Recent Gurwinder Quotes

 "The way to use chatbots is not to ask them what’s true but to tell them what you think is true and then ask them for feedback. This lets you learn without eroding your ability to think for yourself."

"Lessons learned are quickly forgotten unless they were learned in terror, or sorrow, or shame. Wisdom can always be rented for free, but it must be purchased with pain."

" ...while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing."

Russia Hoax and Ukraine

Steve Hsu interviews Scott Horton (transcript available) author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine .  Horton is a libertarian and antiwar activist and discusses the War in Ukraine at the beginning and end of the podcast, but the bulk of the discussion is about the accumulation of evidence that the Russia Hoax was coordinated by the FBI and CIA feeding information to media sources under the direction of the White House. Particularly disturbing was the amount of information coming from the bottom up, with agents reporting there was nothing to it, only to be told by their highest authorities to keep the investigation going anyway.

New Dog

We adopted a small terrier mix and renamed her Maggie. I mostly just call her "Fish Breath" which made me think of Sweet Molly Malone. 

I always think I won't like the Sinead O'Connor versions, and then she just knocks me flat.

 

Northern Lights

I saw them once in the 80s while camping in the north country in the middle of the night.  Despite many attempts I had never seen them again, and my wife had never seen them.  Over the last few years, the most likely night have turned out to be cloudy. Our sons and their families on the Arctic Circle see them often, including absolutely spectacular sightings.

A FB posting from only minutes before sent us out into the cold, and we did get to see them. One can often see them better through the camera lens, and if one can keep the camera still (I cannot - I have always had tremble) with the aperture open the effect is multiplied. My wife got this shot last night. Not spectacular, but real.

Wednesday Links

 Everything is Television  Social media is becoming constant short form video.  "In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol."

Cognitive Dissonance It has happened again. A new paper, based on a tranche of unsealed historical documents, casts serious doubt on a piece of social psychology research from the mid-20th Century. Shocker!

Herodotus Validated  The Scythians used human leather on their quivers. I never trusted those guys.

How the Letter E Almost Ruined English Poetry  It includes good descriptions of the loss of grammatical endings in Germanic languages and even more in English and how that influenced the accenting of syllables.

Jesse Singal on the "Feminization" Discourse - Part 1 This provides some context on how even mild versions of Helen Andrews claim are utterly rejected in many fields of the academy, with shockingly little evidence.  I know, I know, in our section of the blogosphere we've known this for years.  But it is still new to some people.  Part II discusses how Singal thinks Andrews's overall argument still has holes.  (Leah Libresco Sargeant at The Free Press points out that if the theory were entirely true, highly feminized professions like Pharmacist and Veterinary Medicine would have collapsed. )

Dialing For Dollars

 Early Social Media roping you in.  You had to know "the count and the amount" in Dialing for Dollars.

I wondered when it had gone off the air, because I associated it with the 1970s, and it turns out it hung on for a long time, with some descendants even today. Our memories of the cut-ins will likely be different, because it was local programming with regional variations.

 

 

Tuesday Links

A Review of Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert

Ruxandra Teslo on AI and Drug Discovery.  Transformative new drugs are already declining, and AI may not help much. A bit depressing.

In Defense of Men by Will Storr.  The part that continues to surprise and irritate me about this is that I have been reading this for years, but most of America, especially women,  seems to find this new.  Of those who have heard it, many think it is untrue and an example of men whining to even mention it. We don't understand that women have it so much harder that the struggles of men do not even bear mentioning.

Speaking of Organ Donation, this from Sensible Medicine. The Ultimate Medical Drama. One cousin of mine donated a kidney to a sister who has PKD. I am no longer close to either and don't know if the "tyranny of the gift" applied in their case. 

The níðstǫng in Gesta Danorum at Saxo Grammaticus, an entire blog about the Gesta Danorum. This one is about curses, a band a wizards, and a horse's head on a pole. I actually quoted the Gesta Danorum in my final paper for English. I no longer remember what the quote was, but am certain it was not anything I had read myself, not even in translation. I lifted some quote from another source and copied the footnote. It was there purely for show. 

Jonathan Smith at The Orthosphere glares over the top of his glasses at Pope Leo's new "Mass for the Care of the World." Quite the heated discussion follows. You might want to make a stiffish brandy and soda before settling down to this one. 

Settle Down, Now

At a hotel in Montreal, my son and DIL were in a cluster of four rooms at the end of the hall. The second night, the other three rooms were occupied by students preparing to go out after midnight for a Hallowe'en party, in and out of each others rooms noisily. It was bad enough that Ben eventually called hotel security, which improved things a little.  We debated whether with would be better to go out into the hall and make the request oneself rather than call in the fuzz. Which would be more likely to escalate things?  Which would be more likely to work? 

