New York City

 We got home about 1AM. We agreed there are too many people in New York.

Tree Topper

Star, Angel, or something else?  I saw Archangel Michael ornaments and thought that would be a great tree topper.

The angels are getting more insipid.  

Silent Night

 Ghost of Christmas Past

The Gospel of John in The Magician's Nephew

 John 11:32-39 

Digory: 

“But please, please - won't you - can't you give me something that will cure Mother?'

Up till then he had been looking at the Lion's great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.

'My son, my son,' said Aslan. 'I know. Grief is great.”

2013 Links

 Irish Mossing Museum - and small, odd museums in general

What's Wrong With the Schools?  Spoiler alert: Many of these things are still wrong with the schools.

Jesus and Personal Freedom tribes, clans, and loyalties

How Doctors Die - forwarded to me at that time. 

Social Truth vs Objective Truth  When the person you are disputing with says "the debate is over" or some equivalent like obviously/unquestionably/unarguably the odds are good that this is a social truth that you should believe is true if you want to belong to a particular tribe, not an objective truth.

The Gospel of John in The Silver Chair

 John 4:10-14 in Narnia

“Are you not thirsty?" said the Lion.
"I am dying of thirst," said Jill.
"Then drink," said the Lion.
"May I — could I — would you mind going away while I do?" said Jill.
The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.
"Will you promise not to — do anything to me, if I do come?" said Jill.
"I make no promise," said the Lion.
Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.
"Do you eat girls?" she said.
"I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
"I daren't come and drink," said Jill.
"Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.
"Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer. "I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."
"There is no other stream," said the Lion.” 

CS Lewis 

In Dulci Jubilo

 Couldn't find a favorite version. Something about this one kept me coming back, though.

Susie Wiles

 Nellie Bowles at the Free Press has the best take of anyone so far. 

Saturday Links

 We will be traveling, back Monday.

Stereotype Accuracy  In my split-the-difference solution, I have said that stereotypes are about 50% accurate. As a 50-50 guess would be random, 77% looks like about 50% accurate.  Yay me. The tricky part is figuring out what part is accurate and which is historical prejudice. Also, the American political system made a great contribution to the world by pretending stereotypes weren't accurate - and even our own people had a lot of trouble with that.  My solution is to pretend even to myself that stereotypes aren't accurate, but remember them silently when evaluating a situation. 

Journal of Controversial Ideas  Cory Jane Clark discusses the idea of female empowerment contributing to the ascendance of their societal values: "women are more harm-averse, equity-oriented, and prone to resolving conflict through social exclusion." We have discussed this recently and though I think there are holes in the argument it is what we now call directionally true.  

Sharron Davies was canceled in Britain, but is now a life peer in the House of Lords.

The Four Deep Ancestries of Europe  The 20th C guesses based on skulls, plus hair and eye color were wrong, but not completely wrong.  They were taller, and Europeans still carry that. The Aryans did not have blond hair and blue eyes, but you can read about the history of those traits. Basically, all that pigmentation selection occurred after they got to Europe.

What's Killing Marriage - Unmarriageable Men or Liberal Women?  It's a discussion at the Institute for Family Studies, not an either-or choice. 

 

The Gospel of John in Prince Caspian

 John 3:1-9

Lucy: 

But what would have been the good?" 

Aslan said nothing. "You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?" 

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan. "No. Nobody is ever told that." 

"Oh dear," said Lucy. "But anyone can find out what will happen," said Aslan. "If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me – what will happen? 

"There is only one way of finding out."

Now Shine a Thousand Candles Bright

 It is from decades ago.  I had heard it was lost, but that seems greatly in error.

Friday Links

Deeper research with newer techniques confirms studies fro 25 years ago, that the Cohanim priestly line is ancient and distinct.  It can be traced at least as far back as 850 BC, the time of the Assyrian invasion and the Captivity, and is present in nine Cohen lineages worldwide.

Garrison Keillor re-tells the Christmas Story.  My children grew up on this version 

Hitler did not have only one ball, contrary to the WWII song, according to a new DNA study.  He had a worse problem. 

Mark Stoller at Things Have Changed (sidebar) visits the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie centers in Tulsa while in town for a Billy Strings concert.

I hesitate to mention Fuentes at all, knowing that he became famous for being famous via an astroturf campaign. Don't mention his name, and his name will pass on, as "Laredo" tells us. But Rob Henderson does a good job showing his vulnerability to a skilled interviewer. 

 

The Gospel of John in The Horse and His Boy

 John 1:47-50 in Narnia

 Aslan:

 I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.

 

Old Basque Carol

 Also called "Gabriel's Message" and "The Angel Gabriel"

Church Visit

We are traveling this weekend and so visited a church that has weeknight services. Live by the cliche, die by the cliche. There was nothing wrong with it, really. Nothing much to be wrong about. They said "represents" for both body and blood at communion, so I guess that's wrong. I'm not sure even that is wrong, however - just a huge undersell. There was a symbolic moment during the closing music. On a huge screen behind the band, there was a projection of drone footage over an evergreen forest   Off in the distance you could see a frozen lake that we were flying toward.  It looked interesting and I wanted to have a look at it, to see if there were towns or camps of bobhouses there. After a couple of minutes it occurred to me that we weren't any closer.  I looked at the nearer, moving footage and saw that it was on repeat, spliced and overlaying a still photo of the horizon. I nodded resignedly.  I wanted to see the lake.

Why Does Getting Hit in the Cold Hurt More?

 Gee, I wonder why this occurred to me at the dump today...

The Chilling Truth  

"Quick Summary: Cold temperatures trigger vasoconstriction, stiffen muscles, and heighten nerve sensitivity. These physiological changes intensify pain perception, making impacts feel significantly more painful in cold weather than in warmer conditions." Get that?  Significantly.

It's actually a fairly detailed article.  Of course it annoyingly recommends mindfulness and reducing stress, but most of the rest seems based on medicine rather than fashion. And taking a moment to exhale gives perspective anyway. 

