Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia

Because we had so many suicidal and parasuicidal people over the years at my hospital, these discussions came up a lot. The changes in the Netherlands and Canada came after I semi-retired. I have seen honest and dishonest advocates for assisted suicide, and certainly have listened to many people use the tactic of making a pronouncement that they dare you to contradict (particularly if they are a powerful person) and then saying "But I don't want to talk about it.*" Some were motivated by being unable to even imagine how terrible certain situations must be, and grateful that there seemed to be some painless way out of it. Tender-hearted people. Other were pretty callous, that they wouldn't want that life and so figured no one else would either. (People feel differently when they get there, when they actually are 80 years old or in a wheelchair or living alone with no relatives nearby. Humans adjust.) 

I think just looking at the graph for a minute is important, just so we are all dealing with the reality of what is occurring. Today.

In Canada you're more likely to die from a nurse than from suicide, and within a few years Canadian nurses will be more lethal than Canadian highways.

 

Other suicides barely decreased, so this is not medically assisting people who were going to commit suicide, this is almost entirely a new crop. 

Farther down in the thread Stone says

The whole point of all the stuff we did to try to contain Covid WAS TO PROTECT VULNERABLE PEOPLE WITH FEW YEARS LEFT. That was the entire point. COVID was never an existential threat to fit young healthy people. The people COVID threatened were, as a class, highly MAID eligible! 

And

Note that although in 2021 MAID represented just 3.2% of deaths, MAID cases represented over 8% of all cancer cases and almost 7% of all neurological cases, including memory disorders. I'm curious what the consent standards for euthanizing somebody with a memory disorder is.

Let me assure you that is doctor-dependent and agency dependent. And some of those will decide you don;t have a very good lif - hell, they wouldn't want it, so you must not either.

 Michel Houellebecq also had a recent essay in Harpers on assisted suicide. I believe there is a single acknowledged argument for suicide - every argument for allowing assisted suicide is ultimately an argument for allowing suicide per se - "if your life sucks you should have the freedom to end it." I believe I see the force of that argument, that suffering is bad, and it's nobody else's damned business what people do. However, I think that few people actually support this argument out to its end, and the political support comes from deception that these are people in great pain (uh, morphine and its derivatives), or great psychological pain (that is nearly always temporary), or are hopeless (the number of years of expected life for those who elect this increases every year. Also, people who believe for themselves it is no big deal are very aggressive and dismissive that you should feel the same way, you fools, you fools. 

There is also the tendency or people in every country to defend it to others, so Canadians and Dutch will insist that things are just wonderful where they are and only jealous haters disagree. (I think Scandinavians are particularly susceptible to this.)

And of course, just as was predicted and is always denied, it is being applied to disabled children and to old people who are sucking up monetary resources from the rest of the family ("Jared wants to go to college, Gram" is never said, but always known). I heard people making this argument as far back as 1986. From that thread

I do expect everybody reasonable to look at the scale and slope of that line and demand some actual accountability for the personnel involved here, a real accounting, and ideally stricter standards more similar to what other jurisdictions use.

Exactly. Show that you aren't evading the issue and you have a better intellectual case - though you know as well as I do that you have just sacrificed the political persuasion you were hoping for if you admit this. Your choice.

Richard Hanania apparently doesn't evade the issue.  He does believe that - let me try and state this neutrally - some lives are more worth living than others, and our laws and policy funding should recognise this.  Lyman Stone grudgingly respects the lack of hypocrisy, anyway.

*My usual cartoon for this attitude, again.

Not Smarter, Meaner

 Neanderthals caught and cooked large crabs in Portugal.  The end of the article calls this evidence against the belief that we were significantly smarter than Neanderthals. they did have larger brains than ours, after all. I suspect Homo sapiens might just have been meaner. 

They also were able to kill the occasional elephant with heavy cooperation, suggesting they lived together in larger groups than we have previously thought.

Wind Off The Hilltop

I went to pub night at St Anselm's and only Earl Wajenberg, an occasional commenter here, showed up.  Engineerlite is in Antarctica, and Granite Dad is pretending to be a good parent for a few minutes. The conversation was good.  I seem to attract friends who can carry a whole conversational load, including topic changes, without much help. We had to switch to another room because it is 100 days until graduation, so the seniors came out in force to celebrate.

I realised I have never linked to Earl's site Wind off the Hilltop (a play on his Dutch surname, with reference to Goldberry's reassurance to the hobbits in the house of Bombadil). He is a tech writer whose greater love is writing fantasy/sci-fi.

Not That I Don't Like Them

I feel I should make it up to them.  As far as I can tell, this was the first song of theirs I liked enough to play on the constant repeat that 13-year-olds love. In later years I would find earlier songs that I developed a fondness for, but I rather shrugged at them until "Revolver" came out.