Jen thought that the best solution would be to go out into the hall and saying "Our daughter is having an organ transplant tomorrow and needs to be well-rested."  That seems hard to top. 

The War Between the Sexes

That's what we used to call it, and it had both a serious/angry, humorous/affectionate tone to it, plus plenty in the middle that was pointed. Hearing about a radio celebrity publicly criticising his soon-to-be ex it occurred to me that he would have a ready audience of guys prepared to take his side and believe his version automatically.  His wife could also fin such an immediate audience as well should she choose to.  I sighed. Well, that's the way of the world.  It was ever thus...no, wait a minute a lot of this is new! I am embarrassed that this never occurred to me until I was today-years-old, as the new saying is.

The increase in divorce since about 1965 has created a stable percentage of adults who are divorced. 15+%.  It would be higher, but people remarry.  Add to that the people who have had longterm cohabitations that ended, many unhappily. Counterbalancing this are the previous relationships that were deeply unhappy but they did not divorce. This can hardly have been good for the general opinions men and women had of each other. Still, it seems to have been more contained than now. There are also those who remarry more happily the second time. How the reduced frequency of marrying at all fits into this seems multisided in terms of everyone getting along. However, I note that a smaller percentage of recent generations have to keep at least one person of the opposite sex happy. It would seem that at least one fence of the pasture is down.

I'm not much concerned with the actual measurements of this at the moment, not until I have some idea of the balancing.  Yet I note that this is new, and likely contributes to our national er, discussions more than I had thought to credit before. One more pool of disaffected people.

Shutdown/Reopening

I noticed that two of the eight Democratic senators who voted for reopening were from NH, a very purple state, so I looked up who the others were. Five of the other six were also from very purple states, Durbin of Illinois being the exception. Viewed from an entirely tactical perspective, the usual results when one party decides it needs to cut its losses is that the members in most jeopardy appeal to the leaders and say "You're killing us here. We need to switch or you have to give us something really nice to compensate with our electorate." When the pressure gets too much, the leader gets them a couple more votes from ultra-safe districts where they aren't going to vote for the other party no matter what. 

I don't think this means there are fewer ultra-safe districts for the Democrats this time, but that the ultra-safe districts are worried about primary challenges.  This is also very standard.  When one party dominates entirely in a place, factions within that party become more powerful and important. Dominic Cummings is convinced that most national party politics is about the members in safe districts competing for power within their own party, not against the other party. It Takes a Village You Didn't Build. 

When there are close votes with defectors from purple areas, there are claims of hypocrisy that they never cared about the principles they were shouting about 24 hours ago, only about their own advantage. So now it's all "Har, har! You never cared about hungry people at all, did ya?" I think that is always in the front of the minds of politicians in general, but I don't conclude from that that it is all hypocrisy.  I believe they do care about these things somewhat. I think I am more angry at the hyperventilating from supporters who were shouting "plague o'er the earth" yesterday if the government did not start SNAP benefits immediately who are now upset at the cost to the party of it happening. I'm not thinking of a recent Republican equivalent, but I expect there is one there somewhere. There usually is. 

 

Monday Links

 Wealth, War, and Worse A short history of the Plague

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia.  We can learn an enormous amount about evolution in general

Sally Satel reviews Unshrunk. She is right because she agrees with me! I suspected from the start that Laura Delano had Borderline Personality Disorder, for which medications are not often useful. As the story unfolded it became inevitable where the story would end. She got off meds, endured the pain of learning to reduce impulsiveness and make good decisions, and got older. All three help.

Good and Evil are Native Pagan Concepts  at Norse Mythology and Germanic Lore 

The green energy myth is condemning Africa to Poverty 

 

 

Sunday Links

 A video of Ted Cruz getting quite exercised about the growing antisemitism on the right.  Good for him.

Highbrow Misinformation   Even without a subscription you can read the part about climate.

The highly-literate and abundantly fertile Psmiths cleverly review a book about why having children should be easier now but is harder. 

Also the Psmiths, reviewing The Real Korea   I did not know this.  Not even a little bit.

The quest for perfect communism was also assisted, ironically enough, by the fact that only half the peninsula was heading that way. In the first years of the two Koreas, the line of demarcation between them was very poorly guarded. This resulted in a vast demographic sorting, analogous to India’s partition, but far more thorough. Many of the most idealistic and educated South Koreans, who tended to harbor leftist and communist sympathies, headed North to create a worker’s paradise. This further added to North Korea’s human capital. Conversely, a torrent of former landlords, entrepreneurs, and Christian activists fled South.  

