Opinions

 I have had it with people who disagree with me.  They're wrong.  They should go away.

Room To Move

I was not a blues fan until late in my adolescent listening career, but I did know to listen to John Mayall.  I don't think I'm enough an authority to know what to pick, but I like this.

Stop Looking At Each Other

 Sherry Ning at Pluripotent, Stop Looking At Each Other:

We often compare social media to Orwell’s surveillance state of 1984, but here’s what’s different about our telescreens: our screens do not exist to monitor us, but for us to monitor others. There is no totalitarian state behind our screens enforcing social order; instead, the screens turn us into the supervisors of each others’ behaviors.

...

When you chat with a stranger in real life, it’s usually one-on-one and they get to know you as much as you get to know them in real time. They spend as much attention on you as you spend on them. Social media relationships are parasocial — by definition, abnormal — because one million people are “getting to know” one person and that one person must pretend they are friends with one million people.

Most bloggers have this temptation at (ahem) a reduced level. I wonder if the 100 people who eventually read each post in a month are affecting me in ways I do not see and might want to look at harshly. My daughter-in-law has a million followers on TikTok and over all platforms, she may hit two million. I have no idea how this affects her, and neither does she.

I think different generations, different personalities, and both sexes get into trouble about this in different ways.  Those of us who grew up without social media are immune to a lot of these temptations and always will be.  With CS Lewis, I am thankful for temptations I am spared, because I don't do that well with the ones that do come to me. My father, who had many vices and knew it, once said to me "I'm glad I didn't grow up in this era, because I might be pushing a needle and spoon if I had."

Thanks to Rob Henderson for the link

Universal Basic Income

Well, this is sort of depressing but similar to what we have seen before.

Megan McArdle on X

I'm a UBI skeptic and this is worse than I'd have predicted: $1,000 a month reduces work and increases leisure. Minimal effect on schooling, job quality or other human capital investment. Hard to imagine selling UBI on data like this.  (Announcement here) (Study here)

Sarah Miller on X

The cash generated big improvements in stress and mental health, but they were short-lived. By the second year of the transfer, treatment and control reported similar rates of stress and mental health, and we can rule out even small improvements. (with graph)

Sarah Miller on X again

Mirroring what we see for mental health, the transfer generated large but short-lived reductions in food hardship/food insecurity; even by year 2, no significant difference across treatment arms. (graph)

We saw something similar in educational interventions like Head Start or whatever this year's new educational fad is. Scott Alexander has looked at educational interventions and concludes that gains are temporary and large findings are a result of selection bias (referencing Fredrik deBoer).

We saw something similar in criminal justice interventions. Good initial results that level off and become indistinguishable from controls fairly quickly.

You might tuck this thought into the back of your brain whenever you see the evaluation that some intervention "didn't scale up." It may not be the scaling, it may be that the effect wears off.  I knew a psychiatrist who claimed that Prozac usually wore off in a few years and you had to switch to something else. (Referring to depression, not OCD) We adjust to the new normal and our core personality reasserts itself.

"Tiny Ash Cannon" a text thread of mine that includes some you know, suggests that this is similar to the happiness studies about making more money. We just adjust our explanations to another level.

Theory of Mind Again

Those of you who are aspie/on the spectrum or who are close to someone who is, do you find that being able to see the person they want to understand, either on film or especially live, entirely offsets the impairment (for those who have an impairment - I don't think all aspies do)?  I think that for empathy the answer looks close to yes, that the nonverbal cues are sufficient; but for understanding strictly cognitive states, those cues only make up some of the ground.  Or perhaps merely hearing or reading about those states start them in a deeper hole in understanding than would be true for neurotypicals.

Hot Tuna

I admit I had forgotten about them.  I had never bought an album of theirs, only hearing them in the dorm.

They were a Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen project that went on for years.(Hey, I see they still tour.) Kaukonen was a part of the debate at the time of who was the greatest lead guitarist, with Hendrix and Clapton and a few others.

The fiddle player is Papa John Creach, who played with, well, everyone cool.

"$10M for the Big Guy."

So Biden is not going to actually enjoy all this money. Pudding isn't all that expensive. Huh.

Ecclesiastes 2:18  I hated all for which I had toiled under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who comes after me.

Who will get to enjoy this wealth?

Butchering Argentine Armadillos

Anthropic cut marks is the phrase used to describe evidence of butchery of armadillo-like creatures 21K y/a. This would be 30% older than previous finds, well before the prevailing theories of just a few years ago would allow.

At one level we might ask So what? Yes, all true knowledge has some value, but this would seem to be well down the list.  If the were pre-Clovis humans in the New World, they didn't leave more than a fragment of genes and no culture. They are not us, not even proto-us.

Well, we have a current narrative of extinction of megafauna being primarily due to hunting by man, despite the somewhat desperate attempts of some to prove it was climate change. We see it in the New World, in Australia and nearby islands, on Madagascar - pretty much everywhere. 

But here comes an example of the arrival of humans without mass extinctions. (Okay, they got this one and it is extinct now, but...generally.) So the story doesn't always have to play out that way. Why not in this case?

Assassination Conspiracy

 You'd think that a good conspiracy would be better organised.

Fugitives

At pub night I used a line that I could have sworn they were sick of by now, but they had never heard it. I described us a Fugitives from the Law of Averages. 

Okay, now that I'm looking at it it's not as funny as I thought.  Free to all takers, though.

Shark Attacks

 Weather.com has a little film on How to Avoid Shark Attacks.  I'll bet they have very few in Iowa.

Psychotic Reaction

Tom Petty covered this as well, I recall. Classic garage band music.

Personal Limitations

Engineerlite and I discussed two related phenomena this morning on our walk. When we do not easily understand or apprehend a book or parts of a book, we quickly abandon those and consider that they "must not be very important." Or not my sort of thing, not his best work, only for his die-hard fans, or such like.  I took as an example Till We Have Faces, which Lewis considered his best book, as did Tolkien, and as have many Lewis scholars.  I tried three times to get going on it and couldn't get interested.  I think I used excuses much like the above.  I finally read it as a follow-along with a podcast discussing it chapter by chapter and I got it.  It is his best work. 

This was similar to what happens to me reading poetry.  I don't much like poetry.  I tend not to get it. Yet I have found if I get just a little boost up from someone who actually knows something I can get over the wall to the other side and start enjoying.

I also relate this to when I remember events that others do not, which happens often.  When I am with friends who remember about the same amount of past events, there is no accusation if we happen to remember different things about summer studies, or working with particular doctors, or sermons that a late pastor preached. But when I remember a great deal more, there is sometimes resentment. Why do you still care about that?  I dunno.  I remember it. It's in the file cabinet, cross referenced with other stuff.

At this point Tom (engineerlite's actual name) related this to the teachings of Jesus.  If people don't seem to get it, they quickly discard it as unimportant. Or if they take in some of it, they regard those elements that they understand as the Key Elements, that everyone should know, while the other parts are...not so important. Not what I'm interested in. More for the fanatical types. I thought that was an excellent insight to make that transfer to faith understanding.

We are filled to the level of container we bring. "With the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

Imagine

In our discussions of Theory of Mind and Reciprocity I have tried to put the adult issues in everyday language, that it involves putting oneself in another's shoes, seeing from another perspective, whether automatically or when cued. Today I ran across a Confucian saying that I think apt.  "Imagine my heart were yours."

Update: That may refer more strictly to empathy. I use Theory of Mind to include both emotional perspectives and cognitive perspectives, but many use ToM to refer solely to cognitive. I think I need to be more careful about this.

DEI in Academia

I finally got around to listening to Razib interview Steve Hsu, who is also on my sidebar.  IQ, Artificial Intelligence, and Academia (transcript sort of available.) I love it when that happens.  Hsu is a genetic researcher via BGI and knows a great deal about IQ and genetics. (He calls IQ a "colloquial term," which I think is a step forward. I'm going to start using that disclaimer in favor of "general intelligence factor.") He was a physics professor at Oregon, then took a job at Michigan State as Dean of Research.  He was asked to resign from that position and did, for reasons some of you may have followed and are included in the podcast. He is part both genetic and AI startups and is knowledgeable about what China is doing in both sectors and in fact, in all tech sectors.