Beatles Lord of the Rings Movie

It may be well known to the rest of you, but I had never heard that the Beatles wanted to make Lord of the Rings into a movie in 1968. There doesn't seem to be much information on it, but Peter Jackson did speak with Paul about it years later. I learned this from Holly Ordway's Tolkien's Modern Reading, which I am not currently recommending.  It has information that I want to have, so I press on, but the book spends so much time being ultraprecise about what is and is not known about his reading that it is not that interesting to read.  If you like more stories about how Humphrey Carpenter screwed up everything with his Tolkien biography and Inklings book, however, this volume has got plenty.  Carpenter didn't like Oxford, didn't like Christians, and didn't like fantasy literature, so one could see how this might be an obstacle to fully getting things interpreted correctly. Ordway does explode the myth - encouraged as much by Tolkien and his friends as by Carpenter - that he only read or cared about Medieval literature and Norse legends. 

But the movie. There are several brief accounts based on the slight data, but the important bits are that the Beatles wanted to do the soundtrack as well as act in the movie, with Paul and Ringo as Frodo and Sam, George as Gandalf, and John as Gollum; they wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct it, but he turned it down as "unfilmable," which in the context of what special effects could be managed in the late 60's, I think was an accurate assessment. An Apple producer sent them copies while they were in India, leading to the rumor that the Maharishi was a Hobbit fan and had given them each a copy. Why people did not see that as immediately unlikely I don't know, but we were willing to believe a lot of mystical things in those days.

It was Tolkien himself who squashed it for good. There is speculation why he did not want to sign off on it, much of it plausible, but I can't find any record of what he actually said about it. He was capable of just saying no to things without further explanation, especially public explanation. The many news stories I read about the project were brief, and padded, including the one from the BBC, who one thinks might have done better. There was a fair bit of writing that the idea was "intriguing" and "fascinating."  I suppose if you are writing for pop culture fans you can't just say "This is monstrous," but it does grate to read such things. I might grant that Ringo could have been a recognisable Sam, and they might have hit it right on a very few of the songs, such as Bombadil's, but the sustained seriousness would have been well beyond them.  They were good at being funny, even off the cuff, but Mordor requires more.

Quite The Audience, Here and There

I have always been impressed by the audience I have attracted here, so that even though the numbers have gone down over the last few years (My snarky take is that I was not pure enough on Trump support and Covid skepticism - which is ironic because Trump was not very pure on Covid skepticism),  I still have some amazing folks. Some of you I know personally, and others I can make guesses about your intelligence from your vocabularies and abstract thinking or your education/employment/accomplishments.  I wondered if IQ 150 was actually the average here.  I decided that was too rich, but 141, which is 99th percentile is the likely centerpoint here. Remember that because that distribution tails off as it moves along the graph, we do not take the mean for such things, but the median. Even if you have no test scores from ASVAB or SAT/ACT to back it up, if you are following along her, you are at least at the margin for Mensa (130 or 132, depending on SD).

I feel very proud for having a site visited by such as thee.

So it did set me on my heels a bit when I looked at the survey data for Astral Codex Ten, where he was only secondarily looking for IQ but was instead trying to compare different schooling outcomes among public. private, religious, homeschooled, and unschooled readers. The survey data indicates that his average audience has an SAT around 1500+, which is about IQ 146 new scoring. (Old scoring, add 50 SAT or 5 IQ points). Well, people lie, and they misremember in once direction more than another, and they describe things very carefully and technically (I have have done that) in a misleading way - such as Chuck Schumer's supposed 1600 SAT, which is suspect. He is likely very high but not that. People also self-select for surveys and other concrete-answer request.

Well, that's just an amazing number, up into the range of 99.75th percentile.

The audience here also seems to be harder-working and more judicious than I am, which are force-multipliers for IQ. Also probably nicer and under better emotional control. Wisdom, both in the Medieval and D&D sense, is better than all. Put your energy there.

Rapid Fire And Review

 (and China)

Tyler Cowan likes to ask his guests rapid fire questions at the end, often in the format of "Overrated or underrated?" It's an entertaining way of smoking people out, and he does it well.  His production manager returns the favor on him on the 2022 Retrospective podcast.  I usually avoid such things as unlikelyt to provide anything new, as I have listened to all the episodes he is discussing, but I have to get over that.  The retrospectives of intelligent people smoke them out as well.  I hope no one ever does it to me, because I am already incautious. From the transcript, a question sent in (one should know that Tyler is a mostly-libertarian economist):

HOLMES: I want you to answer this rapid-fire because it’s . . . Just answer this as quickly as you can. [laughs] It’s kind of a grab-bag question. [from] Vikash Palit: There are three questions. “What are the pluses and minuses of ending the Fed? What are the top three ways you would change the US healthcare system? What’s the ideal tax system look like, according to you?”

COWEN: In reverse order, the ideal tax system is a progressive consumption tax with a relatively light rate of taxation on capital income, though it can’t be zero because otherwise, people will reclassify their labor income into capital income.

Best ways to change the healthcare system. A lot of that is frozen into place. I’m more focused in my current roles on improving the rate of progress in science and getting more innovation and reforming the NIH and NSF and making them more dynamic and quicker to respond to change.

