An Avalanche of Worthless Non-Studies

Mike Males, a senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice has a nice substack I just discovered.  He is devoted to exposing crap studies pointing to false problems at the expense of real problems we could do something about. Needless to say, I have great sympathy. He especially delights in  showing that social media is not actually bad for teenagers, that researchers dislike the young, especially boys, and that adolescent violence is not on the rise. Here is a representative post: An Avalanche of Worthless Non-Studies on Teens and Social Media 

…this barn-burner MSN headline: “Brain structure changes may partially explain the link between screen time and ADHD”. Screens are wrecking your kids’ brain!

In fact, the study of 10,000 children featured in this scary headline found literally ZERO linkage between increased screen time and “increased ADHD symptoms… and reduced cortical thickness in specific regions (right temporal pole… left superior frontal gyrus… and left rostral middle frontal gyrus)…”

The MAXIMUM β value this study found for any effect was 0.032. NOTHING! Yet, again, that study failed to control for parental abuses/troubles, so: less than nothing.

He uses research and mathematical terms which may throw you at first glance, but it is possible to understand what is going on without knowing them deeply. 

The Woke Are Not Woke

The original idea behind wokeness - what many true believers still pretend is all the meaning there is - is that we should be awake to the effects words and actions might have on groups of people. How would this sound to an older black person?  Does this solution work for disabled people as well? It's a fine idea, a generous idea to remember as many aspects as one can about those within the sound of our voice. It's insensitive for those gathered to complain about their jobs in the presence of the person who just lost theirs. Or worse still, about the foibles of spouses to widows. You don't have to be obsessive about it, but it is good to make sure no one is excluded by how the group photo is posed. If all the white employees are in front and all the Filipino ones are in the back, someone is going to interpret that as a statement.

I would just call that politeness, but you do you. 

Odd, then, that the woke so consistently and gratuitously throw in insults about privileged groups. It's almost as if... 

Well, here's an example.  On Holidays . It finishes on a fine sentiment, though it is a bit milk-and-water for my taste. Common humanity. Showing kindness. Connecting with others. The comments are gushing about how deeply moved people are. Except for my comment, of course.

Because...

The first seven paragraphs are unnecessary to those supposedly central ideas, yet pointlessly insulting to people celebrating Christmas. It gets the historical facts wrong (yes Virginia, Christmas was important to Americans before WWII); it blithely and confidently misreads the motives of those complaining about the "war on Christmas;" it instructs the main group of people actually showing seasonal generosity in how they should observe their religion if they really meant it. Sure.  There are lots of Kwanzaa groups going out caroling at nursing homes. Wiccans everywhere are standing in the cold ringing bells to request donations for the poor in the spirit of Solstice. 

Episcopalians and Fundamentalists are at odds with each other about many things, but they are both doing food distributions, winter clothing drives, and all Angel Tree/Samaritan's Purse toy collections. They do things like this all year, too. And as near as I can tell, dude, you are not. 

I wouldn't be so annoyed if it weren't all so cliched and tiring, the people who went to church when young and think they therefore know all about what it's like there. It is not usually the atheists who write these things, it is the post-Christians.  Jews came up with a good solution.  They took a minor holiday of their own and elevated it to higher status, imitating the things from the surrounding culture that they liked (or could at least stand, like a Chanuka Bush) and pointedly leaving out the rest. When they protested it was about limited and specific aspects of community observance at schools and government areas that they couldn't go along with. 

The post-Christians say their point is to include everybody (not like you bigots), but are then quite clear about who they are excluding. So kind, so sweet.  So community oriented. It is parallel to that large fraction of antiwar protestors who revealed over time that they weren't so much antiwar, but on the other side. When you understand this, you see why these essays are not streams of clear water into which a measure of unavoidable poison creeps in. If you lead with the poison gratuitously, then the poison is the real point. The clear water is the cover, the disguise. 

Now consider what that means for all the gushing comments.  Most are people who like the clear water - we hope. But so many of them seem to like it better when it has that taste of poison in it. Tangy.  Sophisticated.

Two weeks ago I noticed that I was not reprinting The Sadness of NPR Christmas this year and couldn't see a reason to. Ah well, maybe next year.

Four Autism Subtypes

Princeton University announced a study and subsequent paper in Nature Genetics about four distinct autism subtypes.  I missed it at the time.  I don't follow things as assiduously as I used to. 

