The Smartest Online People

Present company excepted, the smartest (somewhat distinguished from wisest) people I know online are increasingly talking about AI more than anything else.  This would be Scott Alexander, Steve Hsu, Dwarkesh Patel - plus some I listen to less - Elon Musk, Marc Andreassen, Tyler Cowan. However, the smartest people I know IRL talk about it much less, perhaps because many of us are old, and sense that this will be a late-in-life tool only, not something we will have expertise in. We won't be doing our own repairs on this Philco, we'll just be turning it on.

The result is that I am reading less of the smartest people I know, which doesn't seem wise of me.  OTOH sumus quod sumus, we are what we are, and we may learn in the judgement that the great Christian teacher of the age was only a couple of miles away most our lives, but we weren't sufficiently attentive to the Holy Spirit. 

Substack quotes

 AI Laundering - "blaming AI for layoffs you were going to do anyway - is going to be a real thing."  Alex Imas

Victor Kumar  at Open Questions "LLMs are so overconfident and they’ll just invent empirical claims when they’re convenient. What a relief to talk to a philosopher instead."

Why America's Extremes Will Both Fail, by Noah Smith at Noahpinion. "In all of these cases, what progressivism is doing is parasitizing the liberal institutions that allowed progressivism to exist in the first place. Liberals built the public libraries; progressives are destroying them by turning them into ad-hoc homeless shelters. Liberals built trains, but now people don’t want to ride the train because of crime and disorder, requiring big bailouts from the state of California. Progressive tolerance of bad behavior by the few — open drug use and sales, theft, street harassment — has turned parks, streets, and other types of urban commons into no-go zones for the bulk of the citizenry." (The whole article is excellent)

 Stefan Schubert "When we try to understand society, we often neglect how people react to changing circumstances. You see it in climate discourse that assumes we’ll sleepwalk into disaster. You see it in Hollywood battle scenes, where they never retreat, no matter how bad it’s going. And you see it in the discourse about a world without work, which tends to assume we won’t be able to create new meaning. But I’ve noticed that economists don’t make this mistake as often, since the insight that people adapt to change and respond to incentives is a cornerstone of their discipline. We should all learn to think more like economists."

Pieter Garicano at Works in Progress: "Why Europe Doesn't Have a Tesla. These rules – severance, negotiating periods, works councils, buyouts, and waiting periods – collectively impose high costs on a European company that tries to let workers go. The costs of restructuring are so high that companies will often try and bribe their workers to leave. In 2023, Amazon offered French employees a year’s salary to leave voluntarily so they didn’t have to fire them and go through a legal restructuring. In 2024, German chemical manufacturer Bayer offered long-tenured workers 52.5 months of pay, or over four years’ worth, in exchange for quitting." 

Twelve Gates To The City

 I was looking for a strong bass version, but I got captured by this.

 

Slavic Prehistory

I'm fascinated by Indo-Europeans and all their descendant peoples. But y'know, there's a limit. In Razib's interview with Peter Nimitz, imagine listening to this as a podcast on narrow rainy roads at night when you have no real chance to change to a different podcast, or even pull over and try to look at the transcript to look at the spelling of all these cultures that are mentioned to see if they look at all familiar. You have to have had 6 credits in Slavic prehistory to even tell what the names are. 

I'm not even sure I got them all. I actually know what a very few of these cultures are, and recognised a few more. I usually feel I can enter just about any conversation as a listener and ask a decent question or two, but I have no confidence I could even form an intelligent query.  

Enjoy. 

 ...the back flow from the Corded Ware people who had first conquered, like Poland and Germany and then migrated back, kind of swept over both some of the Yamnaya people, like their more northerly realm, which had kind of spread up into the Volga and the Kama River basins and what's nowadays, Central Russia, as well as some of the hunter gatherer societies like the Volosovo culture, which were further north in the kind of forest region. So we know that, like that third of the Corded Ware world, roughly from Belarus to Udmurtia to Tartarstan is where this Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic proto population was living. And the Soviet historians actually did know that the Eastern, like the very far eastern part, was where the Indo-Iranians were. That's like the Sintashta culture they come out of, like the Abashevo culture. And there was were they looked back at the metal work and the pottery that was being made by these different cultures in kind of the eastern part of European Russia, and they were able to see that, you know, these were the groups that spread in the Central Asia. They were definitely the Indo Iranians. They were not the Baltic Slavs...

