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?