Elites, Experts, Debates, Covid

Lyman Stone@lymanstoneky

Vaccine effectiveness did not diminish. Today, years later, life expectancy has still CONTINUED to rise more in the high-vax states vs pre-COVID life expectancy. Masks are complicated since elites didn't even agree-- early on "elites" (Fauci, etc) were extremely ANTI mask!

That was in response to: Michael Brendan Dougherty@michaelbd 

Eh… Vaccines had a huge impact when first released but it diminished dramatically over time as the disease evolved and the effect required timing them perfectly, yet elite opinion dug in against evidence. Elites got surgical masks very wrong. Prolonged school closures were really disastrous. Masking toddlers was preposterous, and they remained masked longest in many US states. So was the month of “Racism os spreading faster than the virus.” And the whole balance of elite reputation hinges on whether the lab leak happened and how many are implicated.

Which was in response to Claire Lehman quoting Tyler Cowen in the Free Press

A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot of things right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than people who did not. We also got a vaccination in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility meant that "lockdowns" were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case*. Most states should have ended lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many commenters have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.

That is part of a larger discussion with Rob Henderson about elites and experts over at FP 

Tyler distinguishes between elites and experts - where they are allied and where they are separate.

And Peggy Noonan weighs in at WaPo about elites and Trump, reminding us that he is a response to what has been deteriorating in America, not the cause of it.  I grew tired of her a decade ago or more, but this was sent to me and it is better than I expected. 

I have liked all the above in general on a variety of topics.  I have written things similar to each of them on the matter of elites in general and covid in specific. But if you press me, I think more highly of Stone and Cowen.

*I think he means that because of the disease itself slowing the economy, the additional restrictions by governments were not as severe as they are now portrayed.

Sperm Race Update

 I posted about the sperm race about six weeks ago.  This is the update.

Quincy Wilson

You may remember him from last year as the very young Olympian who couldn't quite pull it off at the adult level, but still looked impressive.

No one wins a 4x400m after a dropped baton.

 

Stomp

The elementary school music teacher we stayed with told us about Stomp, who we had not heard of.

We countered with Recycled Percussion, who are from around here.  Right up the street from our last house, even.

 

Neologism

I would like to add a new word (and concept) to the modern cultural discussion, mostly in visual social media: Transplaining. I'm seeing lots of it.

Post-College

The first album I bought after college. This is a fun track.

 

College Exit

We got introduced to this at a cast party just before our last set of finals.  I never did pick it up, but a theater department always has people who can pick anything up in a minute, including my roommate, who went on to become a professional dancer and then director. Mark Martino is still working as of 2023, but it doesn't look like he is coming to the reunion. There's a story about him I may tell when I get back - which should be today. 

I didn't do much dancing after that except at weddings, but this has the sound of something that would have hung on for quite a while.

 

Different Paranoias

Hitler and the National Socialists were paranoid about the Jews, about Slavs and Communists, and just plain hated other groups without necessarily feeling any paranoia about them: Roma, homosexuals, the disabled.

Stalin and the Communists were paranoid about kulaks in particular, or anyone who had a little something: power, money, connections. The obvious flaw in that was that as they gained power, money, and connections themselves they increasingly became paranoid about each other. 

So both were paranoid but the targets were qualitatively different. Being a kulak was a role or position you had in society.  Being a Jew was something that you were, and ultimately ineradicable. I oversimplify greatly, for both groups had a dozen other hatreds they might kill you for and were indistinguishable in that way. 

Yet I wonder if that is part of why we remember them differently.  Stalin killed more Jews but Hitler remains their iconic enemy. The other explanations don't go away. Many Jews had left for the West between the wars - kulaks and tsarists did not. News of Stalin and the Soviets was buried deeper in the east and did not penetrate the discussions.  Being Jewish was more of a group identity than being a kulak, so when a Jew told her story she was aware of others she was writing for and they of her, creating a mutual library of their experience. Leftists in the west continued to admire the USSR, while no one admired Nazi Germany after WWII, however much they might have before.  The leftists were something of a fifth column in that way. All that is true and perhaps is the entire explanation for why Hitler has the name though Stalin was objectively worse.  But I would like to add the possibility that it was a difference in the type of paranoia at the core of each ideology that causes us to see them differently.

Different Immigrants

I should be getting home today.

I missed this essay when it came out in 2023. Philippe Lemoine's The Mirage of America's Special Sauce Theory. He has heard for years that America must be doing something right in assimilating immigrants (and hence Europe must be doing something wrong) because immigrants to America have better incomes, less crime, and go on to get more education than those in Europe. He points out that other than those from Mexico, immigrants to the US have much more education than those to Europe. Americans have long lumped the lack of education of the incoming Mexicans with the whole package, using that to claim that overall, immigrants to Europe and the US are an apples-to-apples comparison. He calls it the Argument Ad Mexicanos, which is both accurate and clever.  

I recognised it immediately, as I have used it myself.  It is part of my controversial claim that America is much less racist than the countries which criticise it. We actually have different races, unlike most of our critics, and as those countries start to receive people of different races, they have not done well with them. Because our native population was here well before the white population and the black population has been here as long, it isn't quite the same as the immigration discussion. Still, it overlaps because of what Europe is experiencing now.  The rest of the world seldom even makes it into any discussion of races. They don't have them.

Anyway, back to the original topic.  I have believed the America's Special Sauce theory, without thinking very hard about what was behind it. I generalised that we bring in a similar percentage of people with low education overall, so the comparison is fair. Lemoine takes a more granular approach, and the results are striking. Please note that he thinks the special sauce theory might have a lot of truth in it, and grants that arguendo. He just doesn't think it rests on a firm foundation, and is quite obviously inadequate in some ways.

 The problem with this argument is that it implicitly rests on the assumption that, once you control for education and perhaps a handful of other socio-economic variables, different ethnic groups are just as easy or hard to integrate, but nobody who is even remotely familiar with the data can find that assumption plausible. Indeed, on just about every metric that is relevant to how well-integrated immigrants are, a huge amount of variation remains associated with the country of origin even when you control for education. For instance, even if you look only at non-college educated immigrants in the US and in addition control for age and sex, the average personal income still varies wildly depending on the country of origin.

America greatly reduced the number of immigrants it took in about 100 years ago, and the greater proportion of what it took in the hundred years before that was European. That demographic balance persisted for forty years but changed in the 60s. In our lifetimes the bulk of immigration has come from Mexico, and only recently did that shift to Latin America in general, then to a more world-wide pattern. Through that prism, look at the bars of the chart above again. Mentally eliminate Mexico altogether (which is not far from the truth, as the percentage of population that immigrated from Mexico flatlined fifteen years ago) from the right-hand side. Now the bars show that Europe has received a remarkably less-educated set of immigrants from different places than America has.

Lemoine spends a good deal of the rest of the essay describing the ways in which immigrants from some areas are different, and frankly, more difficult to integrate. (How Sweden's Multicultural Dream Went Fatally Wrong.) We uneasily know this here.  Somalis have proved much more difficult than Nigerians, for example.

 

Hard-Luck Cleveland

Update from 2011-2024

Since that time, not much better, but at least not heart-wrenchingly bad. Lebron came back and got the Cavs to the finals four times, winning once; the Browns made the playoffs in 2020 and 2023 but fell out quickly.  The Indians/Guardians still haven't won a championship, but they have made the playoffs seven times and made it to a World Series once.  For younger fans, this is probably enough.  For middle-aged fans a bit of relief. For older fans, it sooths the pain some, and there are fewer who remember the awful times every year.  Still worse than Boston, who has had good teams in all sports from 2001 on.

********* 

Originally published in 2011

On sports radio last week, a Cleveland fan was asked if the record-breaking losing streak, on top of Lebron going to Miami, were the worst moments in that city's sports history. "Not even close," came the reply, but I was getting out of the car after only hearing one other event on his list. I'll come back to Cleveland later.