 There were a lot the Fatyanovo-Balanovo groups that were kind of around, like modern Pskov area, just south of St Petersburg, east of Estonia. They do appear to be Indo-Iranian like groups that would eventually contribute to the Iranians, rather than the Balto Slavic groups...

 ...you do see these kind of post Yamnaya cultures, like the Catacomb that are still dominating a lot of the steppe region - which is a much better place to live than modern Russia, north of the forest line. So these kind of pre/proto Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian groups, they're living in fairly marginal territory for Corded Ware people.

They overrun the early European farmers, the Globular Amphora culture, the Funnel Beaker culture and stuff. There are some farmer groups in kind of interior places, like Kuyavia, which is in kind of like Northeastern Poland, thereabouts. And then you have, like the surviving Baltic Hunter Gatherers that are hanging out in the Baltic that kind of like coexist with them. So 2500 BC, there's the introduction of the Bell Beaker culture...

 ...these Abashevo culture people in the Far East...

 those people definitely have some sort of link to the slot, because those two populations that kind of descend from that mixed like Bell Beaker, you know Netherlands Indo European group that migrated to the east and forms the Trzciniec culture. The cultures they produce, the Komarov culture...

 Finnic speaking people, are pushing out of the Northern Urals and kind of like sweeping across and  eventually, like the most common Y chromosome, a lineage of modern day Lithuania Latvia, is N1c-n3a you know, whichever N3a, like the whichever nomenclature.

 as well as these Baltic Corded Ware people with these populations who are genetically known to have spoken Indo-Iranian, almost certainly…

we would expect, expect to see, like isoglosses, from Albanian, from Greek, Tocharian, which we really don't see. So that's why I lean more towards like this, Iwno culture, Rzucewo culture, this North Belarusian culture…

I think there's a lot of stuff showing that they were linked in with the Srubnaya Indo-Iranian people, who were kind of dominating the Western steppe at the time. So I think they were kind of dragged into these conflicts in the same way that they were when the Persians invaded a couple centuries later, where Herodotus talks about how you have all these tribes that are presumably Slavic or para Slavic, who are getting dragged into fighting Persians on behalf of their Scythian overlords. I think there's something like this for Sosnitsa culture Slavs, they get dragged into these kind of, like collapsing Srubnaya conflicts and the result is their population is devastated. A lot of their sites start to disappear. It was definitely not a good time to be them. So you actually see the rise of this, I think it's the Lebedovskaya culture…

There's this Stamped Ware complex that emerges out of modern day Romania. And they just go and expand everywhere, like they drive into Germany, some of them, like, drive into Greece. You know, some of them go into Bulgaria, where they come the historical Thracians. The one that's relevant for the Slavs is the Chernoles culture. The Chernoles, they're on the north side of the Carpathian Mountains. They start off on the Dniester River and they expand into the Dnieper river. But they kind of colonize both the steppe region as well as kind of the fore steppe  region. They don't really penetrate into kind of the Lebadovskaya culture core territories, and the kind of Pripet marshes and southern Belarus. So this Chernoles culture, they're pretty militarized…

 Like, finally these refugee populations contact the Chernoles, and they're being separated by these first Scythians and the Sarmatians, and eventually these Germanic migrants who kind of cut through at the beginning of the first millennium AD

So the Milogrod culture, they're fairly primitive. A lot of their survival seems to be they would just hang out in the swamps. Archeologists, they have these things called bog forts, where it looks like they were kind of temporary refugues, refugues for these Milograd culture people, if something bad happened, if they're like, kind of main farmstead on the Dnieper or the Desna, or whatever kind of overrun by the Cimmerians, they would kind of flee to these bogs …

And eventually the Cimmerians, they get swept off by the Scythians…

So he discusses the Budini and the Gelonians were the two important ones. The Budini are described as a great populous nation. They're all - they have blue and gray eyes and red hair. And the Gelonians, they have, like no resemblance to the Budinian complexion or general appearance…

 So when the Goths storm in from the West, rather than the east, they're incredibly destructive. They go and they dominate the entire steppe. The Zarubinets it's culture basically implodes. It actually fragments into like multiple cultural traditions. So whatever, like unity the Zarubinets had, and they were, I would assume, kind of like a loose Federation...

 the fringes of the Desna river,  and, of course in the Pripet marshes as well. These fragments still cause the Goths a lot of problems. Jordanes mentions that just before the arrival of the Huns, the Goths from this kingdom of Oium...