People don’t usually call that the healthcare system, but that would be my emphasis. If you look at, say, the mRNA vaccines or what seems to be coming against malaria, against dengue, possibly against cancer — that’s yielding huge dividends. Fighting over the scraps of Medicaid expansion or something ultimately seems to me like a misallocation of talent.

Ending the Fed. Well, what do you replace it with? You can’t answer that question in the abstract, but I suspect what you replace it with will not do better. The price of gold is much too volatile to have a gold standard now, even if you liked the classical gold standard. I’m not sure it was better than the Fed, but it wouldn’t be workable now. And what, Bitcoin? That’s a non-starter. So, replace the Fed with what? Just a frozen stock of dollars? Again, seems to me worse than what we have now.

 

The rehashed the interview with Ken Burns - apparently a lot of people wrote in to say that Burns "gave you the interview that he wanted to give," and they debated whether those rehearsed monologues of his were "more authentic" than other interviewees who are less famous and less self-conscious.  They concluded that that is the real Ken Burns, and is thus authentic in some sense. I was impressed that Tyler and his production manager, who had worked for Burns years ago, were able to communicate that he was a brilliant, skilled, polished-in-interview, preachy, controlling bastard without actually saying that. The transcript is the same as the link above. 

About prediction in general:

What are the topics that are hard to predict? Who’s going to win a contest? In most areas, it’s hard to predict. Not in chess. Magnus Carlsen just played Caruana. He beat him 22 to 4 and didn’t lose a single game. That was not hard to predict. The margin of victory was hard to predict, but not that Magnus would win. But if you were to ask me who will win the NBA title this coming year — very hard to predict.

The history of China is very hard to predict. Switching from zero COVID to COVID free-for-all, I was not predicting. I don’t think I got that wrong publicly, but I know in my own mind, I wasn’t expecting that. China, in general, does very rapid shifts that are hard to predict in advance in a way, say, that India does not. My backup answer after sports would be China is very hard for me or, indeed, anyone to predict.

Too Many Places To Look

 My wife requested ground oat bran today. She uses it for some health-related concoction that I think also includes whey powder.  One of the two local chain* supermarkets never has it - though significantly for this discussion, it has a few things that are somewhat similar, leading a shopper to think that the Bob's Red Mill ground oat bran must be right here somewhere - and the other sometimes has it. So I often end up getting it at Whole Foods, which we go to occasionally for a few specific items. 

I did eventually find it at WF, and it is worth noting that even the employees were stumped at first and went through the same list that I did. It could be with the gluten-free flours. It could be with the variety flours, as most of the Bob's Red Mill are.  It could be with the cereals, in the oatmeal section.  And it could be in the healthy bulk foods - as the whey powder is.  It is in the cereals, but not quite in the oatmeal section. Next to the rolled oats and the steel cut oats there is a section of specialty cereals, e.g. foreign muesli's, and at the far end of that, ten feet from the other oats, because they only carry the organic version (it always irritates me on principle to spend even a few extra cents on organic), is the ground oat bran.  It doesn't say that it is ground, because it is too busy saying that it is organic, but if you look at it, it is ground.

Sometimes supermarkets will put high-markup (brand name) snack foods in multiple places. Oat bran is not one of those.

Which reminds me of the joke about the couple being given their introductory tour in heaven (long storyteller details here, fill in your own), and the husband suddenly turns and smacks his wife a good one. She is flabbergasted, but he is unrepentant and complains "If you hadn't discovered that damned oat bran we would have been here years ago."

*We intuitively know order of adjectives, as I have mentioned before. In languages that do more with declensions and conjugations and less with word order this is less true.

Oxford Webcams

The oldest webcam in Oxford (dates from the 1400s, I'm sure) shows Central Oxford and St Giles Sreet. 

The Broad Street webcam has several colleges within a literal stone's throw from here, depending on the thrower and the stone.  The Bodleian Library is just off camera to the left; Blackwell's Bookstore, where Tolkien kept running up a tab which he paid off in literary works, such as his commentary on The Pearl is just around the corner of Broad Street going out the top. The site has the advantage of connecting you to many other webcams in Europe. They can suck you in.  There are people who have the famous Abbey Road crossing up as a permanent tab on their browser. I did not link to it because you are my friends and I want you to have lives.

Chatbot Propaganda

Astral Codex Ten has, as if often the case, a calm and rational take on this: Mostly Skeptical thoughts on the Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse. For example

4: Propagandabots Spreading Disinformation Is Probably The Opposite Of What You Should Worry About

News articles about this problem always start with the same scenario: what if someone made a propagandabot to spread COVID disinformation, ie the most unpopular topic in the world, which every government and social media corporation and AI corporation is itching to censor?

Here’s a crazy thought: maybe the side that has 10x more people on it and 100x more support from the relevant actors is the one that will win the race to use this technology. You can already get an off-the-shelf chatbot that mouths liberal pieties; I’m not sure there are any that are much good at disinformation production. The liberal-piety-bots will be on version 10.0 before the first jailbroken disinformation-bot comes out.

