Cursed Film

Story at The Hard Times: Everyone who worked on the film "Nosferatu" has died.

 

Varied Links

 Spider Robots for Surgical Interventions.

Empire State of Mind. 

America's Incarceration Rate is About To Fall of a Cliff.  Very interesting numbers, but I wonder about dynamic effects.

"Dog" is a weird word.  It appears out of nowhere about 1200. I am going to go lose some time on this website.

Cremieux knows how to revive America's dying malls. 

CS Lewis on Prayer

 

Subtle Slanting

The Free Press writers split fairly evenly 3 ways in the last election, Harris - Trump - 3rdparty/none, according to Bari Weiss. That's encouraging, as it reduces (though does not eliminate) the chance of reading someone on your side or another who is not completely starkers. It always has a few articles about everyone simmering down and trying to be gracious. I am not a subscriber, and you will only see the first few paragraphs, as usual. You Don't Need the Same Politics to Surf Together. The author is trying to be fair, low-key, even affectionate about his brother-in law. Yet look at the choices made and not made in the descriptions. His brother-in-law is described as vaccine skeptical, but he does not describe himself as vaccine obedient.  Perhaps that would be too strong, but it is there. Not even "vaccine advocating." It just sits there that he believes the default, his brother-in-law is the one who is a bit unusual.  He describes the other as Joe Rogan-listening, but does not put forth any similarly controversial or stereotypical figure who he listens to that might allow others to slot him negatively.  He mentions that his brother-in-law is an electrician, fine. He "mentions" that he wrote for the Obama White House (at 24!) and went to Yale.  Not college, mind you, not a political speechwriter, but at the White House.

So are we all, I suppose, and I likely notice it more coming from one direction than another. Yet I think such things are more persuasive in the long run because they slide behind our intellectual awareness to our social sense of who are the best people, the right people, the ones we want to be part of. When I was a child, "batteries not included" was a joke illustrating that we were smart enough to have seen through the advertiser's pitch on TV.  Direct propaganda we defend against more easily. When it is under the radar we are tricked into thinking that we have figured all this out ourselves, that no one has put one over on us.  We are independent thinkers, after all. 

Cosmic Justice

The issue is not whether you think Harvard (or Columbia, Cornell, etc) or Trump is a greater force for good in the grand scheme of things, the issue is whether Harvard broke the law, and if so, how badly and how consciously; and whether Trump is breaking the law in what he is doing to them. The verb tenses are important because one is a determination about a series of set facts that have occurred.  Trump is mercurial and might modify his actions against Harvard a few times before he is done.

I don't write this to call other people stupid.  I have been guilty of focusing on the cosmic justice rather than the actual legal issue a few times in my life.  It's hard to give up the grand cause. 

America Party

Well, if Democrats were worried how they were going to get back in power, Musk forming a new party likely has them relieved. They wouldn't even have to pivot to the center or learn how to talk to young men.

Climate Emotions

Via Instapundit and Just the News*, a study in The Lancet about how worried young people are about climate. This came up in relation to a discussion of Greta Thunberg and her mental health issues. She had a sense of foreboding before she became involved in climate affairs.  She and her parents discovered that her symptoms were reduced when she was allowed to dramatically tell others what to do about climate. As she adopts other limelight causes this becomes more apparent.  If it were not climate, it would be something else.

Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events 

I suggest that The Lancet has the arrow of causality reversed.  As with paranoia and depression, anxiety usually precedes its eventual focus.  Feelings of anxiety in response to events is more properly thought of as nervousness. You can see that the once-respected British medical publication has begged the question right at the outset in the abstract.

 Climate change has adverse effects on youth mental health and wellbeing, but limited large-scale data exist globally or in the USA. Understanding the patterns and consequences of climate-related distress among US youth can inform necessary responses at the individual, community, and policy level.

The possibility that they were going to be nervous anyway apparently did not occur to the authors.  It might be an interesting question to ask why young people settled on climate as the thing to be unsettled about. That question would lead us to examining what young people had "emotions" about before. Whether adolescents are more anxious now than they were in 1825 we do not know.  We develop a sense of that from correspondence, diaries, and the arts, but we do not know. My belief is that young people are about equally anxious in all eras.  They quite naturally become more nervous in the face of war, famine, disease, or being orphaned. We are evolutionarily wired for a certain level of anxiety, likely modified by the environment activating programs we already have on disk.