 I think there's two finds of Slavs in Iberia, in a Visigothic or Vandal context. So at least some of them did accompany, like the Eastern Germanic groups as they were migrating across Europe. I don't think it was like a full - I mean, there's no evidence to suggest, at least there was, like political movement. These were probably just like random Slavic subjects who had been recruited for the armies and decided to drive west with the rest of the people. You're completely correct, the Slavs themselves did not really play a role in this stage of the migration period. It would have to be a later period, with the arrival of the Avars...

 

 

Links from 2014

 Believing Against Extended comments from Donna B

New England's old numbered roads.  Rte 3 is now Rte 6; Rte 6 is now Rte 3.

Half Man Half Biscuit ("It's Cliched to be Cynical at Christmas") had a small but ongoing following in the UK. They split up in 1986 for "musical similarities" but reunited, and the Scouse (Liverpool) band has had years of sardonic titles, such as "Trouble over Bridgwater" "Achtung Bono," and "Back in the DHSS" (UK unemployment agency).

Us and Them The ethnonationalists won, not lost in Europe, (as of 2008) each boundary more homogenous after WWII than before. They just called it pan-Europeanism, pretending that was internationalism, which was considered holy by the elites, because they liked the internationalists in every other country. Now that immigration has increased, people are feeling the same tribalism they did before, just directed against different groups.

Chick's Got a Sword  St. Dymphna

 

 

Hesykhia

James mentioned upgrading Hesykhia to the status of Muse. I long sought her presence when young, but always murmuring, like Augustine, "but not yet." Now I have too much of her presence, perhaps, but she is very good company.

Stone Age Minds in Modern Skulls

 A debate over at Conspicuous Cognition, What Kind of Apes Are We? 

So my response to Dan might be something like, “Yea, maybe humans are kind of confused and maladapted sometimes, but it’s also really insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals.” And Dan might say something like, “Yea, it’s pretty insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals, but it’s also really important to recognize that humans are confused and maladapted sometimes.” It’s basically a disagreement over where to put the italics.

But if it was all about italics, I wouldn’t be writing this.

I tend to agree with whoever I listened to last on these sorts of questions. 

 

Assortative Mating

I recall hearing about this paper a few years ago, and there may have been similar others in addition to this one. Assortative Mating at loci under recent natural selection in humans.  Nicholas Christakis is one of the authors, which I take as a recommendation. We tend to choose partners who are equivalent to fourth-cousins genetically. Not that they are about fourth cousins, but they have the same amount of genetic similarity. That is in some ways not very much (0.025%) but is also more than the average person you run into in a city (variable, but less than 0.001%) at the loci that are current natural selection.  That means, not the 99% of genetic similarity that we have to a banana, because we are both living and have cells, but the places where evolution is selecting most heavily because of changing environments. Gravity isn't changing.  The amount of sunlight and oxygen isn't changing - there isn't much selection underway at those points.  We've got that covered.

This makes entire sense when I look at myself, my siblings and parents, and my two oldest children. All of us come from that lake that is the North Sea, where genes were in constant exchange, so that even the different varieties are similar. But when I look at my Transylvanian son who married a woman from Manila, the pattern breaks pretty thoroughly. Those populations have not interacted for tens of thousands of years. There is likely a lower threshold beyond which it makes little difference. 

The idea of "similar but not too similar" makes intuitive sense for our default programming. The default is easily overwhelmed by circumstances, such as migration to a different culture (or even a somewhat-different culture), but exerts some influence. The genetic pool we are choosing from is something of a kaleidoscope, not an infinite branching. See also Pedigree Collapse. 

You're The One

I love that topping harmony.  I use that with worship songs at church sometimes.  It makes visitors nervous.  Maybe everyone else as well. 