He looks at various scenarios where chatbots could do Very Bad Things on social media. He also quickly realises the steps we take to prevent Very Bad Things might ultimately be worse than the VBT's themselves. To take a recent example, government efforts to censor some types of Covid information created a backlash in which some people stopped believing the government when they said the sky is blue. None of these things is static. The interaction of people's voluntary actions plus their response to government* recommendations plus their response to (various) expert advising plus their response to government mandates plus their response to other people's responses to everything above is so fluid that it defies easy measure. Plus, social scientists and government agencies were maybe not the people you wanted to have in charge of that anyway. 

Plus I recommend reading what he says about getting spam from Nancy Pelosi, that just won't go away.

Covid is only the beginning, of course.  It gets more complicated every year. Except...is disinformation more of a problem than in Pick a Country/Pick a Century/Pick a Topic? Maybe.  Maybe finally yes, after all the times we have previously invoked the nothing-new-under-the-sun argument. 

I keep recalling from a prepper thread over a decade ago a person from South America who had been through an actual societal breakdown while being on the wrong side of an insane government. He stated in the strongest terms that what is key in those situations, much more than your weapons, alarm systems, and canned food is a network of people you have great certainty you can rely on. It does not fix everything, witness the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, but a stash of rifles, gold fragments, and water filters wasn't getting you through that either. So too with whatever imagined apocalypse you see from AI and swollen government and nefarious actors. If you have a network of people you can trust, you can, in the direst emergency, at least decide that the older children and young parents will get the food and have people you love around you as you go. Lots of humanity never had those choices.

And most likely, the biggest problem of your next decade will be something medical that happens to us or a near relative. Wine will still gladden the heart. Young people will still fall in love. Music will continue to inspire, chatbots be damned.

*And it very much matters what level of "government" we are talking about.  Not only local, county, state, federal, but school district/ WHO.

Great Books

 The Great Books Podcast from National Review has slowly become the Great But Neglected Books podcast. This is unsurprising, as they are closing in on 300 books and have already done "Macbeth," Herodotus, Beowulf, lots of Dickens, Cervantes, Melville, Austen, Newton, and anything else that would come to mind while you were walking out the door thinking about your grocery list. These are the last ten.  They have been intriguing.

261. Winter in Moscow by Malcolm Muggeridge

260. The Stories of Constance Fenimore Wilson

259: The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

258: The Lusiads, by Luís Vaz de Camões

257: Bulfinch’s Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch

256 The Nativity Story of the Gospels

255: The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois

254: Lost Horizon by James Hilton

253: The Essays of Addison and Steele

252. The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan

I have suggested to Miller that he do a Great Books for Young Adults month and a Great Books for Children month, just to break it up. He replied that he will be doing Grimm's Fairy Tales and Black Beauty coming up and is considering doing each of the seven "Chronicles of Narnia."

Good Night

 

British Vs American Humor

 

I have mentioned before, and do not recall where I first learned it, that British humor tends to the ridiculous situation that produces line after line of amusement, but often just stumbles to the end, while American humor points to the final punchline from the earliest opening of the scene. Early SNL was more British in that way, perhaps influenced by Monty Python as much as by the improv they were trained on, which also relies on milking a situation until either A) Agreat impromptu punchline occurs, at which point everyone understands that it is best to move on quickly, or B) we have the British method of limping to a polite point and then exiting. As here. 

It is worth noting that the gay people I did theater with and worked at the hospital with would likely have found this funny, but it might be considered objectionable to some at this point.

Back to Dating Apps Again

I am reading and listening to Rob Henderson's All The Single Ladies, and Razib Khan interviewing Bryan Caplan about open borders, with starts with a long discussion about feminism, for some reason.  (Caplan also writes about IQ, why schools are useless, and selfish reasons to have more children, so he's right up my alley.) So here I am reading about dating apps again. I did a whole series on them and on the extended topic of intrasexual competition in the fall, based on...well, based on lots of things, but I should add in the work of Dr. Tania Reynolds, plus the fact that Son #5 still has to deal with dating apps. 

Henderson

The dating market for women is getting tougher. In part, this is because fewer men are attending universities. Why would male enrollment in higher education matter for women? Because women, on average, prefer educated men.

Razib (to Caplan)

So I guess the question some people would make is, why do women have Why do women have to make that sacrifice as opposed to men?

Caplan (in response, emphasis mine) 

And I'm saying they don't, if you want to look around for a guy that's would rather focus on kids and not on his career. There's plenty guys like out like that out there. There's not many successful women that are interested in those guys. So I mean, you get I would say, this is supply and demand all over again, where, if you, like, if you are a woman who wants that, then the market, it's available. But in fact, there's just not much much of that much demand for it.

I think that's it exactly. Women say that's what they want, but then somehow, they don't. I think Anne Shirley's friend Diana in Anne of Green Gables is close to the mark here Diana hasn’t quite made up her mind though, because she thinks perhaps it would be nobler to marry some wild, dashing, wicked young man and reform him. Yes, the ambitious women want to find an ambitious, challenging, and (gulp) masculine man but reform him into something more tame. In the same way that the elite schools skim off the best students and then start making status and moral rules for the rest of the culture WRT women, race, sexual choice, and personal economics, the most talented elite women skim off the most intelligent and ambitious men who look like they could possibly be at least somewhat tamed, so that they get their masculine one. Then they make rules for the other men and women, who are now, quite frankly, screwed over.

