Posts from 2013

Manifest Destiny

Politicians and Values

Whiskey and Orange Peel

Math Should Be Taught Like Literature and Art

Language Myths

Discussions and Opinions (at work)

Purgatory

Maggie's Farm carried a Real Clear Religion essay about "Groundhog Day" as a humorous but serious depiction of Purgatory.  The idea of Purgatory as a place you get stuck until you figure out some character-improving principle shows up a lot.  Usually it is being stuck in a waiting room until you figure out you have to be kind to the old black janitor or something else tied to simple social kindness rather than anything deeply theological. I've never run across one that was offensive, just rather milk-and-water niceness. 

I don't think much about Purgatory, but since reading CS Lewis's defense that it is possible (though not a required belief) I have been more comfortable with the doctrine than most Protestants.  "Groundhog Day," now that I look at it, is a surprisingly good basis for the pivotal part of the discussion. If we look at Purgatory as a place where we get sent unwillingly until we smarten up, then it seems an unnecessary step by God, who has elsewhere promised us that we will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. 

Yet what if it is not that we have to stay until we get it right, but we get to stay until we get it right? The identical scenario, but with a different attitude. God allows us the freedom, even after death, to participate and cooperate with the change. We have an unlimited number of lives in this video game, and can keep going until we collect all the necessary treasures to move on. The treasures, of course, would not be the accidentals of a game, where it is well more than half luck to learn that the runestone is behind the waterfall guarded by the trolls.  We learn instead that our brilliant idea for improving on God's morality, no matter how vehemently we insist and how many variations we try, is not actually the best answer. We have to unlearn many of our treasured ideas. 

No, we get to unlearn many of our treasured ideas. We not only see, but we see why. When I am nostalgic, I usually try and change something, starting with my worst sins, and I find this good to contemplate. So a purgatory like that sounds difficult and frustrating, like a video game purposely designed to keep you focused to the point of obsession until you crack the code, sounds more deeply comforting than uncomfortable. Bring it on.

Recent Links

Erica Komisar, therapist and parenting expert, explains in interview what is wrong in both specifics and general approach in the education of young boys. From the substack Celebrating Masculinity, which does not just confine itself to complaining about unfairness, but what prosocial masculine traits can and should be taught.

Top 12 Camille Paglia Quotes, from NNN

When we pray "Thy kingdom come," implicit in the petition is "My kingdom go."  Mike Woodruff, The Friday Update.  

Why Clinical Trials are Inefficient. 

Well this is depressing: Do women really select for intelligence? by Ichimoku Sanjin, an evolutionary anthropologist. As I read, I kept thinking "But wait, isn't it true that..." only to have Sanjin address it. I still am uncertain about this.  My wife didn't choose me for my looks, trust me. The assortive mating aspect, that she chose me because she is herself smart and people choose for similarity, is likely. There is a link to a study that shows that intelligent teens (IQ 130) were 3-5 times less likely to have sex than those with average intelligence.  Believe me, I suspected that.

 

Hobo's Lullaby

I sampled half a dozen versions tonight, and still like hers best. 

 

Education as Signalling

 Asian immigration and the signalling model of education, at Aporia.  It's almost a year old now - I don't know how I missed it.

"Arcotherium" is a particularly interesting writer at Aporia. He combines knowledge known to the education skeptics and heritability-focused but little-known (or disbelieved) by even the educated general public, and additional surprises not generally known to the skeptic/heritablist group either. I read along with the frequent thought That isn't what I would have thought, but it sounds quite possible. Hmm. This article is longer than most substacks, but my interest did not flag. He includes homework hours, SAT and SAT-prep, performance in both home country and in US, and IQ. There is a lot here. Key to the understanding is that parenting that is beneficial for the educational success of the individual is collectively bad for the society, as it destroys the signal that education is supposed to provide.

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits.

Asian success in education is partly (1) but more of (2).  

He summarises his argument:

1. Education is mostly signaling, so increasing competition among students and investment in education is collectively wasteful, while individually rational.

2. Asian immigrants, through a combination of grinding and cheating, Goodhart this signal for cultural reasons, thereby attaining more education than expected from their abilities.

