like extreme claims, I acknowledge.  But there aren’t any other paths there.  All other arguments eventually resolve themselves into one of those positions. If you disagree, try it.  Look for the excape hatches, most of which will start with a claim that these things are partially true but needn’t be carried to their end, and see if they don’t all have no stopping point which prevents this.

Obama says “You Didn’t Build That,” and he is expressing quite forcefully the idea that everyone who makes money had help, and therefore does not have an absolute claim.  Well of course.  As I said before, someone can always say that you couldn’t have grown the crop if they hadn’t sold you the seed, or scored 47 on the Lakers if they hadn’t turned on the arena lights.  Every action is most certainly in a context. But Obama’s comment is slyer.  He is saying “without laws, and markets, and enforcement – that is, without government – you couldn’t have made this money.  So we deserve some, and we’re taking it.”  But that is true in any country, under any government.  Afghanistan’s got a framework.  Denmark’s got a framework.  Somebody built the roads for delivery, somebody printed the currency, somebody posts a set of rules for buying and selling. Again, of course.

But such systems have a practical claim on us only insofar as they are themselves practical, and have a moral claim on us only insofar as they are themselves moral.  The questions are “How practical is this system you’re charging us for, Barack? And how moral is it?  And come to think of it, how did it get that way?” Ah but the mask is off then, isn’t it?  If we’re being charged rent for using the system because it’s a really good one for making money, what are its good features and who built them?  If there’s a fee charged for having justice, who’s responsible for that?  And what did Barack Obama have to do with it?  It is fair to turn and say “Barack, You Didn’t Build That.”

I’m quite grateful that I live under a system where it’s possible for me to make a living and have confidence that most people are treated decently.  But I am more grateful to those who came before me and built this place, plus my fellow-citizens who go about doing their jobs, than I am to Barack Obama, or even to government in the sense of everything it wants to do.  I am grateful for some parts of the government, not so grateful for others, and expect we will not all agree on those parts. Putting up with paying for government stuff I think is useless or even pernicious is an expected cost.  I don’t mind paying it.  But I don’t define that a good. It’s an unavoidable friction, to be minimised, not praised.

My uncle sent me a Paul Krugman essay about why we should tax the 1% more.  The claim was that we could get X trillions in revenue, as opposed to the woefully inadequate Y trillions in cuts proposed by Paul Ryan.  I’m not even fussing about his numbers at this point – it’s his assumptions that I’m taking issue with.  It was clear throughout the essay that Krugman has default positions based on sliding definitions:

Krugman assumption that society owns it.  That they can charge money for the
privilege of living here that is unrelated to the ability to make money. A society can physically do that - hell societies can require you to go to a particular church or wear certain clothes if they want.  They have the power to do that.  That doesn't make it moral. If you can make 10x in society A and 3x in society B, and A will charge you 70%, while B will charge you 20%, you still might go with A, just because your net is greater.  Even if A does stupid or immoral things you might go there.  It's power.  They make the rules.

But when A declares that the stupid things are actually morally superior,
and you are cheating the populace by trying to minimise the take, there is
no foundation for that.  

Offhand

I get the impression that Obama thinks he's sort of a Jackie Robinson character in American history, because he's a First Black Something.  That he might actually be a Tom Yawkey, impeding progress because of his prejudices, does not seem to occur to him.

Well, I don't know what occurs to him, so that's not quite fair.  His statements suggest an amazing narcissism, but I suspect I'm really thinking about his supporters' attitudes and projecting those onto him.  But there you have it:  it would never occur to anyone to switch races in that myth.  Obama has to be the black guy because he's a black guy, deeper analogies be damned.

The Danger of Thinking in GDP

(Not Quite Top Shelf)

The statistic Gross Domestic Product encourages us to think in a governmental, especially liberal way.  It paints a picture that there is this huge pile of money, albeit in many different forms, that resides in a country and somehow belongs to it.  The GDP of Finland or Tanzania we just think of as belonging to Finland or Tanzania as a whole.  However they divvy it up, there’s this number, the boundaries of the country contain it, and heck, it’s not ours, it’s not China’s, so it must be theirs.

It’s because we don’t know Finns or Tanzanians as individuals.  It’s a convenient storage for a big idea, but it misleads, because that value is not owned by Finland, but by individual Finnish people.  We do it with The GDP of the US quite a bit.  But we only do it at a national level, when we want to compare how much “we” spend on eyeliner rather than restrooms for the transgendered.  No one talks about the GDP of Goffstown, or NH, because when it gets down to that level it dawns on us.  That’s not the town’s money, that Charlie’s money.  GDP is a fiction.  It’s a statistical construct that helps us to understand certain movements of goods and services, but it’s not really a thing, an object.

It seems like such an exaggeration to government types, and to liberals when conservatives grouse that “they think it’s their money and they want to take it from you to do what they want with it..”  Nonono.  We know it’s your money.  But you made it in a certain interdependent context. It’s only fair that people pay for the privilege of being in that context.  We all live here.  We’re all in this together. 

