Attribution Errors

There are a lot of false quotes by Albert Einstein and CS Lewis on social media, and there have always been "Bible" quotes or "In the Middle Ages/Shakespeare's Time" explanations. Have fun adding to that list for sayings or phrases.  There is a strong human tendency to associate one's own ideas with someone thought to be smart or good.

I get a lot of Impressionist art popping up in front of me, likely because I have clicked "like" on others. The fake ones, the ones by modern artists that even I can tell are not from the 1800s, are attributed to Van Gogh.  I have not seen anyone try to ride a Monet wave, or Toulouse Lautrec or anyone else, always Van Gogh. I attach no particular significance to this other than people liking VVG and considering him the best piggyback.

More From Psychblogger Days - Paranoia

I have stressed many times since putting this post up that the symptom of paranoia precedes its target and exists independently of the target. Part of my best evidence for this was watching a patient over their first few admissions.  At first, they would only know that "something" was wrong, and that forces of some sort were against them. On a second admission they had discerned it had something to do with their sister, and by the third admission that their sister must be trying to screw them out of some inheritance by making them appear insane. Ten years later, the sister had long since died, there was no mention of an inheritance until I asked about it, and the patient was certain that the police were trying to frame him.

An update is the discussion of Conspiracy theorists over at The Studies Show a couple of weeks ago.  I thought it was almost balanced, though they are clearly liberal themselves. For example, they find the analysis in The Psychology of Conspiracies interesting in its thoughts but go on to point out that there isn't much solid research in it.  It touches on possible reasons for conspiracy beliefs - epistemic, existential, and social - and cites social science research along the way, but said research is often ill-defined or biased itself.  I concur.  It reads more like a persuasive essay to convince us of the authors' preloaded opinions.  And as Tom Chivers says on TSS, "After a bit I think I'll just go back to my own ideas."

*********

From 2011.  One of my paranoid patients uncovered the site Are You Targeted (no longer exists) in his searching the internet for proof that he is being harassed by Hollywood and popular music, with messages directed specifically at him. He takes the existence of this site as evidence that his paranoid delusions are true: See, this is happening to other people, too! That different things are happening to those people, and they each have different experiences from each other, with only minor overlap, fazes him not. It's all tied in together somehow.


My other really bright paranoid patient - she was a software developer up until a decade ago - has a different, nonelectronic set of delusions. A homeless person has been stalking her for at least three years, across three states, and recently revealed his existence by mistakenly leaving a purse she had lost in 2007 in a box in her apartment.

Here's the saddening, infuriating, and fascinating part. Both of them are now on medication, and are far more organised and relaxed. Both are able to coherently put on paper or into speech what they were unable to only a month ago. Then, additional notes up the side of the page, or between lines, or underlined and arrowed onto the back made their work unreadable. Now they can write in sentences and paragraphs. (I am overdrawing that somewhat, but the difference is dramatic.) Yet their delusions are absolutely untouched, with the possible exception of the fact that no new material is being added.

So there are two - at least two - parts to the illness, one which is treated by the medication and another which is untouched.

Jungle Boogie

You will notice the quality of the dancing, in contrast to yesterday. 

I did not hear this in the dorm, but I worked at a dinner restaurant summer of 1974 and this was all the rage. Great horns.

 

Not A Dance Tune

When even the Soul Train dancers can't figure out what to do with it, it's not a dance tune. But this is the one I chose from the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" album, which ruled in its era. It also had "Candle in the Wind" and a couple of others that charted on their own.

The songs continue on all the oldies stations and mixes playing in the supermarket, but I don't think they have worn well. However, he gets credit for creating a wide variety.

 All of 1974 for this.

 

Ruxandra Teslo - Edgelord

Teslo is one of those refreshing people who can change my mind by the intellectual force of her arguments.  I go into a topic thinking one way, which she gradually erodes by pulling chunks out of its foundation.  I am frequently left in a position of "Well, she hasn't convinced me, precisely, but she has exposed some weaknesses in my position that cannot be left untended.  I must think further about this."

