To Improve The World

We are reading Kaplan's Revenge of Geography, which quotes Hans J Morgenthau's 1948 Politics Among Nations with reference to Thucydides 2,400 year-old The Peloponnesian War.  

The world "is the result of forces inherent in human nature." And human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos). and honor (doxa). "To improve the world," writes Morgenthau, "one must work with these forces, not against them." Thus, realism accepts the human material at hand, however imperfect that material may be. "It appeals to historical precedent rather than abstract principle and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good."

I don't want to pretend to be wiser than Morgenthau - actually I do want to pretend that but have an immediate caution that this is likely ridiculous - but I don't think that is quite what is happening. We do take those forces into account, but each of us allows any one of them to blind us to the other two.  We focus on the bent sense of honor in Moslem countries, or their fear or self-interest, but never it seems, on all three at once. As we likely need a three-legged stool of motives to convince ourselves to do something, leaving out one of the motives above opens up a slot for us to zip in one of those absolutes and pretend it is not a cat in a dog family among the others. Honor has elements of desire for not only praise, but justice. Self-interest is nearly always loyalty to a larger group, and thus includes selflessness. Fear includes caution, planning, counting the cost. Thucydides' motives are the abstracts, applied at a discount among fallen mankind.

The abstracts reflect the sun too well, not too poorly, and we cannot bear to look at them directly.  Certainly not three at once, without tarnishing them back into something manageable. Yet the New Testament does instruct us to look at them directly, using the language of searing brightness at every turn. 

Paul Erlich

I had a girlfriend in 1971 who was assigned The Population Bomb in some (HS) sophomore social studies class and was very excited to tell me about it.  She became seriously ZPG and did in fact never have any children. Neither did her two brothers, so her two brilliant parents from Nebraska ended up having no grandchildren.  (Note to Jonathan and Ben - this was the girl who I competed with for a month over who could memorise the most decimal places of pi.) Erlich was on everyone's lips in those days, including enough career-first people, male and female, to have a significant influence on the fertility crisis which was already invisibly underway.

To be fair, he might have only provided a convenient rationalisation. 

He joined the Prometheus Society  in the late 1980s*, when it still had over a hundred members worldwide. He was fawned over, as was Marilyn Mach Vos Savant, another person with name recognition.  He is perhaps the best example I have run across of what IQ is and is not. I don't know which of the several entrance requirements he met, but reading his interactions (he wrote no articles for the journal), he was clearly quite intelligent.  Plenty of candlepower. But he was unable to deal with the slightest criticism and dug in immediately when challenged, often using condescension and credentialism as weapons. Some of his main assertions in the book had already proved overstated and perhaps simply wrong by 1989, but he gave not an inch. I did not have any direct arguments with him, as I felt my role as president required as even handed an approach as I could manage. He had not yet lost his famous - okay, nerd-famous - bet with Julian Simon, but his critics in the society were already pointing out that the was just about to lose not only lose the overall bet on the combined prices of five commodities, but on all five commodities individually. 

I used the analogy of being physically powerful enough to forcefully twist in a screw that is cross-threaded to his ability to make an inaccurate theory look plausible by sheer intellectual force. I still like that metaphor and am annoyed that it never caught on.

*It not only still clings to existence with about forty members, but gratifyingly still lists me as a previous officer.  Best figurehead honor I ever had. Amazingly, I am one of the longest-serving presidents, which is less prestigious as the last few have resigned or died in office with no visible diminution of cultural presence for the group. It will look great in my obituary as long as no one looks beyond the most superficial level of what, precisely, was entailed in this international power.  Rather like being Winter Carnival King in 1970 or voted Most Self-Actualised in the year I barely eluded arrest. I think I have collected other worthless honors over the years.  Dare I look any closer? 

Best Ever?

 I saw in a Free Press subheader that Whitney Houston's National Anthem was the best ever, so I had to have a listen.

 Super Bowl 1991,  ten days after the start of the war in the Persian Gulf, for context.

 

 

Bureaucracy Preventing Cures

Ruxandra Teslo reports cases of people willing to fund and develop experimental treatments themselves being unable to get permissions, even with active cancers.

 Around the same time, writer Jake Seliger faced a similar situation while battling advanced throat cancer. Like Sid Sijbrandij, he was willing to try anything that might help. The difference was that Seliger was not a billionaire. He could not hire a team to navigate the system on his behalf, and he struggled even to enroll in the clinical trials that might have offered him a chance.

A system originally conceived to safeguard patients has gradually produced a strange and troubling outcome: the mere chance of survival is effectively reserved for the very few who possess the means to assemble an army of experts capable of navigating its labyrinthine procedures.