Maria Guttentag, a researcher at Harvard, has an interesting observation, that extends back into history. 

“With a surplus of women, sexual freedoms are more advantageous to men than to women. Decreased willingness to commit oneself to an exclusive relationship with one woman is consistent with that fact… It follows further that the persistence of such circumstances would leave many women hurt and angry. Other women, not themselves without a man, would nevertheless often be aware of the unfortunate experiences of their women friends in relations with men. These circumstances should impel women to seek more power, and incidentally, turn them towards meeting their own needs. Most forms of feminism are directed to just such ends.”

African-American AP Test

This is not usually a topic of mine, but I generally like Ilya Shapiro, who applauds the changes. I extract the same sections that Ann Althouse did.

 "... Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wouldn’t have objected and the proposal wouldn’t have become national news. But the College Board, which designs and administers AP classes and exams, felt the need to wave a red flag by including such 'topics' as intersectionality, queer studies and Black Lives Matter in what should have ostensibly been a high-concept history class.... [I]f you’re... going to have an AP African American Studies course, what would you put in it? Probably what can now be found in the revised framework, with units on (1) early African societies, (2) the slave trade and abolition, (3) Reconstruction and black codes, and (4) the civil rights movement and modern black culture. You don’t need an education doctorate to recognize that you shouldn’t give trendy topics like 'intersectionality and activism' and 'the reparations movement' as much space as weighty aspects of the American experience like 'disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws' and 'HBCUs and black education'—which is what the initial framework did. The original idea was surely to advance theory and ideology, not history and culture...."

He mentions that the new framework omits both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and agrees that this is a problem.  (Especially for lawyers and politicians.)

Don't Be A Feminist

It's the title of Bryan Caplan's book.  The title is taken from the custom of using longest and most prominent essay, especially if it is arresting, but the cover gives away that it is a collection of essays about justice. Feminism is not the main topic of the book. Still...

He starts off with defining which is often boring, bur usually necessary. The preferred definition of feminist by feminists is that it means "men and women should be treated equally" or "women have rights too," and therefore all arguments are over; any opposition to the definition can be treated as opposition to basic equality.  They was even a bumper sticker to that effect a couple of decades ago.  But it's just a tactic, an attempt to win an argument without having to do anything difficult, just roll one's eyes and otherwise socially signal disapproval.

Because in strict point of fact, not only do feminists believe that men and women should be treated equally, non-feminists largely believe it as well. The numbers are very, very solid on this. The objections that "no they don't, not really, they try to smuggle in all sorts of inequalities" ignores an important reality.  They have assented to your premise, so the definition is no longer useful, if it ever was.  That men may be cheating is a different matter.

Caplan offers a defintion of how people actually use the word in everyday conversation, which linguists would tell you is always the real definition: a feminist is a person who believes that men are treated more fairly than women. That, certainly, is worth some discussion, and all manner of slyness and cheating by men can still be called out. Yet one will notice that the ground of the discussion has moved greatly.  Evidences, proofs, exposures of bad logic and ambiguous data, all these are now in play. Now the thing has to be demonstrated and alternatives refuted.

He does not insist on the definition, only offers it as an improvement on the bumper sticker. He is correct that changing from the manipulative definition does change the ground of discussion. It immediately allows the question "Is there anywhere that men are treated less fairly than women?"

Barnes & Noble Turnaround

 I had not heard about B&N recovering and having stores one might like to go to now.  I had not heard of Ted Gioia or his substack, either, but am enjoying poking around in it.  It may make it to the sidebar soon. He is a jazz historian of many books, and the substack is music, books, and culture. He seems to have taught at Stanford's jazz studies program at some point

Cold

It is below zero here, and the wind pushes is to something like twenty below, which sounds terrible. It feels terrible. The worst I can recall is three consecutive days in 1979, when we hit lows of 21, 22, and 26 below over Christmas around sunrise. We had an infant bundled up and packed into a VW Beetle to visit relatives. You may remember the heating systems on those: hoses that ran from around the engine beneath the car up to a little vent next to one foot (left for the driver, right for the passenger) in the front, next to the clutch. And not good hoses, after five years of aging. We have hit -20 a number of years in my memory, but nothing else worse.  

After I got indoors this afternoon I had to go back out if only to check on my snowbird neighbor's house.  Heat is still on, Norm, still 56 degrees. Enjoy Venice, FL, you bastard. I didn't bother with hat or gloves or zipping up the jacket, which you can do if you are keeping your exposure under 60 seconds. But there are places you can't do that. WC will go to -48 tonight and I would not risk anything exposed in that temp for any length of time.  You might trip and your wife might be reading or doing line dancing from the computer or something and not notice.