I, of course, started compiling my worst moments in Boston sports history, which I automatically assumed would far outdistance anything any other city had to offer.

I went to Bing this week for other people's lists of Boston's worst to see if I had forgotten something important, and interestingly, a listing for Cleveland's worst came up in the first 10 hits, indicating that this was a site that had a lot of hits, and Boston was mentioned in it somewhere. I kept seeing Cleveland's worst moments in hits 11-20, 21-30 and on, so I figured I would go back and check after I had done my Boston research.

In a fit of objectivity, I supposed that every city must have its Worst Moments and zipped various cities in to the search engine, expecting to semi-acknowledge, however reluctantly, that every city's fans think they have gotten the shortest end of the stick.

This is not so.

Philadelphia's worst moments include many entries of terrible things its fans have done, not its teams. True, but not the same thing.

New York doesn't have general lists, but lists for its various teams: worst Mets moments, worst Jets moments, etc. Because New York has teams in the the same league within its rooting region, it does not think of worst moments shared by the whole area. The Jets and Mets do indeed have terrible moments, but it isn't a shared NY experience, where everyone you meet the next day is shaking their head and looking bewildered. Not the same thing.

Chicago and Los Angeles have similar situations of divided local loyalty, but even granting that, their lists don't have that zing. Michael Jordan retires. Well, players do, and sometimes prematurely if they have gambling problems. The Bulls breaking up after six championships. Yeah, that'll stir a lot of hearts in the rest of America. Walter Payton tragically ill after he retires. I loved Walter Payton, but that's a bad life moment, not a bad sports moment. And Los Angeles barely has any listings under any category - they follow the stereotype. They don't care out there, they leave in the seventh inning.

San Francisco, same thing. They just don't identify out there.

Detroit has a list of years that their team was really better, but lost in the playoffs. That's a pathetic definition of worst moments. That's just real life for a sports fan. Happens all the time.

Washington has had many bad teams. No defining heartbreaking worst moments. Dallas, Pittsburgh, St Louis? Please.

But Cleveland now, Cleveland is in our league in this category. They have been on the short end of too many The's.

The Drive, by John Elway - against Cleveland
The Shot, by Michael Jordan - against Cleveland
The Catch, by Willie Mays - against Cleveland

That's all three major sports, BTW.

Add in Art Modell moving the Browns, the worst-ever Cleveland Spiders of 1899, ten-cent beer night, your all-time best team playing half its seasons trying to break in to the top league (the Jim Brown/Otto Graham Cleveland Browns), the usual city list of championships thrown away (by Brian Sipe, by Jose Mesa, by Ernest Byner), one of the worst owners in sports history (Ted Stepien) - and Lebron puts Cleveland over the top into Boston's category. I think Boston still gets the nod for worst moments, but we have also had good teams and some very fine moments interspersed. Cleveland, not so much. You are the only poor bastards I will acknowledge into this conversation. Tip of the hat.

For the record, my Boston list starts with Len Bias.

Home Again

We have returned from Williamsburg.  I have a worse attitude toward people in general, but we had a good trip. There are still some scheduled posts, so I won't do much for a while.

I-92

I will have been on a variety of eastern roads when you read this, and may or may not have an opinion.  It is also possible I will fly down to Houston and have a private adventure driving one of the cars up to NH as they are moving here. Fortunately, they will be flying the cats, so they didn't even ask me to do that.

I-92 was proposed, but never built. There were (and I suppose, are) several proposed routes from somewhere in NY to somewhere in ME which cut across NH and VT.  The expectation was that it would be a spur to prosperity, especially to the interior of ME, but somehow the numbers never worked out.  I recall hearing years ago that VT increasingly objected, ostensibly for environmental but actually for aesthetic reasons, and this was what had driven the final nails in the idea.

Yet still, if you look at a map of the Northeast, it just makes sense.

I thought the suggestion that the old Yankee joke "you can't get there from here" is based on the absence of E-W routes was silly at first, but on reflection, it might be so.  The whole site at the link is not that interesting, but I just like looking at those three corridors and wondering about them. What do you think?  Does a trucking route make sense?

Numeracy and Self Government

Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government. Numeracy helped participants weigh benefits and risks accurately when the data was presented on a politically neutral topic (skin rash treatment), but the same data was presented as a discussion of gun-control, those who were more numerate were more extreme and less objective in their views.  This was taken as support for Identity-Protective Cognition Thesis when the topic was hot, though Science Comprehension Thesis prevailed when the matter was cooler. 

Also as expected, subjects’ responses became politically polarized—and even less accurate—when the same data were presented as results from the study of a gun-control ban. But contrary to the prediction of SCT, such polarization did not abate among sub-jects highest in numeracy; instead, it increased. This outcome supported ICT, which predicted that more Numerate subjects would use their quantitative reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks.

We talk about this all the time here. Education, even in math, statistics, or hard science doesn't fix everything.  In a vacuum this study might even suggest it makes things worse. I have a slightly different take.  There is some correlation between general intelligence and education, especially in math. Those who are more numerate are likely more intelligent, and this isn't just book smarts but all manner of cognition, including social intelligence.  That is, they know which side their bread is buttered on and have been appraising that since childhood, so their acceptance of what they are supposed to know, what the preferred opinion is, is the path of least resistance.

Originally Entitled "Brandy"

 ...but someone got in earlier with that title for a pop song.

I swear this song was on every time I turned on the car radio over Christmas break 1974. I tired of it rapidly, but it did rather command an era, as it stayed on as an oldie long after. I only otherwise heard it in girls' dorms, and that stereotype was confirmed when a Jewish girl told me the joke a few years later.

How many Jewish American Princesses does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Two. One to call her father and one to put on the Barry Manilow records.  

I'll be here all week.  Try the veal.  

Attribution Errors

There are a lot of false quotes by Albert Einstein and CS Lewis on social media, and there have always been "Bible" quotes or "In the Middle Ages/Shakespeare's Time" explanations. Have fun adding to that list for sayings or phrases.  There is a strong human tendency to associate one's own ideas with someone thought to be smart or good.

I get a lot of Impressionist art popping up in front of me, likely because I have clicked "like" on others. The fake ones, the ones by modern artists that even I can tell are not from the 1800s, are attributed to Van Gogh.  I have not seen anyone try to ride a Monet wave, or Toulouse Lautrec or anyone else, always Van Gogh. I attach no particular significance to this other than people liking VVG and considering him the best piggyback.

More From Psychblogger Days - Paranoia

I have stressed many times since putting this post up that the symptom of paranoia precedes its target and exists independently of the target. Part of my best evidence for this was watching a patient over their first few admissions.  At first, they would only know that "something" was wrong, and that forces of some sort were against them. On a second admission they had discerned it had something to do with their sister, and by the third admission that their sister must be trying to screw them out of some inheritance by making them appear insane. Ten years later, the sister had long since died, there was no mention of an inheritance until I asked about it, and the patient was certain that the police were trying to frame him.

An update is the discussion of Conspiracy theorists over at The Studies Show a couple of weeks ago.  I thought it was almost balanced, though they are clearly liberal themselves. For example, they find the analysis in The Psychology of Conspiracies interesting in its thoughts but go on to point out that there isn't much solid research in it.  It touches on possible reasons for conspiracy beliefs - epistemic, existential, and social - and cites social science research along the way, but said research is often ill-defined or biased itself.  I concur.  It reads more like a persuasive essay to convince us of the authors' preloaded opinions.  And as Tom Chivers says on TSS, "After a bit I think I'll just go back to my own ideas."

*********

From 2011.  One of my paranoid patients uncovered the site Are You Targeted (no longer exists) in his searching the internet for proof that he is being harassed by Hollywood and popular music, with messages directed specifically at him. He takes the existence of this site as evidence that his paranoid delusions are true: See, this is happening to other people, too! That different things are happening to those people, and they each have different experiences from each other, with only minor overlap, fazes him not. It's all tied in together somehow.