For those of you who like real-life examples about DEI resulting in 50th-best candidates (on average) being hired in math or tenure granted to professors of color in the university, I recommend this.  He has sat at those tables, has pointed out the illegality of some practices, and vetoed or denied funding to research, hiring, or promotions that are not the best on the table.  I don't follow it much.  I tend to write academia off as a general lost cause anyway, and something I will never have much influence over. My impression is that the more focus has to be put on real victories over discrimination fifty or one hundred years ago, the more it is an admission that we are not supposed to be looking at what is happening in the present.  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. 

But Hsu points out that in STEM, such things contribute to the US and the West in general falling behind China in important tech sectors. It is real and happening now, and it is an excellent point.

But the part that fascinated me is how Hsu, an Obama-voting liberal who has depended on Republicans in the legislature to make sure the laws are followed and the sentiments reinforced publicly, has found that they don't follow through.  Do we complain that liberals do not real diversity, only the appearance of it?  Well conservatives do not care about real victory over DEI, only the appearance of it. People and whole universities are reported and nothing is done.

Some quotes

The National Institutes of Health now blocks access to an important database if it thinks the scientist's research may enter into forbidden territory...a lot of people are griping about this and angry, but they don't know what to do.  They don't want to put a target on their back.

...they would say the following: "Oh I support you, Steve. But you know, my main goal is to push forward our understanding of dark energy in the universe.  And I can't jeopardise my big NSF grant by supporting you publicly. But I do support you." And OK, that person at least has an articulated justification for the cowardly behavior.  Fine, I respect that. Maybe I would not have been a hero in the Holocaust. But they're just go with the flow conformists who don't have an original thought in their head.

I have never had a wokester academic come at me on the facts. It's never happened.  It's never happened. They say, like* "I didn't like what you wrote in the blog post," I'm like* "Let's talk about it." They didn't. "You think this paper published by these researchers at Harvard is wrong? Tell me why you think it's wrong."

It is hard to go against the flow. I know people went to very evangelical or conservative Catholic undergrad programs, but have now gone native because the pressure starts early. For those who treasure social status, you start noticing what beliefs are the cool ones and which are the shunned ones all the way back to junior high.  And why not? People like me - or Republican legislators - can come make a big show about "You should do this. You should do that." Yet they have their life, often also in academia, and children in the local schools in a university dominant district that they have to live in every day, not just when we want to trot them out as examples. Why should they? We don't back them up. "Sure go on into the Valley of Death.  I'll be right behind you. Oh wait, I'll be delayed a couple of minutes.  Forgot my phone."

If you are absolutely certain you would not do that to them, I would ask you to cite evidence that you have actually done it. Otherwise it might be just wishful thinking on your part.

* Reminder that this "like" construction means "accurate but not exact quote."

Space Oddity

We think of this song as an eerie, effect-suffused studio piece, not a harmony piece.  But it is an illustration of something I have pointed out several times, that harmony was fairly automatic in pop music of that era. Even solo artists of the 50s, the Frank Sinatras, The Tony Bennetts, The Doris Days all had duets and harmony pieces as well. By the 60s and 70s it was even more pronounced.

I loved harmonising to this singing along in the 70s and still do.

The Moral Circle

Aporia likes to pass on older articles they think important. Here is one from 2019 that claims that liberals and conservatives differ greatly in who they extend concern to. Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle

The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism). Here we report seven studies illustrating universalist versus parochial differences in compassion. Studies 1a-1c show that liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation.

The further studies show a preference of liberals to expand their circles of concern to animals, all living creatures, and the universe as a whole. 

In 2006, then Democratic Senator Barack Obama bemoaned the country’s “empathy deficit,” telling college graduates, “I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern.” In 2012, Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney said, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

Those quotes capture the distinction.

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Note. The highest value on the heatmap scale is 20 units for liberals, and 12 units for conservatives. Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence

I will tell you that this looks so dramatic, so perfect that it can't be quite true. We can't be that different. Can we? It is the stereotype, certainly, but this would be a profound difference. I would have found a milder result more plausible.  But...there it is, and I am not seeing much problem with the study.  It may be that the definitions of conservative and liberal are so tight in the study, specifically to try and identify an effect, that it exaggerates what we might see between neighbors who have different yard signs.

I will tell you where my sympathies lie, if you have not already guessed. The people near at hand are the ones God has given to us and are primary.  We should try to expand out from that circle, yes. But Steve Sailer once pointed out that there is a belief among liberals that there is some moral superiority in skipping over circles in order to love The Whole World. I don't fault loving the whole world as a goal - "for God so loved the world" - I just think once you have skipped a circle you have entered the world of illusion, where kindness becomes easier because it costs little. If you think you are skipping many circles, then I think you are just showing off.

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.  Uncle Screwtape to his nephew and advisee Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters, Chapter VI.  CS Lewis 1942

Facebook and Other Comments

It is getting fevered out there, and people seem to want to get their licks in early. 

I don't see the hurry, myself. 

I suspect it is not necessarily the desire to manipulate others - though I am sure that is a partial motive for many - but the drive for narrative.  We don't like to have unexplained things out there, so we start floating what looks like the most probable explanation.  If you think of us as a tribe sitting around a fire in the evening trying to understand how some of our cattle were taken from us by surprise, you can see that the free-for-all of "I think..." and "Maybe we..." might be a beneficial automatic strategy and be perpetuated in the genes.  It has its downsides, but perhaps is better than everyone saying "I dunno. Let's talk about it in a coupla days."

France Is Bacon

I just heard this mondegreen for the first time today.  Love it.

"Knowledge is Power.  France is bacon."

James K Hodgkinson

Early in Trump's presidency, there was an attempted assassination of numerous Republican congressmen on a baseball field in NoVa. The shooter was a Bernie Sanders campaign worker, James, K Hodgkinson. 

We forget. Austin Bay reminds us.

Mato Grosso de Sul, Brazil

So Brian Winter tells us that Mato Grosso de Sul in West-Central Brazil looks a lot like Texas, reminding him of the area around Dallas he grew up in. He finds it forward-looking rather than nostalgic like Argentina.

They have Sertanejo music. Lots of jeans, hats, belt buckles.

The churrasco there is in actual ranch country.

It is an inexpenisve place to stay and eat. I don't know if it is expensive to get there, about 600-900 miles from Rio, Brasilia, Sao Paulo. That could be an issue.

No Buc-ees yet. But it looks like a match to me.

Raelians

No matter how many times you mark them as spam or unsubscribe, the Raelians claw their way back into your email.

Forced Mental Health Treatment - Improved

Thanks to Korora Cranberry for the link.

Unsurprisingly, the best Homeless Mentally Ill article I have seen to date is by Scott Alexander.  Details That You Should Include In Your Article About How We Should Do Something About the Homeless Mentally Ill

3. The patient gets committed to the hospital. The hospital makes an appointment with a judge to legally evaluate the commitment order. But realistically the appointment is 4-14 days out (depending on the state), and by then the patient may well be gone anyway, in which case the hearing can be cancelled. If it does go to trial, the judge will always defer to the psychiatrists, because they’re experts trying to do a tough and socially important job, and the defendant is represented by an overworked public defender who has devoted 0.01 minutes of thought to this case. This is part of why everyone feels comfortable making commitment decisions on vibes. (AVI note: This is one of the parts I am most familiar with.)

In practice, the government tries some combination of these things, each of which works a little. Sometimes they fiddle with the law around inpatient commitment around the edges. Sometimes they give people free houses. Sometimes they threaten them with Involuntary Outpatient Commitment orders. Sometimes they throw them in prison. Most of these things work a little. Some of them could work better with more funding.

From the outside, all problems look simple.

Embarrassed

I am sorry to subject you to a short.  I am embarrassed that I watch shorts - this one or any one.

But I think I would like this guy. A great addition to pub night, I think.

A reminder that pub night is Thursdays if you are in southern NH. 

