Waves of Native American Languages

 Four Waves of Migration From Siberia. Very similar to what we have seen before.

 Edward Sapir noted the n-, m- pronoun sequence over a century ago, but it fell out of favor because the "splitters" among linguists wanted there to be 150+ Native American language families and did not like seeing unifying similarities.

Even when they hit you in the face. The theory was that all the tribes were borrowing and influencing each other's pronouns in the interest of trade and communication. Except pronouns are among the most stable, long-lasting words in a language. Sapir and Joseph Greenberg believed their were three groups: Amerind, by far the largest and comprising most native languages, Na-Dene, which includes Navajo, Hopi, and the Athabaskan languages, and Eskimo-Aleut, arriving last and confined to the Arctic. The linguists who reject Greenberg most frequently do so because they (loudly and sometimes angrily) reject his technique of multilateral comparison in favor of the more traditional bilateral comparison used to identify language similarities and groups.

But the genetic evidence keeps building up year after year. So now it's up to four waves, but the first one does not seem to have clear influence. The drums are beating.

I admit that I have some nagging memory of Johanna Nichols and some controversy, which didn't show up in her Wikipedia page. Also, timelines for language relationship have been bouncing around a fair bit lately, so the sequence may matter more than the numbers.

Emotional Support Llamas

My weather channel tells me that Portland Airport brings in emotional support llamas for anxious travelers. I think I would find that llamas in the airport increased my anxieties myself. I'm betting there are plenty of children who would rather not share their space with llamas as well.

Plagiarism

So Sam Payne at Brigham Young was sent a paper to review in his area of specialty - and discovered that the paper was 100% plagiarised from his own paper in 2021. He reported this, but the journal Proteomics published it anyway. When he went on X, other scientists reported that the same thing had happened to them.

The authors of the new paper are all from the I M Sechenov First Moscow State Medical College.

HT: Science Fictions 

Chip

Is "Chip" used as a nickname for a son instead of "Junior," as in Chip off the old block? I have seen it twice in an Appalachian context, but that's a very small sample size. Both were named after their father and called Chip, though.

Cultural Appropriation

I have written a decade ago that accusations of cultural appropriation are about snobbery, not protecting cultures. We show that we know how the dish is prepared back in Nepal, or what this dance means in Namibia, or what an earring means in Nauru - and you don't, you benighted fool.

Listening about the exchange of elite goods in the Iron Age today, I was struck by a similar pattern.  First, a foreign good would be given and received solely as a marker of status.  It should you had a wide reach, and wide knowledge. Kings exchanged gifts as a favor to each other, so that they could show them off. Yet as trade increased, a few things started happening.  The expensive pottery influenced the style of the local pottery. Other people desired to get some inferior version of the foreign pattery if they couldn't get the best kind. In a generation the original gift was not fully unique, and in two generations it might even be a bit common.  I was reminded of the objects the sea captains brought back from distant lands to the ports of Boston and Portland, and how they populate the small museums of various towns in New England. Ornate letter-openers, doll-costumes, or intricate knives from Rio, or Rangoon, now mostly valuable because they are 200 years old, not because they are from a distance.  We have such things in abundance now, but they were treasures then. They have become much less valuable. 

And she feeds you tea and oranges, that come all the way from China. Well, we've all got lots of stuff from China now, which is different even from 1966. The tea in question was Constant Comment, by the way, which was created in NYC in 1945, so, bit of a letdown there.

So to with the treasures from other cultures that are information.  If you know about tlayudas, that used to be a big deal.  But now that there are Oaxacan restaurants in the US, for status you now need to know the real way they cook tlayudas in Oaxaca to be one up on the others in your circle. Your status object is now not a piece of pottery, but information.  This is much harder to protect, and other people knowing the good stuff cheapens your precious object. You have to cry "Sultural Appropriation" to slow them down and keep your leverage. The accusation is a specific version of a larger general case about showing off your foreign connections.

Shredding the Meat

Journalists and the 100,000,000 independent journalists of social media are a bit tired of complaining about Biden and Trump.  Harris and Vance are fresh meat and people are looking for clicks.

Cookies

If you go down to the "Opinions" post below and read the comments, you will see that this has become a cookie blog.

Compound of Three Cubes

I have written about the compound of three cubes, the most difficult question on the Mega Test, and of course used by MC Escher at one point, in "Waterfall," which was on  lot of dorm walls when I was in college.

Ganzir just sent me this, so I will pass it along.

Good Luck!