 Arctic Frost Is a Real Scandal, by Eli Lake.  I'm sure it is, but I think of Bullwinkle 

 

O Waly, Waly

The Water is Wide, I cannot cross o'er

And neither have I wings to fly

Give me a boat that can carry two

And both shall row, my love and I 

Sometimes I think I would like to have the verse on the bench that is our headstone.  Mrs. Wyman disagrees. It is a good verse for when one has died and the other remains. 

 

The Water is Wide has a jumbled history, as most folk songs do. I did not know until I read the Grokipedia entry that one can sing "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" to it.

France Is Already Doing This

When I have discussed reduced fertility and possible pro-natalist policies that would help, I not only quote "things to try," and "reasons why we aren't having children," but my commenters are likely to offer their own ideas. However...

France has already implemented most of the modern pro-natalist wish list (reducing income tax rates based on the size of the household, cash payments to mothers at birth, cash allowances for families, subsidized child care, universal paid parental leave, school cost payments, and housing subsidies for families with three or more children), though many of these programs are means-tested, and the French state has been ideologically pro-natalist since the interwar period. In total, France spends about 3.6% of GDP on family programs, rising to 4.7% if you account for the indirect income tax adjustments and pensions benefits (the highest in the OECD). France does have the highest fertility in Europe… but this is largely due to the exceptionally high fertility (TFR = 2.95) of non-European immigrants, who account for 22% of total births. Rather than bringing French fertility to replacement, the French pro-natalist state overwhelmingly subsidizes large families in the massive Arab and African populations (which makes the problems of population decline worse, not better). Contrary to the Age of Malthusian Industrialism hypothesis, native French fertility (TFR = 1.62) is at the high end for Europe but by no means exceptional.

(From Arcotherium at Aporia "Communist Pro-Natalism")

Comeback

In an online argument I read last night a young man was furious at how difficult the economy is for young people now, citing familiar statistics about housing costs (new houses were 1/3 the size in the 1960s) and wages (exclusive of benefits, the much smaller percentage of people working at that level, and more) and college costs. 

He fell into a trap laid by an older person who partly agreed with him, stressing deterioration of services by cheap bastard companies trying to gouge us. He described the amazing meals and service in airplanes compared to what they served now, and how little space we have. There was an exchange of agreement. 

"So how was your last flight?" 

The boy bit, and complained about a transatlantic flight last year. 

The older man: "I didn't even go up in a plane until I was 41, and not to another country for ten years after that. Yeah, life is tough for young people now." 

Infant and Maternal Mortality

"America’s maternal mortality rate is shocking: In 2023—the most recent year for which there’s reliable data—almost 19 in 100,000 women died in childbirth. (The equivalent figure in the UK was 12.67.) Among black women, the rate was 50 in 100,000. Every American should demand better care for mothers—and be grateful to Carmon for her reporting." (Iris Carmon, author of Unbearable.)  Kara Kennedy "Progressives Can't Bear Pregnancy" at The Free Press

Numbers like this circulate a lot. Aaron Sorkin* had one of his characters rant over a decade ago about everything the US did wrong, and nearly every number had the same explanation. The black numbers are much worse in many categories, and they are 11% of the overall population. If you apply that to the quote above, you will see that our mortality rate is not shocking - our black mortality rate is shocking. The rest of the country, including Hispanics and Asians, is about the same as the UK. This applies to education rankings, longevity, homicide, incarceration, and more. If you do the quick math in your head and multiply the black rate by whatever factor separates them and then apply it to the whole, the numbers match up moderately well. 

The followup questions are all variations of why. There is an automatic leaping to the conclusion that it must be about racism, or poverty, or lack of access, or medical professionals paying worse attention to black women.  Yet when you try to illustrate with real data what people are sure must be true it turns out to be hard to nail down. Because the mortality numbers vary somewhat by state, inequality is probably part of the answer.  That could be some of it.  But it is well less than half the explanation, because the numbers are the same for blacks in other countries.  For every country to be exactly as racist, or blacks there to be exactly as comparatively poor is less likely than the probability that something genetic is happening. Survival in Africa was different from survival in Pakistan was different from survival in London. That this entire evolutionary history vanishes in a couple of centuries is too much to ask. 