My other really bright paranoid patient - she was a software developer up until a decade ago - has a different, nonelectronic set of delusions. A homeless person has been stalking her for at least three years, across three states, and recently revealed his existence by mistakenly leaving a purse she had lost in 2007 in a box in her apartment.

Here's the saddening, infuriating, and fascinating part. Both of them are now on medication, and are far more organised and relaxed. Both are able to coherently put on paper or into speech what they were unable to only a month ago. Then, additional notes up the side of the page, or between lines, or underlined and arrowed onto the back made their work unreadable. Now they can write in sentences and paragraphs. (I am overdrawing that somewhat, but the difference is dramatic.) Yet their delusions are absolutely untouched, with the possible exception of the fact that no new material is being added.

So there are two - at least two - parts to the illness, one which is treated by the medication and another which is untouched.

Jungle Boogie

You will notice the quality of the dancing, in contrast to yesterday. 

I did not hear this in the dorm, but I worked at a dinner restaurant summer of 1974 and this was all the rage. Great horns.

 

Not A Dance Tune

When even the Soul Train dancers can't figure out what to do with it, it's not a dance tune. But this is the one I chose from the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" album, which ruled in its era. It also had "Candle in the Wind" and a couple of others that charted on their own.

The songs continue on all the oldies stations and mixes playing in the supermarket, but I don't think they have worn well. However, he gets credit for creating a wide variety.

 All of 1974 for this.

 

Ruxandra Teslo - Edgelord

Teslo is one of those refreshing people who can change my mind by the intellectual force of her arguments.  I go into a topic thinking one way, which she gradually erodes by pulling chunks out of its foundation.  I am frequently left in a position of "Well, she hasn't convinced me, precisely, but she has exposed some weaknesses in my position that cannot be left untended.  I must think further about this."

The edgelords were right: a response to Scott Alexander: We should aim for better elites 

I take a breath and take stock of my position before entering the arena against Scott Alexander. I don't know if Ruxandra has to gird up her loins before sitting at her keyboard, but she does end up hitting "publish," however she got there. So at the moment she is carrying on disputes with Alexander, Lyman Stone, Richard Hanania, Holden Thorp - former editor of Science...Lord knows who else. She holds her own.

It is true that the shift of tech billionaires towards the right probably had an actual electoral impact, and that can be partially blamed on “edgelords”. However, it was not edgelords who led to the extreme wing of the liberal elite (e.g. Taylor Lorenz) alienating tech through constant attacks — an extreme self-own from the liberal coalition. It is worth noting, however, that despite tech billionaires donating more to the right, Democrats still amassed more money in total donations. So, overall, they had resources *and* the main establishment institutions on their side. To me, it clearly looks like something had gone wrong among classical establishment elites, or what Nate Silver calls “The Village”. To blame the “edgelords” instead seems incorrect and not in line with the data we have.

I think my view is now close to hers. Domain expertise is real, and preferable to populism.  But the unaccountability of elites had become dangerous, even Stalinist, because they controlled enough levers of power that they could squash opposition socially through ridicule. Media figures with less intellect but savvy social awareness learned to imitate them and pose as intellectual elites*, covering for them and allowing them to be lazy. Just as crony capitalism is not real capitalism, crony meritocracy is not real meritocracy. The pseudointellectuals were not stupid, but were way out over their skis. One can see how this hangs on but observing how much of the dismissive attitude on the left is not merely cartoonish, but actual cartoons. Trump/Musk/Hesgeth/Rubio is so stupid/uncaring/incompetent that he would probably... Ah, probably, yes.  You can read minds and predict the future, I see. Quotes and accusations have gotten so far out of context that it is clear that the meme-creators or not only neglecting primary sources, but even secondary sources.

If you were so smart, you should have been more responsible.  If you do not institute reforms with a scalpel, someone else will come in and do it with a hatchet.  I saw that working at the state hospital repeatedly, with units, whole departments, the hospital entire, and even the Division being dismantled by fools because the wise would not police themselves.  Crony meritocracy. Now Trump and his allies have moved the Overton Window, and more than a few nutcases have leaked in as well. Teslo weighs who caused this in fascinating fashion.

*I put Barack Obama in this category, and many other prominent Democrats of the last few decades.  Not stupid, but effective imitators of the intellectual class rather than thoughtful themselves. The real intellectuals cheered them on because they saw them as allies giving them access to power.

Testimony

Originally from 2011.  The link to Retriever now only works if you ask for an invitation.

 ********

Retriever has a post about her ambivalence listening to testimony at a churchwomens event she dragged herself to out of duty.

"Testimony Sunday" is a catchphrase in our family, based on an experience we had while church-shopping when Jonathan was almost 8 and Ben almost 4. We visited an independent Baptist congregation that friends attended, and happened to come on Testimony Sunday, a three-hour marathon. Interesting how various people see this variously. My wife liked it at first, though began to weary of it as we crossed the 100-minute mark. The friends we were honoring with the visit to their church were mortified: Sue Byrd swore she could see the steam escaping from my ears. Benjamin was initially fine - the Sunday School teachers had released the children, with some annoyance at having been left holding the bag, thank you very much, after 90 minutes, and while most of them were antsy, Ben had found a pile of books and was lying comfortably in the aisle, oblivious to those stepping over him. But at 3.9 years, he wasn't reading at a high level, and exhausted everything in his range and several outside it, in the next hour. At two-and-a-half hours, women were coming up to the microphone for second helpings of testimony giving, and I was growing homicidal.

Jonathan thought this was the coolest church service ever. Having only been to Lutheran services to that point, the idea of church where people would get up and cry and talk about their alcoholic parents and being beaten, going to school in awful clothes, having only bread and milk for food for a week - or alternatively, having husbands that went off for "affairs," - we had covered in our Ten Commandments teaching that "adultery" was stealing someone else's husband or wife, and I think he dimly grasped that something like this was up - and the police coming to your house or being teased at school... well my goodness, this is the most interesting church we have ever been in, Dad. Can we come back next week?

He didn't know from Baptists yet, that next week was going to be lots of scripture memorization and a few choruses of singing "Trust and Obey." Anyway, at Retriever's event

The speaker continued describing how at 15 she had become suicidal and been sent away to some teen center. And then I tuned partially out. Wondering "What are you leaving out?"

Yeah, exactly. Your terrible, neglectful Mom that you are kicking up and down the narthex in this testimony - what's her side of this?

It's not accidental that testimonies grew up as a major part of the church culture on the frontier and in the black church, where people were mobile and there wasn't going to be a lot of fact-checking. Christians of my age may remember what happened to Mike Warnke, who had the misfortune to straddle the old fundamentalist culture where people took you at face value and expected the same, versus the new evangelicalism where earnest young college students delighted in doing research about Christian topics.

Things People Don't Really Mean

What they mean is "Look over here!  Shiny! Shiny!"

I'm just trying to start a conversation is nearly always from the lips of a person who presents only one side of an issue, in a condescending and self-righteous manner. This is true in the art and literary worlds, and I have seen it a great deal upon my return to catching up with news. People who really want to discuss something want to find out what is true.

At least she's willing to stand up to the establishment.  Right or left, a last ditch effort to evade the fact that she has no supporting evidence. 

In my whole career, I have never seen such... My side did this a couple of years ago and I want you to forget that. 

I don't see why it wasn't a deal-breaker when... Because you broke the deal three or four times before we even got there. 

 

I think this would have been a great hashtag to start here twenty years ago.

 

Consanguinity

A large British longitudinal study (n=13727) confirms that children of first cousin marriage have higher rates of mortality, morbidity, and intellectual and developmental disability.   Mortality, morbidity and educational outcomes in children of consanguineous parents in the Born in Bradford cohort   

It was a a larger effect than I expected. For some reason I thought that first-cousin marriage had a consistent but mild deleterious effect cross-culturally.