3. Given (1) and (2), Asian immigration to the US makes life for aspiring upper-middle class children and their parents significantly worse—by worsening the college admissions grind that has come to dominate childhood.

Note:  I did not read the comments there.  They often have some good ones, so I intend to get back to that. I am still overwhelmed from too much input last week, so not today.

Brilliant But Unreliable

I thought I remembered it was James who had heard the phrase "brilliant but unreliable colleague" to describe AI, but I couldn't find it at his site, not on any of your other sites. It eventually occurred to me that it might be on my own site, and it was. Steve Hsu thinks of AI as a "brilliant but unreliable genius colleague." So I had the physicist part right.  

I mentioned this at book group to David Foster and Texan99, and the latter noted immediately that this described many of the humans she had worked with as well. It's a fair point. When I worked the neuropsych unit 1998-2003, I had many brilliant but unreliable genius colleagues. I hate it when I forget my own rules.  In this case, "Compared to What?" 

CANOE

The acronym CANOE is an etymological joke, referring to the Committee to Attribute a Nautical Origin to Everything. Many English words do come from nautical terms, because English spread around the world first on ships, headed for Bermuda, Canada, India, Australia, or Pitcairn Island. But people got completely carried away with this, with "Port Outward, Starboard Home," or "Shipped High In Transit," neither of which is the real origin of those terms*. Acronyms did not come into being until such things as RADAR and SCUBA** in the 1940s. Also, there is no such Committee.

There are romantic notions that seem to be culturally installed, so that phrases are often falsely attributed to "Shakespeare's time," or "gambling slang," or "originally Irish." Those are red flags (which is a nautical term) that the purported explanation may be invented. As for the Irish in particular, I wrote about that almost twenty years ago There's a Sach Ur Born Every Minute.

*Posh is an old term for a dandy, based on a thieves cant word for coins. Shit occurs in other Germanic languages, likely derived from a a verb meaning "to snip." Which makes sense if you are spending a lot of time around sheep, dogs, or other mammals.

**SCUBA means Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. TUBA is also an acronym, meaning Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus. 

The Nones Project: Not Who You Might Think

Playwrights, screenwriters, journalists, and novelists have long sold the idea that strict evangelical homes have produced a lot of atheists. Those children were disillusioned, have seen through the hypocrisy and charade, and they know the real score. I have run across this in conversation about Catholics as well, but have not seen it in media as much, so my personal experience may be influenced by growing up in a disproportionately Catholic community, a northern mill city. Social media is overrun with people who will tell you why you shouldn't believe, many of them angry and disdainful, but they do not represent the majority of the non-religious. 

Ryan Burge of Graphs About Religion has written extensively over the last few years about the non-religious in America, and after surveying the Nones, a hefty 12,000 of them, divided them into four categories: Nones in Name Only, Spiritual but not Religious, Dones, and Zealous Atheists. He looked specifically at their religious upbringings and found patterns. Different types of upbringings produced different types of non-religious people. 

Because I often look for heritability explanations, I will note that he does not include anything like personality types as possible confounders.  Parents provide both genes and environment after all, an a certain personality type of parent might not only environmentally influence the religion of their children, but pass along a disposition toward a certain style or approach.  But Burge isn't touching that, at least not at present. He's already generating an 8x8 matrix for his surveys, broken down into a number of 4x4 questions, and one has to draw the line somewhere. 

The Nones Project  is three related surveys, beginning with religious upbringing and continuing with beliefs and what their level of well-being is.  Graphs and more graphs! Bright labeled colors! 

Bsking gave me a months free subscription, so lots of this might be behind that paywall.  Let me know and and I'll see what I can piece together for you. 

Ring, Ring

An ABBA song I have not yet posted. I'm not that fond of it, but I'm thinking I have to eventually expose you to the entire collection. You can hear "Dancing Queen" anytime at Home Depot after all.

 

First and Second Amendment Conflict?

Consistently libertarian Eugene Volokh, who Glenn Reynolds used to suggest should be a Supreme Court nominee, weighs in on the right to bear arms at protests, by excerpting recent decisions.  In the first case he quotes both the ruling and the dissent.