 *As predicted by one of my rules of naming, a site called "Just the News" is going to in fact be highly slanted. I am wary of the word "truth" in a title, or many uses of the word "just" as in We were just trying to educate the public about their right to photograph the police. We were just hanging out near the girls' locker room. The site is indeed slanted rightward. 

Julian Bream - Renaissance Lute

 

Schizophrenia and Gut Biomes

If you had run across this theory and wondered if there were something to it, Scott Alexander explains why he thinks it doesn't hold up. Contra Skolnick on Schizophrenia Microbes.  The usual style at ACX.  Point 1, Point 1A, possible objection considered and answered, Point 2 brief point with promise of later discussion, Point 3 referring to previous post...

Sterphen Skolnick answers in the comments.  Not very effectively, to my eyes, but I admit I was already unsympathetic at that point. 

Track Records

 Karsten Warholm WR 300mH

Nico Young US 5K  

Watch this kid with the memorable name. 17 y/o Gout Gout with the Australian 200m record.  Goes under 20 wind-aided with a tentative start.

Jakob Ingebrigtsen World indoor mile. 

 

Empathy Again

The overall sentiment is true, and important.  "Sparing the wolf is shallow, not deep empathy." But as we have covered here, and Grim covered in some detail, empathy is not the word Musk is looking for. The simple word "kindness" would have been better, and in line with the advice to use a simple word rather than a complicated one. That someone as smart as Musk uses "empathy" in that manner tells me that it is already well on its way to being a mere mild synonym for kindness, fellow-feeling, goodness.  It's a shame when a useful word with distinct meaning gets watered down to a vague approval.  We have plenty of those already.

Other words will rise to take the place of the weak ones. 

Missing Heritability

Once again, I find that I know very little.  Much More Than You Wanted to Know over at ACX. I hope my 20 years of misleading you has been much less than half. It is as long an article as you would predict ACX would devote to it. But as it flips everything up in the air and we are still waiting for the fried goods to come down, it would sort of have to be.  

There is a whole new group of Anti-Hereditarians over the last decade or so, who have applied very strict standards to what we can predict from genes, causing our previous estimates to look much more fragile. 

It seems like we have to accept one of three possibilities:

Either something is wrong with twin studies.

Or something is wrong with Sib-Regression and RDR (and then we can explain away GWAS and GREML by saying they’re missing rare variants).

Or something is wrong with how we’re thinking about this topic and comparing things. 

The hereditarians are fighting back with some compelling evidence that there are some things we do know by gross measurement, even if we are unable to make that more granular. Dr. Alexander gives a good personal example.

 During residency, I spent a few months working in a child psychiatric hospital for the worst of the worst - kids who committed murder or rape or something before age 18. Many of these children had similar stories: they were taken from their parents just after birth because the parents were criminals/drug addicts/in jail/abusing them. Then they were adopted out to some extremely nice Christian family whose church told them that God wanted them to help poor little children in need. Then they promptly proceeded to commit crime / get addicted to drugs / go to jail / abuse people, all while those families’ biological children were goody-goodies who never got so much as a school detention. When I met with the families, they would always be surprised that things had gone so badly, insisting that they’d raised them exactly like their own son/daughter and taught them good Christian morals. I had to resist the urge to shove a pile of twin studies in their face. This has left me convinced that behavioral traits are highly heritable to a level that it would be hard for any study to contradict.

 (I am a big Cremieux fan, BTW.) 

The Anti-Hereditarians strike back!

 Sib-Regression is a clever way of avoiding most biases. Its independent variable - the degree to which some sibling pairs end up with slightly more shared genes than others - is even more random and exogenous than the difference between fraternal and identical twins. It can sometimes have biases related to assortative mating (which would falsely push heritability down), but otherwise it’s pretty good. RDR has many of the same advantages, and allows more diverse relationships and so larger sample sizes. It’s hard to think of ways these methods could be wildly off.