I have one of those in my ancestry, in the 1800s in Nova Scotia among the Spinneys.  It seems we got over it.

Pledge Dance

Sororities would welcome their new pledges in late winter every year, and a pledge had to be presented with an escort, and the upperclasswomen likewise had to go out and find a date somewhere.  This created a Sadie Hawkins vibe in which girls could ask boys out. I had only dated girls non-sorority girls at first, but that was changed for me in 1973.  The Doobie Brothers were a standard with that crew. It makes sense. They fit the American Bandstand cliche "It had a good beat and the kids could dance to it, I gave it a 95."

 

This was likely played at all dances, but I only remember it in that setting. When Tracy invited me to hers in 1974 I considered it an important gesture of approval.

William James Sidis

Another post with a lot of links to keep you entertained while I am away.  Please comment here rather than at the individual links.  Billy Sidis was reputed at one time to have the highest IQ ever, at 254.  He was in Ripley's I think, the king of barely-sourced newspaper factoids. Most of my posts are longish, as are a few of the comments.

I first heard about Sidis from Grady Towers' essay "The Outsiders," in the late 80's. Perhaps vaguely before then, because he was from Boston. I wrote that up talking about Grady, whose story was also tragic and interesting. 

 And Another One Bites The Dust. An introduction as to why Sidis might not be the real deal.  7 comments, including the first of the argumentative ones.

 The Doubt  I discuss what the evidence of his IQ 254 or thereabouts is, and my initial suspicions that I want to "interrogate it" as we say these days. 14 comments, and things are heating up.  One person accuses me that I thought Sidis was not all that smart, another calls  him an outright fraud with no mathematical ability.  Both thought it best to be insulting to me along the way as well.  Thanks to Texan 99 for understanding what I actually said, deciding she agreed with it, and calmly defending it while I was getting testy with the others.  Thanks to James for evaluating Sidis's writings about physics. Great fun, in retrospect.

 Prodigy About whether genius always shows up in childhood.  One comment, very decent.

About That Harvard Exam One of the critics suggested that entrance into Harvard in those days was always an indication of high intelligence, and therefore Sidis entering at 11 puts him in the absolute top rank.  We examine the forbidding looking exam in detail and see that it is a bit less than that. 14 comments again, and this time even more snippy. I stand by my original opinion, thank you very much.

Smart, Wealthy, Athletic. A digression about definitions.  One comment, quite to the point, by Texan99 again.

 But If It's True We come to the final weighing.  4 comments, everyone has calmed down or left.

Facts Are Meaningless

 

This is a good place to link to Scott Alexander's The Toxoplasma of Rage again. I look at what supposedly rational people are post about politics on Facebook and I think "They can't possibly believe that.  Is no one standing back a few yards and asking themselves how this will all look in retrospect?" 

No they aren't.  This is performative politics, where you show how much you care and really really hate those other people, who are unutterably stupid, because you aren't a fair-weather supporter.  You are one of the best, a foxhole friend who sticks with their side even when it makes no sense.

After all, anyone can agree with you when you're right.  That doesn't mark you out as one of the special ones. 

Institutional Memory

Originally published fourteen years ago.  I have put the editing in parentheses.

 

Grumbling about work...

The central narrative of my 30+ (eventual 42) year employment at the hospital was being asked to work with the staff that no one else would, often put in those exact terms, culminating in being supervised by an insane person 1991-99. Then after, the liberation from this in 1999-2006, when I worked with the most wonderful people and everything I touched turned to gold. As central as those are, they are now virtually unknown outside a circle of about a half dozen people at work, and perhaps a dozen of my friends and family.

This was brought home forcefully over the last month (April 2011) in three work conversations. The previous supervisor, and what a strange, almost dangerous person she was, came up in conversation in matters unrelated to me. I mentioned that she had been my supervisor for eight years and received amazed, shocked looks. But she's diagnosable.* Dr. K made a detailed, non-humorous case for it when she covered on our unit, and gave us instructions how we were to deal with it. The other stunned comment was similar.

I thought: Yes, yes I know this. I said this for years, trying to get people to listen. But it's over now, and it ended well, actually. You didn't know? You worked the next unit over and no one ever mentioned it? Huh.

Similarly, the buoyant days of doing two jobs at once for the sheer joy of being appreciated and feeling competent had also slipped the minds of some I was sure would remember. Vague nods. Well shucks, then. I was kind of thinking I was holding the department aloft, covering for the impossible person, followed by covering two jobs. Those powerful people who assured me this was all being observed at a high level, and something would be done about it...well, I long ago figured out that no one was going to take any risks and do anything about it. But I guess I had still harbored the fantasy that someone had noticed those fifteen years.

So I asked the (new, third department head later) head of my department whether any of this information had ever come to her in passing over her three years here. Nope. She was quite fascinated, actually. She spoke with at least one other long-time member of the department about it after. I don't know that it changes anything. Just another up-short reminder: it is not merely that people see things differently and remember things differently - it is that most things aren't remembered at all. On the plus side, that may mean two major screwups of mine from those years, topics that I still wince at whenever someone wanders near them, may also have vanished.

Human nature being what it is, that's less likely, actually. But we are less noticed than we think. (Commenter Mike, who also worked for the State of NH, noted that this seemed fairly typical of what working for his agency was like as well.)

(And now even I had almost forgotten. When I read the old post I couldn't think when this had last occurred to me.  Right after full retirement, I'll bet. It all seems as if it happened to another person now.)

Ah, if only Stalin knew, (they used to tell themselves. I learned to understand that delusion quite well myself, but did escape it before the end.)

*I would now say Autism. Others claimed it was Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder with Psychotic Features, and I won't bore you with the differential. 

A Republican-Democrat Divide in 2011

It Was My Understanding There Would Be No Math.  I suspect the divide is less true, but still quite real.

As for the SNL trope using that line to make fun of Gerald Ford as if he were stupid, it should be noted that his degree was in Economics.  That department uses a little math from time to time. Ford was a decent man, and would laugh at the jokes made about him, such as his clumsiness - he was a Collegiate All-Star in football who played in the yearly game against the NFL champions in 1935.

Who I Left Out

Spoiler Alert.

No CSNY, no Eagles, no Carole King or James Taylor, though those were ubiquitous in the dorms. 

But just some guys I played with in college. 

I don't see either of their names on the registration list, though.

"Wasting" Your Third-Party Vote

Most of us consider a third-party vote wasted and say so when we encounter someone who is going to do it. This could be the election that is decided by a single vote.  It's close.  It's important, the most important election of your lifetime.* Every year there are, in fact, local elections that are tied or only a single vote. NH had a Senatorial race in the 70s where they decided to run the election again because the count and recount were very close, and also different.

But even the extremest of close elections, such as Florida in 2000, ends up with votes to spare for the winner.  In retrospect then, a third-party vote might have had more effect in terms of "sending a message" that People Like You wanted to be heard. Still rather small, but maybe even less wasted than a Republican/Democrat vote. We don't see this because we have had mostly duolithic elections for so many years that any other outcome seems intuitively unreal.

Europeans see more dramatic rising and falling of parties over their lifetimes.

Open The Door, Longhair!

Kenny Loggins, the rhythm guitarist, looks like my cousin Steve did. A lot more hair, though.

Late 1972

 

Expertise

I believe in domain competence and even domain expertise. Yet I have spent a great deal of my life listening to legitimate experts in one field speak as if they were therefore near-experts in another. My PCP forty years ago tried to insist on a very familiar, but nonetheless overexcited interpretation of 1 Cor 6:19 ("Actually Phil, I very seldom sleep with temple prostitutes"*). Psychologists are notorious for making half-baked social and political pronouncements, clergy try to pass themselves off as experts on economics. I am not expansive in what I count as expertise on a subject.  I have spent too much time explaining mental health law to attorneys or acute psychiatric emergencies to growth mindset psychologists for that. Paul Krugman knows more than the average bear on economics in general, but he is only an expert in a narrow area. He overreaches, as most economists do.

