Opinions

 I have had it with people who disagree with me.  They're wrong.  They should go away.

Room To Move

I was not a blues fan until late in my adolescent listening career, but I did know to listen to John Mayall.  I don't think I'm enough an authority to know what to pick, but I like this.

Stop Looking At Each Other

 Sherry Ning at Pluripotent, Stop Looking At Each Other:

We often compare social media to Orwell’s surveillance state of 1984, but here’s what’s different about our telescreens: our screens do not exist to monitor us, but for us to monitor others. There is no totalitarian state behind our screens enforcing social order; instead, the screens turn us into the supervisors of each others’ behaviors.

...

When you chat with a stranger in real life, it’s usually one-on-one and they get to know you as much as you get to know them in real time. They spend as much attention on you as you spend on them. Social media relationships are parasocial — by definition, abnormal — because one million people are “getting to know” one person and that one person must pretend they are friends with one million people.

Most bloggers have this temptation at (ahem) a reduced level. I wonder if the 100 people who eventually read each post in a month are affecting me in ways I do not see and might want to look at harshly. My daughter-in-law has a million followers on TikTok and over all platforms, she may hit two million. I have no idea how this affects her, and neither does she.

I think different generations, different personalities, and both sexes get into trouble about this in different ways.  Those of us who grew up without social media are immune to a lot of these temptations and always will be.  With CS Lewis, I am thankful for temptations I am spared, because I don't do that well with the ones that do come to me. My father, who had many vices and knew it, once said to me "I'm glad I didn't grow up in this era, because I might be pushing a needle and spoon if I had."

Thanks to Rob Henderson for the link

Universal Basic Income

Well, this is sort of depressing but similar to what we have seen before.

Megan McArdle on X

I'm a UBI skeptic and this is worse than I'd have predicted: $1,000 a month reduces work and increases leisure. Minimal effect on schooling, job quality or other human capital investment. Hard to imagine selling UBI on data like this.  (Announcement here) (Study here)

Sarah Miller on X

The cash generated big improvements in stress and mental health, but they were short-lived. By the second year of the transfer, treatment and control reported similar rates of stress and mental health, and we can rule out even small improvements. (with graph)

Sarah Miller on X again

Mirroring what we see for mental health, the transfer generated large but short-lived reductions in food hardship/food insecurity; even by year 2, no significant difference across treatment arms. (graph)

We saw something similar in educational interventions like Head Start or whatever this year's new educational fad is. Scott Alexander has looked at educational interventions and concludes that gains are temporary and large findings are a result of selection bias (referencing Fredrik deBoer).

We saw something similar in criminal justice interventions. Good initial results that level off and become indistinguishable from controls fairly quickly.

You might tuck this thought into the back of your brain whenever you see the evaluation that some intervention "didn't scale up." It may not be the scaling, it may be that the effect wears off.  I knew a psychiatrist who claimed that Prozac usually wore off in a few years and you had to switch to something else. (Referring to depression, not OCD) We adjust to the new normal and our core personality reasserts itself.

"Tiny Ash Cannon" a text thread of mine that includes some you know, suggests that this is similar to the happiness studies about making more money. We just adjust our explanations to another level.

Theory of Mind Again

Those of you who are aspie/on the spectrum or who are close to someone who is, do you find that being able to see the person they want to understand, either on film or especially live, entirely offsets the impairment (for those who have an impairment - I don't think all aspies do)?  I think that for empathy the answer looks close to yes, that the nonverbal cues are sufficient; but for understanding strictly cognitive states, those cues only make up some of the ground.  Or perhaps merely hearing or reading about those states start them in a deeper hole in understanding than would be true for neurotypicals.

Hot Tuna

I admit I had forgotten about them.  I had never bought an album of theirs, only hearing them in the dorm.

They were a Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen project that went on for years.(Hey, I see they still tour.) Kaukonen was a part of the debate at the time of who was the greatest lead guitarist, with Hendrix and Clapton and a few others.

The fiddle player is Papa John Creach, who played with, well, everyone cool.

"$10M for the Big Guy."

So Biden is not going to actually enjoy all this money. Pudding isn't all that expensive. Huh.

Ecclesiastes 2:18  I hated all for which I had toiled under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who comes after me.

Who will get to enjoy this wealth?

Butchering Argentine Armadillos

Anthropic cut marks is the phrase used to describe evidence of butchery of armadillo-like creatures 21K y/a. This would be 30% older than previous finds, well before the prevailing theories of just a few years ago would allow.

At one level we might ask So what? Yes, all true knowledge has some value, but this would seem to be well down the list.  If the were pre-Clovis humans in the New World, they didn't leave more than a fragment of genes and no culture. They are not us, not even proto-us.

Well, we have a current narrative of extinction of megafauna being primarily due to hunting by man, despite the somewhat desperate attempts of some to prove it was climate change. We see it in the New World, in Australia and nearby islands, on Madagascar - pretty much everywhere. 

But here comes an example of the arrival of humans without mass extinctions. (Okay, they got this one and it is extinct now, but...generally.) So the story doesn't always have to play out that way. Why not in this case?

Assassination Conspiracy

 You'd think that a good conspiracy would be better organised.