 I did like the advice in the sub-question about what one can do to minimise pain from cold weather.  Get warm.

The internet can be a wonderful thing. 

Persuasion

Related to the previous post, though possibly in contradiction of it, I have thought of the fertility crisis and our responses to it.  Because it can be tied pretty solidly to the marriage crisis, I don't see how we get around putting responsibility on both young males and young females, as well as on the economic and social environment we parents and grandparents have put them in. Yet my prejudice is toward lecturing the young men. Dude, it's your job to persuade her.  Present a package that someone will put on their wish list. If you aren't pretty, you should work on being funny. Only then you can start on laying down your Good Provider/Kind/Smart/Generous cards.  Those only matter if you've you've already made it to the display case.  The days when she had to choose someone are over. It's not fair that she doesn't care about those things first, but you aren't hurrying to buy the brussel sprouts first either, amiright?

Is Everyone Capable of Changing Their Mind?

Despairing over the futility of so many discussions I encounter, and the mere recitation of the previous point in a louder voice, I wondered if there were some present who were not even able to change their mind. There is a poster that has alternating near-identical lines "Taxing billionaires will solve Problem A/Deporting illegal immigrants will solve Problem A. Taxing billionaires will solve problem B/Deporting illegal immigrants will solve Problem B..." for about eight things, with every other one crossed out.  I forget who it favored, but it doesn't matter. The real answer matters, but it doesn't matter in terms of the current national discussion. Similarly WRT the fertility crisis, it's the women's fault, it's the men's fault. 

One of the interesting discoveries discoveries about the persistence of delusions is that acetylcholine transfer in the brain is impaired for those with the illness, and that is tied to the formation of stories and comparing narratives. There are certain types of arguments you don't want to get into with an autist. Yet those two categories do not in any way exhaust the percentage of people who are unmoved by any reasoning. I dare say it applies to all of us, and often. Persistence of belief has advantages after all. Who wants to get up every morning taking everything under question? 

The probability of this being on a continuum looks high, doesn't it?  Also, it looks situational, where some beliefs overturn easily. It really is 7 minutes quicker to take the highway. Incentives matter. The ones that are immovable are more tied to our status and reputation. Folks want to belong to the Good Team and don't you dare try and take that away from them. The smart/righteous/strong/modern/fashionable team. This is more powerful than courses in logic or those websites about bias - unless, of course we are aspiring to be recognised as a member of the logical team. Then we change jerseys to play for the Logics. I have said we are more likely to have our mind changed by someone who agrees with us 90% of the time than by an opponent.

When we hear stories of people changing their minds about major things it is often after painful disillusionment or shocking revelation. Going on a foreign mission trip might change a child more than years of Christian schooling. Yet the incentive of getting along with our chosen group works the same magic. If we move to a different society, even a different neighborhood or job, we have incentive to worship the gods of that city. With the latter we don't always notice it happening. 

Yet sometimes I wonder whether we exceed amoebae in our reasoning ability, merely responding to external stimuli. I am principled. You are stubborn. He is pig-headed. 

Thursday Links (and a quote)

 Intelligence isn't Really Sexy.  At least, not at first.  It's pretty good for survival and mate stability, but looks and humor are your best lead cards

Martin Gurri at the Free Press  "Young men and women today are at war with the world. Deprived of the lubricant of local habits and traditions, they tend to experience reality as exasperating friction and suffer inordinate levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Their politics are outbursts of frustration" (Italics mine)

A frequent commenter here has a post at the True Crime Times. Most of you have seen earlier versions of this work.

The claim (from the emails) is that Jeffrey Epstein was "a dealmaker and fixer at a very, very elite level" with intelligence agencies, including ours. Steve Hsu does the interview with Murtaza Hussain at Drop Box News.  Well don't look at me.  It sounds plausible, but everything sounds plausible at this point.

Grammatical Gender with a great quote from Jorge Luis Borges.

Heather Cox Richardson-ism  It looks like I should be up on this sort of thing, but frankly, I just can't work up the energy. 

Once In Royal David's City

Years ago, youth groups used to go Christmas caroling to shut-ins, either at their houses or in nursing homes. Someone would ask if they had a favorite carol. Usually, people would say "Oh, I like them all," but some would have a choice. Years ago, I decided that when it came to be my turn I would choose this one, just to enjoy the blank stares.

 

Weird Medieval Guys

A substack I had never heard of Weird Medieval Guys. Topics include The coolest medieval woman you've never heard of,* The Medieval Monks Who Lived on Top of Giant Pillars, a continuing series on strange etymologies, and the coat of arms of the Colleoni family, which has 3 sets of testicles on it. It's not likely to make it to my sidebar, but it's worth at least a look.

*I had heard of her on the Great Books podcast this year. It's sort of like playing soccer, where if you just hang around in good places good things can happen to you. 

Managing ChatGPT

Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias relates a recent anecdote about trying to get a helpful answer out of ChatGPT.  He got what sounded to me at first pass like a helpful answer, but he wanted more. To topic is The Rise and Fall of Modern Abstractions

When I first asked ChaptGPT about this it put the peak as roughly 1880-1930. It explained the rise in terms of new research needs and opportunities, the availability of new data and tools, and easier communication. It explained the fall in terms of diminishing returns, increasing scale and funding forcing specialization, an information explosion, and the rise of new communication tools and field specific tools. That is, similar factors to those it used to explain the rise.

I then suggested that these sounded like excuses...

He asks better questions, then challenges the AI why didn't you tell me this the first time? And then How do I get you to give me that answer first next time? Fun ending.

 

Wednesday Links

 Revenge of the Climate Realists. I recall seeing Pielke's name a few times over the years

Neanderthals may have cheated to light their fires. John Hawks is always fun. 

How College Majors Change Political Beliefs. I checked to make sure that this did measure changes, not original beliefs at matriculation. I think I am reading that this is the case. 