The suicide of expertise I have faulted Glenn Reynolds for his harping on the squandering of credibility by medical experts during Covid, when he was one of the first to start undermining it - and not always accurately.  But the date of this essay is 2017, so I have to acknowledge that this did not come out of the blue for him as a political convenience in 2020.  I have to give him more of a pass on the dangers of overreliance on expertise than I thought.

By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately (2017). As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”

I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Grandmothers taught you not to go swimming for an hour after eating, and night air was bad air. We have conveniently forgotten that some of the traditional wisdom was unutterably stupid, because it is so much fun to tell the opposite story. 

I am a talented amateur on a lot of subjects, but I don't think I would any longer call myself an expert even in the field I worked in for forty years. 

*Be it noted that I do believe the verse can be understood to include a lot of sexual behavior. I think it can be an influence on an overall approach to behavior. But for risky behavior, nutrition, drinking and smoking, cosmetics and body-focus - I think it is a serious overclaim.

Just Fun Writing

The essay Yet Another Reason To Hate College Admissions Essays over at ACX is behind the subscription paywall, but the following excerpt is included in a discussion post. 

Five, maybe ten percent of applicants are some kind of special snowflake whose father was murdered when they were five years old. As he lay there bleeding out, he said “Daughter, my whole life, I dreamed of being the first LGBT person to get a PhD in the study of ancient Assyria. Now that dream has been taken from me. With my dying breath, I give you my trowel and hand-painted figurine of Tiglath-Pileser III, in the hopes that one day you will succeed where I failed”. […]

The rest of us are just some kid who wants to go to college because that’s where all the good jobs are...The college admissions essay is what happens when you tell the second type of person that, in order to ever get a job better than busboy, they need to pretend to be the first type of person.

Anosognosia

I wrote a lot about Anosognosia in 2011. It figure prominently in my long series May We Believe Our Thoughts? At least, I think it did, because I am not going to read the series again.  My uncle was still alive then and the discussion/argument was fresh every day. I remember it as being both quite insightful and about five times as long as it needed to be. I may be exaggerating on both points. If anyone wants, they can tell me if its any good now.

There is one short one that is still interesting, though. Anosognosia - Or the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Texan99 had a kindly comment about the poor soul.

If There's a Bustle in Your Hedgerow

 I have posted many of the songs that I liked or performed in my younger years, but for this sequence I will post what everyone else played day and night - within reason, and when there is a choice to be made...

...I might pick the worst instead of the best. I am already toying with "I Believe in MIRACLES! Where ya from? You sexy thing!" 

But for now, the song that everyone played in 1972.  I tell younger people that I am so old that they didn't play Stairway To Heaven at my Senior Prom. It hadn't come out yet.

 

Anti-Gravity

 Babson's Partial Gravity Insulator. With picture.

Um, of the monument, not the gravity insulator

Justifications

 In all the outraged discussion about Kilmar Abrego Garcia it is true that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sent a minor filmmaker to jail for a year, blaming him for the explosive protests in the ME and ultimately for their own horrible misjudgements in Libya. It was ludicrous on its face and many outraged today turned a blind eye then.

It is also true that there was an increase in crime, especially violent and sexual crime directly attributable to illegal immigrants during the Biden administration that was shoved under the rug, denied, and explained away.  Many of the outraged today said nothing about that as well, except to claim that anyone bringing this up must be racist.  After all, most immigrants, even the illegal ones, did not commit violent crimes. Well, most Germans and especially Japanese did not commit violent crimes during WWII either, but we don't consider our contact with those nations at the time peaceful and non-problematic.  It is a sophistical argument.

There are many examples of similar hypocrisies by Trump's critics.

However, that does not make his actions right, and we should not be evasive ourselves by pretending it does. Americans have considered our treatment and protection of law for the disfavored to be a test of our commitment to our own stated values.  Do we really believe in free speech?  Do we really believe in the right to a fair trial? Due process? I do not claim that illegal immigrants have the same rights as citizens, nor that the outrageous claims I see from lefty meme factories have any validity. Just normal approved standards, done well enough.

I would like to see the administration make its case better.  No one should complain that an obscure case should not be elevated to such importance,  because that is what always happens. Those are the cards dealt.

Cake or Death

Sara Hoyt was right. Not all questions are easy.  We have to choose between bad choices - It is seldom Cake or Death?

 

Homicide Rate

 Homicide Rates by state.  Yet NH, VT, and ME are all very lax in their regulating guns and their terrible citizens have high rates of gun ownership. It's a mystery. 

Preparing For Contingencies

There was much brouhaha about Kamala's team preparing for the possible death of President Biden. There were accusations that this was evidence of how corrupt they were.  Simmer down, people. Would you rather they didn't think about it and had no plan?  "Golly Gee Willickers folks! We never saw that coming!  Who would have thought an 80-year-old guy might kick off unexpectedly?  What'll we do?  What'll we do?" They jolly well should have a plan, for that contingency and a lot of more remote ones.

I recall something similar from the Democratic side in 1996, when partisans, were outraged, outraged that the Republicans had started planning how to defeat Clinton within days of losing the election in 1992.  It just showed how they weren't even willing to give the royal couple a chance! The nerve!

Um, that would be their job, remember?  The sooner the better. 

Maybe I should go back to ignoring the news.

Baba O'Riley

We left today for Traditions Weekend, the elevated track to pitch for our money that William and Mary switches to for the 50th Reunion. We will drive down by an interesting route, going across Long Island Sound from New London CT by ferry to Orient Point, NY. We are planning to see the Custom House Maritime Museum.   From There we will go to Cape May to take another ferry, to Lewes DE. We will drive down the Delmarva Peninsula to stay with friends in Cape Charles, then take the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel and on to the Burg. There is an air of adventure about it for us that is reminiscent of our arrival in August 1971. 

With that in mind I have loaded in advance music from those years.  Freshman year I was in JBT-43, a dormitory that had just been refitted after being purchased from Eastern State Mental Hospital. It was far off campus and freshmen were not allowed to drive cars, so we took buses which ran regularly. Why they would give freshman boys, the students most likely to screw up schedules and self-discipline, the most disruptive arrangement I don't know. Or maybe it was actually a good idea, as it forced us off campus where the upperclassmen were drinking and hanging out with girls.

This song was played nonstop in the dorm my whole first semester.

 

Wyrd and Providence

A series from 2011 that I have reposted. I put up this series because I am leaving for Williamsburg today and want you to have something while I am gone until the 30th. This should keep you busy. Wyrd and Providence.   

A history professor tells me that Alexandra Walsham agrees with some of this in her Providence in Early Modern England, but at $100, it has sat on my wishlist for over a decade.

Please comment here and not at the individual links. Talk among yourselves and I'll catch up when I get back.  I will likely at least read the comments this week on my email, even iof I don't comment myself until May.

Vagus Nerve Stimulation

This would be wonderful if it holds up, but don't sell the bicycle shop yet, Orville.  Treatment-refractory depression is debilitating.  People get their hopes up, and sometimes even have a brief period of improvement, then it poops out. The amount of alleviation does not look enormous, but the lasting nature of the improvement can get people through one more day.

Mirror Image

I think articles like this could have come out every week in 2015, and every day since Trump's inauguration. 

Trump Is Using Weapons Perfected By Liberals. 

Humor, Intelligence, Reproductive Success

Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males.  

I am imagining this being debated by men and women...

On a sitcom

On late-night TV

On Joe Rogan 

On The View

At Thanksgiving

In Adult Sunday School

By a minister, a priest, and a rabbi

Race to the Bottom

My reading of the polls is that Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk ae gradually losing popularity.  Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in general has cratered in terms of popularity.  So collectively, we like everyone less.  It sounds humorous, but I think it is increasingly dangerous. 

