Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs

 The review convinced me that Lee, the topic, is fascinating, but the book isn't. Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs at Astral Codex Ten, part of ACX's yearly series. Lee was the determined genius who rescued Singapore, taking it from Third-World hellhole to economic powerhouse.

There’s an irony in that while Japan lost World War 2 pretty badly on the field, their actual stated goals in the war were to free Asia from western colonialism, and those goals they achieved amazingly well. They may have lost by direct force, but Lee and others like him didn’t forget how weak and disorganized and cowardly the British ruled in defeat. Western empires ruled Asia more through their aura of invincibility than through their technological advantage, and once that was lost their days were numbered and they knew it. The fall of Singapore was the single greatest military defeat the British ever had in terms of soldiers lost; it was also the battle that struck the deathblow to their Empire. 

But also

Something like half the book is Lee listing every world leader he ever talked to as PM. This is another part that mostly gets kind of dull (especially if you don’t follow the details, although this case is much easier to track than the internal politics chapters since you’ll probably recognize the characters’ names, or at least their countries). They’re all described as “tough” and “vigorous”, occasionally as “warm”, and usually with some other positive descriptors. This is probably a mix of sincere respect and diplomatic language for most of them.

Except Jimmy Carter. Lee spends an entire chapter making fun of Jimmy Carter for being shallow, undermined, weak-willed and inauthentic. And then takes an aside in the next chapter, when he’s complimenting Reagan, to mention how smart it was of the American people to replace Jimmy Carter with this guy. If you ever want to see someone who’s not a giant swimming rabbit attacking Jimmy Carter, this is the book for you 

Nolan Sisters

British.  Never heard of them before. This was their first TV appearance, but they were big in Europe in the 70s.  A friend described them as "terminally cute," which is true. As they got older, they got just a little more frisky, more like Marie Osmond than ABBA or Olivia Newton-John, but in that range.

The algorithm just sends you things, and there are lots of YouTube videos about their later tragic lives (three died of cancer; their agents ripped them off) and how beloved they were in Europe, especially England and Ireland. Perhaps it is the green dresses, but that's a very Irish-looking group of sisters.

Public Perception

Bethany again looks for the research, finds there is very little research, and so does some research.

Do People Ever Change Their Minds About Controversial Cases? 

This is why polling can be valuable: people’s perception of what others think does not necessarily match what others actually do think, and it definitely doesn’t always catch when people change what they think. 

Data Republican is a national treasure, and it looks like she does this full time.  Bethany, OTOH, has a day job, a husband and child, and lots of medical appointments or she would be DataCatholic/~Feminist/~Libertarian*, which doesn't really roll off the tongue and sell subscriptions. 

We think we know what the general public thinks, but it is often only what "my people" think, or "those stupid other mass culture people" think, or what I overheard today, saw a poll on today, or was assured by reliable opinionards is true. There is almost nothing that we have more than a slender portion of the data, but even with that low bar, gauging public opinion might be near the bottom of the list. This leads to the puzzle of whose opinion we do actually know pretty well. Perhaps I should write about that general question.

Public perception does change, but is tough to suss out, because there are so many temporary and interactive factors that influence point-in-time opinion guesses discernment. 

*I don't know who has what symbols and semiotics in place, but "~" means approximately. 

Kids These Days

 Kids These Days Part II by Paul Bloom.  Part I is linked there. He goes directly after the smartphones-are-the-problem issue, but expands to trying to explain anything about development.

 Turkheimer’s skepticism is about explaining individual differences, but population trends also emerge from many interacting causes. When trying to understand an increase in depression among a certain population at a certain time, we should take seriously a similar skepticism about theories that say it’s caused by this—and even about more subtle theories that say it’s caused by this and that and this other thing. When it comes to the claim that smartphones are to blame, this skepticism should be reinforced by the failure to find robust evidence in its favor.

Kids these days can't even shoe a damn horse. 

Johnny Most

Everyone around the league hated him. I grew up with him.  I thought that's the way basketball announcers were supposed to sound. 

Pound the Table

 There is an old lawyer's joke that works well for just about any dispute:

If the facts are with you, pound the facts into the table.