Other countries talk about racism, but we are one of the very few countries that actually are multi-racial.  I have long been irritated at Europeans sniffing at us when they are just short of a Viking invasion for whiteness overall. Plus, their record with Jews and Roma is still poor, and recent immigration is not going smoothly. The Anglo Canadians don't even get along with their French, who were also white Northern Europeans. Sorry, that was a tangent to an old soapbox of mine. 

None of the three links address full reasons for the maternal/infant mortality rates racial disparities, but they all bring out interesting possibilities. 

I think Cremieux's is the most interesting  and most thorough

Peter Frost  at Aporia has one about Mother-Fetus Mismatch that was surprising.

Plus some data from Europe. I am wondering if the UK definition of Asian is different from ours, or the countries that make it up have a different balance.

*When I went looking for the Aaron Sorkin tirade from over a decade ago that the US is not the greatest country in the world, citing the infant mortality statistics.  Graph Paper Diaries was the sixth search engine entry. 

Repeal the 19th Amendment

Apparently this is a thing now.  I have heard it suggested humorously for many years, and quarter-seriously by some men looking at the voting demographics and not liking the results. The premise seems to be that women are fooled by charismatic charlatans who can't deliver on what they promised.  Well they are.  But this is one of the main ways that men get to have sex, so you may not want to advertise the point too loudly. This also points up a major weakness of the scheme, that men also get taken in by women who um, don't necessarily have their best interests at heart.  Or by men who have great advice what will work with women.

I imagine you could ask advertisers for their opinion who would tell you with a straight face "Oh!  Oh sure! Men never spend their money on stupid things, which is what makes our job so hard!"

Thus the best you can manage at that point is "Okay, men are also fooled by politicians and stupid ideas, but women are fooled more often." Pretend it's true. How are you going to repeal the amendment?  Where are you going to find the votes for that, even in Congress which is predominantly male. Secret ballot? How are 74 men going to convince their wives and daughters that they weren't one of the 67 who voted for it? But say it works by some wild chance.  Now you have 100,000,000 angry women who will then blame men - with some justification - for everything that goes wrong.  I mean, even more than they do now. Tell you what, Mack. Why don't you find that country and get back to me how moving there worked out for ya.

So it's obviously trolling women to convince them everything would be better if they were more like men. Well. I suppose that would be a refreshing change from what I have been hearing from women since fifth grade, but I think that will have the same success rate as trying to repeal the 19th. Shaming people always works so well, y'know?  

 

Not a Pet

 Man explaining his leashed cat to store security:  It's not a pet, it's a "lack of support" animal to prevent me from becoming too conceited.

Next woman in line: It's not working. 

Politics and Religion

Politics and religion have been dancing a long time. And every time it happens, politics ends up leading - and stepping all over the feet of religion. Mike Woodruff "The Friday Update" Woodruff is senior pastor at a multi-site church in the northern suburbs of Chicago.  My wife has been reading me quotes from his updates for a few weeks now, and I always sigh at what new Christian site she has found that I'm not going to like.  But I am entirely wrong about this and I find his simple style engaging.  I think he is doing what I do, only better.

I have aware of this concept for some time - it is very much part of Lewis's teaching, such as the "Christianity and..." of Screwtape, several of the essays in God in the Dock, and most chillingly, in That Hideous Strength. I thought we came to "the fell incensed points of might opposites" (Hamlet) in the 80s and 90s, when I was assailed by the mostly-decent but quietly self-righteous believers left and right. I was not good at being nice to either of them. 

It is back with a vengeance now, or maybe social media just gives a platform to the worst of them.  I don't think Episcopalians have heard many sermons on demon rum or adultery over the last decades - the priests reserve the hellfire and brimstone for the evils of Republicans.  I suspect it has the same effect as the old sermons did, scaring the bejeesus out of the already converted and making sure they don't dare leave and go out into the void, but chasing the unconverted away. I cannot believe the tone and accusation I am hearing from men and women of the cloth, spoken with the absolute certainty that is itself a red flag. 

Yet that isn't the whole story. Simmering up among the online young is a Christian conservatism with many good aspects, but entirely too welcoming to old demons in new disguises.  I don't know these children that well, and I doubt they will listen to one such as I.  But I have seen this before. I recall the revival weekends on church signs: Faith. Family. Country. " 

“If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.” CS Lewis The Four Loves.  Yes, if even love can fall, and can fall farther than mere lust, so too can love of family and love of country. The higher a thing can rise, the greater is its fall.

My own words would be that if a Christian develops any politics, the danger of the political beliefs becoming the faith is so great as to be irresistible without Divine aid.  Our tendency to self-deception is bottomless, whether we go off a cliff or sink into the marshes. The demon discovered simply hides one level further down.