 School Closures under Covid show minimal standardised testing effect in Australia. Scott Alexander notes a puzzle about this, however. (Scroll to #42) Conservatives sites are near-unanimous in declaring right from the beginning that this was going to be catastrophic. As a person who believes that schools matter mostly for the worst students, if at all, I have not been convinced. It certainly isn't proven to my mind.  However, reality is complicated, and when someone claims it is simple hold tight to your wallet.

The Culturist discusses What is Evil, according to CS Lewis.  Nice little summary.

Some Children See Him

I hadn't planned to do music every day for Advent, I just sort of fell into it this year. But I often have an Advent focus problem myself, and someone dragging me into into a prayer closet is the only way I'll get there some years. 

 

Two Steppes Forward

Razib Khan has a summary article on the Indo-Europeans and their subset the Yamnaya about what is known at this time.  There has been rapid change over the last decades, especially the last one. We now have a pretty good timeline of where the Urheimat (linguistic homeland) was on the lower Volga and where the various migrations and back-migrations were. I found it amusing to see how the Anatolians and Mittani ended up near each other by the long route home. In this case, it was definitely people not pots.

We have thought the Yamnaya conquered with horse and wheel, and that is indirectly true. But it is not entirely being more warlike, violent, and mobile (though they were) but a different result of living entirely with animals - resistance to disease, especially plague.

 Ok, so they were tall, dark, robust, maybe a bit plodding and prone to mentally instability. And how exactly does that package add up to inexorably overrunning half of Eurasia in the space of a few centuries? Here, a 2025 paper lays out something critical for any pre-modern population: “Our findings provide direct evidence that this lifestyle change [pastoralist nomadism] resulted in an increased infectious disease burden. They also indicate that the spread of these pathogens increased substantially during subsequent millennia, coinciding with the pastoralist migrations from the Eurasian Steppe.” Early forms of plague were pervasive in Neolithic Europe in the centuries after 3000 BC; it is likely, judging by the emergence of disease resistance among the Yamnaya that the ultimate origin was the Eurasian steppe, just as it would be thousands of years later during the outbreaks that occurred in 6th-century Europe and during the Middle Ages’ Black Death. David Anthony has argued that the Yamnaya were the first truly pastoralist nomadic people, relying entirely on their herds on the steppe, ushering in a mobile lifestyle that endures down to the modern era in Kazakhstan and Mongolia. And genetic evidence finds changes in adaptation to diseases at the end of the Neolithic and during the early Bronze Age among these first nomads; it seems likely that the Yamnaya inoculated themselves early against the plagues that they would unwittingly unleash upon the agriculturalists of Europe. Their third-millennium record of routs and conquests across an entire continent may have prefigured the similarly inadvertent biological warfare of Europeans against Amerindians some four millennia later.

I don't know how much of this article is behind the paywall. But all the extra studying we did during Covid about the history of disease began even before the disease hit us.  

Conspiracy Theories

Candace Owen, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson

Conspiracists have always settled on the Jews eventually, but they seem to be moving there faster these days. 

I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day

 The story about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing the poem in both despair and hope as he heard the bells.

In 1861, two years before writing this poem, Longfellow's personal peace was shaken when his second wife of 18 years, to whom he was very devoted, was fatally burned in an accidental fire. Then in 1863, during the American Civil War, Longfellow's oldest son, Charles Appleton Longfellow, joined the Union Army without his father's blessing. Longfellow was informed by a letter dated March 14, 1863, after Charles had left. "I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer", he wrote. "I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good." Charles was soon appointed as a lieutenant but, in November, he was severely wounded in the Battle of Mine Run. Charles eventually recovered, but his time as a soldier was finished. 

 

Informal Law of Karma

"Instant Karma!" we like to say when someone gets theirs quickly. We like the justice of such things, that good people eventually get their just reward and bad people get theirs. We have a strange narrative sense of justice as well, that a miserable life that gets a happy ending is better than a great life that ends badly.  Speaking for myself, I'd rather have the great life with a bad year at the end.  From the inside a life is a life, not a story.

I know too many people who have come to end with no justice - in both directions.  Never got rewarded or never got punished.  The more sophisticated definitions of karma are not like our popular version, and I make no comment on those. But the popular version is just flat untrue. 

Showing Class

I would much prefer a president who showed more class around such things as the sad murder of citizens by their son. I do note, however that Rob Reiner never showed any class talking about conservatives. 

I therefore have some moral right to complain about Trump.  I'm not at all certain that most of Reiner's defenders do. 

 

Wyman Christmas Letter - 2025

“Engineer’s Daughter”

David has been saying this for a few years, and it is time to praise Tracy, with examples.  Her spatial abilities in particular are better than his, and he has long since abandoned deciding on his own what size container is needed for the leftovers. She can see where objects will fit. There are other skills as well, such as decision trees for what has gone wrong.  When we got home from a few days in Quebec City, both the primary and backup heat were not working properly. David had not even gotten all the luggage in before Tracy figured out the easy one and got it started. (Look, I would have figured it out eventually.) The second one was harder, but Tracy remembered the problem from a few years ago and knew what to google.  David is inordinately pleased whenever he figures something out first. Natural science - birds, mushrooms, and wildflowers still bring her joy.

Engineer’s Great-Granddaughter

Emily went to St. Paul’s School Advanced Studies this summer to study engineering, so Tracy’s father’s genes are still in play in the world. We think that she and David are the only grandparent/grandchild pair to have attended the program. Em is applying to engineering colleges and acceptances are trickling in, while Jonathan and Heidi are still taking her on school visits.  Sarah has started high school and picked up two more sports in addition to softball.  The season never ends. The girls get the same twin question that Jonathan and Ben did for years, but they look different enough to us.

