Some things in counseling are indeed predictable. The trick is not in discerning what is happening, but in getting the patient to see it.
Saturday, March 14, 2026
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.
Friday, March 13, 2026
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.
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.
Thursday, March 12, 2026
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.
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
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.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
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.
Monday, March 09, 2026
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
… What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now.
Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides.
If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory. The Gulag Archipelago
Sunday, March 08, 2026
Science Clearinghouse
I get links from Science Alert, an Australian site, from time to time. I've decided I'm not that fond of it. It is too much like the old Discover or Omni magazines, promising more in its headlines than it delivers. What do others use for a general science news site?
Recent Links
Science Fictions has a podcast on antidepressants. Paywalled, but in the few minutes I heard them report a study from Cambodia that showed depression decreasing if you gave someone a cow. They doubted this would scale and work in London.
However, More Cows, More Wives - It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.
Two Is Already Too Many A Works in Progress essay on declining fertility, with special reference to South Korea. I have previously linked to an article that showed that subsidising having children had no effect there, but this argues the near-opposite. The subsidies partly work, but South Korea's problems are so extreme that they don't begin to solve them. I think convincing.
Earl Wajenberg put up a link about The Bible and Slavery
A book group member sent a bunch of links from robotics companies, with video of what they can do.
DYNA Robotics - Commercial-Grade Robots for Real-World Automation
Friday, March 06, 2026
RFK and Bullying
Michelle Obama at least followed standard practice by only bullying children about food. RFK is trying to escape from the Dunkin Donuts fiasco by reassuring people that he's not coming for their Dunkin, but goes on to say,
@SecKennedy
No one is taking away your Dunkin'. But isn't it reasonable to ask whether a drink loaded with 180 grams of sugar is safe?
Remember the libertarian brag that they wanted to take over the country and just leave people alone? This is the opposite. It looks like Kennedy just wants to be a bully. He thought, reasonably enough, that the Democratic Party was his best bet for that. But he switches parties and Shazaam! finds out that he has a better chance of that with Trump.
Massachusetts governor Maura Healey put out a meme of a DD coffee with the words "Come and Take It" underneath.
Town Elections
I have not voted for a Democrat in decades, based on a promise I made to myself in 1998, which even then I chuckled at because I had not voted for one for a few years anyway. (I supported nothing but Democrats from 1966-1979, then slowly migrated 1980-1991. The town elections are not listed by party in March, but we know who's who from the November elections. I will be voting mostly for Democrats this time, a very quick switch. The Republicans are crazy, and are making Trump loyalty an either-or for town offices where that is irrelevant. Trump is being used as a proxy for All Good Things, and a word of criticism against him, even from other conservatives, is a proxy for All Bad Things. Enough.
The 1998 promise was when the Democrats in the US Senate refused to even cross the street to look at the Juannita Broderick and Paula Jones testimony and evidence. I vowed I would not vote for any who had any connection to that unless they apologised. Though I liked Joe Lieberman, he was among them.
Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism
The name "Extreme Male Brain Theory" is based on a true story, but it's been an albatross. What female wants to be told that she not only has a tendency to maleness, but to extreme maleness? Heck, even the boys are likely to look askance and the title and wonder "What do you mean by that? Bullying? High-risk hobbies? Peeing off the porch?" Those who research brain differences between males and females have found a few things, most of them pretty small effects. Systematizing versus Empathizing is one of the few medium-size ones. It's the only medium sized one I can think of at the moment, actually. Male brains lean toward systematising. Most librarians are female but Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal were both created by males. It is men who think to themselves "Well Babe Ruth is obvious in right field. Do I want Mays or Mantle in center? I might even take Griffey..." There are females who say, "First I set up a spreadsheet..." but I think that was after lots of males had become obsessive about it. Women often let men run the experiment a few times to see if it works before committing resources themselves.
So when autistic children stack cans out of the bottom cabinet, then stack them back into the cabinet just so, then stack them outside again for hours at a time, becoming very upset at being interrupted, it clicked in many people's head that this is something boys do more than girls already. This is a male brain thing. For review, I will put up the standard distribution graph with two overlapping peaks, this one about height.