The edgelords were right: a response to Scott Alexander: We should aim for better elites 

I take a breath and take stock of my position before entering the arena against Scott Alexander. I don't know if Ruxandra has to gird up her loins before sitting at her keyboard, but she does end up hitting "publish," however she got there. So at the moment she is carrying on disputes with Alexander, Lyman Stone, Richard Hanania, Holden Thorp - former editor of Science...Lord knows who else. She holds her own.

It is true that the shift of tech billionaires towards the right probably had an actual electoral impact, and that can be partially blamed on “edgelords”. However, it was not edgelords who led to the extreme wing of the liberal elite (e.g. Taylor Lorenz) alienating tech through constant attacks — an extreme self-own from the liberal coalition. It is worth noting, however, that despite tech billionaires donating more to the right, Democrats still amassed more money in total donations. So, overall, they had resources *and* the main establishment institutions on their side. To me, it clearly looks like something had gone wrong among classical establishment elites, or what Nate Silver calls “The Village”. To blame the “edgelords” instead seems incorrect and not in line with the data we have.

I think my view is now close to hers. Domain expertise is real, and preferable to populism.  But the unaccountability of elites had become dangerous, even Stalinist, because they controlled enough levers of power that they could squash opposition socially through ridicule. Media figures with less intellect but savvy social awareness learned to imitate them and pose as intellectual elites*, covering for them and allowing them to be lazy. Just as crony capitalism is not real capitalism, crony meritocracy is not real meritocracy. The pseudointellectuals were not stupid, but were way out over their skis. One can see how this hangs on but observing how much of the dismissive attitude on the left is not merely cartoonish, but actual cartoons. Trump/Musk/Hesgeth/Rubio is so stupid/uncaring/incompetent that he would probably... Ah, probably, yes.  You can read minds and predict the future, I see. Quotes and accusations have gotten so far out of context that it is clear that the meme-creators or not only neglecting primary sources, but even secondary sources.

If you were so smart, you should have been more responsible.  If you do not institute reforms with a scalpel, someone else will come in and do it with a hatchet.  I saw that working at the state hospital repeatedly, with units, whole departments, the hospital entire, and even the Division being dismantled by fools because the wise would not police themselves.  Crony meritocracy. Now Trump and his allies have moved the Overton Window, and more than a few nutcases have leaked in as well. Teslo weighs who caused this in fascinating fashion.

*I put Barack Obama in this category, and many other prominent Democrats of the last few decades.  Not stupid, but effective imitators of the intellectual class rather than thoughtful themselves. The real intellectuals cheered them on because they saw them as allies giving them access to power.

Testimony

Originally from 2011.  The link to Retriever now only works if you ask for an invitation.

 ********

Retriever has a post about her ambivalence listening to testimony at a churchwomens event she dragged herself to out of duty.

"Testimony Sunday" is a catchphrase in our family, based on an experience we had while church-shopping when Jonathan was almost 8 and Ben almost 4. We visited an independent Baptist congregation that friends attended, and happened to come on Testimony Sunday, a three-hour marathon. Interesting how various people see this variously. My wife liked it at first, though began to weary of it as we crossed the 100-minute mark. The friends we were honoring with the visit to their church were mortified: Sue Byrd swore she could see the steam escaping from my ears. Benjamin was initially fine - the Sunday School teachers had released the children, with some annoyance at having been left holding the bag, thank you very much, after 90 minutes, and while most of them were antsy, Ben had found a pile of books and was lying comfortably in the aisle, oblivious to those stepping over him. But at 3.9 years, he wasn't reading at a high level, and exhausted everything in his range and several outside it, in the next hour. At two-and-a-half hours, women were coming up to the microphone for second helpings of testimony giving, and I was growing homicidal.

Jonathan thought this was the coolest church service ever. Having only been to Lutheran services to that point, the idea of church where people would get up and cry and talk about their alcoholic parents and being beaten, going to school in awful clothes, having only bread and milk for food for a week - or alternatively, having husbands that went off for "affairs," - we had covered in our Ten Commandments teaching that "adultery" was stealing someone else's husband or wife, and I think he dimly grasped that something like this was up - and the police coming to your house or being teased at school... well my goodness, this is the most interesting church we have ever been in, Dad. Can we come back next week?