Magic Malfuntion

 James Bellinger - our James, from I Don't Know, But... has a story out in a new collection available at Amazon, Magic Malfunction.

Paranoid Schizophrenia

I knew a couple hundred like her.  You can't explain or reason. Medicine sometimes fixes it completely, sometimes it helps, sometimes it has little effect. 

It's just heartbreaking.  They wear out their supports.

You'll Hardly Know I'm Gone

We leave tomorrow earlyish to head for our 50th reunion. They call it Traditions Weekend now and the reminders to give money are already more than other years, and we haven't even got there yet. We will be going down by the more coastal route which includes two ocean ferries, which I took with Sons #1&3 when we went down to Parris Island for their brother's graduation from Basic in 2009.  Tracy has never been that route. Which route we go through Long Island and NYC is TBD.

When we went to Ireland last year I preloaded posts for you to read while I was gone.  I enjoyed it so much I have quadrupled down on it.  Each day will have music from 1971-75, plus a reprise post from 2011, plus other recent posts that were not time sensitive and I thought could delay publication for a few weeks.  There are a few reposted series, so you'll have plenty of AVI to lift your spirits. Now that I am briefly back on the news I have gone back and changed a few of the recent ones. One of the main things I learned is that CS Lewis was right: If something big happens, people will tell you about it, you don't have to go looking. FOMO is wasted.

I may check in and read your comments but I will not reply until after I am back.  Talk among yourselves. 

Actually, any attention is good attention.  Talk about me all you like. Even better, more than you'd like.  As much as I'd like.

Characters in the Arts

Reflecting on my conversation with The Mad Soprano under the "mini-soaps" discussion, I remembered that filmmakers, playwrights, and novelists can make their characters say whatever they want and we grant a certain amount of reality to those people, as if there were an actual individual who said this thing, or at least was "based on a true story." Philip Yancy gave the example of Bishop Myriel showing grace to Jean Valjean, who then repented, not as an expression of the idea that grace works, but as evidence of it. Not the same thing. A second cousin of mine posted a FB story about a young bigot shouting insults at a black man before exiting laughing with squealing tires.  The black man turned out to be a doctor who had spent many extra hours that day working to serve patients of all races and was weary. Of course. I challenged him that had looked fishy to me, and I in fact could not find any source that it had actually happened. My cousin and a few of his commenters were outraged at me for not believing it. I mentioned this to one of the actual black doctors I was working with at the time who smiled wryly that "Yes, we are under more pressure to be saints." (I don't think either of us spoke as clearly and wisely as I imply here.  It's based on a true story.)

So again I say that fiction is dangerous because we give our hearts to stories that another person is crafting, and they may be neither honest nor wise. It wasn't any different around cooking fires 10,000 years ago and may even have been worse then. You were surrounded by others who believed it in the same moment and your band membership may have depended on you believing it too. There were no other allegiances to switch to. I remember a psychologist friend who wore a "Fear No Art" button at the time of the Mapplethorpe exhibit who did laugh and get the point when I said "No, I think art is one of the most dangerous things in our lives." Szoborpark

Genetics and Bad Luck

We ask what causes our medical afflictions, often from a place of great emotional as well as physical pain. We have made up answers throughout our history, as we find it hard to accept answers that don't have a story attached to them.  We now find it ridiculous that anyone could ask Jesus whether it was the man's sin or his parents' that caused him to be born blind, yet many of our hypotheses even now aren't better. They are sometimes even the same. Your parents committed the sin of having you vaccinated, though we may transfer that to Big Pharma, or The Medical Establishment, or Government. Your community committed the sin of allowing bad neighborhoods, resulting in physical danger, stress and lasting medical effects. Negligent manufacturers, drunk drivers and the bars that served them, smoking, obesity...Some of these things are at least partial explanations.

We don't like "bad luck" as an answer, because the story eludes us then.  "Genetics" is also unsatisfying, as it does not fasten tightly to a cause. The guilt of "I gave my son this condition in the moment he was conceived" leads immediately to "but I got it from my mother, and she from her father" and so on endlessly. It runs in our family. It becomes the bad luck explanation eventually. The refinements that we inherited risk or predisposition but not disease are not emotionally different.

For Christians this is both easier and harder.  Easier, because we know that there might be a meaning more important than our pain behind it, whether a specific lesson for our specific life, or a general lesson that suffering comes to us all; harder because we then take it personally when we wonder why Omnipotence has allowed this. We are not alone in the void, but we now wonder if our companion there really has our best interests at heart.

Lift High The Cross

This was the first music our choir sang yesterday, but I put it off until today because of two interesting coincidences. This is First Methodist Houston, where my son has worked since 2018 as Director of Communications. Until today, in fact, his last day. He has taken a job with Events United in Derry and will be moving back to NH. This seemed appropriate for today, to put up something he did or supervised the filming of just as he did the one yesterday. 

We sang this often at Gethsemane Lutheran in the 1980s.  Today is its last day - a church founded in 1881. It is where Ben was baptised in 1983, and I in 1953, my mother in 1930, and her mother in 1896.

Big Joe Blues

I included Pete Seeger in my list of Ten Worst Americans almost twenty years ago, when I was still picking up this blogging thing.  I acknowledge that this seems unlikely and is likely colored by my worship of the man when I was a teenager. The disillusioned have a special hatred, perhaps.

But not Seeger, I guess.  Even while denouncing Stalin in 2007 by writing "Big Joe Blues" he was rather tepid about it, concluding that though he claimed he was bringing us to a new tomorrow, he ended up bringing us back to the same old place.  Sure, which of us hasn't killed millions of people, after all.  The problem was that Stalin was a disappointment. Michael Moynihan at Reason magazine does the takedown well, noting that even while apologising, Pete Seeger had to kick Christians and Americans and everyone else.

I can't find record of it ever being recorded. You can read the lyrics and read about it, but it seems that few people (if any) ever heard the song. If someone links to it being sung - by anyone - I'd be grateful. 

The Wikipedia article on Pete is a classic whitewash. The uncomfortable bits are included, so that everyone can pretend there's no censorship going on here.  But they are excused with mild words and swept into the corner, in order to get back to the real business of assuming the worst about his enemies and apologising for tyrants.

As I head out for my reunion, which will include daily music reminiscent of the time, I felt I should include where my musical head was at as I left on a bus for college, 12-string by my side. Yes, I had other luggage, but it got sent to Nashville by mistake, switched in DC, and I wore the same clothes for 3 days of August orientation in coastal Virginia. An inauspicious beginning, perhaps.

 

Against Tariffs

A Trump-sympathetic economist at Bastiat's Window explain why tariffs are a bad idea more clearly than I had previously understood.  Megan McArdle had explained why Trump's tariffs might be temporarily useful a couple of month ago as a political club that hurts both parties but one side can take the damage more easily.  That would be similar to selling at a loss in order to increase market share by forcing your competition out.

A key insight here is that America cannot increase its inflow of foreign investment money AND reduce its trade deficit simultaneously...

and concludes with

Memo to President Trump: Voters in 1932 dumped both Smoot and Hawley into the electoral dumpster when they saw the damage their 1930 tariffs had done to the economy. A Democrat defeated Smoot, but Hawley got the boot from fellow Republicans. So far as I can tell, neither Smoot nor Hawley has any significant memorial—even in their own hometowns. Voters do not take kindly to politicians who crater the economy.

Bob Graboyes, the author, proudly resorts to algebra to prove his point.

Mini Soaps

There are plenty of YouTube shorts and short videos based on replaying a legit TikTok or Instagram with a content creators commentary. But the ones that were too smooth, too perfect I sensed were hoaxes. Men underestimating women, women receiving revenge after their affairs are discovered, con artists being outwitted, court hearing where someone is either vindicated or treated so unfairly as to inspire outrage. Acres and acres of emotional spillage, and I wondered - where do they find the people willing to be this patently ridiculous?