Mt Washington Observatory, home of the worst weather in the world, just hit a new wind chill record (for them) at -106. (Now -109) Apparently the troposphere could drop below the summit tonight, meaning that MWO would be above the stratosphere. It sounds terrible.  I have no idea what that means. They are wondering if they will have a temperature record as well, just after midnight, below what happened in 1885. (-45.  They got to -47.1) I have no idea what -106 means.  It's just a number to me.  But I try the thought experiment: I know what -3 is, in complete stillness. And I know what +100 degrees is like in the summer. That's a 103 degree shift, and -106 is as far below -3 as +100 is above it.  I can't get my mind around that. I write it but have no idea of the reality. Bsking tells me the US record is Alaskan at -80, and lowest for the Lower 48 is -70 in Montana. Robert Frost claimed to have seen -62 in Franconia (and Above The Notch is a land of fantasy cold), where ridiculous claims are made. Color me suspicious, even there. The average temperature on Mars is -80.

Sidebar: The Observatory got a better naked-eye view of the comet last night than my wife did down here with binoculars.

The State of NH announced it will not be sending out rescue teams for any hikers stupid enough to try even a little bit of this (again, it is good to have a governor with a science degree). People want bragging rights, but forget that the colder it gets, the more stuff breaks. Things you were counting on working even in very cold conditions - like zippers, carabiners, even your damned boot soles - don't behave the same way.

It's just numbers at this point, and my son in Nome sees worse numbers than mine every year, so I won't update unless there is some additional story. He just headed out on snow machines to go 70 miles and hunt caribou with friends.

Update: Well accuweather said it was WC -45 during the gusts, so I gave it a shot and went outside for a minute. Yes.  That is cold, I thought.  I agree. Not exactly profound. In general the wind has been less and we are more like -25 or 30

Culture Transplant Revisited

Two months ago I blogged about Garett Jones's book The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left. Rob Henderson links to a review by Scott Sumner at Econolog that calls a fair bit of it into question, eventually concluding that it might be true but is definitely overstated.  "True, but overstated" seems to have been our lot for the last few years and even decade, I think. We are selling our ideas too hard. I had liked the concept of Jones's book, but I like this corrective better.

NH State Song

The real one, that I learned at Straw School from Miss Morse, one of the circulating music teachers in the district in the 1960s. Reposted from 2012. Few of us knew it then, and I'm sure it is even fewer now.

Important New England Sports Retirement

 Remembering another sports retirement, not so long ago

Don't Move To NH

I didn't go looking for one of these, but having seen it, I feel obligated to post it. Some of these things don't matter to me and won't matter to you, but you need to know they are here. The tax issues are because we have no sales or income tax, which is a good thing.  But that means they have to find the dollars somewhere else.

Let me add that houses have some likelihood of ice dams here if they don't have enough pitch, as we learned this week. And if you do have a roof with a steep pitch that ice can come off heavy, and too fast to get away from. Ice in general is a problem, even more than snow, because we are a wet state. A fair number of states have icy roads, but we combine ours with hills. 

It's going below zero for a couple of days now. That has been slightly less bad the last couple of years, but I'm betting that's just poor memory on my part.

Jeffrey Sachs and Philippe Lemoine on Covid Response

Jeffrey D. Sachs was on the Lancet Commission for Covid-19. He is an economics professor at Columbia and is Director of the the Center for Sustainable Development, so not likely to be a conservative attack dog. He is very careful to stay in his lane and not (quite) comment on whether a lab leak was possible, even though he has been on previous epidemic commissions as well. Yet he feels he is very much in his lane to point out the evasiveness and dishonesty of the commission and other major players, as he had a front row seat. He notes the evidence that the Wuhan knew something was up and the Chinese government imposed silence as early as September 2019, and Western authorities, including American, were also hushing up those parts.  He repeatedly notes that authorities kept doubling down when they should have been allowing more discussion.  Physicist Steve Hsu, also no conservative shill, interviews him at Manifold. Transcript at the link. I was no better at prediction than anyone else in these matters, but will note that my belief that an earlier version of the virus escaped and gives us false positive readings outside of China remains in play even after listening to this account. 

Sachs goes on to relate this to secrecy in general in American government and how long this has been going on for things powerful agencies (more than the politicians, who are often just going along on their best guesses) believe would be dangerous for the public to know. He does not comment further on other Covid controversies, though he does hint just a bit.

I think I first heard Richard Hanania interviewed by Razib (might've been Tyler) and didn't like him much, thinking that he was making some of the usual cultural assumptions about conservatives that come close to being disqualifying for me. But I have very much come around on him in subsequent hearings and interviews. There are still liberals out there that I like. He is the director of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, which he started because he wanted to get out of academia despite being there for years, needing more ideological freedom. If you like that sort of thing his credentials are top shelf. He mentioned research done by Philippe Lemoine which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, on Covid responses by governments, with particular focus on the statistical analysis. Lemoine, similar to Sachs, above, takes what I believe is a very proper scientifically cautious attitude about what he reports, being very careful to stay in his lane and note at every turn the limitations of what his data is saying. Yet that eventually becomes his major point, that governments and their agencies (he focuses on UK, France, US, Sweden) were not properly cautious and pretended to a level of certainty that was impossible. He was interviewed by Institutionalized podcast (Manhattan Institute editor and Free Beacon writer are the principals there) and is sometimes so set on pointing out the limitations of studies that it gets frustrating. But I'd rather have that. 

