Victorian City Planning

 Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress writes about urban planning in Europe and America Many Victorian Cities Grew Tenfold in a Century. 

This sluggish growth rate (Ed. today) has generated intense housing shortages. Tackling them may require learning from the city planners of the nineteenth century. The whirlwind pace of nineteenth-century expansion was underpinned by a distinctive approach to urban government, including a fundamental right to build when it was profitable to do so, tolerance and even mandating of infrastructure monopolies, and willingness to charge fees at profit-making levels to fund urban infrastructure, whether sewerage, water, buses, trams, metros, gas, or electricity.

The illustrations alone are worth going over and wading through a long article. The followup a few days later How writing about nineteenth-century cities changed my mind,  was what actually attracted me to the first essay.  The words "changed my mind" are like catnip to me.  It is so hard for all of us to change any belief that the arguments in such essays are likely to be surprising and powerful. It is the intellectual equivalent of hiking up a mountain with a fire tower, at least in New England. Those spots were chosen for wide visibility but easy access for a fire warden to live there, so you get a lot of view for moderate effort.

1. It made me more pro-planning

Living in 2020s Britain, it is easy to become sceptical about planning. Our planning system enormously constricts housing supply, impoverishing the country. The housing and industrial buildings that do get built are often distributed around the country according to political imperatives rather than economic logic. It is natural to think that some sort of Hayekian emergent order would be preferable.

In the nineteenth century, however, we see planning performing its true function, solving the collective action problems inherent in urban life...

So for moderate effort, I actually feel I know something about the topic.  That is probably an illusion, but still, it's a nice feeling. 

The Lily of the West

I had only heard the PP&M version, which has the best lyrics. But I instantly knew it is better as a bluegrass song.  I didn't like the Irish versions much, even with Mark Knopfler and the Chieftains. I might have liked to hear a Johnny Cash version, but this group is great instrumentally.

 

Special Pig

 I had heard it, but I wanted to hear Norm tell it anyway.

 

Super Bowl Halftime

The usual NFL fan thinks every aspect about the Super Bowl is supposed to be about them, because they are the ones who cared all year, buy the merch, and watch the games. The halftime show is therefore supposed to be someone they like. The NFL views it differently. They want to be known as every year's Big Event for the country and even the world. They want to throw the best party. Next, they want to attract some new fans.

The football fan feels defensive about this.  They consider the Super Bowl to be essentially their territory, their party.  They earned it. But the NFL brass knows that the fans would be thrilled with highlights from 10 random previous Super Bowls, commented on by someone who knows football. No one else is watching that. There are no new fans there. There's no national party there, only a football party.

The halftime show has more in common with the commercials.  Lots of non-fans tune in just for the ads, though these days it is more common for those people to watch them as an entirely separate entity, only distantly related to the game. 

The NFL desperately wanted Taylor Swift this year, but there was a dispute about who was going to own the rights to it afterward.  Swift doesn't need to bend on such questions, and they need her more than she needs them - except for the precedent of owning the rights, which the NFL felt was a bridge too far.  Taylor had already brought in female fans, especially 13-40, a demographic which football is weak in. I never watch the halftime show, but even I might have looked in on it in order to chat about it with my granddaughters. Bad Bunny is not going to bring in nearly as many new fans.  But he fits the bill as big this year and a demonstration that the Super Bowl is the country's biggest party. 

The football fan wants to be acknowledged as one of the people the party is for, one of the honored guests.  Ain't gonna happen. 

Klosterman

Humorous what Chuck Klosterman says now that he's older. But I give him credit.  He is well aware that he thought differently when he was younger, and finds it amusing now.

Ethan: But this one right here, this one right here, Chuck. This is about the topic, but about a whole lot else, and something that I've thought about a lot, though not necessarily from your perspective. 

quoting Chuck, (from his new book Football): The enlightened opinion one is supposed to hold about the young is that their provocative ideas are inevitably correct, and that history unfailingly proves that the views of outspoken 20-somethings eventually become the views of everyone else.

This take is particularly common among hipster olds who believe aligning themselves with young people keeps them young. They see a college protest, or they read a novel from a precocious author, or they hear a teenager voicing radical politics, and they say, the kids know the truth. What's hilarious about this claim is that it only works in the aggregate.

Ask any 50-year-old if he or she, on a personal level, was more intelligent and more ethically sophisticated at the age of 25. They'll always, always, always say no. Somehow, it's possible to imagine that young people are smarter as an amorphous group, even when the individual experience of every midlife adult suggests the opposite. (Podcast interview with Ethan Strauss)

Archbishop Wolf's Sermon to the English

A thousand years ago, the Archbishop of York chastised the English people for their sins.  (Full text)

You can read this marveling at how different they were then, or how much the same.  Both are true. 

But what I say is true: there is need for that remedy because God’s dues have dimin­ished too long in this land in every district, and laws of the people have deteriorated entirely too greatly, since Edgar died. And sanc­tuaries are too widely violated, and God’s houses are entirely stripped of all dues and are stripped within of everything fitting. And widows are widely forced to marry in unjust ways and too many are impoverished and fully humiliated; and poor men are sorely betrayed and cruelly defrauded, and sold widely out of this land into the power of foreigners, though innocent; and infants are enslaved by means of cruel injustices, on account of petty theft everywhere in this nation.

And the rights of freemen are taken away and the rights of slaves are restricted and charitable obligations are curtailed. Free men may not keep their independence, nor go where they wish, nor deal with their property just as they desire; nor may slaves have that property which, on their own time, they have obtained by means of difficult labor, or that which good men, in Gods favor, have granted them, and given to them in charity for the love of God.

But every man decreases or with­holds every charitable obligation that should by rights be paid eagerly in Gods favor, for in­justice is too widely common among men and lawlessness is too widely dear to them.

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.