If the authorities (professors, officials, regulations) are with you, pound the authorities into the table.

If neither the facts nor the authorities are with you, pound the table.

This comes up in hereditarian disputes all the time. The hereditarians pound the facts, the environmentalists pound the authorities...

Who pounds the table? That should tell you something. 

Ever Green

 

Chart-topper in 1909

I don't think they called it barbershop quartet singing until much later, but this kind of four-part harmony was big for many years. The soloist was more prominent at this point, while a full blend became the standard later. I have a dimly remembered fact I will confirm before going forward...

Yes, the barbershop sound was all-male at first. But women sing as well as men if not better and there was resentment that they could not join, so they formed their own groups, called the Sweet Adelines. Great name, BTW.  They tended to be more choral than quartet. Eventually there was enough pressure that the SPEBSQSA (checks notes, yes, that's it) admit women that they did so, but an all-male movement started up almost immediately after.  The claim was that the all-male sound was distinctive and worth preserving.

They were right. It's not the same. For choirs, Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass or Soprano-Alto-Baritone is standard, and it is just different from all-male or all-female.  It is not accidental that the most precise arrangers mixed both sexes for voices voices.  There is something more universal about that.  But for homier, more intimate harmonies in performance, those community groups tend to be all-female or all-male. Three or four sisters dressed alike, four neighborhood guys on the corner trying to make it big, all the Oak Ridge/Byrds/Temptations with qualitatively different sounds than the Supremes or Vandellas.  When the voices were mixed, it was a female lead with Pips behind her, or a famous male with interchangeable female backups. Call it whatever you like and complain about it if you have nothing better to do, but the sound is different. I like them all, but don't consider them interchangeable. 

I had a friend who went to Mount Holyoke who claimed that there was nothing more breathtaking than spending all week hearing nothing but female voices and then having a male chorus come in to perform on the weekend. Similarly, USO performances always brought in females.

Effective Altruism

Data Republican believes EA should be banned from AI safety, policy-making, and governance.  That's a pretty extreme position, but she makes a solid case for both the mild and extreme versions.

Fundamentally, EA is a maximizing philosophy: it always tries to price future value. And extinction is the “negative infinity” number in the ledger. Once you are determining outcome by probabilities, just having even a tiny chance of extinction dominates every other calculation.

One such scenario that many conservatives might find sympathetic is: do you do gain-of-function research for a 70% chance that you will prevent the next swine flu, or is the 1% risk that the virus escapes containment in Wuhan and kills 10 million people acceptable? Many of us, having lived through COVID-19, would put our foot down on allowing any kind of gain-of-function research again within our lifetimes. That’s one scenario where conservatives can potentially reason their way to the same answer as EAs.

EAs run that same logic in every calculation. What this means, inside their heads: an extinction level event scenario is the greatest threat vector. 

Scott Alexander, like others, is obsessed with AI, alignment, and its effects. He is very much a supporter of Effective Altruism in general, though not slavishly so. Still, I imagine he would object to such a blanket disallowing of EA from the discussion (or at least, from the decision-making). There are so many discussions and counter discussions over at Astral Codex Ten that I won't even attempt to choose for you. As his commenters are also quite brilliant - I consider it one of the few sites to compete with this one for average IQ - you can either dabble or go hard against them, trying to steelman your own arguments. This would be the major leagues. And yet...

I have felt uncomfortable with Effective Altruism since I first heard of it, though it took me a while to articulate why. Frankly, it probably took reading others who had thought about it more rigorously to be able to articulate it.  One of the consequences of becoming lazier, and thus less intelligent, is not being able to provide some of the service I was designed for. I have excuses. Not good excuses, but at least some things I can say out loud with some earnestness. 