Wait.  Are you charging me rent for using the system or asking me to share?  I might be glad to do either, but it sounds like the ideas are combined here.

You should want to share. So it’s the same thing.

No, actually, that’s where it starts to get scary.  Because “sharing with society” has come to have “giving it to the government” as its synonym.

Well sure, that’s just more efficient.  Societies designate people to do this work for them.  And we have to do it that way, because it didn’t work when we left it to individuals, so the government has to do it. 

It doesn’t work this way either.

But it works better.  And we can keep trying and do better and better still.

Actually, we don’t know that.  We know that private charity was inadequate, but we don’t know that this way is any better.  

Oh come n -

No really, we don’t.  We’ve spent a lot of money, and it’s done some good things, but we also have measurably worse family arrangements.  We may have worse individual character as well, though we can’t measure that either.  

****

 

Justice Learned Hand in 1934 when he was on the 2^nd Circuit

Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.

The courts ruled “over and over again” because over and over again, government reaches, believing that the money actually belongs to “society” and thus to it.  It treats tax avoidance as equivalent to tax evasion, as if money is being stolen from The People.  Liberals are absolutely on board with this idea, believing that there is indeed something sinister, something unpatriotic, about sending your money away from the tax bite, to Switzerland or the Caymans.  They simply don’t get that theirs is the unamerican idea.  The People is not Society is not The Government.  These are not interchangeable concepts, however blurry the lines between them are.  Red is not blue is not yellow just because green and orange exist.

More on this tomorrow...

Rare Link

Notice that Ten-Four blog has leaped off the bottom of the sidebar list with his first post in five months, Why I'm Against The Red Sox Fire Sale, Even If I'm The Only One.  The argument depends on the fact that the Red Sox - and many other MLB teams - are making ever more money, and this is unlikely to change.  Therefore, they didn't really need to clear salary, which is being sold as the beating heart of the deal up here.

The Superhero

(Not Quite Top Shelf)

If you really could do Superman or Batman types of things, wouldn’t you be obligated to fix things without rest?  No one else can see through walls – you have to ferret out the criminals, Superman. No one else can climb the side of the building, Batman – you have to rescue the child on the ledge. To be given super powers would be a curse, not a blessing, for you could never sleep.  There would alwys be one more thing that you were needed for.

So you’d come pretty quickly to the understanding that you couldn’t do it all, or you would be so consumed with guilt you couldn’t function.  Consider – this is precisely the situation all of us are in now.  There are a thousand, a million ills in our ken which we will do nothing to alleviate.  And yet. There were Jews other than Lazarus who had died in those few days, but Jesus raised one.  He healed one at the Pool of Siloam.  Sometimes he healed all who were brought to him, sometimes few or none.  How can such a thing be?

Consider also – this is the argument that governments use to take control of situations and charge us for the privilege.  They are the only ones big enough, they must do everything.  The responibility must be theirs.  Because there is still death and disease in Palestine, this Jesus has failed.  That way doesn’t work, so you have to do it our way.

This only makes sense if one believes that all problems are ultimately solvable.  That claim of mine may take some thinking, as you search the various escape-hatches from that premise before you conclude that it is so.  The optimistic, upbeat approach that says with a good ol' American can-do attitude we can lick this thing, and we won’t rest until there are no more childhood illnesses (or no more poverty, or no more wars) sounds kind but is ultimately cruel.  The versions with a Christian spin are no better – you will notice that Jesus himself did not talk like that, noting that we would always have the poor, and many people would live under oppression.

When one believes that a solution must, simply must, be out there, it does indeed spur her to keep trying heroically, keep looking indefatigably, and that is a good thing.  But it leads inevitably to trying terrible solutions, not because they are moral or have much chance of success, but because the previous ideas have not worked, or not well enough.  We see it in Narnia when two of the dwarves suggest bringing in monsters to help in fight against Miraz.  Lewis notes it more explicitly in “Why I Am Not A Pacifist” when he tackles the argument that we must disarm because getting enough people in enough countries to do that is the only path left.  Gandhi ultimately has to advocate that the Jews should just allow themselves to be killed, on the hope that they will be an example and shame the world into – into what?  Singing “Imagine?” The Nazis would keep on killing, yes?

It may be asked whether, faint as the hope is of abolishing war by Pacifism, there is any other hope. But the question belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life might be curable if only we can find the right cure; and it then proceeds by elimination and concludes that whatever is left, however unlikely to prove a cure, must nevertheless do so. Hence the fanaticism of Marxists, Freudians, Eugenists, Spiritualists, Douglasites, Federal Unionists, Vegetarians, and all the rest. But I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists of tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.  CS Lewis “Why I Am Not A Pacifist,” 1940

We live in a fallen world.  Start to finish, a fallen world, and our job may not be to fix things, but to learn how to act in a fallen world.  That will likely include fixing things that come into our path, “uprooting evil in the fields that we know.” Yet God repeatedly has said that the large solutions are pretty much His.