He didn't know from Baptists yet, that next week was going to be lots of scripture memorization and a few choruses of singing "Trust and Obey." Anyway, at Retriever's event

The speaker continued describing how at 15 she had become suicidal and been sent away to some teen center. And then I tuned partially out. Wondering "What are you leaving out?"

Yeah, exactly. Your terrible, neglectful Mom that you are kicking up and down the narthex in this testimony - what's her side of this?

It's not accidental that testimonies grew up as a major part of the church culture on the frontier and in the black church, where people were mobile and there wasn't going to be a lot of fact-checking. Christians of my age may remember what happened to Mike Warnke, who had the misfortune to straddle the old fundamentalist culture where people took you at face value and expected the same, versus the new evangelicalism where earnest young college students delighted in doing research about Christian topics.

Things People Don't Really Mean

What they mean is "Look over here!  Shiny! Shiny!"

I'm just trying to start a conversation is nearly always from the lips of a person who presents only one side of an issue, in a condescending and self-righteous manner. This is true in the art and literary worlds, and I have seen it a great deal upon my return to catching up with news. People who really want to discuss something want to find out what is true.

At least she's willing to stand up to the establishment.  Right or left, a last ditch effort to evade the fact that she has no supporting evidence. 

In my whole career, I have never seen such... My side did this a couple of years ago and I want you to forget that. 

I don't see why it wasn't a deal-breaker when... Because you broke the deal three or four times before we even got there. 

 

I think this would have been a great hashtag to start here twenty years ago.

 

Consanguinity

A large British longitudinal study (n=13727) confirms that children of first cousin marriage have higher rates of mortality, morbidity, and intellectual and developmental disability.   Mortality, morbidity and educational outcomes in children of consanguineous parents in the Born in Bradford cohort   

It was a a larger effect than I expected. For some reason I thought that first-cousin marriage had a consistent but mild deleterious effect cross-culturally.

I have one of those in my ancestry, in the 1800s in Nova Scotia among the Spinneys.  It seems we got over it.

Pledge Dance

Sororities would welcome their new pledges in late winter every year, and a pledge had to be presented with an escort, and the upperclasswomen likewise had to go out and find a date somewhere.  This created a Sadie Hawkins vibe in which girls could ask boys out. I had only dated girls non-sorority girls at first, but that was changed for me in 1973.  The Doobie Brothers were a standard with that crew. It makes sense. They fit the American Bandstand cliche "It had a good beat and the kids could dance to it, I gave it a 95."

 

This was likely played at all dances, but I only remember it in that setting. When Tracy invited me to hers in 1974 I considered it an important gesture of approval.

William James Sidis

Another post with a lot of links to keep you entertained while I am away.  Please comment here rather than at the individual links.  Billy Sidis was reputed at one time to have the highest IQ ever, at 254.  He was in Ripley's I think, the king of barely-sourced newspaper factoids. Most of my posts are longish, as are a few of the comments.

I first heard about Sidis from Grady Towers' essay "The Outsiders," in the late 80's. Perhaps vaguely before then, because he was from Boston. I wrote that up talking about Grady, whose story was also tragic and interesting. 

 And Another One Bites The Dust. An introduction as to why Sidis might not be the real deal.  7 comments, including the first of the argumentative ones.

 The Doubt  I discuss what the evidence of his IQ 254 or thereabouts is, and my initial suspicions that I want to "interrogate it" as we say these days. 14 comments, and things are heating up.  One person accuses me that I thought Sidis was not all that smart, another calls  him an outright fraud with no mathematical ability.  Both thought it best to be insulting to me along the way as well.  Thanks to Texan 99 for understanding what I actually said, deciding she agreed with it, and calmly defending it while I was getting testy with the others.  Thanks to James for evaluating Sidis's writings about physics. Great fun, in retrospect.

 Prodigy About whether genius always shows up in childhood.  One comment, very decent.

About That Harvard Exam One of the critics suggested that entrance into Harvard in those days was always an indication of high intelligence, and therefore Sidis entering at 11 puts him in the absolute top rank.  We examine the forbidding looking exam in detail and see that it is a bit less than that. 14 comments again, and this time even more snippy. I stand by my original opinion, thank you very much.

Smart, Wealthy, Athletic. A digression about definitions.  One comment, quite to the point, by Texan99 again.