Arctic Wymans - Alaska and Norway

Aurora went to Subsistence Camp for a week this summer and can now sorta kinda lasso and butcher a reindeer.  There was also gold panning, packrafting, catching salmon, and metal detecting. A lot of these are hobbies the whole family already has, including her younger sisters Quinn and even Bella. Jocie continues to have millions of people watch her cook Filipino food with Nome ingredients and JA was on “Outdoor Boys” again. We will see them in Orlando in January. Chris and Maria decided to join us there as well, all the way from Tromso. Chris is able to put more and more time into his vehicle-rental business - and telling Maria not to work so many hours managing the halfway house. 

“May I remind you that you are the dog, and have no formal authority in this house?”

Tracy did not wait until her husband died to get a dog.  We now have Maggie, a rescued small white terrier mix. I have nothing further to say. 

“Are You Talking to Me or to Yourself?”

As we age, more of our conversations begin - or end - this way. They often continue with Tracy’s preferred pronouns: “It,” “they,” “she,” without clear antecedents. David seldom knows whom she is talking about.  Similarly, “Amy” or “Sue” could mean many people.  She described a hip replacement while gesturing to her shoulder. She tells lots of such stories, because she continues to be prayer central, keeping up on everyone’s medical, job, and relationship needs. Jonathan and Ben understand her, because they grew up with it and do the same. If she says “left” when she means “right”, they get it without missing a beat. Heidi and David insist none are speaking English. Ben’s wife Jen is more diplomatic, but this can’t last - she has to break sometime. Kyle wisely won’t say.

“The Cats Still Won’t Come Out”

Ben and Jen moved from Houston to New Hampshire, now in a Millyard apartment overlooking the Merrimack. Jen is now one of the librarians in Goffstown, giving Tracy even more excuse to go there. Jen runs a lot of programs - tomorrow it’s wolves and last week it was Taiwanese cooking. Ben is at Events United, which sets up festivals, graduations, conventions, and performances all over the country. He is one of the  few Oldheads, learning how to corral young tech wizards into a final production. 

Puffins! 

We feared we would have to travel well up the coast, perhaps even to Canada to reliably see puffins. Not so. In August we caught what may have been the best day at Eastern Egg Rock off the coast of Boothbay Harbor.  Tracy viewed as many puffins as she could possible want that morning. The ocean still calls to Tracy, as it does Kyle, who is still living in Duxbury. He works selling Orkin plans (rather than be the guy crawling around under the house.  Good choice.) Unsurprisingly, he is quite good at it, top salesperson in Northern New England already, though his heart is still in photography - people, dogs, ocean or some combination thereof.

“We Grow Too Soon Old and Too Late Smart”

Tracy and David went to the William and Mary 50th to see many friends and continue to refuse to give money to the college. We drove down by a very coastal route, taking the ferries at New London and Cape May, and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. We will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this coming year, and are still learning things that would have helped us understand each other. Better late than never. Tracy still takes on too many new tasks, David still stares out windows and thinks or writes about things. He also occasionally injures himself loading donated food onto trucks. 

Monday Links

 Did Saxons Invent the Runes? The Scandinavians insist it was they, but there's a problem...actually two problems. If the heavier linguistics comparisons of vowels doesn't fascinate you when you get to that part, you can skip to the final two paragraphs.

Why Implicit Bias Training Doesn't Work I've mentioned the weakness of this concept several times, but the first point in this takedown is in itself the best I've seen.

Also from N3 Personality and Intelligence are More Closely Linked Than We Thought. This surprised even me, though upending any longstanding view in psychology no longer shocks me. Point 2. Facets show much stronger links to intelligence than do broad traits.

Steven Pinker doesn't think we had, or have, a 1984 problem.  He thinks Orwell would be relieved. 

If Asians are Lactose-Intolerant, Why All the Milk Tea? A plausible answer of building up tolerance because of gut biome

 

He Shall Feed His Flock

With the recitative, which was a pleasant surprise

We used this as the theme for our Jesse Tree skit in 1987 or 88. The youngest shepherd was left behind because someone had to watch the sheep and he was low man.  Alone, he pouted tearfully "I wanted to see the baby king." But he hugged the sheep and would not leave it behind - because he loved it.  And that was the point.

2013 Links

 James and I had a discussion at his site (linked) about Proxy Effort in good deeds.

Should of  Some regulars commented.  And Our Alleged Language. 

Which Scandals Take off  

An early version of my theory that the right was more on defense WRT violence, while the left was more on offense.  I expanded that later to the willingness of the right to talk about violence against humans, while the left, in all its aggressiveness, usually stuck to objects.  The tradeoff is much less clear now: the right goes more on offense, the left no longer recoils from violence against people. 

Idear Will Be The Last To Fall.  Waning Eastern New England Accent

Wood Wide Web

Science Fictions reviews the scientific evidence behind Entangled Life winner of the British Royal Society's 2021 award for best science book. 

There isn't any. The book claims that trees communicate with each other by means of shared fungi in the roots, warning each other of insect attacks, sharing nutrients, and preferentially helping kin. It's all very woo, and I recall claims of plant consciousness back to my undergraduate days. Our physics TA assured us that plants responded to being spoken to kindly and encouragingly, and would register some sort of surface electric response if another plant in the room was destroyed. It is great fun listening to the podcast breaking down the arguments one by one. For example, related trees near a "mother tree" grow worse, not better; there are alternative explanations for every claim.; If you enclose a plant's whole root system in a fine mesh bag it might not grow as well for reasons other than lack of fungal communication with other trees.

Yet through it all I thought they dropped a stitch. The believers in tree communication thought that this was all peaceful, kindly, and encouraging. 

I found the underlying assumption that this purported nutrient exchange is a form of "sharing" humorous. Why would these be good communist trees "To each according to its need, from each according to its abilities" in a sharing-the-means-of-production situation? It's not even a capitalist scheme where one tree offers the lowest price.  The Douglas Fir is bullying the White Birch when it is stronger, demanding carbon.  When it is weaker and in the shade, the birch raids the root village and takes back what it can.  Mother trees are tribalist, even strictly clannish, giving resources only to their own offspring.  What have they got against immigrant trees? This seems a terrible example for the children to be teaching them in school. 