I am too used to videos of real people who are being stupid to have been alert that you can follow that down the garden path.  These are mini soap operas.  They are scripted.  These are actors. Duh.  As with hoaxes, the key is when they are just too perfect. The villain who mistreats the homeless woman who turns out to be the disguised sister of his job interviewer. Extra points if he's racist or sexist. The woman begging to be taken back and the betrayed husband delivering well-constructed and crushing lines right off the top of his head.

I never thought all of them were real, but I just figured out I have been falling for the new generation's soaps.  Maybe if someone had been named Marco Dane I would have woken up. 

Support Animals

A dog - not a support dog, but an untrained pet - made it all the way to the sanctuary this morning, with lame excuses.  A few weeks ago a lamb was snuck in. Well, there are worse things that can happen to a church, but the lack of consideration is annoying. I was speaking about the matter with our Director of Christian Education* and suggested that such issues are going to become increasingly difficult, as unofficial support animals are becoming more common.  Businesses can, and often should, restrict animals to official trained service animals.  But churches? Hmm...

What is the most unusual "service" animal you have encountered in person, and which is the most unusual you have heard of.  For me, that would be a ferret and a llama.

Crown Him

Our choir is singing this today, and I wanted to find a good version of it to play for you for Easter.

This caught my eye and is excellent. 

This is my son's church in Houston, where he is Director of Communications. Today is his last Sunday and his last day is tomorrow. Today the info for the bulletin was there fifteen minutes before service and the announcement information (on special paper) was only ready five minutes before and he kept getting texts to come down and take pictures of the Easter breakfast.  I am so glad he is getting out of there. He is moving back to New Hampshire, now with a wife, Jen Crouse Wyman, a children's librarian. Deep sigh of relief about many things in life.

He will now be working for Events United.

What is Work For?

Our Souls Need Proof of Work, by Julie Zhou at The Looking Glass

I don’t care to argue here whether hard work leads to material success.

What I want to suggest instead is that hard work is necessary for our happiness and well-being.

As it turns out, our souls needs proof of work...

This is the hidden trap of comfort: the easier and quicker our desires are fulfilled, the more our brains recalibrate. Getting what we want, without struggle or delay, numbs our ability to experience real joy and satisfaction.

In short, being too comfortable actually makes us miserable.

Almost 20 years ago, Pope Benedict spoke with Italian artisans and reminded them that 'Work is for man, not man for work.'

Too much silly research has been done on work and happiness.  It is meaning that we seek and drives us.  Happiness is a frequent but not inevitable byproduct of that. Christians distinguish between joy and happiness, and the former is tied much more strongly to meaning than to pleasantness and comfort.

What Makes Work Meaningful?  At MIT Sloan Management Review. 

We were anticipating that our data would show that the meaningfulness experienced by employees in relation to their work was clearly associated with actions taken by managers, such that, for example, transformational leaders would have followers who found their work meaningful, whereas transactional leaders would not.6 Instead, our research showed that quality of leadership received virtually no mention when people described meaningful moments at work, but poor management was the top destroyer of meaningfulness.

I remember those days at work, when I had five admissions and three discharges (one and one would be more typical) and I began to ramp up the moment I got in.  My office-mate would moan, especially in his last three years before retirement, but I would tell him brightly "Fred, we are the best that is.  This is why they hired US." No wasted moments.  Anything funny was a one-liner to encourage, not an opportunity for storytelling.  Focus. Focus. Paradoxically, I was not at my most impatient those days, but at my kindest, listening most intently. I would come home and grin to my wife while sighing "I did magic today."

Seven Last Words

At our Good Friday service this evening, each of seven people read the scripture around the seven last words of Jesus and spoke a few words of their own about them.  The woman who spoke of "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" told about her own struggles with forgiveness. One line jumped out, that for forgiveness to happen, something has to die.  She was speaking not only of Jesus's sacrifice, but that something had to die in us in echo of Jesus's death for resurrection to follow. No death, no resurrection.

Good Friday - When I Survey

 

The American Debunk

It looks like one-stop shopping for Trump hoaxes. I haven't clicked through because I have seen about half of these already, but I might browse on a slow day.  CWCID Maggie's Farm.

Maundy

I must have heard hundreds of times that "Maundy is from the Latin word mandatum, meaning 'commandment.' Jesus giving us a New Commandment." But apparently no one remembers it, because people keep asking where this comes from year after year.  Maybe it is because people usually say "Monday Thursday" which send us down a wrong path mentally. 

Maybe they should just say the Latin means "mandate" or "mandatory." Is that so hard? Wouldn't that stick in the memory better? Do they think people don't know those words? Or did it not occur to them either?

This has annoyed me for decades.

Common Culture

Was there ever a common culture here? There was a post WWII culture when popular music, bestseller books, national magazines, movies, radio and TV, only a few brands of similar school textbooks, and a new world of interstates and other good roads, with chain hotels, restaurants, and gas stations on them. We see our world as fragmented in comparison, and ourselves worse off. That's what we say, at least. Did that last from 1950-1995 with soft boundaries? 

That was the exception, though.  American culture was far more regional before then, all the way back to colonial times, when everyone came from the British Isles and lived near the Atlantic but nonetheless, South Carolina was very different from Maine. Different Christianities, different crops, different economies.  Different ways of building houses, preparing food, saying goodbye to the departed. As we went west each successive move was a greater cultural distance from Boston, New York, Williamsburg, Charleston. 

National elections were shifting alliances of the four main British regions, with different foreign immigrants in each one. Some of that persists to this day. Minnesota is not Louisiana; Seattle is not San Diego. Yet we somehow believe that we were all one until quite recently. 

Are entertainment and national politics the main shared culture now? Nine rings of entertainment, seven rings of sports, with the Presidency as the one ring to rule them all in our cultural attention?

Maundy Thursday - An Offering

Cultural Psychology - East Asian, Siberian, Inuit, Andean

 Arctic instincts: The personality of East Asians by David Sun, via Aporia. 

I don't have the background to tell whether this is a just-so story, but I will say that the theory holds together with some things I know about human migration and physiological similarities, and also matches up with some fragments of historical linguistics, though the time-depth for that makes everything chancy. 

My paper falls within the discipline of cultural psychology, which seeks to understand people’s culture and personality by examining the socioecological factors that they experienced over the last 10,000 years. Many interesting findings have been made already, as a recent literature review documents: population density predicts collectivism, tightness and future orientation; frontier regions are characterized by individualism and high agency; pathogen prevalence predicts collectivism; rice farming is associated with tightness and higher nepotism...

My paper documents that, in terms of psychology, East Asians bear a striking resemblance to indigenous Inuit and Siberians. All three groups exhibit high emotional suppression, in-group cohesion/unassertiveness, introversion, indirectness, self-consciousness, social sensitivity, cautiousness, perseverance and visuospatial abilities – traits that would have enhanced their ancestors’ survival in the unforgiving environment of Ice Age Siberia.

My paper also documents that Arctic environments necessitate these very traits in polar workers and expeditioners.

It is fascinating, at any rate. These ideas remain unpopular to even study in wide swaths of academia, but Sun seems to be on a mission about it.

From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine

It's a fun site with new material frequently 

Advertisement.

 

 

When I Survey Basses

This is what happens behind the scene when you survey basses.  For those of you who have any interest in singing in a choir, know that there are helps like this all over the internet, especially on YouTube. I rely on them heavily to rehearse at home when I join for Advent, Christmas, and Holy Week.