Good White Men

Freddie deBoer again.  Maybe I should subscribe and put him on my sidebar. The Good White Man Roster. I think I recognised the name of Will Wilkinson from somewhere in the past. I don't know the others, but I am trusting Freddie that they have some prominence.

Including this guy. I genuinely thought this was a parody when I saw it. "White supremacy gaining ground among black-passing individuals within the Mexican and Latino community is particularly troubling."  I'll bet.

Merrimack County

I was not aware of this song and did not know that Tom Rush was born in Merrimack County.

Oh wait.  He wasn't.  Poetic license...he did live there and later came back to Deering which sorta kind should actually be part of Merrimack County. Hillsborough County and Rockingham don't scan quite so easily, I admit.  Merr'mack gets down to two syllables more easily. And his K-8 childhood seems to have been spent there, which counts for something.

The video gets tiring because of how it is filmed, but is very much reminiscent of my childhood. 

Rush was very much in that tradition of prep school (St. Paul's, Groton), then Ivy League (Harvard, like Pete Seeger) then deciding he wanted to be authentic, so he started singing Woody Guthrie songs and traveling around to coffee houses in backwoods places like Bryn Mawr and Cambridge.

So I should hate the guy, but really, I have always liked him.

SCUBA 2024

I have not kept all of you apprised of Vacation Bible School every summer, even though it takes over our house and my wife's attention each year, not to mention my daughter-in-law, who runs the thing for about 150 kids, and my two granddaughters, now 16 and 13. They are quite capable at this point, able to run a small country if called upon. This year it is SCUBA.

All the crafty people come out with over-ambitious projects, which the semi-crafty dutifully try and effect as well as possible. Tracy is irritated that she can't get something-or-other to look quite right, but last year Sarah, then twelve, gave the calming line that should be a good influence on all these overwrought women: "Nana, these kids are eight."

Today is the last day of setup, then le deluge.

Megafauna Extinction

There has been debate for at least fifty years whether the extinction of megafauna has been caused by human hunting or by climate change. The evidence has long pointed to hunting being the primary driver, at least to my eyes.  those who keep insisting "Well, it could be climate change" seem to want that answer to be true, because they want to roll that over into a modern climate change danger argument for cultural and legislative/regulatory purposes.

I am sure there are some who are fair brokers of the research, but my long impression is that they squint a lot to get the package they want to present.  Most notably, the phrase climate change is currently culturally loaded, referring primarily to anthropogenic warming plus a belief that extreme weather has become more common. They want to highlight the danger of this by pointing to extinctions of cool animals.  But cooling, especially freezing, has been a more frequent danger, and changes in rain and moisture have pressured species (and humans) as well. This is politely ignored.

Researchers at ECONOVO at Aarhus University in Denmark have concluded that it is hunting that has been decisive. For example

Extinctions occurred on all continents except Antarctica and in all types of ecosystems, from tropical forests and savannas to Mediterranean and temperate forests and steppes to arctic ecosystems. Svenning explains,

"Many of the extinct species could thrive in various types of environments. Therefore, their extinction cannot be explained by climate changes causing the disappearance of a specific ecosystem type, such as the mammoth steppe. Most of the species existed under temperate to tropical conditions and should actually have benefited from the warming at the end of the last ice age."

 This will have some impact on some people.  We hope.

Male and Female Brains

I have not seen commentary or refutation of this paper, so I don't really know if it has weaknesses.

Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization

Our stDNN model accurately differentiated male and female brains, demonstrating consistently high cross-validation accuracy (>90%), replicability, and generalizability across multisession data from the same individuals and three independent cohorts (N ~ 1,500 young adults aged 20 to 35). Explainable AI (XAI) analysis revealed that brain features associated with the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network consistently exhibited significant sex differences (effect sizes > 1.5) across sessions and independent cohorts. Furthermore, XAI-derived brain features accurately predicted sex-specific cognitive profiles, a finding that was also independently replicated. Our results demonstrate that sex differences in functional brain dynamics are not only highly replicable and generalizable but also behaviorally relevant, challenging the notion of a continuum in male-female brain organization.

Midwinter's Day, Midsummer's Day

I wondered, but never looked up why Midwinter's Day was actually the first day of winter, Midsummer's Day the first day of summer.  It seemed that someone had missed a trick, or was confused about the astronomy.

Well, no. We decided late in northern European history to set the beginning of winter on the shortest day, the beginning of summer on the longest. 1300 to 1500, very regional in adoption.  Before that winter began variously anywhere from mid-October to the first of November, often on a Saint's Day. Vetrardag in Old Norse, the first day of winter, was the Saturday that fell between October 10 and 16th.

The years of one's life were counted more often in winters than summers. "A lad of fourteen winters" we would call thirteen. As food was more scarce and fuel depleted over the winter, it was something of a milestone, even an accomplishment, to make it through a winter. Even the wealthy would find March rather grim. There was also some tendency to divide the year into summers and winters, with autumn and spring being sections of those, the planting season and the harvest season.

Those who do genealogy see the remnants of this in the new year starting in the spring. Regardless of what the calendar is doing, we keep the same idea in our poetry. 

Or more recently, 

And Vivaldi starts his Four Seasons with "Spring." Sometimes the heart knows what the mind refuses to see.

Pilgrimage

I chatted with the young nun I saw at the grocery story, noting that I had not seen her there for a while.

"The sisters who usually do it are on a pilgrimage.  they are wlking across the country for the next two months."

Well that blows the vague idea of a weeklong pilgrimage hike next year right out of the water, doesn't it?

Rogers Hornsby

This isn't that great a little video, but it's not bad, and the subject is worthy. It is difficult impossible to compare across eras but the claim that Hornsby was the greatest right-handed hitter of all time is not ridiculous. It was a hitter's era, yes, so some discount must be applied. But against that we have to note that he did not play for Boston or (especially) New York, the teams that got the most attention. He played for St Louis, beloved across what was then regarded as the West in baseball, but that did little for his reputation back east. We would know more about him if he had played for any of the east-coast teams. 

I am of the opinion that the quality of player has improved over the years as well. Hornsby playing today would face more first rate pitchers, some of whom would throw a wicked slider, a pitch unknown in his day.

I was going to include that Ted Williams had called him the greatest hitter, but learned while searching for a clip of that that Williams had high praise for a lot of players. WRT our discussions of heritability versus effort, Williams said often that you couldn't teach hitting, because a lot of it was innate...BUT, everyone could be improved. With film and better medical care even a Hornsby could be better, but not enough to hit .400

Steve Sailer Substack - With Update

Steve Sailer has gone the substack route.  I don't know if I am going to subscribe, but I thought I would let folks know.  I bought his book Noticing, a collection of older, best essays and like it thus far. I just learned about it today and on my first look read why he doesn't think Michelle Obama would even want the presidency.  Odd, because we always assume all these DC types are power-mad, but he points out a few things that suggest she's about where she wants to be in life right now.

Or evidence of what Deep State decision-making really is. or Deep State Vs Peak State.

Ceausescu and a preference falsification cascade, and how it applies to Joe Biden. 

Personally, I subscribe to the New York Times because it provides me a vast amount of useful material, especially down toward the end of its articles when its reporters tend to spill the beans about what’s really going on.

Sailer is just a more interesting thinker than most.  Because he notices things and then writes them.

Don't Legalise Drugs

From Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal, Spring 1997. Don't Legalize Drugs.  We wonder how well an argument of Descartes or Voltaire will hold up over centuries. Sometimes it is worth considering how well a point of view holds up over even 25 years.

No man, except possibly a hermit, is an island; and so it is virtually impossible for Mill’s principle to apply to any human action whatever, let alone shooting up heroin or smoking crack. Such a principle is virtually useless in determining what should or should not be permitted.

Perhaps we ought not be too harsh on Mill’s principle: it’s not clear that anyone has ever thought of a better one. But that is precisely the point.

 

Amie

 

Post 9900 - Is it Hip to Have Asperger's?

The next marked post will be 10,000, which should occur sometime in September. I started off by just noting the number on whatever post happened to be next in line, but as I have gone on, I have found myself positioning them so that those that fall on an exact hundred are a little bit more special, or perhaps representative of the blog s a whole in some way.  I am undecided which I shall do for that landmark. Maybe ABBA will be in the news then or something.