Links From 2013

 Just about done with that year, as you can see. 2014 was the year I blogged least, and the following three weren't much denser.  I don't know why. Maybe when I get there I'll remember.

Life Together  With an uncomfortably prescient comment from Texan99

Rants On Disc  And here I am a bit prescient myself.

Live Simply  What I mean by that, or what it has meant to me, has changed over the course of my life more than once.  You may find the same.

Marty on the Mountain  Only older NH residents, mostly in the North Country, remember Marty. A legend in his time, though.

To Anacreon In Heaven 

Minstrel Show 

 

Love In The Ruins

One of my book groups is reading Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins.  I had not known there was a subtitle (Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World) until I started this post, and think it would have helped me understand what the heck is going on - a problem I often have with non-genre fiction. I also learned from Amazon that it is an uproarious comedy. I have yet to roar myself, finding the oddity more disturbing that funny.  Perhaps that will help going forward as well.  What I have concluded is that one main theme is "What is wrong with mankind at the root, and what can be done about it?"  There, now you have three hints to go on if you want to pick it up. It's pretty easy to turn the pages on this one even when it is confusing, and I write this as one who doesn't enjoy the amount of description he engages in.*

I thought he was dancing around the problem of evil, but then dropped "The mystery of evil is the mystery of limited goodness" on me and that put an interesting twist on a concept I have been long familiar with, that Evil is not self-existent, it can only be spoiled goodness.  I discussed it here early on in Sauron is but an Emissary, which I still enjoy on rereading. So, limited goodness instead of spoiled goodness.  It fits the novel, and is in some ways an idea more accessible to the modern mind.  I don't think it is ultimately a better understanding of evil, but it has advantages.

*I suspect when people talk about fine writing they mean description, which is why I stay away from those books. 

Personality and Book Genre Preferences

 Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels.  (The graphic expands for much greater clarity)

 

  

The colors are from the Big Five personality traits 

C (yellow) - Conscientiousness

O (red) - Openness

N (dark blue) Neuroticism

A (light blue) Agreeableness

E (green) Extraversion

This was fun, not only seeing what are common personality features for the genres you love and those that don't interest you, but for the similarity of some genres. Journeys is close to balanced, and Classics, Racial, and Kids only a bit less so.  Young Adult, Girls Fiction, and Fantasy have similar shape.  One might expect that Philosophy, Religion, and Paranormal to have similar shapes, but they are in fact quite different. Does the graph show that girls become more conscientious as they become women, or that the type of person (likely female) who reads Girls' fiction as an adult is less conscientious than the type that reads Women's? Why are Drama and Plays so different? As these are user-generated tags, does it only mean that different personality types describe the same works in different words?

 

Intelligence and Prejudice

It is about 18 months old now, and we have been going over this material for all 20 years of this blog, but I think it is worth pointing out again.  I don't think it is morally reprehensible that one group is just as prejudiced as another. The problem is when they don't consider it even possible that they are in the same ballpark, and spend so much energy berating the other group for being bigots. Jesus was harder on the accusers than on the sinners. 

Intelligence and Prejudice 

 

Too Many New Ideas

I spend increasing time dopamine-scrolling through substack summaries, linksites, and blog commentary sites - like you SOB's - looking for promising ideas that will explain to me what is happening in the world. I sample them, sometimes reading all the way through, sometimes just extracting something tasty before moving back to my idea-flooded Internet River to look for more. Am I going upstream to find tributaries and sources, or downstream to find out where it is all going? I have no idea.  I only know that after a few hours a day I realise that there are too many promising explanations in the world and I have to walk away from things which might be the Key To Life. How can I turn my back on them?

Fiction takes too long to get to the point; daydreaming is much faster. But both carry the related dangers of repetitiveness and sleepiness. My brain is full.  I shall go and play Octordle. Do not send me any new ideas, I have no more storage space, and I am weary of building more shelves.

Guantanamo Bay

Now that there is electronic, portable, and personal music available, I don't know how much servicemen have shared songs anymore.  Schools, fraternities and sororities, miners, regions, ethnic groups - all had more shared songs not so long ago. 

 I had this album, but for this one, I don't remember the liner notes or the lyrics.