The Dark Night of the Soul

I am no mystic and have little taste for poetry, nor do I well understand either.  I suspect I am too literal for both.  The Dark Night of the Soul by St John of the Cross is the Great Book discussed on the National Review podcast that dropped today. Armed with that further revelation, I tried this poem again. I still look at it almost blankly, with only a few lines evocative and not much that matches my experience.

Yet another dark night of the soul I understand better. St. Teresa had a shining vision of what God would have her do when she was a girl - and barely heard from God again nor felt His presence for decades after. 

 The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction–that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

That is from  Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith by David Van Biema, who was then religion editor of Time. It was written shortly after her death, and it is jarring and almost quaint to recognise that this was the period when the New Atheists were in ascendance and claimed to seep the field before them. The new atheists have been sweeping the field before them for centuries, haven't they? Van Biema mentions them and gives them a try at the podium, then returns to quoting the writings of the Saint of the Gutters. Her words are as solid as bricks beneath the feet.

My dark night is bright as noon compared to her experience, yet still I have a recognition.

Discus World Record

When someone keeps breaking their own record, and one that has stood for decades, they are usually superior enough that they dominate the field for a decade.  Think Usain Bolt or Edwin Moses. But when Mykolas Aekna of Lithuania (still young - I mentioned him last year) broke his own record twice in a few hours, there was an Australian who was just behind him. Matt Denny would have broken the record set earlier in the day but was a little short of Aekna. This record is going to be repeatedly broken for a while, much as Mondo Duplantis keeps breaking his own pole vault record.

 

Mykolas's father was a discus Olympian and held that record for decades.

Deep Ancestral Structure of Modern Humans

Hot off the presses: A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans in Nature: Genetics. Most of the paper is about the mathematics and modeling used to arrive at the deep structure conclusion and where the results of each piece points. But for the layman there is the following.

 we present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%.

In the past we had a vague picture of there being very few human lineages that were essentially distinct.  That was the model of physical anthropology I was taught in the 70's.  Some ongoing interbreeding events between populations was considered possible but unusual. We now think quite differently, that given the timescales involved, interbreeding was always likely eventually, and the genetic river that empties into the sea that is modern mankind is more like a delta than a single current. Analogous to this:

 

These coexisting populations diverged and recombined, intermarrying with far-distant cousins. Two groups that had separated 1.5 million years ago interbred more than a million years later, and this was the combo that led to us. One group's genes outnumbered the other's about 4:1.

Nature Nurture Nietzsche

Whenever I go over to The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter I find something interesting. The site tends to discussing sex differences and gender bias, Politics and perception of issues, and philosophy of science. Most of the articles have a graph and a couple of paragraphs, with the remainder of the article for subscribers only. That is often enough for me, as the linked paper is above the fold if I want to go look at it. (The title always diverts me into thinking Kinder, Kuche, Kirche because of alliteration and Nietzsche being German.  So now you are stuck with that association too.)

This week it is The Psychology of Political Extremism.  He writes often about how the prevailing view for the last 60 or more years is that Republicans and the right wing are much more likely to be conspiracist, paranoid, and violent, but the evidence is much more balanced.

A recent paper by Jan-Willem van Prooijen and André Krouwel explores the psychology of political extremists on both ends of the spectrum. It identifies four key traits that both tend to have in common, and which distinguish them from moderates:

1. Psychological distress

2. Cognitive simplicity

3. Overconfidence

4. Intolerance

 

Real Feel

Discover magazine became more social than science decades ago, and I am told that even Scientific American has opened the bulkhead and headed down into the cellar.  Is Popular Science still okay?  This article on wind chill/heat index/Real Feel seemed pretty good. 

“It’s basically just how the temperature feels different to our skin,” meteorologist Cyrena Arnold tells Popular Science. “We have sensors in our skin and our skin is made up of water. So our skin actually behaves differently based upon the evaporation of that water.”

Palm Sunday

I sing with the choir Christmas and Easter. This is Palm Sunday's music.

Then Will The Very Rocks Cry Out

We will be singing this for Palm Sunday tomorrow

Why Skipping College Can Be Feminist

The immensely clever Ruxandra Teslo has ideas which should not be thaty radical, but will be, about how to reduce the conflict between "greedy" careers and fertility windows. Why Skipping College Can Be Feminist. Palantir is offering internships for the highly talented, male and female, straight out of highschool.  Teslo has previously suggested related options.

Anyway, why do one’s 30s matter so much? Some of it might be societal, or the way we set up our institutions. Indeed, Dr. Arpit Gupta made the clever observation that we should do the following things as a society:

early graduation from high school

3 rather than 4 year BA degrees

major in law or medicine up front; rather than in professional school

social shift to promote the young.

I would have loved it, myself.

Apart from a bunch of other negative social impacts, including on the science itself (which I discuss here), this also affects women in particular, because timelines to promotion clash even more starkly with their fertility windows! This is something almost nobody talks about, but as I also highlight in a previous post:

I wish I would have graduated much earlier from high school. I wish I would have started doing research instead of just going to uni courses much earlier. And so on. In fact, if I were to complain about how society “has wronged me as a woman”, it would be that it has treated my limited “fertility time” with extreme disregard. At each step of the way I was encouraged to “be patient”, do more training, told that “things will figure themselves out”, even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things.

It would affect only a few women or men and have little impact on overall fertility rates. I suppose making having children more accessible for elite women could lead to a rise in social desirability for all women.  I haven't tried the idea on any of the childless couple of my age in my circle, whether this would have made a difference.  It would seem accusing, which is not my intent.  Yet I admit I am quite curious. And just because not everyone could use this option, it might be worth pursuing for its own sake, to increase options for people.

One thing that does not get mentioned in these discussions enough is that one of the primary things needed for raising small children is sheer physical energy, which parents have more of when they are younger. Toddlers don't know if they are poor or not, they only know if someone loves them and interacts with them.

 

The Purpose of the System Is What it Does

Scott Alexander over at ACX just put out a serious/fun essay  Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does 

But then what was it meant to apply to? Nobody uses the phrase in cases where it’s obviously true - for example, nobody says “The purpose of a system is what it does! Therefore, you must believe that the purpose of airlines is to transport people using planes!” It’s only used for galaxy-brained claims like “The purpose of a system is what it does! The police do a bad job solving crime, therefore the purpose of the police must be to tolerate crime, no matter what you gullible starry-eyed idealists who take the police’s story at face value might think!”

Here the correct response is that the police might try to solve crime, but fail - just as the Ukrainian military tries to win wars and fails, or a cancer hospital tries to cure every patient but sometimes fails. Given that this is not just possible but in fact incredibly common, what is left of the phrase “the purpose of a system is what it does”?

I commented there, referencing that Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy has some merit, but after working in a state hospital for over forty years I can confidently assert that it does not cover the territory. Pournelle was genuinely brilliant, but sometimes clever cynicism masquerades as wisdom.  Because it's easier. I have fallen into it many times, and still understand how sometimes these cynical things are just fun to say. 

Bureaucracies do become good at perpetuating themselves and move toward doing the easiest parts, but there is a limit.  Someone has to actually make many cans of beer or the brewery goes under. Also, even in the starry-eyed fields, new starry-eyed people enter every year want to do what the sign over the door claims.  Nor are these always fresh graduates.  Sometimes they are people who have gotten sick of other bureaucracies or systems but still hope to accomplish something like what they set out to do.  Doctors and engineers come to mind here.

Causes of Autism

 A very good summary from the Wall Street Journal last month. The writer is quick to apologise "we don't know," but then shows what we do know (it's not vaccines or thimerosol), and how far we have narrowed the field in what does cause it. She suspects that not having a definite "this causes autism" to point to is part of why the vaccine idea won't die.

There remain few nominees from the environment having more than marginal effect. The strongest predictors are still genetic and early intrauterine effects. The correlation with age of mother and especially age of father at conception has a highly plausible explanation tied to changes in sperm and eggs over time.  It is possible to call that an environmental or epigenetic effect depending on definitions.