But 9900 has been steered just a touch.  It would have been somewhere 9899-9902, and it is about the different ways of looking at what it means to be "on the spectrum," "an Aspie," "have autism or HFA." There has been a good deal of that here over the last half-dozen years especially, and it is messy. So I thought I would give some space to people who are pushing back on the "everyone is claiming they have autism these days" attitude. I have sympathy in both directions, and will put in my own thoughts as well, which many of you might guess at pretty well.

Jesse Singal: Why Disability Advocates are Trying to Shut Down a Policy That Benefits Disabled People.

 Lutz, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who has previously written a book about her experiences raising a son (now an adult) with severe autism, goes on to lay out a fascinating history of this concept in the first half of Chasing the Intact Mind. She focuses heavily on memoirs written by parents of children with autism, showing how at every stage in the modern history of our understanding of this condition, such parents have pined for — and in some cases gone to herculean and frequently pseudoscientific lengths to free — the “intact mind” supposedly lurking behind their severely disabled child’s troubled exterior.

Facilitated communication was the most dramatic but tragic attempt to find the "intact" mind in children who seemed beyond reach. There are Temple Grandins in the world, yes. And there are deeply gifted children who seem very strange - I knew many and know some now.

Freddie deBoer The Gentrification of Disability.

 She was really not a fan of the autism awareness community of the time. This was well before the “neurodiversity” movement and all of its habits. It was all about awareness, raising awareness, 5ks for awareness, bumper stickers for awareness. That was precisely what angered her the most. She said to me once, “What does awareness do for my kid? How does it help me?” Words to that effect. It was a good question, one I couldn’t answer. Today I don’t hear about awareness so much, but there’s still plenty of the basic disease of awareness thinking - the notion that what people who deal with a particular disability need is a vague positivity, that what every disabled person requires is the laurel of strangers condescendingly wishing them the best.

Yes, much of autism advocacy (and LGBT, etc advocacy), especially self-advocacy in the present era is the old Self-Esteem movement smuggled in with mustache glasses. If only I could feel better about myself (And I'm looking to YOU for that), I would thrive. Of course we would all do better if we were in encouraging environments, but I don't think there's evidence it makes that much difference. I have always had a sneaking suspicion that the attitude comes from professionals who don't have much to offer in the way of practical help, trying to convince themselves and the world that they can be really, really valuable just by standing around and listening, being pals.

I do not recommend the Blocked and Reported podcast "Keep Autism Weird." I was 22 min in, more than 1/3 of the way through, and they had not gotten on topic yet.  The rest might have been valuable, but I didn't wait around to find out.

There are lots of videos and short essays by people explaining how their aspieness (or ADHD, or OCD) limits them.  The best ones talk about how they have learned to work around this and make themselves useful, by coming in early when it is quiet, by working in spurts, by making very clear requests for accommodation. A lot of the worst ones have gone viral because of others making fun of them and their poor work attitudes.

Here is Peter Wharmby

My own view is that there is often an advantage to having a slight amount of something. Comedians are often depressed or anxious; leaders with mania sometimes do better; accountants and surgeons with OCD will do naturally what others might find difficult. The oddity, even disability, is useful in a particular context.  It is usually not quite the same as those conditions where there is an advantage to having one copy of a gene, but two copies will kill you, but the analogy is pretty good.

Whenever there is a decent excuse for your inability to quite reach your potential - racism, misunderstanding, language barrier, lookism, religious prejudice - a flood of people will come in and try to hide behind it. And that is also a spectrum, as people have various strengths of claim to the defence.

Distantly Related  How Ancient Neanderthal Genes May Influence Autism.  This doesn't quite answer James's query that about higher African incidence of autism (at least by diagnosis in North America) conflicting with the lack of Neanderthal ancestry, but I suppose it helps a bit.  I suspect that autism is overdiagnosed in African-Americans because of depressed IQ scores. Just a guess.

Forced Mental Health Treatment

Granite Dad sent an article by Freddie deBoer* in the New York Intelligencer, The Case for Forcing The Mentally Ill Into Treatment. I am gratified that Granite Dad has been paying attention all these years, noting right off the bat that deBoer does not likely have much awareness how expensive this would be. But still, there are good points throughout the opinion piece. 

But fear of violence on the subway is in fact rational, even as we must rise above that fear to embrace compassion. The gloating insistence from progressives that they are never bothered by the behavior of disturbed people on the subway does not fit the facts about mental illness and violence...

Let’s start with problems we don’t have. New York City is not in the middle of a crime wave. There has not been a terrible spike in violent crime in the past year, not in the subways or parks or anywhere else. There was, as in the country writ large, a spike in murders and gun crimes in 2021; the reasons for this are hotly debated, as you’d predict. (I’m going with cops refusing to do their jobs, personally.) Happily for all of us, the pandemic-era crime surge both rose and fell swiftly, and we’re living through a record decline in murders. Subway crime specifically has fallen...

And tellingly,  

A New York Times piece from November 2023 used the same language, saying “mentally ill people are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than to commit one.”

That statement is, in fact, true — true and meaningless. It says literally nothing about the question of whether the mentally ill are more likely to commit acts of violence against strangers or not.

The reality is that because a small percentage of people commit the large majority of violent crimes, members of almost any identifiable group are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than to be the perpetrators.

There are other missing pieces, as I know from working in this field for over forty years. It gets easy for harried social workers, cops, nurses, to shade off focusing on what is clearly dangerous to what "would be good for Jason" (and it would be good for Jason - like a roommate who isn't a violent druggy after his check), or what "would give this poor family a break," and be tempted to move farther and farther from what the letter of the law is, and the spirit of the law is. Rights get shaved, partly from compassion and partly from weariness.

Secondly, treatment is seldom fully effective with few side effects. There is a lot of gray area of meds that help a lot but feel awful to take, given to people who don't remember how miserable they were when they were ill and are therefore outraged at those side effects.  Worse, there are some patients who get only a little benefit.  For society, that might be a worthy difference, keeping them off the edge of complete meltdown and violence or helplessness, but it is not good for the patient.

Well, we have covered this before, many times in the old days at the beginning of this site when i saw myself as a psychblogger.

 

*deBoer is every conservative's favorite socialist (even communist), as he is unsparing in his honesty about the reality of social programs not doing what they claim, beginning with educational programs, continuing through affirmative action, and ending...well, I don't know where else it goes, come to think of it.  I should look it up, shouldn't I? 

His view on social inequality is similar to Chesterton's comments about the undeserving poor.  “ It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.”Heretics

Funeral

I drove down to West Hartford today for the memorial service for Sally Ayer Rossetti, my mother's favorite cousin. The readings and music were standard - Dvorak, "How Great Thou Art*," "Amazing Grace," "His Eye is on the Sparrow;" The 23rd Psalm, The Lord's Prayer, 2 Timothy 4:7-8, and John 14:1-7. It turns out that the whole service was based on the bulletin to another service Sally had gone to years ago.  She brought the bulletin to her daughter and said "This is perfect.  Do this."

The medley of instrumental ABBA songs for the prelude was a little different, though.

My brother was there, and Sally's children, who I had not seen in decades, though we have corresponded a bit. Only one other relative, one of her brother's grandsons. It felt odd.  Yogi Berra supposedly said "If you don't go to other people's funerals they won't come to yours," one of those impossibilities that is nonetheless true. The number of people likely to attend your funeral slowly trickles away.  If you are still in the workforce there will be people for whom you are currently a big deal in their lives.  Ten years later, not so much. This is also true for how active you are at church or in other groups. You start to become invisible when you are gone. 

I keep telling people some things they can do as they age to fight invisibility, because regardless of whether you care about the attendance at your funeral, you might need someone to drive you to a consult you have to be drugged for more than an hour away, to wait in the lobby for you to be able to return home, or need meals when you have a hip replacement. 

I am already destined to be set on an ice floe and pushed out to sea, but what about the last few years before that?