It is gratifying to see something I predicted start to come to pass. Because autism shows clear symptoms and collections of symptoms, it has long been known that there is a strong biological component. Family studies and genetic evidence show that it is in fact largely heritable.  But it has been elusive - expected symptoms are simply not there sometimes, and some co-occurring conditions are frequent enough to make one wonder if an individual presentation is some variant of OCD or ADHD, or how the clear depressive/anxiety symptoms fit into the explanation.  For this reason I started saying a decade ago that there must be subtypes clouding the picture. I didn't have the knowledge to do more than wave my hands at what those subtypes might be, but there was clearly something that had more OCD elements and something that had more impairment of theory of mind/inability to consider alternative explanations. Common symptoms like demand avoidance have a variety of presentations, sometimes are not present, and sometimes are found just as strongly in people who have not a hint of autism elsewhere. That should suggest it is a useless category, but it isn't. When you work with patients it is prominent and you develop techniques for working around them.  (Unfortunately, these techniques do not work on theoretically higher-functioning people like your supervisor.)

Though I conceded that there was a spectrum to the condition, I thought it was not only a spectrum. The idea of a wheel/pie chart of symptoms, and the older multipolar theories still had explanatory power for me. The most serious cases, which require significant intervention and resemble what we have always called autism, or in Europe, Asperger's Syndrome were not only more severe, but somehow qualitatively different, as if some further thing was broken - yet not always the same thing. The Princeton study identifies a reason for two of the categories having more serious presentations: de novo mutations for one and rare variants for the other. De novo mutations usually have little effect, though more often negative. Changing your genetic programming at one tiny location usually just gets overrun by redundancy effects in development.  However, just the wrong change at just the wrong place can be catastrophic. The effect for rare variants is similar but usually milder. The parent who passed it to you and all those before who passed it to them survived and had fertile young, after all. 

For example, children in the Broadly Affected group showed the highest proportion of damaging de novo mutations — those not inherited from either parent — while only the Mixed ASD with Developmental Delay group was more likely to carry rare inherited genetic variants. While children in both of these subtypes share some important traits like developmental delays and intellectual disability, these genetic differences suggest distinct mechanisms behind superficially similar clinical presentations.  

This also made immediate sense to me. In other psychiatric conditions symptoms do not always show at birth. They may activate under the hormonal influences of puberty and proceed slowly. Late-onset paranoid schizophrenia comes on so gradually that symptoms are not clear until the late thirties or beyond.  We can sometimes retrospectively see that the illness was present in the early 30s, some few quirks that no one thought much about at the time. In such patients, development was normal for a considerable time, and many cognitive systems are entirely intact. That this is also true for autism adds up. 

 The team also found that autism subtypes differ in the timing of genetic disruptions’ effects on brain development. Genes switch on and off at specific times, guiding different stages of development. While much of the genetic impact of autism was thought to occur before birth, in the Social and Behavioral Challenges subtype — which typically has substantial social and psychiatric challenges, no developmental delays, and a later diagnosis — mutations were found in genes that become active later in childhood. This suggests that, for these children, the biological mechanisms of autism may emerge after birth, aligning with their later clinical presentation.

 

Wachet Auf

 

A Small Star

In the artwork, the Star of Bethlehem is pictured as some big can't-miss-it item. But if it was a dramatic star (planet/comet) then everyone would be talking about it, and Herod would be consulting his own astrologers. There might be word from Rome commanding everyone what to think about it.  The Romans didn't like wild cards and unrest. You over there.  Simmer down or I'll know what to do with you. It had to be something of a surprise, something that only specialists might notice. It might only be visible on the clearest of nights, far from even campfires. I can still only see it moving in and out.  I'm taking your word for it here.

The star would be in the west for the Magi.  We let the word order fool us on "we have seen his star in the east."  The star wasn't in the east, they were in the east.* If you were in the east and you saw a star further east, you would not say "Hey, let's head west to find it." Nor would you know when to stop.  Not that far past Bethlehem you would hit the Mediterranean - about 12 miles. What do we do if we get to the sea and the star is still out in front of us? Get on a boat?  Wait? Whatever that little star did to "come to rest" would have been a relief to them. 

No, Herod was taken by surprised and this idea of prophesied kings in the stars was unnerving.  His wise men said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and the Magi jumped on that as the first place to check.  Herod may have thought they were cranks who didn't really know anything and we looking for favors or influence.  He didn't believe them enough to send them with escorts. But he wasn't going to let them wander over the countryside talking about heirs to the throne, either.

Mary and Joseph may never have heard anything about a star identifying their boy, either. Heck, there's no guarantee they heard the company of angels, either.  That might have been for the shepherds alone.  If everyone had seen them the last people they would have asked about it would be shepherds.  They would have headed out to Bethlehem themselves, crowding the place up and making the Romans nervous in the middle of the night.  The shepherds would not have gotten near it.  

*And maybe not that much east.  The East Road went SSE for long way before turning SE, then East. The Magi may not have come over days of desert. Roads are preferred. Due east would have been the Dead Sea, then days and days of desert.

The Maid-Servant at the Inn

Earl at Wind Off The Hill sent along this poem by Dorothy Parker with the comment "she wasn't always wittily bitter"

What's Wrong With The West?