 But If It's True We come to the final weighing.  4 comments, everyone has calmed down or left.

Facts Are Meaningless

 

This is a good place to link to Scott Alexander's The Toxoplasma of Rage again. I look at what supposedly rational people are post about politics on Facebook and I think "They can't possibly believe that.  Is no one standing back a few yards and asking themselves how this will all look in retrospect?" 

No they aren't.  This is performative politics, where you show how much you care and really really hate those other people, who are unutterably stupid, because you aren't a fair-weather supporter.  You are one of the best, a foxhole friend who sticks with their side even when it makes no sense.

After all, anyone can agree with you when you're right.  That doesn't mark you out as one of the special ones. 

Institutional Memory

Originally published fourteen years ago.  I have put the editing in parentheses.

 

Grumbling about work...

The central narrative of my 30+ (eventual 42) year employment at the hospital was being asked to work with the staff that no one else would, often put in those exact terms, culminating in being supervised by an insane person 1991-99. Then after, the liberation from this in 1999-2006, when I worked with the most wonderful people and everything I touched turned to gold. As central as those are, they are now virtually unknown outside a circle of about a half dozen people at work, and perhaps a dozen of my friends and family.

This was brought home forcefully over the last month (April 2011) in three work conversations. The previous supervisor, and what a strange, almost dangerous person she was, came up in conversation in matters unrelated to me. I mentioned that she had been my supervisor for eight years and received amazed, shocked looks. But she's diagnosable.* Dr. K made a detailed, non-humorous case for it when she covered on our unit, and gave us instructions how we were to deal with it. The other stunned comment was similar.

I thought: Yes, yes I know this. I said this for years, trying to get people to listen. But it's over now, and it ended well, actually. You didn't know? You worked the next unit over and no one ever mentioned it? Huh.

Similarly, the buoyant days of doing two jobs at once for the sheer joy of being appreciated and feeling competent had also slipped the minds of some I was sure would remember. Vague nods. Well shucks, then. I was kind of thinking I was holding the department aloft, covering for the impossible person, followed by covering two jobs. Those powerful people who assured me this was all being observed at a high level, and something would be done about it...well, I long ago figured out that no one was going to take any risks and do anything about it. But I guess I had still harbored the fantasy that someone had noticed those fifteen years.

So I asked the (new, third department head later) head of my department whether any of this information had ever come to her in passing over her three years here. Nope. She was quite fascinated, actually. She spoke with at least one other long-time member of the department about it after. I don't know that it changes anything. Just another up-short reminder: it is not merely that people see things differently and remember things differently - it is that most things aren't remembered at all. On the plus side, that may mean two major screwups of mine from those years, topics that I still wince at whenever someone wanders near them, may also have vanished.

Human nature being what it is, that's less likely, actually. But we are less noticed than we think. (Commenter Mike, who also worked for the State of NH, noted that this seemed fairly typical of what working for his agency was like as well.)

(And now even I had almost forgotten. When I read the old post I couldn't think when this had last occurred to me.  Right after full retirement, I'll bet. It all seems as if it happened to another person now.)

Ah, if only Stalin knew, (they used to tell themselves. I learned to understand that delusion quite well myself, but did escape it before the end.)

*I would now say Autism. Others claimed it was Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder with Psychotic Features, and I won't bore you with the differential. 

A Republican-Democrat Divide in 2011

It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Math.  I suspect the divide is less true, but still quite real.

As for the SNL trope using that line to make fun of Gerald Ford as if he were stupid, it should be noted that his degree was in Economics.  That department uses a little math from time to time. Ford was a decent man, and would laugh at the jokes made about him, such as his clumsiness - he was a Collegiate All-Star in football who played in the yearly game against the NFL champions in 1935.

Who I Left Out

Spoiler Alert.

No CSNY, no Eagles, no Carole King or James Taylor, though those were ubiquitous in the dorms. 

But just some guys I played with in college. 

I don't see either of their names on the registration list, though.

"Wasting" Your Third-Party Vote

Most of us consider a third-party vote wasted and say so when we encounter someone who is going to do it. This could be the election that is decided by a single vote.  It's close.  It's important, the most important election of your lifetime.* Every year there are, in fact, local elections that are tied or only a single vote. NH had a Senatorial race in the 70s where they decided to run the election again because the count and recount were very close, and also different.