Revelation

Robert Frost  A Boy's Will 1913

We make ourselves a place apart
     Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
     Till someone find us really out.

’Tis pity if the case require
     (Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
     The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play
     At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
     Must speak and tell us where they are.

 

I'll have a go at it because of the last stanza, though I am not known for being good at all at poetry analysis.

We hide ourselves, quietly or noisily, because of some fear of discovery and rejection. Yet discovery is what we desire, so we craft our hiding cleverly, in hopes of inspiring someone to look more closely. Sadly, few pursue to the degree we would like, and in the end we forego the disguises and say the truth more baldly.

Because few will look, or none, all must eventually reveal themselves.  Even God must spell it out and appear before us, because so few earnestly desired to know Him.

 

Entrepreneur

All five of my sons work for employers, as my wife and I did our entire careers.  But the three younger ones especially are also moving out into self-employment. John-Adrian works as an accountant at a hospital, where his wife also works. But he also makes money at his hobbies - catching king crab and salmon, metal detecting, fleecing overconfident drunks at poker tables in Vegas, hunting caribou.  His wife makes money as a media influencer to Filipinos. Their side hustles put together are about a decent salary now. Son #4 works for Mercedes above the Arctic Circle in Norway, but also has a car rental business, having discerned that the only other rentals are all very high-end, leaving an unserved market.  Kyle has started a photography business, particularly dog photography, which he hopes soon becomes his only business. He has a few other ways of making side cash, though he is not pursuing those as careers.

Son #2 used to make side money as a wedding photographer, not longer does.

Having to hustle for your livelihood is not something I well understand.  They have qualities of resilience and enduring rejection that I seem to lack. Bully for them, then. I tip my hat.

Replacing Biden

I am already hearing people saying that the Democrats who want to replace Biden should be taken at face value when they say that they are doing this "for the country."  I can see that.  I'll bet some of them are. It is not a crazy argument to look at this and say "the country must be led by someone else."

But there is something deeply worrisome in terms of precedent to say "we have an elaborate but understandable and long-established method of consulting the American people about who they want to have as president, but we don't like how that worked out this time, so let's scrap it and do something else."

What could possibly go wrong with that in the next election, or the one after that?

Misinformation

The newsletter from Stuart Ritchie of The Studies Show (sidebar), Science Fictions, is checking out what is up with the field of Misinformation, which he does not hesitate to call a bullshit field.

So maybe it is not a shock that a Misinformation expert from Harvard (now BU) is spreading misinformation.  The Distortions of Joan Donovan. She says that Meta pressured Harvard to get rid of her.  But according to the Chronicle of Higher Education

Donovan presented no firsthand evidence that Meta was behind her ouster. And when I tried to get to the bottom of what actually happened at Harvard, a different narrative emerged from interviews, documents, recordings, texts, and emails.

Eleven Technology and Social Change Project ex-members and Shorenstein staffers told me they had seen no evidence that Meta exerted pressure on Donovan’s team or that its influence is what ended it. Several of Donovan’s other claims about her time there are misleading, untrue, or contradicted by people directly involved. Some former colleagues say they no longer trust the scholar they once admired.

This is on the heels of a Nature article Misunderstanding the harms of Online Misinformation.  In Journal-speak, the Nature article is telling us that the terms are undefined, it is unclear what if anything is being measured, and the researchers have little idea what all the people making claims about how damaging misinformation is are talking about.  

So far, there's no there, there, just people talking about how bad it all must be.

Worship Music Meltdown

We had a worship music meltdown in the narthex this morning, a person complaining about "praise songs" (they aren't praise songs - that was 40 years ago) and only one hymn when the use of the Doxology was pointed out she angrily yelled "That doesn't count!" The accusation was that "No one is listening!"

That accusation usually means "People aren't doing what I think they should," or even "People aren't doing what I tell them to." I intervened to keep her from yelling at the worship pastor in the narthex during the sermon.

What I should have said was "If you've ever been in a church plant that was slowly dying over six years, you would find that this doesn't matter much."  I am 71, and have never had a church that had the music that I would choose for myself. That is not entirely fair of me.  I don't love any of the major worship styles (though I like individual pieces of all of them), but I like all of them 50-70%.  I can get by with most styles.  More importantly, I have learned that it is possible to worship even with music you don't like.  I would have communion every week at the kneeler if I could.

But it's never going to happen.  I am never going to have the service or the music that I want.  Never. One adjusts.

A story, related to the dying church plant one above.  At our first church together starting in 1976 there was a woman with a six-year old daughter. Susan had been raised a good Lutheran, and when Jennifer was an infant a week came that was a tough week, and Susan was eager, even desperate to take the sacrament that week.  Gethsemane Lutheran was on monthly communion at that point, so it was going to be a bit of a wait if she missed it. 

She had grown up under the watch of strict church ladies who could freeze the blood of a child who misbehaved during church with a single glance. I learned as an adult that Florence Anderson was a lovely person, but when I was nine, I feared Florence and all of her ilk, so that even as an adult I worried what they might think. But Jennifer's tough week continued into Sunday morning, and she was screaming and inconsolable. Young mothers are sensitive to criticism for keeping a disruptive baby in service even now, but it was worse then, much worse.

Yet the sacrament was there and was going away, and Susan decided to tough it out, going up to the rail and kneeling, screamer and all.  I wasn't there.  Perhaps Jennifer was only that bad in her mother's memory. But mother and daughter made it through. After the service all the nice Swedish ladies gathered round, deeply moved.  "It's been so long since we heard a baby cry in this church."  And it was true.

It matters.

The Different Generations

We went to see Karen at the Music Hall in Portsmouth tonight, at the Music Hall.  A variation on this section was part of the routine.

A newer comedian we had not heard of before opened for her, who we also liked, Kathy Gilmour.

Isolation

I have discussed the dangers of eroding supports, isolation, and loneliness as we age a few times over the last two years. Following the links for Gossip II, I saw reference to another book by Robin Dunbar, about friends. It mentions that having a non-depressed friend makes you less likely to be depressed yourself, but a depressed friend is six times more like to make you unhappy than a happy friend is to make you happy. 

That would look like an encouragement to avoid depressed people, wouldn't it?

So sure, cut your depressed friends ruthlessly from your life then. That's the sort of living your best life we want to promote around here. I wonder how many people just quietly do that, not from any malice, but like an amoeba avoiding an unpleasant stimulus. 

And of course, when I see such things I wonder about two verses of Scripture. Matthew 26:22 - "Lord, Is it I?" and Galatians 6:2 - Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Gossip II

Much of the anthropological discussion focuses on Robin Dunbar's theories (he of Dunbar Number fame - the maximum number of people you can keep track of socially, usually put at something between 100-150, flexible), which we have discussed before, also in the context of gossip. It educates everyone about the family/village values, it mediates the everyday changes in status and acceptance, it creates bonds across distance because it is story-based rather than shared experience. That link leads in turn to our brief discussion of The Dawn of Everything, which discusses a great deal about gossip as "our first government." 

I know I promised more discussion in this second section, because I knew I had read more on this topic elsewhere in the last couple of years. Following my own links, I discovered that the main place I had read about it was...(sheepishly) here. There are further links to David Foster and ACX within the links above.  You can treat this as a refresher, then.

Gossip

In the Lingthusiasm podcast about Theory of Mind which I linked not long ago there was some discussion about the importance of gossip socially. Their take was that gossip may have even been one of the first functions of language, as we needed to have lasting ideas about whether someone was trustworthy or not, and ways of communicating values - especially what people should not do. Interestingly, gossip in all societies studied does not consist much on speculating on the states of mind or motives of others, but has a strong tendency to focus on what actions people have actually done. "She ate my cake," as one of the podcasts hosts said. 

That has stuck with me and I have finally gone and taken a look at the topic. The first thing that occurred to me is that in writing, people focus on motives all the time.  They make up what the person they are talking about must be thinking, usually as a criticism. Political discourse is often entirely about imagined motives. I have had people question my motives (sometimes explicitly, but more often revealing it with subtler clues) in writing, but I can't recall an incident of this in conversation.  It is more confrontive, likely more socially dangerous to call people out like that live. This further suggested...