 Rob Henderson interviews Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom and many, many essays: What's Wrong With the West, in The Spectator. Henderson has written a new introduction for the 25th anniversary edition of the book. I have linked to or written about Dalrymple a score of times if you are interested in my experience with his work. He was an inner-city psychiatrist in England and saw much of what I did in my career.  I usually agree with him.

 I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.

Even people who are answering off-the-cuff will mention that there is less community in America and the West than there once was, and less than they observe in other cultures. Much of this is perception. As Garrison Keillor once said and I have repeated many times "We think times were simpler then because we were children and our needs were attended to by others." We remember getting together with cousins - or even siblings - but that doesn't happen anymore. We generalise that into believing that the culture as a whole has lost something. But we don't see the cousins because they now have other people that they love - spouses, children, grandchildren. It is the natural order of things for cousin closeness to be recreated in every generation. Similarly, we don't share a home with our siblings anymore.

When we view other cultures and the closeness and camaraderie they have, we are seeing a survivor bias of those who stayed in the village or neighborhood. Yet they also have young people who moved to the city. 

Yet with all that said, there might be something to it. The fragmentation of culture may not all be illusion. 

It's a good thing to comment on at Christmas, I think, when you were thinking about similar topics already. 

Merry Christmas

 

The Gospel of John in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

John 1: 1-5; 9-10 in Narnia

Aslan: 

It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.  Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.  But if she could have looked a little further back, into the darkness and stillness before Time dawned she would have read there a different incantation. 

Exhale

There is a reminder, almost a trick, really, when someone can't catch their breath and is starting to panic: get them to exhale. It doesn't have to be with blow-out-the-candles force, but it can automatically trigger proper inhaling.  It also works if someone is getting more and more anxious, so that they are taking many shallow breaths, unable to get very much new oxygen in any of them. It works for thinking as well.  When we are going to do some difficult physical thing we are likely to take in a deep breath and hold it. But when we want to look over a situation and consider what we've got in front of us, there is an instinct to purse our lips and blow air out slowly in a long exhale.

A post here set Grim to thinking about marriage and young men, which in turn prompted me to think of my current perspective versus what may have been my attitude when I was young myself.  The puzzle has stuck with me the last few days. All relationships are an opportunity to give, and none more than marrying and parenting. I know I long ago suspected that this might be at least partly a dodge, a Sunday School lesson to get everyone to be as nice as they should.  "It is better to give than to receive" sounds very noble, but I wondered if it were also a bit hollow.

Giving is exhaling. If you are feeling that not enough is coming in, it may be best to give more.  You may be in panic, or breathing shallowly, unable to take in what might be there.  The analogy won't hold forever of course. One cannot keep exhaling indefinitely. But even then that might be a result of humanity's fall.  The system was designed that both exhaling and inhaling will occur, and each supports the other. That is still the design and likely to work remarkably well even in difficult circumstances.

One More Chapter

 Epigenetics is real but overhyped "If the claim is that environmental shocks leave durable biochemical marks on the DNA, and those marks survive the developmental demolition derby of early embryogenesis, and then survive again into the next generation’s germ cells, and then change phenotype in a measurable, replicable way, all those steps need to be demonstrated. What we have instead are a handful of noisy observational studies that would fail to impress even if the question were trivial, let alone one of the boldest claims in biology — namely, a partial rewriting of inheritance."

Twin studies: One thing the partial heretitarians have convince me of is that twin studies are not necessarily as powerful an argument as I had assumed.  When I first heard the caution that identical twins reared apart still share significant environment if they are in the same or even similar (Canada/US) countries, I thought it a stretch and an excuse. Because the circumstances of being separated are often unusual or even dire, the parenting, socioeconomic status, diet, and home culture can differ widely. Yet it is true that much that is key to development is the same. Communicating things via signage, including diagrams for directions, are a way of knowing that is not known in all societies. The idea of having shelter might vary in America, but far more worldwide. Students enter school at the same age in Michigan and Mississippi, and might even have the same textbooks.  Heck, the fact that they are given textbooks has developmental implications. From early years they will color in shapes, hear similar music.  Even if one child does not have a TV or a computer they will see plenty of both and learn to decode the world from screens. I was wrong to dismiss it so thoroughly.

Nose ring theory revisited.  It is a symbolic statement that one can be led around by fashion quite easily and thoroughly.  This includes intellectual fashions. As these fashions are usually part of female culture, it is an advertisement that one can be led around by other women. This mostly applies online, as far as I can tell. As I wrote before, the women with nose rings I meet in real life seem more like lost souls than man-haters.

 

 

Dormi Jesu

 

The Gospel of John in The Last Battle

 John 21:1-6 

And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. 

On December Five-and-Twenty

Reposted from 15 and 10 years ago.

Well knock me over with a feather.