One of these treatments was a personalised mRNA vaccine on a dog. Veterinary medicine has nearly as much bureaucracy as that for humans.

Two from Aporia

 Earliest Firemaking. It is difficult to detect the difference between using natural fire and anthropogenic fire from archaeology, but the difference for humans is great.  Being able to cook food on demand, especially meat, is a big step forward in reliably improving digestibility and energy availability. This find pushes the evidence back to 400,000 years ago.

Indirect Measures of Racism and Discriminatory Outcomes.  Direct reporting of what people say their attitudes are explains almost all of the variance. Unconscious bias is present but accounts for very little of the variance.

Marriage Counseling

 Some things in counseling are indeed predictable. The trick is not in discerning what is happening, but in getting the patient to see it.

Forty Fingers

Flamenco & classical guitarists who now do remarkable things with other genres as well. Recommended by my brother over lunch while we were in Chelmsford today for a funeral.

 

Recent Links

 Restacked by David Foster: The UK does away with jury trials after 800 years.

3 Links from Rob Henderson: 

 Who Engages in More Science Denial, Left or Right? Steve Stewart-Williams at N3 teases this at the perfect spot for his audience.  I think his sympathies would ordinarily be with the left, but his own areas of research have been vilified by the institutional left, drawing the attention of what is called the Dark Enlightenment, the right-wing intellectuals who have been similarly driven to dark corners. 

Do I feel sorry for those moderate Democratic voters, who are almost 50% of the party but controlled by the younger 10% who are communists and democratic socialists? Not at all.  As a psychiatrist friend of mine used to say "You ordered it.  You eat it."

Fallacies Don't Exist.  (They are made-up textbook examples that don't occur very often in real life.)  I don't think I agree. They may be much rarer than advertised, but I encounter people all the time who don't settle for the weak versions, such as "it's to their advantage to believe this," or "that site isn't always reliable" but go all the way to the strong versions: "They are only trying to sell you pills," or "You can't believe anything they say."

From  The History of English podcast (transcript available) Old England and New England How the East Anglian accent and vocabulary in the 1630s influenced the New England accent, some of which is still detectable.

 

Popular Science Books

 The wonderful Eric Hoel is at it again: Why do most popular science books suck? 

A bookshelf is laid out before you. It’s stuffed with photorealistic covers showing off black holes, the curvature of Earth seen from space, glossy pictures of double helixes, along with faded images of the Vitruvian Man. Everything is impossibly exciting. Did scientists just uncover the God Particle? Who killed Pluto? Wait, I killed Pluto? Here’s what’s definitely going to happen at the end of the universe. Here’s why 90% of the universe is a mystery and we have no idea what’s going to happen. Here’s a theory of consciousness that solves the problem by ignoring it. Here’s an idea others have said a million times, but wait, this time it’s in an original jargon. What if you are your brain? Ever think about that? And did you know everyone is the outcome of a complex interplay between environment and genes? Also, heredity is 100% deterministic for everything. By the way, a technology that doesn’t exist yet is going to change the world. Cephalopods are smarter than your dog!

I think I need to plead guilty for encouraging some of this. 

The Five Deaths of the Faith

My most infrequent book group just finished GK Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. The others had not been familiar with it, though many of you have read it.  I draw your attention to Part II Chapter VI, The Five Deaths of the Faith. 

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.  

That would be a classic Chestertonian inversion.  We have said for centuries that because the Church remains, that Christianity has never really died. GKC looks over the landscape and says "actually, it has, many times. But it has been resurrected after each death." John 12:24 unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (KJV) This is not something that happened once, but repeatedly, just as the physical seeds do.

The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner; by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic renaissance every{291} century or two, with the young Druids crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids is safe from the vandalism of restoration.

But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable. It withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal parallels were worthy of the occasion, we might say that the snake shuddered and shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly postponed.

Yet when you read his illustrations of this, those who know history keep coming up against interpretations that aren't...quite true.  There are things that looked like possible re-interpretations a century ago, but now are partly - never fully - impossible to assert. Chesterton is still a man of his time. He gets pieces of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation wrong. We know more plain facts about the Dark Ages now, and Gilbert's read on them is skewy. Reading through the chapter, I feel his premise being undermined at several turns, and wonder if I will have to abandon it entirely. But strangely, when I redraw the lines to map out the changes as I now think they occurred, I find the the principle has held up even as the old evidence vanishes.  The new evidence is just as good, perhaps better.  It is a re-enactment of the very theory he is advocating.

So read the chapter and be not dismayed by any spot where it looks as if it is teetering on the edge of the cliff and about to fall. A new path opens up to the side and skirts the danger. 