 

Spammer

I have what is purportedly a young woman commenting on every post, telling me how much money I can make from home on Google-something.  My spam detector is keeping her out at present, as she isn't showing up in the comments, just my email.  I suspect it is a result of me being stupid enough to comment twice on Instapundit about a week ago. 

I am not going to put any effort into deleting "her." Sometimes the spammers say things that are unintentionally funny. 

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Mythbusting

 Why the worst idea in linguistics won't die, at Dead Language Society. I have written about both Sapir and Whorf over the years - in exactly the same posts. It is the very cool idea that the language we speak constrains our speech, so that having a different native language, or learning a new one, drives how we think. All those stories of "the German word Schadenfreude does not exist in English, and it is untranslatable." No, it's not. There is no one-to-one translation for the word, but it is easily translated if you allow phrases and multiple adjectives.  This is why your pastor can take apart a word in the NT from Greek and explain it to you, even though it is different from English - because it can be translated. At an overwhelming level, any thought that can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another.  That's going to be tough when one society has very different technology from another and it will take time, but it can be done. 

I knew the essay was going to include the very slight exceptions, such as Russian light blue and dark blue, and even though it is after the paywall jump, I am going to bet that the Amazonian language Piraha and its lack of numbers will be brought forth as a stronger exception.  But really, you aren't ever going to meet any speakers of Piraha, so there's no need to know it. Linguistic Relativism isn't true, even though we would like it to be.

The Evolution of Social Paradoxes

Human behavior is often paradoxical. We show humility to prove we’re better than other people, bravely defy social norms so that people will praise us, and donate to charity anonymously to get credit for not caring about getting credit. Here, I argue that these and other social paradoxes have a common thread: they are all attempts to signal a trait while concealing, from both the signaler and the recipient, the fact that a signal is being transmitted. 

David Pinsof in The Evolution of Social Paradoxes .  He sees them as a spin-off from the necessary Theory of Mind to perceive signals of trustworthiness.  We have to be able to know what others might think of our actions. But when we know what they probably think, we can mimic what will give them a particular impression about our actions.  We can game the system. But then we know that they also can game the system, and they know that we know that they know that we know.

Except in reality, we quickly disguise these motives from ourselves, and lots of people will likewise give us credit for being virtuous. Of course Congresswoman A isn't virtue-signalling.  She really cares about working people because she was one herself. It becomes a recursive mindreading game in which some people see one or more levels deeper than most, while others are one or more levels more superficial. The advantages either way are uncertain, because at each mindreading, there is only a percentage chance we are correct. The deeper we dig, the more speculative it all is.

I am reminded of Screwtape's advice to Wormwood about drawing his patient's attention to the fact he has become more humble in his battle against pride, as he will think "By Jove, I'm being humble!" and be proud of it. This can be repeated at the next revelation, but not endlessly, else the patient will see it is a hall of mirrors, laugh at himself, and head for bed - a very bad outcome for the demons.

Yet to a point, I think it is useful to remember that there is always a further layer of self-deception. This essay may well alert you to areas you have previously overlooked. 

"It is a spiritual gift from God for a man to perceive his sins" - Isaac the Syrian

 

1930s/60s/90s Pro Football

The running plays are more rugbyish, and there is much less strategy and technique in the line play, but it is still recognisably football, more so than basketball and soccer are from that era.

No. 3 is Bronco Nagurski 

 

By the 1960s, you can see much more precision and deception in the blocking and route-running. But it is the defense that is most different.  Instead of getting into a position and just trying to stop whatever comes to them, the defense is playing more angles and shifting around. If you grew up with this, as I did you have some tendency to see this as not all that different from the modern game.  But it is...

 

...which you can see immediately in the film in the 1990s. Much more misdirection and finding seams in the strategy, the passing depends much more on timing. 

 

Ship of Fools

I was on a Christian discussion site in the early 2000s called Ship of Fools. It is where I got the name Assistant Village Idiot rather than Village Idiot. There were some good discussions and reasonable people there, but I eventually found it repetitive and enabling to, well, fools. It suddenly occurs to me that it was far better than TikTok, FB, Twitter/X, etc. There were a variety of bulletin boards with names such as "Dead Horses," which helped keep perspective on discussion that was potentially rancorous.  It was still often rancorous, but less so than we see now.