The best arguments against EA are in Data Republican's essay. Pricing future value is a great example. It makes entire sense, but somehow leads to insane conclusions. If a future life is worth the same as a life now, then the sheer volume of future humans and their needs with forever dwarf what is good for us. More interestingly, perhaps, is how that completely devalues our ancestors. There is the (bogus in reality but worth valuing as a myth) Native American belief in Seven Generations, that we owe something to the three generations before us and the three after us. GK Chesterton wrote similarly that tradition is the only way of giving a vote to the dead. CS Lewis, describing the Tao in The Abolition of Man shows that the wise in every tradition teach that we owe something to both our heritage and our posterity. But EA very quickly reveals that it owes nothing to heritage and everything to posterity.  The dead have made their contribution and their suffering is now a sunk cost. 

There is also comparative suffering among species, leading to calculations that the horrible suffering of three chickens or thirty-two shrimp are equivalent to the suffering of one human. The actual numbers are immaterial.  Thirty or three-hundred chickens would be the same. The principle of comparing it to any human suffering is something new in the world. It may be a logically consistent and defensible philosophical and moral position.

But it is not a human position, despite being favored by "humanists." It gives away the game, recognising that humanists are in fact subhumanists, valuing some bare minimum of the species as fungible with any other human.  Dismiss it as a mere prejudice on my part if you will, but the idea of perpetuating humans who are only biologically and not culturally related to me is not just disquieting, it's silly.  

Humanists are actually Subhumanists.  I should probably think about that and post on it.  Yet now that I have said that, I recall that CS Lewis already covered that in the last debate section of Out of the Silent Planet. 

Common Criticisms

Rob Kurzban on discussion of evolutionary psychologists:

Critics assert that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what [should] be. Evolutionary psychologists reply that they never made any of these claims, and document places where they claim precisely the reverse. The critics then reply that evolutionary psychologists are wrong in believing behavior is genetically determined, that every aspect of the organism is an adaptation, and that discovering what is informs what should be.

Death Used to Be the Term Limit

 Longevity Threatens Democracy, by Lyman Stone 

Key points in this post: 

Death has historically been the main exit mechanism for unelected rulers, including natural death, but this exit route is vanishing thanks to rising lifespans. 

All else equal, longer lives mechanically produce longer tenures in power. 

Political power compounds over a career, so longer careers mean more concentrated power. 

Older electorates carry a larger cognitive-impairment burden and are further from the experiences a vote is supposed to be able to think about when making electoral decisions. 

As a result, political elites face weaker accountability from less attentive electorates, have longer careers over which to accumulate power, and upon reaching the top are likely to have longer tenures since mortality rates are falling. 

Things You Don't See At The Time

Which is why I'm not a boxing judge.

When you are a fan, looking mostly at the punches and probably rooting for one guy over another, you miss things.  Watching and listening now, I hear the referee telling Tyson to let go, but it is Bruno who is holding Mike on the back of the head rather continually. Yet at the time I would have only noticed that Bruno had a lot of ineffectual punches that count in scoring but do not damage, plus a few that really rock Tyson. Tyson, OTOH, misses a lot but hits more generally solid shots. By rounds 3 and 4 this pattern is almost embarrassingly consistent. That really looks like a home ref at this point. "Last warning. Last warning." he says to Bruno but I haven't heard many warnings since round 2.

Tyson was never a smart man, but was a smart fighter, perhaps by training to channel his amazing instincts into the right avenues. This gradually tips toward the winner, but ends quickly, which is often the case in boxing. As with an economy, a war, or any other collapse. Slowly, slowly, then all at once.

 Did Tyson and Ali ever discuss boxing? I would love to watch that.

Caspar the Friendly Ghost

 I said to myself I couldn't remember the second verse. This turned out not to be a big problem.

 The tune is reminiscent of "Frosty the Snowman" in places.

Grand Am

There has been long suspicion that the variant use of "am" in Black English is a minstrel show fabrication that was never actually used.  "Brother Jones am a fine preacher," or "The corn harvest am a little late this year."

Scholars of AAVE have typically assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in transcriptions of ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the transcribers. 

John McWhorter uncovers enough believable, non-critical and nonsatiric reports of the usage to declare it was not only used in Southern Black dialect in the 1800s, but that it came from nonstandard dialects in England in the late 1700s, which were still in occasional use up until the early 1900s. The 20-min podcast am here.