Lully, Lullay

We sang Christmas Carols in the car even while we were just courting, and when the children came along we would go for an hour straight, rotating choices. Tracy taught this one to me, but I didn't get how to harmonise to it until I heard a choral version.

 

Quick Review of Ken Burns

Adam Johnston of The Federalist tells me all I need to know about The American Revolution by Ken Burns. Well, not all I need to know. His full review is at the link, plus some excellent comments by others.

But this tells me I'm not missing anything

Less than 3 minutes into the Ken Burns documentary on the American Revolution, and we get:

1. White people are bad.

2. Native Americans had a democracy that had flourished for centuries before British colonists arrived.

3. Benjamin Franklin copied the Native American blueprint.

This is propaganda disguised as history, built around lies, half truths and truth, all carefully interwoven to reinforce a progressive narrative.

Propaganda works by controlling the lens through which we see things.

For Ken Burns to frame the American Revolution in this way, right from the start, sets the stage for how the viewer interprets everything that comes after.

So for example, the smallest amount of truth, like “the Iroquois had a confederacy” morphs into “it was used as a model for America” while leaving out the more important structural influences, including the very system of government used by Britain at the time.

Or “Ben Franklin referenced the Iroquois in his writings” becomes “influenced,” while leaving out the far more influential thinkers that had an impact on all the founders.

This combination of lies, half truths, truth, along with deliberate omissions, especially at the start of the documentary, are what make this propaganda. 

What Child Is This

Uncle Bill mentioned that lightness and bounce may less appropriate for Christmas Carols than a more somber and serious tone. I thought of this one immediately.  Nails, spear shall pierce Him through; the cross be borne for me, for you. Even in church that part is often left out.

 

Conservatism

 "Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.“

Roger Scruton 

Saturday Links

 The Monks In the Casino for, um, one meaning of the word "monks"

The dark side of the rainbow: Homosexuals and bisexuals have higher Dark Triad traits than heterosexuals. Aporia notes that this is strong evidence against the Sociosexual Hypothesis. I don't have numbers, but I do have a career of observation of a subset on the group. Borderline and Antisocial personalities have high percentages of bisexuality that I used to characterise as omnisexuality, pansexuality.  Both sexes, children, animals, fleshlights, vacuum cleaner hoses...anything. They were often traumatised by relatives, which brings in questions of environment vs genetics again. Were those parents also antisocial/borderline? Is there more than one wheel turning here? Should we take them out of the studies or are they the far extreme of the same spectrum? I do not have an opinion.

That was a serious subject, so lets be insensitive and consider it from a light perspective by that beloved children's author Shel Silverstein. 

Copycat effect of mass shootings.  Like plane crashes versus auto deaths or drowning in a flood vs a bathtub, we fear things that are much less likely to happen.  Mass shootings take up an enormous amount of media space, fundraising, and legislative time, but the odds of you dying in one are vanishingly small. Because they often involve (seemingly) random victims who are entirely innocent, it offends our sense of justice and control over our worlds as well as our realistic fear. B ut paradoxically, our obsession with keeping them in the news makes them more likely. 

The survival of Swiss watches Quartz watches were cheaper and more precise, but a small number of watchmakers kept Swiss watches alive after two-thirds of the watchmakers had already gone out of business.

Maxfield Parrish

 The Culturist picks some favorites 

 

Too Good to Check

I saw Steven Pinker's tweet about Oliver Sacks making up enormous amounts of his case studies, symbolically projecting his own life's obstacles onto his patients, and thought about this throughout the day at odd moments. When I got home I read the whole article in the New Yorker. I found it fully sickening while reading it, the sheer range of his dishonesty in his writing staggering for one who was trained to treat a clinical record with literalist accuracy. Anything subjective had to be identified, such as an interpretation by a community clinician of what has been happening. "Her community psychiatrist identifies having to move to a less-supervised setting as the primary stressor." Anything in the chart is subject to be entered into a court record. When a particular case is discussed outside the circle of confidentiality, such as at a conference, the name and any identifying details have to be disguised sufficiently to prevent disclosure. Yet one cannot disguise them by changing them, saying "a young black male" when it is a young black female. It is simply not allowed to pretend that someone who has political paranoia has religious paranoia for purpose of discussion.

To describe twin autistic patients as having an obsession with prime numbers and uncanny abilities to discover them, spending their day trading them playfully back and forth when they don't do anything like this is an enormous breach of trust. To further claim to have brought a lengthy prime into discussion with them, so that they make a place for you in their little world would be grounds for immediate firing. 

I believed every one of the cases Sacks described. If you told me that Witty Ticcy Ray was a actually bass player rather than a drummer, I would have felt deceived. 

It speaks to the power of the fantasy of the magical healer that readers and publishers accepted Sacks’s stories as literal truth. In a letter to one of his three brothers, Marcus, Sacks enclosed a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” which was published in 1985, calling it a book of “fairy tales.” He explained that “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” He added that Marcus would likely call them “confabulations”—a phenomenon Sacks explores in a chapter about a patient who could retain memories for only a few seconds and must “make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses,” but the “bridges, the patches, for all their brilliance . . . cannot do service for reality.”

Sacks was startled by the success of the book, which he had dedicated to Shengold, “my own mentor and physician.” It became an international best-seller, routinely assigned in medical schools. Sacks wrote in his journal,

    Guilt has been much greater since ‘Hat’ because of (among other things)

    My lies,

    falsification

He pondered the phrase “art is the lie that tells the truth,” often attributed to Picasso, but he seemed unconvinced. “I think I have to thrash this out with Shengold (ed. his psychoanalyst)—it is killing me, soul-killing me,” he wrote. “My ‘cast of characters’ (for this is what they become) take on an almost Dickensian quality.”

Who was harmed?