To give you just a few of his points, he notes the strong nature/nurture comparison influencing what type of responses both individuals and governments preferred.  Those who felt there wasn't much that could be done, the virus would spread anyway favored behavior that matched that; those who thought managing was possible heavily favored managing. But both were right, both were wrong, yet everyone was quite certain about their conclusions - and he relates this back to their original assumptions. In measuring how well a restriction or a relaxing of restriction worked, the voluntary behavior of the public immediately changes the picture. When deaths rise people restrict themselves, regardless of what the mandates are. Yet they also quickly return to cultural norms, even if the data does not support it.  They will only temporarily restrict.  Then the nations or cultures with high interpersonal contact will return to that, and you will not see much difference across borders, even when the borders are closed and the mandates different.  I felt vindicated by this, having previously noted that the areas of Canada below the 47th parallel were not that different from the places across the closed US border (there were exceptions), and neighboring European countries would have similar statistics, including that the extremely low-contact Scandinavians had better numbers, while Mediterranean countries would inch bak up even after restriction.  People go back to life as usual. 

He also spent a good deal of time talking about how researchers have to make choices repeatedly in what they are going to call similar mandates or legislation versus different. Are they going to make three categories or four?  Are they going to call this level of closings the same or separate them?  We see the same in comparing state and national gun regulation. John McWhorter jokes accurately that you can enter any cocktail conversation by listening for a few minutes and then asking "But where do we draw the line?" because that's what discussion is usually about, at least superficially. 

I will note that I did not agree with Sachs or Lemoine or the interviewers entirely, but mostly thought they were very solid.

Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

The same characteristic can look different if you gradually see it as a symptom instead or a personality trait.

I chose the Village Idiot name, but stumbled into the Assistant part.  It's funnier, and happily it also has a defensible point. I would have preferred to take the role of the boy who stated that the emperor had no clothes, stating the obvious that no one else dares to, but that is clumsy, so Village Idiot had to work instead.  The V.I. I imagined says the obvious, the quiet part out loud, which actually turns out to be quite wise. Some sort of reflection or opposite of the Wise Men of Chelm in Jewish tradition. Forced by a password mistake to take a new identity I chose AVI, which met with hearty approval for its humor.  But I also kept it because it reflects my character.  Our weaknesses are often our strengths in excess or misplaced, our virtues swollen out of proportion to become vices. If the Village Idiot points out the obvious, the Assistant still cannot quite get the hang of that and must continue the apprenticeship, because he tries to be wise and makes things too complicated.

I also had Orwell's admonition that it is difficult but important to keep the obvious firmly in mind and write accordingly. Comedians can stand or fall on how well they express what others won't say. The great thinkers of any age are often only noticing and organising what is in plain sight.

I have always fancied that I am at my best when I stick to pointing out the obvious, but this year I have come up against the uncomfortable possibility that there is a fair bit of rationalisation in this. While it is true that the unsaid sometimes does need to be said by someone, maybe sometimes not. A friend at work who also tends to make the subtext audible in many conversations was asked by her husband "Can anything just be left unsaid in this house?" A fair point.  Ouch.

Somebody needs to tell them we had this same discussion just last week.

Somebody needs to lighten the mood here.

Somebody should point out the possible risks here.

Somebody should (for example) remind this study that there are other scriptures which give a different take on the matter...and all the similar discussion points on a hundred other topics, especially the controversial ones. 

Somebody needs to encourage him in this thankless task. 

And the natural outgrowth of this are the next steps

Well if I don't tell them, who will?

Has she got anyone else in this job who will point this out to her? 

Am I the only one who dares/cares enough to actually say this?

No one seems to be picking up the ball and researching this.

And yet...

What if my dial settings are just a bit off because I'm an Aspie? That's only subtly different from "having a blunt personality type" because one is Dutch or raised in a military family or naturally impatient or whatever. Some of it could be hereditary, some of it could be environment, all of it is under some personal control. But from the inside, it feels very different if this is a symptom rather than a decision, because the decision will be based on how this seems to me, and the seeming itself may be wrong. Not horribly wrong necessarily. Not hair-trigger, just a diminished filter.

It reminds me of the Eddie Izzard bit about suffering fools gladly. And heck, someone has to post it. 

I mean, like “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly.” We go  Who does suffer fools gladly?! How often you can go,

“Hello! I’ve got a pig in me trousers!”

“Come in! Come in, you fool!

Nobody Tells Me Anything Anymore

I missed this in 2011.  It's someone's fault, dammit.

