Golf

 No one ever got better at their job after taking up golf.  My source for this did point out some exceptions.

But You Knew That

 From Ryan Burge, who has a current primary focus on religious statistics.

I am unsurprised by this. I suspect it is the same in my own small denomination, the ECC.

Beggars Have Persistence

When we were in Chester, England over twenty years ago the was a young man on a main street trying to get passersby to purchase one of his socialist tracts. He had a standard patter in a heart-wrenching voice. Every few seconds he would interject "Please!" in a voice that went right through me.  It was hard to turn away. I had not heard anything like it, even in Romania, and I realised how professional beggars in very poor countries must have to sound because of the competition. One has to reach into primal places where we have few defenses to cut through the noise of the market. (BTW, his voice creates empathy in us. We have discussed that before.)

Similarly, when I was alone in Budapest in 2001 there was a man seated on the street in the cold, shabby and miserable. He said nothing but his sign (in English) was imploring, and nothing about himself: Food my little dog, with a dachshund beside him. The dog has died of old age inf nothing else by now, but I am still sad to think of it.

In Till We Have Faces, When Orual describes hearing Psyche weep, I thought first of the sound of the man in Chester, then of the appearance of the dog and man in Budapest.  I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her.   

Psyche's sadness was real, and I presume the Hungarian's was. 

The voice of the man in Chester hawking pamphlets was likely an affectation, either discovered or learned with practice.  Yet still frighteningly powerful.  I can hear it still. I knew that there was no discussing or arguing about socialism with the man, nor even talking about some other subject.  This was his job, he depended on it in some way, and would do it regardless. News that a war was begun or a war was over would not affect that cry.

I think of that when I see the social media photos of Gaza with lettering plastered on them, of "70,000 innocent Palestinians killed. Send our NGO money. "  No correcting of the number would matter. No questioning of the innocence would dent. "Famine in Gaza is at catastrophic levels. Send us money to give them food." That Hamas is breaking into the storage, stealing the food and feeding themselves first while starving their own people would fall on deaf ears. 

It's their job. 

Hit The Road, Jack

 

Capitalism Vs Status Quo

 I am not usually a Matt Yglesias fan, but there are worse thinkers out there, and he's not stupid. He makes an observation that instantly makes sense to me, that young people complaining about capitalism are not only not talking about a formal system of private property rights and reinvestment, not even about a general free market, which is the term I have preferred to use for clarity. They mean, with vague hand-waving, "the status quo."  That instantly rang true about the knuckleheads I read on social media complaining how capitalism clearly doesn't work, and impervious to statistics and reasoning about it.  They are talking about something else and don't know it.

Over at Slow Boring he put up To save capitalism we need radical land-use reform. (From Emma Camp at the WSJ Free Expression, whose own article Capitalism Gets a Bum  Rap is excellent as well. It's about refrigerators!)

 If you’re young, your experience of the economy is dominated by the housing situation. And the housing situation in the United States is not very good. So I think for most young people “capitalism” means something like “the status quo system,” and they perceive the status quo system to be pretty bad because they are super exposed to the single most dysfunctional element of the status quo economic system.

Now, in my capacity as a lawyer for capitalism, I am happy to point out that not only is housing the most dysfunctional element of the status quo economy, but it’s also the element that is run in the least capitalistic way.

Far and away the number one thing that could improve young people’s living standards in America would be to embrace more market-oriented housing policies.

I might even get suckered in to making myself miserable for a few days by responding to them again, by beginning with "What you are describing is not capitalism, but the status quo in America, which is a mix of socialist, free market, bureaucratic, and sometimes corrupt elements. The free market parts are actually the parts that are working the best." It won't help, but it's fun to say. 

Selfie Generation

Engineerlite sent me a Wall Street Journal article by Scott Atlas, of whom I had not heard who I had not heard of.  It describes how the Selfie Generation has become a problem because Boomers coddled them. * While there is something to it, of great-grandchildren and gggrandchildren not showing the same pluck, sufficient grit, the same spunk and moral fibre as their forebears, I always look sideways at such things. Damn kids can't even shoe a horse nowadays. Generalising about whole generations has limited value. Sometimes the times brings forth the women or men.  Yet even beyond that, the variance is so enormous in every generation that choosing examples necessarily involves cherry-picking. I look at my own great-grandparents, and there was child abandonment and complete irresponsibility alongside incredible resilience and effort. I doubt that the percentage of responsible versus irresponsible men and women changes that much because of who is president and what movies are popular.

 The appeal of socialism to young Americans isn’t really about economics. It’s about having someone else to blame. When you haven’t succeeded after being given every advantage, it’s easier to claim the system is unfair than to admit personal failure.

What’s tragic is that the narrative of societal unfairness is being sold as compassionate. It isn’t. It is condescension packaged as solidarity. It tells young people they are victims—incapable of rising, dependent on redistribution, owed a life they haven’t earned. It robs them of the one thing my father’s midnight taxi shifts gave me: the knowledge that I could do it myself.

Well, maybe.  But going through the effects of elder relatives I found Uncle Manfred's Swedish Socialist Songbook from a century ago. My grandfather and my Uncle Dee used to grumble about "those Reds down in Washington" in the 50s, but it looks like their wives voted for them. Damn Swedes. You'd never catch the solid Scots-Irish doing that! Except...

As lot of what we see as impressive about our ancestors is survivor bias. 

*He sent an ungated version to me.  I hope it works for you. If not, I will add to the summary to give you more flavor. 