The patient is potentially harmed, but in many of these cases the patient experienced the doctor's attention and even projected interpretation as a positive. For people abandoned by the world, someone simply showing up and showing consistent focus would be precious. Oliver Sacks rather obviously cared about these people and tried to see something special in each, to the point of overidentification. That matters.  That counts. But the subsequent storytelling to the world is not a necessary part of that. A sincere and kindly person with no clinical training could do the same. Being seen inaccurately is not as good as being seen truly, but it must be better than remaining invisible. This comes up in the discussion of AI therapists which reflect back to you what you want to hear.  Is that good for you? We crave being understood deeply - an imitation of that might well meet the craving.  I thought of Ray Bradbury's The Man In The Rorschach Shirt. Couldn't the doctor have just done that instead? No, despite his very real compassion, Dr. Sacks was in it to "work through" (vacuous phrase) his own issues. It might have kept his nose to the grindstone, to his patients' benefit, but the risk of spilling his own pathology into them would be real.  Treatment decisions, including independence, medication, and legal status are decided on the basis of reported information. It could matter. I have seen entire treatment approaches to a patient reversed on the basis of discovering some new information, or the disproving of old information. Not often, but it happens.

The public was harmed. New Yorker writer  Rachel Aviv stresses the importance of the compassion and (ahem) empathy people might feel for damaged individuals.  That's fine. Keeping up general fascination with the brain and research could have good effect.  I draw the line at clinicians.  Teaching therapists, prescribers, and outreach workers false information must in the end be bad for their patients. I did not read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat thinking "How inspired I am to see the ultimate value of every human being," I was looking for brain understanding, thinking how wonderful it was that we are learning such intricacies on the basis of these oddities. We now know looking back that Postwar psychology was more a literature than a science - which would have been fine if everyone had been clear about that. The Stanford Prison Experiment, Kinsey's mythology of sexual behavior, delayed gratification prediction, priming, stereotype threat - all pretty much useless.  But it would be so cool if this were true.  Let's all talk about what it would mean if it were true. No thanks. These are people's lives we are screwing with. 

My title was "Too Good to Check" but how would I have checked?  It would be more accurate to say "Too Cool to Question," and I didn't.  I am quite distressed about what this means in general for my standards. I have been wondering if this is another time of upending for me, one of those periods that comes along every decade or so from which I emerge with my mind changed about things. I find I have been unable to force this to happen and also, only recognise it when I am more than halfway through.  Hey! I might be halfway through! I wonder what has changed?

 

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in the 1950s

 Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, as viewed from the 1950s from David Foster's Substack.  I kept meaning to put that on my sidebar and finally did it. 

Given the recent advances of AI and robotics in our own era–and the positive and negative forecasts about the implications–I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at two short story collections on this general theme: Thinking Machines, edited by Groff Conklin, and The Robot and the Man, edited by Martin Greenberg. Both books date from around 1954. Here are some of the stories I thought were most interesting, mostly from the above sources but also a couple of them from other places.

Nice summaries of some classic early sci-fi stories on the subject 

Ben Ruthe - One to Watch

 I didn't expect to be seeing any outdoor track, but it's Australia. Six races in one weekend.

 

Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming

 Probably my favorite music at Christmas

 

Somebody Else's Problem

When I was a young man I put things off until the last minute.  It was lack of discipline, certainly, but there is also a rush one gets from pulling chestnuts out of the fire, whether yours or another's. It came in handy later when I worked in emergency situations to be inspired rather than daunted by the task.  Toward the end of my career I would say to my office-mate "Fred, this is why they hired us. If it was easy, anyone could do it."

By that time I had learned not to put things off, because emergencies have a way of occurring at inconvenient times, such as while you are already fixing another emergency.  I am now a fan of getting things off my desk as soon as possible. Read it, reply to it, send it.  Pick it up, fix something you see wrong, and send it back. Your goal is to make this SEP - Somebody Else's Problem. Get it off your desk and on to the next. 

Tolkien's Christmas Poem

 

If you would rather hear it read, you will find it here. 

Thursday Links

 The Dirty Secret of the Muslim World.  It's slavery, and it is and is not a secret. It is long-known to people who read about the last ten centuries of the Middle East at all. But it is mostly unknown in the popular imagination, and it is mostly unstudied in any detail by academics. 

How to Measure Competition It has examples in industries we are all familiar with 

 In short, we want to measure whether markets are rewarding excellence or sclerosis. It turns out that such a measure exists: what is called the Olley-Pakes decomposition. The decomposition measures whether customers are switching to more productive companies. If productive companies are gaining market share, we might judge that the market is competitive and working well. If they’re not, and more productive businesses are not doing better than less productive ones, something is wrong, and intervention could be necessary.

People who have a spiritual understanding of life in the absence of a religious framework are vulnerable to mental disorder.  The British results are slightly different from the usual American results.  I have arrow-of-causation questions here, but it's interesting.

Why are there so many Chinese people?  Psmiths again.

Thinking About Crime at 50 

Like many crime researchers, Wilson saw a society’s crime level as shaped chiefly by the degree of restraint exercised by the community in which offenders operate. More than the police or courts, a community’s informal systems of social control—the norms and rules defining not only criminal behavior but also “orderliness”—play the central role. The idea of a community keeping the peace has roots in an older legal tradition that Wilson at times sought to evoke. Recovering it sheds light on today’s crime debates and sets the stage for a renewed appreciation of Wilson’s continued relevance.

"Predatory crime does not merely victimize individuals; it impedes and, in the extreme case, prevents the formation and maintenance of community.”  

 

 

At Least You Had Something...

In the Gen-Z-has-it-hard argument I stepped back from the overall statistics and even the comparative prices and income to zoom in on what were their particular sticking points. Housing is nearly always mentioned, college is usually in there, affording an unspecified car and the difference in wages for an entry-level job get mentioned. I tried to look back on those both as one who was there and knows the story behind the story but also how it does look now.  