I am already ahead of myself.  The Wikipedia article on Gossip is quite interesting.  Go there first and play around with that.

In fact, let's not discuss it further here until you've seen that and chewed on it a bit.  I should have time tomorrow or Saturday to come back to this. Interesting that I was so little interested in the meaning of workplace gossip now.

Catholic Worship Music

Listening to the music at Mass these days, even in Ireland, I was struck by how frozen in time the style is to mid-60s folk music. Even things written later have that feel. So when Vatican II came in the music must have changed, along with the other elements of the worship. For Boomers growing up in that, plus the Irish folksingers who came up and performed in Kingston Trio/Limeliters era coffee houses in the decade plus before that, there was an immediate comfort in the style.

And so it became the new holy music and stayed forever. Weston Priory. John Michael Talbot (of the old folk duo the Talbot Brothers), Even Taize music owes as much to that era as to the chant it patterns itself after.

It's comfortable for me, but that Peter, Paul, and Mary style, those Joan Baez voices was a lot of what I grew up on. It's easy to harmonise to and I fit right in.  Musically, I fit in better that the other hundred people there who are actually Catholic.

I wondered what the music was like just before Vatican II and went looking. I will not be exhaustive, just giving you a couple of things. Hymns before Vatican II included more chanting.  Not shocking. They were also much more used in the Divine Office and the Low Mass, not High Mass, which relied on external rather than participatory music more.

But the best commentary I ran across in my brief research was from a Reddit thread.  Not where I am used to going, but this was fine.

Italian, Spanish, and Mexican parishes have long had boisterous vernacular hymns, but these "ethnic" Catholic cultures were never really mainstream. Standard Catholicism was Irish American Catholicism, which hated high church innovation and had a very weak, very new repertoire.

In.. the '40s? '50s? A liturgical revival started, which enthusiastic lliturgists started assembling little boys choirs and scholas. They started trying to reintroduce chant and polyphony into masses. This was cut short in the '60s by Vatican 2.

After V2, a new liturgical movement started which based its stance on the idea that the mass was a "community celebration", and that the Church is "the people". This music was much more about affirming the community ("One Bread, One Body"; "Who Shall I Send"). It also tried, as many Catholics have for centuries, to bring in the sounds of popular music. This is what created folk masses. Hymnals drew from the same handful of contemporary Catholic composers or borrowed wholesale from Protestants. The issue here, though, is that you can't just import an entire culture. Protestants have had strong musical traditions for centuries, but Irish American Catholics had a culture with a stunted, infantile musical limb AND a sense of stoic "we don't need musical frills to worship, unlike those protestants".

Fun stuff.

Cultural Identification

Jews have regarded their Jewishness as a cultural identity more than a religious one for decades now.  This was somewhat elective, somewhat forced on them by Christians over time. Christian did take on the meaning of not-Jewish in Europe centuries ago, though this was often in the context of people who did have Christian observance as well. This bled over into North America as well, though not as strongly. 

This happened with American Catholics as well, or at least, with the Irish Catholics around here.  Catholic was an identity even when it was no longer a held faith. Come to think of it, that happened even more strongly in Ireland itself - I was just there but it didn't come to mind immediately.

There is something of this among smaller and culturally distinct groups like Mormons or Mennonites.  Perhaps it is as strongly felt among them, just not so widespread as to be noticed much by the rest of us.  Garrison Keillor joked about the Midwestern cultural tendency of Lutherans to see themselves in this way. "When you become an atheist in Minnesota, it is a Lutheran God that you don't believe in." (He himself grew up Brethren, and was thus something of an observer to the larger Lutheran & Catholic religious environment.)

Now it has happened to Evangelicals, which shows the shifting nature of these things. 40% now go to church yearly or less. Yet this is a category that changed in meaning to come into prominence in my adulthood, or at least in my lifetime.  Earlier in the 20th C, Lutherans and Presbyterians called themselves Evangelical, meaning "proclaiming" churches. It still showed up in names of churches and titles of their organisations. But it became more associated with evangelis-ing churches and movements, born-again Christians.

They started flexing their muscles culturally leading up to Jimmy Carter running and wearing his faith prominently, but still stressed strict observance of things like church attendance. Ronald Reagan did not fit that evangelical model nearly as well, but he either naturally or tactically stressed the simple faith model, and the evangelicals grew more comfortable with moving into the politically conservative camp. Church attendance as a whole did not drop off that much, but shifted away from the mainstream denominations to "Christian Culture" ones.  They built schools, starting with kindergartens but eventually moving on to K-12. There was some church-like-the-old-days aspects that were cultural or political as much as doctrinal, but they held to doctrine that the mainstreamers were easing away from as well. We were Lutherans until 1986, and Sunday School included people who had very odd ideas about the Trinity, and Other Gods began to be added in as interesting. The Native American spirituality at church camp was something of a final straw for us and we moved to the Evangelical Covenant Church.  

The larger Christian Culture was never much mine, even though most of my best friends were in it and my children went to school in it.  But the mainstream and secular cultures were also not mine, and you have to sleep somewhere.

Looking at the graph again, it does have that feeling of every level of participation slowly changing, not people switching positions.  Maybe I'm wrong on that.  Maybe there is a serious contingent of people who used to attend weekly in 2008 but don't go at all now.  There has always been some of that - when you pay as much attention to who is worshiping with you as my wife does you become aware of people who no longer come. I remember that as far back as the 80s in this congregation, and it was painfully obvious in the small startup church we were part of 1996-2010. But maybe there has been a sharp increase in hard switches.  But the more likely explanation is that there is a tendency toward less participation among everyone.

It seems to coincide with even evangelicals having fewer children. The children in the Christian culture grew up and moved out, and their parents now longer have the youth group, choir, and Sunday School attendance drivers in their own lives and so stay home a bit more. There may be some connection, though disentangling that is beyond me.

Strandbeest Evolution 2021

 This was shared at Maggie's Farm today. Mesmerising, each one better than the last.

The Exhortation Before Marriage

The Exhortation Before Marriage.  While there is a lot of false nostalgia for Pre-Vatican II Catholicism (and I will cover some of that soon), there were also some simple but profound things that are now de-emphasised that deserve to be looked at more closely.  Tracy and I were married in 1976 and I do not believe this was said to us then.  My source for this exhortation claims that there are still priests who use this as their marriage homily.

My dear friends: You are about to enter upon a union which is most sacred and most serious. It is most sacred, because established by God himself. By it, he gave to man a share in the greatest work of creation, the work of the continuation of the human race. And in this way he sanctified human love and enabled man and woman to help each other live as children of God, by sharing a common life under his fatherly care. Because God himself is thus its author, marriage is of its very nature a holy institution, requiring of those who enter into it a complete and unreserved giving of self. [But Christ our Lord added to the holiness of marriage an even deeper meaning and a higher beauty. He referred to the love of marriage to describe his own love for his Church, that is, for the people of God whom he redeemed by his own blood. And so he gave to Christians a new vision of what married life ought to be, a life of self- sacrificing love like his own. It is for this reason that his apostle, St. Paul, clearly states that marriage is now and for all time to be considered a great mystery, intimately bound up with the supernatural union of Christ and the Church, which union is also to be its pattern.] 

This union, then, is most serious, because it will bind you together for life in a relationship so close and so intimate, that it will profoundly influence your whole future, That future, with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and its failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows, is hidden from your eyes. You know that these elements are mingled in every life, and are to be expected in your own. And so not knowing what is before you, you take each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death. 

Truly, then, these words are most serious. It is a beautiful tribute to your undoubted faith in each other, that recognizing their full import, you are, nevertheless, so willing and ready to pronounce them. And because these words involve such solemn obligations, it is most fitting that you rest the security of your wedded life upon the great principle of self-sacrifice. And so you begin your married life by the voluntary and complete surrender of your individual lives in the interest of that deeper and wider life which you are to have in common. Henceforth you will belong entirely to each other; you will be one in mind, one in heart, and one in affections. And whatever sacrifices you may hereafter be required to make to preserve this mutual life, always make them generously. Sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome. Only love can make it easy, and perfect love can make it a joy. We are willing to give in proportion as we love. And when love is perfect, the sacrifice is complete. God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, and the Son so loved us that he gave himself for our salvation. ” Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

 No greater blessing can come to your married life than pure conjugal love, loyal and true to the end. May, then, this love with which you join your hands and hearts today never fail, but grow deeper and stronger as the years go on. And if true love and the unselfish spirit of perfect sacrifice guide your every action, you can expect the greatest measure of earthly happiness that may be allotted to man in this vale of tears. 