The commonly-told explanation for the early Christians choosing the date of Christmas - that it was piggybacked onto a gift-giving Roman holiday Saturnalia, in and effort to woo pagans over to celebrating the birth of Jesus? Turns out it's likely not true, according to Biblical Archaeology Review. It's a good example of how hearing a plausible theory that explains some of the data can cause you to forget what you already know. I had known that the very earliest Christians didn't pay much attention to Christmas at all. Easter was the big deal, as it should be. And if you'd asked the question in the right way, I would have answered that over the next few centuries, the Church were concerned with distancing itself from pagan customs, not embracing them and co-opting them. That came much later, when it was making a more concerted effort to convert my ancestors in northern Europe. But I breezed right by those known facts because the Saturnalia (plus a few other pagan celebrations) theory sounded so plausible.

The most loudly touted theory about the origins of the Christmas date(s) is that it was borrowed from pagan celebrations. The Romans had their mid-winter Saturnalia festival in late December; barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe kept holidays at similar times. To top it off, in 274 C.E., the Roman emperor Aurelian established a feast of the birth of Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun), on December 25. Christmas, the argument goes, is really a spin-off from these pagan solar festivals. According to this theory, early Christians deliberately chose these dates to encourage the spread of Christmas and Christianity throughout the Roman world: If Christmas looked like a pagan holiday, more pagans would be open to both the holiday and the God whose birth it celebrated.

Despite its popularity today, this theory of Christmas’s origins has its problems. It is not found in any ancient Christian writings, for one thing. Christian authors of the time do note a connection between the solstice and Jesus’ birth: The church father Ambrose (c. 339–397), for example, described Christ as the true sun, who outshone the fallen gods of the old order. But early Christian writers never hint at any recent calendrical engineering; they clearly don’t think the date was chosen by the church. Rather they see the coincidence as a providential sign, as natural proof that God had selected Jesus over the false pagan gods.

(CWCID: First Things)

Quick Links

 The Myth of Male-Only Voting Rights Voting rights?  What is this "voting?"

We now know when the best years for culture were. 

Your Brain May Be Built For Socialism - But Your Country Wasn't. I have said the same thing less well. We resent rich people and assume they must be gaming the system or even stealing because in prehistory, that was true for hundreds of thousands of years. 

Related and from the same source: Nordics are not socialists, they are compact capitalist societies with high social trust, built up over years. 

"Gentle Parenting" of other adults. It's really grating, isn't it? This young woman, like many others, clearly gets off on using this tone.  Did I mention there are also men that do this?

Land Acknowledgements

While we're at it, shouldn't Europe - especially France and Germany - be doing land acknowledgements that the land they are on was stolen from the Neanderthals? As for Great Britain, they should be acknowledging that they took their land from the Neolithic farmers, possibly with high rates of violence. 

And don't even get me started on the Bantus.  Their list would take an hour at conventions. 

The Gospel of John in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 John 13:1-9 

Eustace: 

The water was as clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg. But the lion told me I must undress first…

So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place… But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before... Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—‘You will have to let meundress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.

The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund.

“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.”

Harmonious Chorale

 They sure are

New York City

 We got home about 1AM. We agreed there are too many people in New York.

Tree Topper

Star, Angel, or something else?  I saw Archangel Michael ornaments and thought that would be a great tree topper.

The angels are getting more insipid.  

Silent Night

 Ghost of Christmas Past

The Gospel of John in The Magician's Nephew

 John 11:32-39 

Digory: 

“But please, please - won't you - can't you give me something that will cure Mother?'

Up till then he had been looking at the Lion's great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.

'My son, my son,' said Aslan. 'I know. Grief is great.”

2013 Links

 Irish Mossing Museum - and small, odd museums in general

What's Wrong With the Schools?  Spoiler alert: Many of these things are still wrong with the schools.

Jesus and Personal Freedom tribes, clans, and loyalties

How Doctors Die - forwarded to me at that time. 

Social Truth vs Objective Truth  When the person you are disputing with says "the debate is over" or some equivalent like obviously/unquestionably/unarguably the odds are good that this is a social truth that you should believe is true if you want to belong to a particular tribe, not an objective truth.

The Gospel of John in The Silver Chair

 John 4:10-14 in Narnia

“Are you not thirsty?" said the Lion.
"I am dying of thirst," said Jill.
"Then drink," said the Lion.
"May I — could I — would you mind going away while I do?" said Jill.
The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.
"Will you promise not to — do anything to me, if I do come?" said Jill.
"I make no promise," said the Lion.
Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.
"Do you eat girls?" she said.
"I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
"I daren't come and drink," said Jill.
"Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.
"Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer. "I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."
"There is no other stream," said the Lion.” 

CS Lewis 

In Dulci Jubilo

 Couldn't find a favorite version. Something about this one kept me coming back, though.