Let's start with the housing. There is a common complaint that there are no small homes on small lots being built these days, because contractors are leaving money on the table if they don't build big.  It's true, and because there are fewer small houses all the time, they are not the bargain they should be. But that's only the beginning. Pretty much any house and most apartments have a dishwasher, a dryer, a far better stove and refrigerator, decent windows, wiring, and plumbing (compared to my childhood).  Those add up. The small houses themselves have grown. This is the house I moved into when I was two, in 1955.

It didn't have the garage or breezeway then, nor that addition on the front, just that cape with slanted ceilings on the 2nd floor bedrooms. The first house my wife and I bought was even smaller and less impressive.  Originally a 1906 one-room summer home, every room was a separate addition, including the bathroom and kitchen. Knob and tube wiring.  Stone foundation and some crawl space. About 900sf, $29,500 in 1978. It's one thing to be a defensive Boomer about how hard we had it, dear child, but to them "At least you had a house." 

And they're right. That was how we looked at it then, too.  Lots of young couples would never touch such primitiveness today even if it were available. Yet some would, but they can't. 

If you want to buy property and gradually build over three years, as some friends who went the log cabin route did, the town won't let you. They expect completion within a certain time period. If you can't build it to code, you don't get occupancy. None of these improvements - and they are improvements - destroys the market in itself.  But it's like a game of Jenga, and the tower is falling in a lot of areas. 

I always drove beaters for cars and was fine with it. Obama pretty much killed that for the next generation. In the 60s people had one car per family or none. Some guys hitched to work, even when they had families when I was a boy, and being in a city, we knew plenty of families that had no car at all. I knew rural people with no car, too, mostly old people who had someone drive them into town to shop once a week. 

We can sneer at devices and laptops and tell young people they can live without those, but a lot of them need them just to do their jobs.  You have to make a conscious effort to step away from that and embrace an entirely different life. We took a half a stab at it when we were first married and didn't like it.  Not everyone wants to grind their own flour now, either. Mother Earth News had lots of ways to building with rammed earth or aluminum cans stacked in mud, but try getting permission for that. You usually have to go well into the wild to find a place where the county will say "Hey, do what you want," and if you are that far out you and your wife had both better have reliable vehicles with 4WD. 

Medical care and insurance was less of an issue because it wasn't much damn good anyway. Health insurance was nice if you could get it, but people paid out of pocket, hoping nothing major would hit. If you got cancer or had a heart attack you were probably going to die soon with even the best of care, so people just didn't bother.  My grandfather was prosperous in his last decades, but when he got prostate cancer in 1969 at 73 he just said there was no point in getting the surgery and died a few months later. You can say that sucks but notice: when you don't have good things you also don't have to pay for them. 

I originally told myself that this ratcheting up of what you had to pay for included college, but that's only half true.  Both Doglas2 and bsking have pointed out to me that you can pay a lot less by not going the American Dream route of 4-year residential with nice cafeterias, gyms, and student centers. When my oldest looked at Asbury on his own, he said "Tell Dad it looks like a real college." That was still important to me in 1996. Not now. You probably can't do lab sciences entirely online, but plenty of things work fine.  Son #3 started at a 4-year school, switched to local, and eventually finished in accounting online. From Nome. Credential ratcheting means lots more jobs need a graduate degree now, just to get your resume read. If you've got a lot of student loan debt, that's going to cut into affording a house.

And before we go all kids-these-days on them taking out those loans to begin with, even though they'd been warned, I worked with lots of people who were told to save for retirement too, but didn't.  

December Weather

Not for me. It would be cool to say that one had done a season there at one time in our life, but there are a hundred things that's true of but we never choose to do. 

I've climbed up there, but never in winter.  Our nephew Doug has done all 48 NH 4,000 footers in the winter, I think, so he must have at one point. You can see this mountain a hundred miles away on a clear day from a few spots around here on a clear day, including the cupola on the barn on the property where commenter bsking grew up and Mike still lives. 

La! Thaet Waes Blithe Willspell

Old English translations usually go in the other direction, so I am not used to seeing this, and am used to seeing the older form in alliterative verse.  This has a feeling of being overliteral, very one-to-one from a dictionary, but I have no expertise in such things. I certainly would not try to offer a better version.

It is sung in that deep, ragged tone that everyone seems to want to use for Anglo-Saxons. For the ancient Irish, people want to go high and ethereal. 

And I loved the refrain.  I would keep it even if it proves to not be authentic.

Tuesday Links

The other argument I am seeing a lot of is the affordability "crisis," which may be a crisis of perception, or anxiety, or values instead. David Foster and bsking have also had things to say on it. My wife's mother had a cleaning lady who came in once or twice a week for years, and people have nannies now. Before that, lots of people had maids or cooks that put in a lot of hours. With larger and multigenerational families and big Victorian houses there was more work per household. Many labor saving devices were not yet invented.  But Matthew Iglesias points out that the reason people don't have servants now is not because their wages are less, but because servants wages are more. 

Lyman Stone links to two problems for the hereditarians 

Dizygotic twins reared apart 

There has been actual fraud, excused by prominent researchers 

and comments himself that we have in fact modified real-world phenotypic intelligence  with things right under our noses. He analogises to better visit because of glasses, contacts, and surgery even though genotypic eyesight isn't any better

Maybe Y'all Really Do Need Jesus by the always controversial and entertaining Cartoon Hate Her.  She is a one of the rare adult converts who had no religious upbringing whatsoever.

The Great Downzoning "It was once legal to build almost anything, everywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?"

Has an English Civil War Already Begun?  

 

For Unto Us

 

Fuentes Astroturf

 Nick Fuentes' fame and stats look to have been manipulated.  His followers are manufacturing his retweets with foreign and/or anonymous accounts. 

Mainstream media thought they were tracking organic sentiment on the right. In reality, it was reacting to manufactured noise. Fuentes is an extremist entertainer with a niche following. But coordinated amplification networks have artificially pushed him into the center of national discourse.

 This is going to be harder to discern every year - what photos, videos, and statistics are real and which have been faked.

Links from 2013

 Opinion, Fact Schoolchildren can make a distinction that sometimes eludes those with advanced degrees

Is Confidence Better Than Correctness?  