Concealed Vs Planted

You know bsking from Graph Paper Diaries on my sidebar, but she occasionally writes for her true crime blog as well, Exhibit Asterisk. She has a new one up about how small differences in a poll question can yield different responses. Concealed Vs Planted. To believe that the police concealed evidence sounds rather passive. But to plant evidence to frame someone is a deeper level of corruption.  And in this case, it matters.

Sorry. She's dealing with a serious case, murder actually. But all I could think of was this. Starts at 2:34

(Second try. First version forbidden)

 

Debunked

I keep encountering that word in Wikipedia, especially about controversial political topics. I often sit back with a frown and say "I don't think so.  I think the idea is still standing. It's unacceptability in certain circles is well-established, but I don't think a debunking has taken place."

I happens often enough that when I encounter it now I conclude that the claim has been 30% debunked - usually the strong or extreme form only - but is otherwise intact. Some editor at Wikipedia is wishing it were so.

 I think it was in Miracles that CS Lewis asked "By whom?  And when?"

Encouraging Fertility

Rob Henderson at City Journal on having babies and having friends. It is his take on the Stone and Brooks study and recommendations I linked to a week ago. 

 The researchers asked respondents how many kids their three closest friends had, and how those friends would react if the respondent had another baby. Would they offer to help? Cook meals after the birth? Or would they worry about their career stalling or stop inviting them out?

The answers were associated, to a startling degree, with the desire to have children. For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up.

Whether we copy our friends or choose them because of similarity,* our closest friends have 4, 2, 2, 4, and 3 children.  Our college friends had 0, 2, 3, 0, 8, and 2.  Our (barely) remaining high school friends have 3, 0, 2, 2, 0, 2, and 2. We had two originally and then adopted 3 more. 

*Some of both.  Must be.  Peer pressure is more powerful as an adult because we have chosen those peers rather than just being stuck next to them in homeroom or the neighborhood when we were teenagers.

Violent Crime

There is a reason why we focus on homicide when we discuss violent crime.  There is a body that the police and the statistics have to do something with. With other crimes, people might not report it because they don't think the police will do anything. This is a complicating factor for reports of rape, certainly. There is an interplay of female reluctance to report, police willingness to prosecute, and legal system sympathy for quick and neat solutions for fair ones. Maybe the police won't care if Blacks get into fights, or maybe they'll care more and prosecute, telling the white boys to just go home and cool off. 

Still, those other crimes are there, and there are other statistics that capture some of it. Even though the numbers may vary by county, there are victimisation reports that are consistent across counties. These numbers are softer, but they ain't nothin'. 

John Lott, who draws eye-rolls* from gun-control advocates who claim he has been debunked even though said debunkings only pay off at 30 cents on the dollar, has an interesting and controversial claim that Canada and Australia have much more violent crime than America. America's high homicide rate is important, but it is a small percentage of overall crime and is most related to drug turf. Also, suicide is a large part of the "gun-death" numbers and presumably requires separate discussion and interventions. 

While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.   

I might have expected that the numbers were closer to America's than people think.  I didn't think there was any world where those countries exceeded our violent crime rate. In round numbers, victimisation reports yield estimates that 60% of violent crimes in the US makes it to a police report, while less than 40% make it to the official statistics in Australia and Canada.  Look for yourself and see if you think he deals with the data fairly.

*And Lott, the much-despised, he tore the cover off the ball..." 

SuperPlatner

I mentioned over at Grim's that the Democrats seemed to be going for an outlaw image to fit their "take from the rich to give to the poor" model. I notice that Graham has already done the "take from the rich part," starting with his parents, but the "give to the poor" part was always rather theoretical and in the future. This is similar to the original Robin Hood, or one of them, who is not on record as giving to the poor, but was beloved because he refused to rob them. And at least he robbed the rich.

Which put me in mind of this, which might be a better fit.

 "Let's rob from the rich...and KEEP IT!"

Introducing Plan A

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten Introducing Plan A, a proposal for AI safety built on agreements that recognise the principals do not trust each other. It is offered as an overall plan, but also as a stand-up comparison model 

... it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better. 

The full plan comes from AI Futures, which had an uncannily good prediction in 2021 of what would happen from then to now. It includes a link to the actual Plan A. The ACX essay linked above is Scott's sales pitch for it. 

I don't know enough to have a credible opinion beyond the observation that these people are much smarter than I am, have good credentials that they are well-meaning, and have spent a lot of time on what could go wrong and how we prevent/fix that. 

Recent Links

 Men, We Love You.  Please Holler Back. Dating apps were originally designed to help you find a date.  They are now "optimised" to keep your eyeballs on the site. This feeds bad attitudes in both men and women, about themselves and about each other. Update explanation of my statement: The imbalance in swipe left/swipe right numbers creates automatic evidence for the theory among women that "a lot of guys are coming onto to me and lots of them are creepy," while men have the impression that "I could like lots of women and think I'm a decent guy, but even women who aren't that great are rejecting me from even a chance." 

The Weird history of "Weird."  Wyrd, which I wrote about in 2010 and reposted a few times, is only half the story.

Just Plain Rivka (sidebar) sends this along from  Anthony DiGiorgio at Off Label Ideas 

 The commenter pushing back makes some valid points, but not as strong as he is pretending. 

What do women want? 

A legislative work-around to the EU opposition to GMO foods. Approval of "lightly edited" genes.