And the "maybe we are just looking at this all wrong" group has some power in it as well.  Some traits like intelligence (IQ) and educational attainment (EA), where we (think we) can easily see how they must be related, but also can easily see they would have some wild variance may be related just about as much as we have been measuring, but for completely different reasons, so that our further testing is leading us down false paths.

Each of those possibilities would mean we have a lot of humble thinking to do.  So I will start by learning more humility, as that is one thing that is going to clearly be needed.  

The Smell of It

For a moment as she started, I could smell the interior of the guitar.  Unfinished wood. I don't know if it was the appearance, or expectations, or maybe even something about the musician.  I am not usually noted for intensity of sensory experience.  But as I get older I find uncomfortable sensory input such as brightness, echo, and skin irritation* are more noticeable, so perhaps this is related.

 *Autistic children are sometimes upset by the feel of their clothing labels, especially shirts.  I could not recall that ever happening to me as a child.  But recently it has started happening.  I notice the feel of the label on my neck and don't like it. Interesting.

Let's add this one in, because I found it along the way and liked it. 

 

Birthright Citizenship

From Amy Coney Barret's majority opinion:

"JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: '[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.' Ibid. That goes for judges too."

Damage Reports

When it comes to intelligence reports showing up in the media, there are always feints and double-feints. Sometimes the intended audience to be fooled is not the general public but another country's general public, or its intelligence service, or some intricate balancing act many audiences. It causes me to forget my role as the person pointing out the obvious. The chorus in the ancient Greek dramas was usually supposed to represent to what the audience wanted to say, or what the community would wish to ask. It's a useful part of the play.

There are reports that the American bombs destroyed nearly everything of importance at the Iranian nuclear sites. Then there are reports that much of the good stuff was taken away in the nick of time and it was merely a flesh wound. All reports are careful to say that they are being cautious because it's all way underground and it hasn't been analysed yet, then they are not the least bit cautious at all and make some pretty declarative statements. 

It occurs to me that if they weren't destroyed the Israelis would want every one to know that so they could bomb them some more.  Heck, they might want everyone to think they weren't destroyed even if they were, for the same purpose of public opinion about more bombing. Am I just being naive here?

Botswana

 Hot take from Magatte Wade Director of Atlas Network's Center for African Prosperity, at her substack, Africa's Bright Future.

The results speak volumes. 

From one of Africa's poorest countries to middle-income status in a generation. 

Consistent growth while socialist experiments collapsed around them.  

Alpha School

 ACX runs an essay contest every year, not revealing the authors until after the judging. This entry reviews "Alpha School," this year's magic educational fix. He seems both as skeptical as we would be, except he has tried it out on his own children.  He faults the program for not describing what they are doing quite accurately.  He worries that it will not scale up, as other methods have not. It is not only 2 hours a day.  It is not teacher-free.  It does not use AI. However...

…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.

That would be worth studying with more effort than a lot of things we are studying about education now. 

Horrible to Contemplate

 IDF soldiers ordered to fire upon unarmed Gazans. Much was made of Hamas killing Palestinians coming to humanitarian aid sites of the US-Israeli food outreach. Now it looks like some Israeli officers are ordering the same thing.  I would have more doubt about the story if it came from a Palestinian-favoring site, but this is Haaretz.  The IDF promises to investigate.  Chilling.

 Soldiers quoted in the report called the locations a "killing field," saying commanders authorised the use of heavy machine-guns, grenade launchers, mortars and tank fire rather than non-lethal crowd-control methods. One soldier said between one and five people were killed every day in the sector where he served, an operation informally dubbed "Salted Fish". 

2012 Links - Highly Varied

I must have been reading widely on the Internet that month. 

 Liz Warren's Authentic Cherokee Gefilte Fish.  At No Oil For Pacifists

Supportive Community 

Dave Barry's Best Ever The Story of Roger and Elaine. 

Fairytale - 2009 Eurovision Winner 

Express Lanes  

The Proverbs 31 Woman  Not as well-written as I would like, but the concept holds.

History of Cricket

 Sort of.

 

It was a relief to find this.  I had been bothered all afternoon wondering if Leg Before Wicket was a rule before Lexington and Concord or after.