Links from 2014

 Voted Best Ever Religious Joke 

Tobacco's But an Indian Weed 15 years now since I quit.

The Copernican Theory  James explained how part of it is theoretically easy (but practically difficult) to prove.

Like Grandma Used to Make 

Flawed Leadership Bethany, there are parallels to the Karen Read case here.

AI "Alignment"

 The Most Important Question No one is Asking about AI, a podcast by Dwarkesh Patel. It is based on the standoff between Anthropic and the US Military and Pete Hegseth, and military need versus the right of private companies to refuse to engage in such dicey areas as mass surveillance in every specificity the government insists on. Grim has been talking about this especially in The Anthropic Dustup.  Dwarkesh very rightly points out that conservatives would not have liked AI companies signing off on this under Joe Biden. He does see Hegseth's point as well, however, and has suggestions about what he should have done instead (and still could do). 

AI future and alignment is a Patel specialty, and he sees new problems that will be popping up in 2027 give the projected reduction in cost of mass surveillance year over year. That is, the costs will reduce by 90% each year, so that smaller and smaller actors can manage them. It's pretty alarming.

Mondo Duplantis Again

When you are this good, you can game the system.  He gets paid every time he breaks the world record.  He just set it again at 6.31 meters.  Before that he set it at 6.30 m...6.29m...6.28m...15 straight times in 0.01m increments. It's early in the season.  Expect 6.32m to come soon.

 

Salty Dog

 

The Right To Giant Congress

 David Speiser guest-posting at ACX is persuasive about twenty-seven more states passing the Congressional Apportionment Act. It is the only one of the original twelve of the Bill of Rights which never did pass. (The eleventh passed in 1992, becoming the 27th Amendment to the Constitution.) It would increase the number of representatives in the House from 435 to 6641.  I usually hate gimmicky ideas like this, but stick with him.  He has put a lot of thought into the ups and downs of this. 

Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction. Our various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. This fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them. 

Third parties would finally get a reasonable chance to gain a seat.  Both the initial and the ongoing publicity for that one would be a foundation for others. 

Won’t Congress Become Unmanageable?

At first, probably yes! 

But some immediate self-correction would have to take place.  It's an intriguing read.

Recent Quotes

 Only in one direction. 

The enemy of my enemy is statistically not my friend, but my enemy. For those of us who are math-raised, who apply +/- directionality to grammar, culture, and conventional wisdom, this is unexpected.  In fact, I would like to see more data on this.

"In today’s attention economy, one way to increase audience engagement and news virality is to single out victims most likely to trigger moral outrage." 80% of homicide victims are male, but the most famous true crime victims are not even close to mostly male, more like the reverse. The "preferred victims" that drive attention are women and children. From an academic paper quoted by Bethany at Exhibit Asterisk  I commented there.

Why we don't notice good things as much. 

And from the same source, learn to live with uncertainty.   Related: people with Borderline Personality Disorder are especially unable to tolerate uncertainty.

 

 

The Battle of Mount Badon

King Arthur's opponent at Mount Badon and its location are not known with any certainty, but Bernard Mees makes the case that it could have been Cerdic at Badbury Hill, between Oxford and Swindon. There is a hill fort there from a thousand years before the Saxon invasion, and bractates from the 6th C have been discovered by metal detectorists. One was recently purchased from a car boot sale in the area. 

Tax The Billionaires

 The Moral Crisis Behind the Billionaire Wealth Tax* by Ruxandra Teslo.  We hear a great deal about how such wealth taxes will cause rish people to leave their states, or move their money overseas. We also see statistics about how little this would provide in revenue, that in fact taking all their money wouldn't fund the government. But the moral case is less often made.

 In recent years I have come to think increasingly in the language of virtue ethics: that certain things must be done because they are right, and that in the long run what is right tends also to be what is also “useful”. Institutions, like individuals, cannot long survive when they betray the virtues that justify their existence. Intellectual life, in particular, rests on a fragile moral foundation — honesty, seriousness, and a devotion to truth that must remain independent of immediate political or strategic goals.

*Which reminds me of Eat The Rich, by PJ O'Rourke 

Public Disorder

America and Public Disorder by Chris Arnade, author of Dignity a few years ago. He contrasts the public areas of American cities with the rest of the world. 

That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the U.S. it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder1.

He walked all over America, and is now walking all over the world. The article is not remarkable for its originality, but for the opposite.  We all see it, everyone has a pet solution or three, and the comments sections are always the same, with everyone either patiently pointing out to us what we already know, as if we are stupid middle-schoolers who just can't understand, or throwing up their hands in frustration at the intractability of it all.

 

 

Just a Closer Walk With Thee

 We haven't had any Dixieland in a long time.