Languages usually die out when the last speaker dies, and that is usually a person who lost their last conversational partner, often a relative, just a few years earlier. Some linguists would say that the language is officially dead when there is only one speaker, as without conversation there are features that are irrecoverable even in theory, as speakers do not notice them consciously. If you have any experience with returning to a place that had unusual features you can get a sense of this. A friend now almost 80 who learned Swedish in America from her mother and especially grandparents went to Sverige to visit and used that language in conversation as well as she was able, as did her husband, who had a similar experience.  Eventually someone laughed "You sound like an old farmer!" In the quick changes in Romania after the Revolution, radio and TV programs were no longer considered dangerous and people got cell phones.  My sons, who lived in tiny Transylvanian villages in the mid 1990s, stayed briefly in foster care and orphanages in the late 90s, and came to America in 2001 went to a wedding in a bigger city (Marghita) in 2007 and quickly found that people were chuckling at some of their vocabulary, though they were speaking their first language. A word for pants or trousers was considered particularly uproarious. Only a few old people brightened and smiled benignly at its use. 

You may know examples even in America. The use of tonic for "soft drink" was common in my childhood. I don't recall whether I used it myself - I think we were likely to say soda instead, but I knew plenty of people, not just older ones, who preferred the term. Moxie and other beverages were sold as "nerve tonics" or other medicinals* a century earlier, and carbonated beverages were common earlier here than elsewhere (as were "bubblers," which actually originated in Wisconsin) so the name took. My father's second wife, who lives on in Nabnasset, MA, still says "tonic," and she can't be the only one. There may even be a few from my generation who say it. But if you multiply these things by a thousand and throw in six or seven trades or practices with their own vocabularies that are now uncommon, you may get to see how languages die in pieces, sections, and dribbles, until there is suddenly nothing left. Thus has it always been, though it is accelerated now that the children move to the cities for jobs and schooling - more true now than ever in the past 10,000 years, I think.

But Ayapeneco, an indigenous language in Mexico did not follow that pattern to the bitter end, but added a twist, which I missed hearing about at the time. The last two speakers refuse to talk to each other. I can see my brothers and myself pretending to do that while still secretly emailing or texting each other, just for the glory of it, but these two have no need to speak together for any reason, and so don't. 

Except it seems to be a hoax.  A linguistics hoax. I have written about how to detect hoaxes before (summary: if they are too perfect) but I admit I didn't see this coming.

The nearly-extinct languages mentioned in the article:

Ter Sami (note the second term, a people we used to call "Lapplanders") The last two speakers were uncontactable or dead in 2020.

Kayardild One fluent speaker may have still been alive in 2015, but only 8 spoke it in any fashion as of 2016.

Lengilu Three native speakers as of 2000. Bye-bye.

Mabire Sorry to be so ethnocentric, but a chief named Souleyman Dabanga sounds like a humorous character by PG Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh. The other two speakers were elderly siblings in 2001, and Dabanga now lives in another village. Not promising.

Tehuelche the last speaker died in 2019

Emine Sinmaz is not a language, as I originally assumed, but the writer of the article.

*Sponge-Headed Scienceman, who literally wrote the book on Moxie is now working on a book about the early history of soft drinks in New England - or maybe just New Hampshire.  I already know a couple of the stories about that, but will hold my fire until publication.  I wouldn't want to depress sales, ya know.

Gift Subscriptions

Substack seems to do this a lot, offering free 3-month subscriptions for subscribers to give out to others.  I now have 3 Rob Henderson ones if anyone is interested. And I still have at least one for Razib.

It's Complicated For Ken Burns

I have never watched any of Ken Burns's documentaries, even though he is my age and from NH and a young friend of mine used to deliver artisanal bread (outdoor oven) to his office regularly. I did think I might like the one about baseball, but have never gotten around to it.

Listen to Tyler Cowan interview Ken, I really liked learning that Burns has a little neon sign in his studio in Walpole that says "It's complicated."  He went on to explain that it's important to listen to many voices in history, and a documentarian has the responsibility to present these to the viewer. Just the right attitude, I say. He even had a little jab at those new college students who don't think that all points of view should be heard.

He does make strong declarations though about some things he believes are obvious about which there should be brave voices with no compromise. And every single one of those things are bog-standard elitist liberal without so much as 1% deviation.

But it's good to be open minded.

He is doing a documentary on George Washington next, and said that what most schoolchildren know about him is that he never told a lie, and chopped down a cherry tree, and threw a dollar across the Potomac, all of which aren't true.  At which point I had to wonder "what century is this man from?" Does he really think that schoolchildren now think those myths? Who would be teaching these to them? Already when I was in eighth grade we were being told they weren't true and Bob Newhart was doing comedy routines about it. Maybe in my mother's generation people believed those? But I'm not sure even of that.

It's great that people like Ken Burns are protecting us from these myths, though. We have to be ever-vigilant against misinformation because conservatives might take over the teaching of history and keep on teaching this stuff, and I'm sure there are still districts where they are quietly still teaching that George told his father "I cannot tell a lie."

Joe Biden

Adam Gilbert explains why he likes Joe Biden best of any president in his lifetime.

There's a way to post videos from twitter - Ann Althouse seems to manage it.  But I haven't figured it out yet.

City Architecture

"I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night. At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks." GK Chesterton "The Giant" in Tremendous Trifles