The rest is in the hands of God. Nor will God be wanting to your needs, he will pledge you the life-long support of his graces [in the Holy Sacrament which you are now going to receive].

Passage and Landscape

When we looked at the prehistoric monuments in Ireland, a couple of themes kept recurring that supply a correction to our usual picture of what their construction was all about. First, the monuments were not standalone or independent. They were part of the landscape, and oriented not only to the sun's solstices and equinoxes (which has been a new understanding in our lifetimes itself), but to each other and to the surrounding hills and rivers. They were often part of an entire network of monuments, sometimes visible to each other, but occasionally aligned to things out of sight.

We have learned this in the last few decades about Stonehenge, Avebury, and other sites in England, where we now know that the Cursus and Stonehenge Avenue were integral parts of the site because of its processions, and that disputably, Durrington Walls was a s well. Similar things are proving out in Ireland at Newgrange and Knowth, probably Dowth (though it is unexcavated and little known for certain), at Carrowmere and Knocknarea. 

You might have noticed that Passage Grave is a phrase often mentioned at the links in connection with these. The burial areas are not, or not only, placed under a great deal of earth or stone in order to build an impressive mound and discourage looters. The passages were used after the burials, and as many show signs of further burials of related individuals, it is likely that families revisited the bones of their ancestors many times after. The passages are difficult but not impossible to navigate and would usually be entirely darkened. The exceptions to this are interesting. Though the kurgan tradition was originally a closed tumulus right from the outset, by the time it reached Ireland and probably Jutland, there are examples where the passage was open to the sky at first and enclosed later. This certainly reinforces the idea that the passage itself, the journey from one place to another, was part of the monument's importance. These were likely liminal areas, between the living and the dead, the earth and the heavens.

Light also penetrated at significant anstronomical times, usually a solstice or an equinox. There is some evidence that megaliths especially also record lunar cycles of 19 years, but this is less certain.

Depression

Birddog over at Maggie's carries an article on brain scans and depression. As I no longer need precise information on the subject, I was only mildly annoyed that there is no link to the study itself, but there are enough internal clues that it should be possible to find for younger people and those that have loved (or hey, even unloved) ones with depression. These results may not hold up strictly, but this is what many clinicians have always suspected, and indeed treated on the basis of: what we call one thing is actually many things, and we are only now just sorting it out. Autism, ADHD, OCD and various Anxiety disorders also seem to overlap and differentiate in unexpected ways,  and as the science of "You have Depression 3 and Anxiety 2 and 4" starts to become an understandable concept, medical and non-medical treatments will return, at least for a while, to being an art. Medications have side effects, costs and time might matter, balancing one thing against another will involve guesswork and refinement.

So it might not be six types of depression, it might be four or nine, and as the kaleidoscope turns with life events treatments and interactions might change as well. 

Freud set us back 100 years, and we have only been crawling out of that hole since the 70s or 80s.

Death While on Hajj

 Ann Althouse reports on the many deaths on hajj this year (as every year) as carried in the NYT. 

Two of the dead were Americans, a couple from Maryland, who spent $23,000 on the trip but did not have the permits. The article ends with a quote from their daughter, the classic statement: "They died doing exactly what they wanted to do."

This always reminds me of one from my son Ben. "At least he died doing what he loved.  Surprising tigers."

100 Meters

I am happy for Noah Lyles.  Potential relay team looks awesome as well, as usual.

Dream a Little Dream of Me

 Nice version

For Bethany

Bsking, who is still surrounded by all the Karen Read-has-been-framed, Dr Turtleboy nonsense, now mercifully coming to an end (we hope) as the trial concludes, has been discouraged at how many people have opinions with only the most superficial knowledge. She has several Psalms which have occurred to her over this.

Today I was listening to Jonathan Keeperman, known online as "Lomez," (Verbal quote, not written)

In my real life - family, friends, former colleagues in particular - they are not online by and large, and they do not understand the context.  In a couple of cases I have tried to explain "Hey this guy at the Guardian, he's an Antifa activist," and they go "What's Antifa?" I sort of skip over that and I go "Well he's trying to doxx me," and they go "What is doxxing?" And then I realise it would take hours to construct the proper contextual clues so that they could make sense of what happened and what the motivations of this guy are and why I am a target.      

And so they are not inured to these smear tactics, they see that the Guardian  and they just assume that this is a credible outlet, and if they are publishing this piece it must have some public-interest rationale.   I must actually be whatever he called me this "Leader of this proto-fascist movement" and they don't know what that means either...so I try to prod a little bit to see where these people are coming from and I say "What does that mean to you, that I'm a proto-fascist," and they don't really have an answer. (Italics mine.)

Yup, it's one of the versions of what I used to call whack-a-mole politics, that not only are there too many things to hit, but that they don't stay down.  You answer one and a few seconds later it pops back up again. You are arguing against aura and feelings, not facts.

Opposite of Prosecutor's Fallacy

One way of getting the wrong end of the stick is  The Prosecutor's Fallacy. I had heard of that and even tried to keep it in mind when numbers started getting thrown around in criminal cases. It's the idea that when there are conditional probabilities we sometimes apply them in the wrong place. This may be genuine ignorance, or it may be an attempt to deceive. We see it when referencing tests that have what looks like a low false positive rate, like 1%. A crime has been committed and according to some scanning of test data, for example DNA, the police find a suspect that is a match. A million people were scanned, and the prosecutor might quote some statistic that the test had eliminated 990,000 people, and wasn't it extremely odd that the suspect matched?

But there were 10,000 false positives in the data. Each of them would also match that extremely odd occurrence.  It would be like accusing someone of cheating on a lottery because the likelihood of their winning was very small.

Or to bring it to civil suits, it is applying in retrospect how rare it is that so many people should have died in that hospital that week on one particular nurse's shift, or that so many people got cancer while living near a particular landfill. But on each of these, we would need to know about the base rate, just for openers. Perhaps that hospital is world-renowned and gets all the toughest cases for a particularly risky procedure. Perhaps the area in question is very sparsely populated, so that a few extra cases of unknown attribution make the canal look more dangerous.  What happened at other places on the canal?

But I had not thought the whole thing through, not quite, that the whole fallacy can be reversed and is indeed the Defense Attorney's fallacy.  It is linked in the Prosecutor's Fallacy above. It was just discussed on the studies show with especial reference to the OJ Simpson trial.  The defense wanted to show that even if he had beaten his wife, it was extremely unusual for a wife who has been beaten to be murdered in any given year, on the order of 1-in-2500. 

But that's not really the number we are looking for, because we already know that she had, in fact, been murdered. What we are looking for is the likelihood that the husband who had beaten her had done it.  There is a base rate of 5 out 100,000 women murdered across the population. If we assume that 1 in 2,500 of the beaten women murdered is correct, then of 100,000 women with abusive husbands, about 99,955 will not be murdered.  But of the remaining 45 who are murdered, five will just be murdered as sort of the background rate of American women being murdered. Murders that happened for some other reason.

So that means 40 will have been murdered by their husbands. So the correct probability that the husband did it should be nearly 90%. 

Well that's different kettle of fish, isn't it? The key is not looking at what the prior likelihood of a woman being murdered is, but at if she is murdered, who did it? 

We see something similar in seemingly random digits that suddenly show some amazing pattern, like 30 sixes in a batch of 100.  What are the odds, eh?  Something fishy must be up. But the real question is "once the hundred digits are up, what are the odds that we can find some interesting pattern, like lots of 6's or hardly any 4's or three separate runs of the sequence 2468?" If you find lots of patterns interesting, then the odds of you finding one is close to 100%

Gong Show

 Somehow...