The site has shifted to humorous and satirical content, though there still are discussion boards. As an example of the former, there is a piece about the double-entendres of hymns, Bosoms and Ebenezers 

 I've always found singing in church a joy, but some hymns make you smile for all the wrong reasons. For a start, they use words that lead very different lives in other parts of your brain. Words such as 'bare', 'bondage', 'bosom', 'bowels', 'breast', 'bush', 'desires', 'conquest', 'flesh', 'gay', 'kiss', 'loins', 'lover', 'organ', 'prostrate', 'queen', 'rude', 'seed', 'submission', 'succour', 'tossed', 'virgin', 'womb' – and not forgetting good old 'intercourse'.

For the latter, Oops- Your Trump Presidency Discussion Thread in the "Purgatory" category, which is currently discussing his bone spurs as a draft deferment. The site is more UK than USA, but plenty of both.  It definitely tends liberal and snarky. I don't think I will reinvest my time, but someone here might be curious.

 

Are People Innately Lazy?

The prevailing theory is that people find effort aversive, and people avoid aversive things. The Principle of Least Effort. Some recent evidence paints that picture a little differently. Are People Innately Lazy? 

 The new, improved alternative theory was best articulated by my colleague Guido Gendolla: people are averse to wasting effort, not to effort itself. Or as the lead author Nathalie André put it, effort is a cost, which people are sometimes willing to pay. Effort is more like money than like pain.

This makes sense to me. I will take the most efficient route, even if I have time to spare, unless there is something worth spending the effort on, such as a particular view.  Even if I am walking for exercise, I will take a diagonal to shorten a distance.  

Mythbusting by Megan McArdle

How do people even come up with these things?

Ollie Whitby (who?) on Substack: Our grandparents were on to something. Turns out slow mornings, early home-cooked dinners, getting lost in books, walking everywhere, real conversations, and minding your own peaceful business was a great way to live. 

Megan McArdle in response:  My grandfather got up at 5 am to drive down and open the gas station where he worked until 6 pm, unless he was short a worker and had to go back to man the evening shift.  There were about five adult books in their house, two bibles and three biographies. No one in his small town ever minded their own business. The home cooked dinners and the conversations, I grant you.  Otherwise you are describing college, not how our grandparents lived.

AVI: One grandfather was the egg man for two towns.  The rooster woke him at  4AM and 300 chickens needed to be fed and harvested, so that he could drive around in an unreliable car until noon, at which point he switched to the garden and repairs, six days a week. He chatted for a few moments with some customers.  He read two newspapers every evening, the Lowell Sun and one of the Boston papers.  I recall no books. Before that, he walked 26 miles each Friday to see his wife for the weekend and 26 back to Boston every Sunday for his chauffeur job.  I imagine her weeks were not filled with real conversations except for Aunt Betty half a mile away. She died at 49, I never knew her. The other grandfather didn't talk much, not even to his wife and children. Worked 60 hours/week as an accountant. His wife had friends and conversations - mostly after the children were grown. 

If you take that down to our parents' generation, it is only slightly less "relaxing." Later in life, after they had lived long and prospered, they had more quiet dinners, books, and real conversations. That would be what my children remember.

So too for us, as we are grandparents now. I used to get up before 6 to get to work for 6:45. I can draw real conversations out of just about anyone, but psychiatric patients are a challenge even for me. My wife worked with children and books, having real conversations only on the fly with co-workers. Hurried home-cooked dinners, drove everywhere all week to church, sports, lessons, relatives, talking with other moms and dads while watching kids. Lost in books, yes. 

Recent Substack Links

 Why Poor Countries Stopped Catching Up. Notable for academic researchers being honest and saying "The data now says we were wrong."

It looks like Fukuyama was prophetic about this in 1991.  

Bernini.  Imagine being able to make stone look soft. 

Steve Sailer reminds us what PJ O'Rourke wrote about Somalis. In 1993. 

The purpose of Milan Cathedral 

First and Second Palestine.   Seems to be new

Reminder

One of the possible names for this blog 20 years ago was "Do I have to pull this car over?" I rejected it because I knew I would prove as guilty as the misbehaving children in the back. 

So there's this.