But even the extremest of close elections, such as Florida in 2000, ends up with votes to spare for the winner.  In retrospect then, a third-party vote might have had more effect in terms of "sending a message" that People Like You wanted to be heard. Still rather small, but maybe even less wasted than a Republican/Democrat vote. We don't see this because we have had mostly duolithic elections for so many years that any other outcome seems intuitively unreal.

Europeans see more dramatic rising and falling of parties over their lifetimes.

Open The Door, Longhair!

Kenny Loggins, the rhythm guitarist, looks like my cousin Steve did. A lot more hair, though.

Late 1972

 

Expertise

I believe in domain competence and even domain expertise. Yet I have spent a great deal of my life listening to legitimate experts in one field speak as if they were therefore near-experts in another. My PCP forty years ago tried to insist on a very familiar, but nonetheless overexcited interpretation of 1 Cor 6:19 ("Actually Phil, I very seldom sleep with temple prostitutes"*). Psychologists are notorious for making half-baked social and political pronouncements, clergy try to pass themselves off as experts on economics. I am not expansive in what I count as expertise on a subject.  I have spent too much time explaining mental health law to attorneys or acute psychiatric emergencies to growth mindset psychologists for that. Paul Krugman knows more than the average bear on economics in general, but he is only an expert in a narrow area. He overreaches, as most economists do.

The suicide of expertise I have faulted Glenn Reynolds for his harping on the squandering of credibility by medical experts during Covid, when he was one of the first to start undermining it - and not always accurately.  But the date of this essay is 2017, so I have to acknowledge that this did not come out of the blue for him as a political convenience in 2020.  I have to give him more of a pass on the dangers of overreliance on expertise than I thought.

By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately (2017). As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”

I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Grandmothers taught you not to go swimming for an hour after eating, and night air was bad air. We have conveniently forgotten that some of the traditional wisdom was unutterably stupid, because it is so much fun to tell the opposite story. 

I am a talented amateur on a lot of subjects, but I don't think I would any longer call myself an expert even in the field I worked in for forty years. 

*Be it noted that I do believe the verse can be understood to include a lot of sexual behavior. I think it can be an influence on an overall approach to behavior. But for risky behavior, nutrition, drinking and smoking, cosmetics and body-focus - I think it is a serious overclaim.

Just Fun Writing

The essay Yet Another Reason To Hate College Admissions Essays over at ACX is behind the subscription paywall, but the following excerpt is included in a discussion post. 

Five, maybe ten percent of applicants are some kind of special snowflake whose father was murdered when they were five years old. As he lay there bleeding out, he said “Daughter, my whole life, I dreamed of being the first LGBT person to get a PhD in the study of ancient Assyria. Now that dream has been taken from me. With my dying breath, I give you my trowel and hand-painted figurine of Tiglath-Pileser III, in the hopes that one day you will succeed where I failed”. […]

The rest of us are just some kid who wants to go to college because that’s where all the good jobs are...The college admissions essay is what happens when you tell the second type of person that, in order to ever get a job better than busboy, they need to pretend to be the first type of person.

Anosognosia

I wrote a lot about Anosognosia in 2011. It figure prominently in my long series May We Believe Our Thoughts? At least, I think it did, because I am not going to read the series again.  My uncle was still alive then and the discussion/argument was fresh every day. I remember it as being both quite insightful and about five times as long as it needed to be. I may be exaggerating on both points. If anyone wants, they can tell me if its any good now.

There is one short one that is still interesting, though. Anosognosia - Or the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Texan99 had a kindly comment about the poor soul.

If There's a Bustle in Your Hedgerow

 I have posted many of the songs that I liked or performed in my younger years, but for this sequence I will post what everyone else played day and night - within reason, and when there is a choice to be made...

...I might pick the worst instead of the best. I am already toying with "I Believe in MIRACLES! Where ya from? You sexy thing!" 

But for now, the song that everyone played in 1972.  I tell younger people that I am so old that they didn't play Stairway To Heaven at my Senior Prom. It hadn't come out yet.