Performative Politics

Performative political stances are also get-along stances and thus maybe not quite so contemptible as I often suppose. I originally thought display was 50% of our politics and cultural beliefs, but slowly ratcheted up to 75, 80, 90% of the motive.  I wonder if there's any rational thought behind them at all by now, or if it is just like following the local sports team (rooting for laundry) as a signal that we identify with the place or a cultural tribe or those around us. I am one of you.

Yet putting it in that perspective drew its fangs a bit as well. None of us has much effect on the national election outcomes or the culture. Putting our beliefs to use as a type of worshiping the gods of the city in order to live at peace with our neighbors might be a better use for them.  I'm not ever going to fully know, of course.  I'm not wired that way. It seems shameful to trim my beliefs to mere popularity, and I am determined to believe that I came by my views by rational thought and reflective experience - and will irrationally cling to that self-deception.

Robert Frost/Old Stagecoach Byway

Kyle, driving on the Robert Frost/Old Stagecoach Byway (NH Rte 28) today: "It looks pretty traveled to me."

Greek Names

Using Greek words, especially for journals or websites or organizations is a PR move that "we been around since Plato mate" and are absolutely steeped in ancient wisdom. Christian journals and websites will do this as well. But frankly, I am not able to translate Greek, I have read various Greeks more in sections or in summary than whole works start to finish, with a couple of exceptions. I hang around as well and pick up words here and there, and if I were naming Journal or a website that purported to be intellectual, I might pull out one of those words and go, yeah this will make me sound Knowledgeable. Like Kerygma, or Pneuma, or Agape.  I'm not saying don't do it if you are naming a church or a band, I'm just saying don't fall for it if you are a customer. Yes there are distinctions in Greek that aren't in English, or not easily in English. Those can be illuminating. But there are distinctions in English that don't come naturally in Greek as well.

This is downstream of the Renaissance attitude that Greeks were much smarter than us and using their language meant you were being more precise yourself.  Because all languages have difficulties with exact translations between each other, it was fertile ground for making it look like they were making distinctions that were superior, rather than merely different. "You have to understand that the Egyptians did not understand the afterlife in quite the same way that we did, so when they said..." You could, and likely still can, make a career out of explaining to Englsih-speakers that they just don;t understand this properly. It led to all our medical terminology being unnecessarily Greek and therefore less-understandable. Hyperkalemia means "lots of potassium." Arteriosclerosis just means "artery hardening." We could have dispensed with the edumacated sounding language altogether.

OTOH, when we didn't have dead languages to aspire to we named our diseases croup, thrush, and grippe, so maybe snobbery was a real upgrade.

My Buddy

Yesterday I listen to an older guy who grew up in Charlestown talk about Boston Harbor while looking at old photos at the New England Seafarer's Mission. An overhead from 1968, commenting on Schrafts or Domino plants that were there, and what was there now. 1994 and the beginning of the Ted Williams Tunnel. But some things would suddenly puzzle him, a picture of a building that fell between years that he knew what it was used for. "Well, that couldn't have been part of the Navy Yard then, that closed in '74." He would wonder who was still alive who might know the answer. He would tag a lot of lines "I'll have to ask my buddy about that."

I thought he was talking about the same guy who was extra-knowledgeable about the subject, but I gradually came to understand that he was talking about a series of buddies. I wondered when I had last heard it used conversationally like this, while recognising that it had been very common in my youth.  I very much doubt I ever used it myself, nor any of my friends. It was something from my father's generation, though it could have extended to a point halfway between us. I think "My buddies" might have hung on longer. My friends, my pals, my guys - these things change gradually, much more slowly than slang words for things that especially good or especially bad.

Buddy is a word that changes greatly in tone depending on usage now.  One might say it very kindly and encouragingly to a young boy, even a baby. It is used similarly with a dog or other animal, though there is an element of calming the beast or testing whether it is safe. You can shout it across a parking lot to kindly draw someone's attention to a thing about to happen, like a door he left open.  Or it can be directly challenging to another man (women use it this way to set limits with men as well) to smarten up. Hey buddy! You can't go cutting in line like that.  

But used as the guy at the mission used it yesterday, it's an old guy word.  That it hung on directly around Boston doesn't surprise me.  I would bet that it was used in Quincy and Waltham longer than Scituate and Sudbury.

Single Sex Cultures

Facebook may give a false impression of the gender balance of friends, I grant.  It may make all people look like they primarily have older women and young mothers as friends. Yet you can find FB networks that seem more male if your poke around.  I went down a rabbit hole on a few people last week and sometimes also knew the people deeper in the network and what type of people they were.  One network had almost no men in it, only single (or now-single) women of my generation, plus a minority with husbands, and a further minority of those with once child. Lots of pictures of them going places with each other, though widely separated in time. There were some disquieting moments, and I will say no more than that.  

As soon as I start to draw conclusions about a group like that, I fairly automatically consider whether the same applies to men of my generation, or women of a younger generation, etc. I think it prevents jumping to conclusions, but each also provides insight into the others. 

Tangential thought: Women unfriend on FB more often than men, and I wonder if there is a further distinction generationally.  The current stereotype is that it is all these woke young people, especially females, unfriending people over nothing.  I'm not so sure. Anyone who is siloed is likely to put up with less and less from anyone outside the silo.

I pair this with what keeps showing up in my YouTube feed (probably because I click an occasional one) of short clip relationship advice, men advising other men about women, men advising women about men, women advising women about men, women advising men about women, and also from fairly definite, even extreme points of view.  There is a common pattern of showing a clip of a person who they think just gets it wrong, wrong, wrong, pointing out their stupidity or bad character in fairly stern language. "Ladies, this woman is complaining about where all the good men are, but notice that she never says anything about..." or "This man is toxic, and girls, if you run into one like this you need to get away as quickly as you can." Many of these seem to make valid points, but only on one side of the balance scale. Women heavily critical of other women, women critical of men - these seem to dominate.

I recall that the YouTube algorithm will funnel you into more and more extreme political and cultural content, and I wonder if the same thing is happening here, as young men and young women are herded into inflexible Positions.

Cultures that are single-sex, or single generation, or one educational class, one marital class, and certainly especially those in combination will push you toward attitudes of "you don't have to put up with that." It is most noticeable in the courtship and relationship discussions "Guys, you don't have to put up with this from women. If you are over sixty, there are plenty of other choices out there." But it expands to being about not having to put up with whatever from your own sex, or from contractors, or from bosses, or from neighbors. The more you are only with your own people, the more poisonous it gets.  And in such situations there doesn't have to be any anger or displayed rancor.  Who could sustain anger that continually? It is just part of the culture.  Nice people, being nice, reassuring each other how nice they are, teaching each other to be a just a little less tolerant. 

There may be something of positional competition in that as well, of gaining status within your cohort by advocating that less and less be tolerated from another cohort. You shouldn't put up with this from your children/parents/coworkers/wives.  Big Kahuna.

But it may flow in both directions.  The sub-sub-culture may also be teaching each other what they should be more tolerant of. I may be only focusing on the negatives here. It seems to be making us all worse people.  When we speak about the negatives of social media, this may be the driver.  We depend on peers to reinforce our values, and we tend to adjust our beliefs as a herd. When we are only among ourselves it might get poisonous. I think of this in long-term cultural, even evolutionary psych terms - have we ever been so siloed? Have older women ever been so isolated from younger ones?

As fewer young people marry and have children, fewer people attend a church, fewer people have an actual workplace they attend or a club they belong to this can only increase. What will drive you into contact with a variety of generations if you don't have these things.  Bowling Alone, indeed. I have to suspect this is getting worse. 

When women invaded the all-male institutions one of the great contributions was a subtle one - it caused men to notice some things about themselves and how business was done.  Not all men took to the lessons, but most did, almost unconsciously incorporating their understanding of female POVs. (And the subtleties of this increased as well, as they noticed that some differences were not gender or class-based, but generational.) Now there are all-female subcultures who could probably benefit from an invasion of males, especially of another generation. Reality checks are good things.