Aspergery people/mildly autistic people/ HFAs/ and geeks who don't quite qualify for an ASD diagnosis can be particularly good systematisers because they also give some thought for usefulness to others, when enough is enough, and activities of daily living. ("Children. I have children. Three of them. They should eat pretty soon. I'd better make something.") Engineers are the archetype for good reason. They are Useful. They don't think they are aspies, for two reasons: everyone they work with is like this, so it must be typical; and they have friends and especially relatives who are more autistic than they are. We make fun of them, but they have created just about everything that makes your life easier, since time immemorial. Fire. Bridges. Washing machines. Tampons. (A woman bought the patent and popularised it.)
The female brain is more empathic. Fortunately, no one has been stupid enough to officially call bleeding heart syndrome or reflexive knee-jerk overidentification Extreme Female Brain, though there are lots of mutterings by laypersons to that effect. We have discussed the misdirections and limitations of empathy here a dozen times at least. Autists especially have less empathy, but there is a catch. At least once I have tried to draw the distinction that it doesn't mean they aren't nice and don't care about others, but they don't always think about others or do it as well. Once they have thought "how will the people I supervise feel about this change?" they can do well at it, but it doesn't come naturally. It is called Theory of Mind (internal link below) and is a big part of how we navigate in the world, projecting likely responses of others. I had not known that observant researchers had also noticed this, defined it much more clearly, and divided empathy into two distinct parts. Autists are about as good as anyone else at the second part, it's the first part that is impaired. They do very well with rules-based empathy, like sending everyone a thank-you note or following the agenda item of remembering to seek out everyone's opinion during the discussion phase. It may sound less warm, but when Empathy A is driven by the obsessive nature of Asperger's they become much nicer than the rest of us, with occasional slips. *
As with engineers and systems, overempathisers do not see themselves as pathological. They see themselves as Nice People, and the reasons are similar. They work in fields where everyone is like that, and they have friends and family who really are pathological in their overidentification. I suggest that this comes from reversing the arrow of Empathy A and Empathy B. People think that kindness results from identifying and understanding, and kindness is the goal. Therefore, if they feel kindly toward some one or some group, it is because they have accurately understood them. You can see this in the complete intellectual disconnect of leftists supporting Palestinian causes rather than just feeling sorry for the people. The correctly surmise that it must feel real bad to be losing a war, especially for the women and children who have less control over the situation. So the empaths feel bad about them. Except... they misread the Palestinians. Leftists project how they would feel if they were in a war zone and their side was losing. They miss the part that there are other feelings at play among the Palestinians: cruelty, anger, revenge. These go unnoticed. Empathy is always projection and must be tempered by follow-up questions, usefulness, and boundaries.
How would Empathising and Systematising be opposite ends of a spectrum? I don't think they are. I think two separate things are being measured that both sexes have in different proportions. To take the hormonal stereotype, I don't think that testosterone and estrogen are "opposite" chemicals. I think they are different chemicals. I don't think the data shows that one extra bit of empathy means a complementary drop in systematising. If they are related, I would take a wild guess that when autists put things in categories, they resist changing the system and this makes them less flexibly empathic. You can't possibly feel the way you do because you are wrong. It's not teal, it's green, and they see you as just being obstinate about it. Anyone who has gotten into one of these arguments knows how dug in aspies can get about a rule they have made for everyone else, even if you can definitively show it's not a good rule and they are the worst breaker of it. It's a rule, and you are breaking the rule. But I am probably reaching here. They are more likely unrelated.
The primary opposition to Extreme Male Brain Theory I don't think I can do justice to, because...well, my explanation might be insulting. One aspect is that the original theory (Simon Baron-Cohen) thought that autism was caused or at least mediated by exposure to testosterone, especially in utero. That part isn't holding up. Secondly, there is a belief in the ASD community that they empathise just fine with each other, so it is a different Empathy A, an Empathy A1 that's just as good. That isn't bearing out in the data. It is more likely that this results from cueing autists past step A, telling them they have to look at something from another's POV. (Trust me, autists are not the only people who need this cueing. It is all of us at times.) Thirdly, there is a strong pushback from women both in and out of the autism community that this does not match their internal experience and sounds derogatory to women anyway.
You can do an AI request or a quick search yourself to get expanded versions of the POVs, but this short article is pretty good. -and no, it doesn't mean autistic people lack empathy or are more 'male.' If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can ask Claude about the criticisms as well.
*Did I get that right, darling?
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