 

Anti-Gravity

 Babson's Partial Gravity Insulator. With picture.

Um, of the monument, not the gravity insulator

Justifications

 In all the outraged discussion about Kilmar Abrego Garcia it is true that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sent a minor filmmaker to jail for a year, blaming him for the explosive protests in the ME and ultimately for their own horrible misjudgements in Libya. It was ludicrous on its face and many outraged today turned a blind eye then.

It is also true that there was an increase in crime, especially violent and sexual crime directly attributable to illegal immigrants during the Biden administration that was shoved under the rug, denied, and explained away.  Many of the outraged today said nothing about that as well, except to claim that anyone bringing this up must be racist.  After all, most immigrants, even the illegal ones, did not commit violent crimes. Well, most Germans and especially Japanese did not commit violent crimes during WWII either, but we don't consider our contact with those nations at the time peaceful and non-problematic.  It is a sophistical argument.

There are many examples of similar hypocrisies by Trump's critics.

However, that does not make his actions right, and we should not be evasive ourselves by pretending it does. Americans have considered our treatment and protection of law for the disfavored to be a test of our commitment to our own stated values.  Do we really believe in free speech?  Do we really believe in the right to a fair trial? Due process? I do not claim that illegal immigrants have the same rights as citizens, nor that the outrageous claims I see from lefty meme factories have any validity. Just normal approved standards, done well enough.

I would like to see the administration make its case better.  No one should complain that an obscure case should not be elevated to such importance,  because that is what always happens. Those are the cards dealt.

Cake or Death

Sara Hoyt was right. Not all questions are easy.  We have to choose between bad choices - It is seldom Cake or Death?

 

Homicide Rate

 Homicide Rates by state.  Yet NH, VT, and ME are all very lax in their regulating guns and their terrible citizens have high rates of gun ownership. It's a mystery. 

Preparing For Contingencies

There was much brouhaha about Kamala's team preparing for the possible death of President Biden. There were accusations that this was evidence of how corrupt they were.  Simmer down, people. Would you rather they didn't think about it and had no plan?  "Golly Gee Willickers folks! We never saw that coming!  Who would have thought an 80-year-old guy might kick off unexpectedly?  What'll we do?  What'll we do?" They jolly well should have a plan, for that contingency and a lot of more remote ones.

I recall something similar from the Democratic side in 1996, when partisans, were outraged, outraged that the Republicans had started planning how to defeat Clinton within days of losing the election in 1992.  It just showed how they weren't even willing to give the royal couple a chance! The nerve!

Um, that would be their job, remember?  The sooner the better. 

Maybe I should go back to ignoring the news.

Baba O'Riley

We left today for Traditions Weekend, the elevated track to pitch for our money that William and Mary switches to for the 50th Reunion. We will drive down by an interesting route, going across Long Island Sound from New London CT by ferry to Orient Point, NY. We are planning to see the Custom House Maritime Museum.   From There we will go to Cape May to take another ferry, to Lewes DE. We will drive down the Delmarva Peninsula to stay with friends in Cape Charles, then take the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel and on to the Burg. There is an air of adventure about it for us that is reminiscent of our arrival in August 1971. 

With that in mind I have loaded in advance music from those years.  Freshman year I was in JBT-43, a dormitory that had just been refitted after being purchased from Eastern State Mental Hospital. It was far off campus and freshmen were not allowed to drive cars, so we took buses which ran regularly. Why they would give freshman boys, the students most likely to screw up schedules and self-discipline, the most disruptive arrangement I don't know. Or maybe it was actually a good idea, as it forced us off campus where the upperclassmen were drinking and hanging out with girls.

This song was played nonstop in the dorm my whole first semester.

 

Wyrd and Providence

A series from 2011 that I have reposted. I put up this series because I am leaving for Williamsburg today and want you to have something while I am gone until the 30th. This should keep you busy. Wyrd and Providence.   

A history professor tells me that Alexandra Walsham agrees with some of this in her Providence in Early Modern England, but at $100, it has sat on my wishlist for over a decade.

Please comment here and not at the individual links. Talk among yourselves and I'll catch up when I get back.  I will likely at least read the comments this week on my email, even iof I don't comment myself until May.