Ganzir also tells me that this interior space is a Rhombicuboctahedron

Childless Cat Ladies

I had lunch with three guys from my St. Paul's summer in 1970 today.  A fourth was missing.  He had said "I'm sorry I have to cancel, but it's my wife's 100th birthday, and these things are important to her." Two of the men started to say "Well, maybe she likes to celebrate her birthday often - I mean, my wife does..." but Gary laughed "No. This is absolutely a dig, and I hope he doesn't say these things in front of her. How does he get away with this?  Would you say something like that?"

"Do I look suicidal?"

"I had a friend at my old church who used to say '...and this is my first wife, Betsy,' which seemed ill-advised to me.*"

"Phil has survived seven cancer diagnoses, so maybe he doesn't sweat the small stuff now."

"That could be."

The point being that even if things are flat true, or meant to be funny, or to capture a general truth arguendo or whatever, they still might be spectacularly stupid to say out loud. Vance, if you expect us to follow you into battle, could you give us more evidence that you thought this one through?  DC journalists are not going to ask you for evidence or numbers or research - they have little idea what those things are.  But folks around here are, and I say "So how are you going to measure this? How many cats  is the cutoff?  What about one child long grown and five cats now? What if she wanted children? What about dog moms? What about men with cats? JD, how the hell are you going to back this up with any evidence that will hold up for five minutes? Thanks a bunch."

There are ways and places one can bring out the information as well.  A comedian could say "Remember when you used to stay with your grandmother and she would bring you over to see her friends? The ones who didn't have any children of their own but had cats all over and they would make cooing noises over you and then ignore you, so they could sit down and she could complain about everything that was wrong in her life?" (A real comedian would be much funnier, yes.) Presenting it that way allows people to take an "if the shoe fits" approach, and even some childless cat ladies might smirk and think "Actually, I do have a couple of friends like that." The generalisation doesn't include everyone, nor was it intended to. You could technically say that Vance's comment wasn't intended to include everyone either, but it's too far over the line to give more than grudging acknowledgement of that.

Oddly, I believe there is something in there, and I was talking about a related subject with my brother yesterday. What with one thing and another, information has filtered back to me over the last year about older lesbians from two groups: women I used to work with (and I often knew both of them) and couples who are friends or siblings of the um, childless cat ladies that I know. I offered the opinion that they might be sadder than straight women I know of similar age, especially when widowed.

He disagreed, which I knew he would regardless of the data, because he is honor bound to make sure that any DEI group is just as happy, honest, or smart as the boring whitebread mainstream conservative culture. But I am so used to this that I can still get useful info by listening to what arguments he appeals to. And he did actually give some qualified agreement, relating it to the support of their general communities.  He lives in western mass and worked in theater, so he knows way more lesbian couples than I do. And he is in a place more supportive of such than nearly anywhere in the country. So he wasn't seeing them as any worse off than other older people.  That could very well be so. Community might matter.

It is very hard to tell what is up from FB. Older women are traveling together, or eating at restaurants and everyone looks cheery, but then in their other posts you see that they are Great Deplorers of others. What's the reality? Well, we likely won't ever know. I walk miles in my 55+ community and have chitchat with people on their porches, or in their yards, or also walking.  Attitudes leak out. Or you hear about childless cat ladies from other friends who don't see them much anymore because they have become difficult, or reclusive. Or you meet with two CCL's in a group of retired social workers for lunch and they do tell you how hard their lives are, and how upsetting so many things in the world are, and how they really do prefer cats to people.

Men and women complain differently. While some men are boisterous and want everyone present to know what they think about Trump or Biden, most drop their voices a bit to complain.

And of course I always knew the grim underside from mental health, of people deeply unhappy and largely unnoticed, with her sister coming in to try and talk sense into her for the thousandth time; and from my wife's extensive prayer list, which always includes someone having great difficulty with their elderly mother. There's a lot of loneliness out there. And it may be my prejudices overruling the real data, but I think it really is worse for childless cat ladies.

One more thing.  Vance also criticised them for not caring about the future of the country.  But some of the ones I'm talking about were teachers, or social workers, or other professions oriented to the future of others.  Maybe it is true that they no longer care much about the future of the country except in abstract and symbolic senses, like making sure that Trump doesn't "take over," or something**. But I think they get some credit for what came before, even if they are deplorers of things now.

*Steve McAuliffe used to say that about his wife Christa.  Then she blew up in the sky in the Challenger disaster.  Which is why husbands shouldn't say things like that.

**It can go the other way.  I know at least two childless cat ladies who are big Trump fans.  But usually...

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 - it was mildly notorious - and are included in the podcast. He is part of 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 their 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 value 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 who 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?