You Already Know Joseph Henrich

Anthropology Has a Truth Problem Len Gutkin at the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Henrich's critique of his own discipline. J Henrich is the author of The WEIRDest People in the World , famous in the social sciences.  I have mentioned him here before.

Henrich spends some time rebutting the supposed consensus rejecting the existence of a biological sex binary — actually, a significant faction of biological anthropologists consider the question “settled the other way,” a fact which the AAA ignores — but his real interest is in the moral reasoning that permits Rouse and those who agree with her to assume that a technical claim about biology entails a series of political and social prejudices against both gay and trans people. (In her interview with the Chronicle, Rouse expressed incredulity that Kwame Anthony Appiah, who, she noted, is gay, could consider the AAA’s position on biological sex problematic.) Henrich summarizes this extremely weird logic: “If it turns out that natural selection only favors two kinds of gametes, we would have to oppress gay and/or trans people. What?” 

Biblical Censuses

 The Biblical Censuses are Correct Demographic Records, by Lyman Stone

What went wrong was people trying to fix them because they thought they knew better long after the Book of Numbers was composed.  This was fun.

Indexes or Indices?

 We are having a discussion.  Mine is the minority opinion - against librarians. 

In Praise of Obsessive Men

 In Praise of Obsessive Men, by Rosemary Hopcroft at Aporia.  It is a good summary of one side of this discussion about autism. As it is the side I lean to more, I pass it along.  

In short, there is evidence that men are more likely than women to obsessively focus on their chosen area to the exclusion of all else, and this often leads to extraordinary achievement. While the achievements often only benefit the achiever himself, in cognitively demanding areas like science they frequently have tremendous public benefits. Thus, it is likely that extraordinary achievements with the greatest public benefit come disproportionately from obsessive, high IQ men. They deserve our gratitude. 

However there are things worth mentioning that come from another side of the discussion. It is generally agreed that women are in general more attentive to social norms and better at social tasks. This, plus conscientiousness are the prime suspects why they do better at schools as they are designed in most places. I suspect we will find exactly what brain structures are affected by genes being turned on or off by hormones as early as conception, but that is a matter for another day.  For the moment, I stipulate that this is so. Women would thereby have more backup social systems, so that even if they have autism, it is less impairing, and less noticeable. This would explain why it is less often diagnosed.

Secondly, the overlap of symptoms with OCD or Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder makes diagnosis and research less reliable.  I think this is going to be wide open for the next twenty years, as genomic data becomes more available. When we say that something is polygenic, that is even more complicated than we think at first. If there is a variant which makes one 1% more obsessive, it is likely upstream or downstream of variants which make one 0.5% or 2% more obsessive, plus a bunch that are so similar that they also weigh in at about 1%. Each of those is surrounded by nearby SNPs that are similar to others in the population that have a tiny effect or magnifying effect, but most likely no effect at all, yet are along for the ride.  And our target gene is just along for the ride on some other trait near it on the chromosome which is also being selected for. It's all going to be ranges and percentages combined with a hundred other ranges or percentages elsewhere. Some of those are going to be autism, some OCD, some simply anxiety, not to mention a hundred other God-only-knows selection events. 

Funny thing.  The odds for things in genetics are going to turn out looking a lot like the odds for things in real life.  What a concept. Because all these conditions are Mendelian only in their extreme and more destructive versions, it is likely that many are going to be rather obsessed, somewhat obsessed, mildly obsessed, and this will be lessened by women who are more likely to say to themselves "This is just too much.  It costs too much socially" and back off. 

There is a further set of arguments which come from autists who declare that the supposedly scientific claims are weaker than advertised, which they often noticed because the internal experience of autists is ignored and dismissed in favor of that which is objectively measured. There is something to this, but that data is, well, polluted by a very high percentage of the self-diagnosed. When these are female, they borrow heavily from feminist perspectives that science/men/logic itself are antagonistic to women's wisdom. (Which is in turn complicated by women who are striving mightly to argue from an entirely objective and logical perspective. Sigh.)  I can only say that I take the point that the holes in the autism mainstream's position are real, but that does not prove that all opposition to it is correct.