Jason Collins: "I'm a Basketball Player." My little sendup of an already obscure player coming out in 2013 is even more distant now.  It continues to be the case that few male professional athletes are gay, while very high percentages of female professionals are lesbians.

Teaching the Opposite Lesson. I still think of this sometimes. 

World's Largest  Two of the photos are unavailable, but the Moxie Bottle House is now in Union, ME - we visited it on our puffin trip this summer, and not only the giant Milk Bottle but lots of other roadside architecture is at this wonderful site.

 

Monday Links

 There is a lot more debate, or at least debate between people I have heard about, on hereditatrianism.  It is getting rancorous and I am finding that part unpleasant. There is no practical reason why I need to follow the debate, I am just fascinated by it and have been for a few decades. But I am also only in it for pleasure now, and can drop it if it is less...fun...entertaining...something. I don't need the grief.  But I will continue following it for now.  I usually put up posts on controversial topics if I mostly agree with them, less often if they are simply interesting new looks. But I am duty bound to post more of both sides on this one now, because of my own uncertainty. I will say that there is not only new evidence, but new arguments on the field, and keeping up will mean some updating for everyone. 

I won't hit you with all of them at once. There was ACX on 12/3, two mixed in today and 2.5 tomorrow. After that we'll see.  

 The return of psychiatric eugenics Thomas Reilly at Rational Psychiatry shows how it is not only a hateful idea, it won't won't work.  It's been tried. Sasha Gusev, who I have not been fond of, gets this one exactly right, so perhaps I am on my way to revising my opinion about him.

Twins Reared Apart Do Not Exist Another essay attacking one of my central hereditarian beliefs. We'll see if the ground continues to shift. 

Inventing the Dishwasher 

Europe is Under Siege  I wanted to argue with parts of this, but some of it is uncomfortably true.

Of course motherhood drives the gender wage gap by Ruxandra Teslo.  Lyman Stone gives credit to Camille Landais and Henrik Levin rather than Claudia Grondin for the heavy lifting on this, even though Grondin won the Nobel Prize for it. 

O Helga Natt

 Effortless

 

In The Bleak Midwinter

As I covered earlier this year, it is called Midwinter even though it is at the beginning of winter because Autumn and Winter were generally lumped together as one season called Winter, Spring and Summer lumped together and called Summer.

 

Caps

There were cap pistols in the early 60s, but we didn't see those often.  They malfunctioned too easily and had to be replaced, so only rich kids from other neighborhoods had those. We just had the paper tape, which you hit with a hammer, or more likely just a rock. Some kids thought these were amazingly exciting, hearing the little explosion. My friends and I weren't so interested.  We might bang out a dozen of them once in a while. You couldn't bring them to school.  Big trouble for that.

 I can still smell them.

6-7

 Middle school kids find it subversive to say this, and will insert it in wherever they can.  Most don't know where it comes from, having picked up from their peers as a saying ok kids famous for being a saying of kids. Some probably know that it comes from Maverick Trevillian from Maryland, who said it on camera at a youth basketball game, after which it went viral.

I'm suspicious of a kid whose mother named him Maverick, right off the bat.  I can imagine being reassured if it's a family name, maybe even taken in honor of the TV cowboy of two generations ago. There are ways out of this.  But in general, that mother is telling you something about what she's going to encourage in this child. Still, probably mostly harmless. A bit of a show-off.

But that is only halfway back in the story. Maverick got it from a highly recruited basketball player* in Atlanta who has made several videos using the phrase with the usual "I don't know/ comme ci comme ca/ either-way/ mezzo-mezzo" hand gesture, palms up. He stages being asked questions like "What time is dinner?" or "How do you rate this Starbucks drink?" and answering "Six, six-seven" while his friends laugh. Maverick saw those videos.

The highschool player got the phrase from a highlight film of pro basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is 6'7". In the soundtrack underneath the film is a song by the drill rapper Skrilla called "Doot Doot." In the son he uses the unexplained phrase "six seven" in the context of shooting someone and knowing he is dead. All sorts of stories sprung up about how the two were connected, but someone finally had the clever idea of asking Mr. Skrilla what he meant.  It is a reference to 67th St in Philadelphia, where he and his friends hang out. "Six-seven" meant he was going to brag about the killing to his friends in the neighborhood. He wasn't using it after that one time until all this went viral, but now he uses it frequently and his fans go nuts over it.

The middle schoolers mostly don't know any of this upstream origin. It's just something they say that seemed vaguely forbidden at first and is now just an in-slang to show they know what's cool. 

 *Talen Kinney.  I had to look it up. I don't know if he's 6'7"

Good King Wenceslas

 You can't get more authentic than a cold Czech cathedral. Everyone bundled up.

 

Completed Family Size Will Plummet

From Lyman Stone, who has taken the article out from behind the paywall Completed Family Size Will Soon Plummet to Unprecedented Depths . We are below replacement and going lower in the next decade or two. There is a theory that it's not fewer children, but delayed fertility ending up with the same number of children. That doesn't turn out to be true.

Stone has pointed out elsewhere that this decline tracks with the decline in marriage. Married people have almost the same number of children as they did decades ago, and unmarried women have the same amount each. It's just that there are a lot more unmarried women now. 

Coventry Carol

 

Down the Rabbit Hole

A very cold looking rabbit hole.  I was trying to remember the name of Telemark skiing. Tavistock, Tuckahoe, termagent... I was on the recliner with the dog on my lap so I couldn't get up.  Transiberian. Tullamore. Twilight of the Gods. I finally gave up and looked up "hybrid skiing," which did not help at all. "Norwegian skiing styles" finally brought it to earth.  The Grokipedia entry is good, but suffers from lack of illustration or photos. I found videos on YouTube - it's very pretty when done right, though it looks clumsy at first. I got to the part that said "For safety in avalanche-prone areas, telemark practitioners carry the "big three" essentials: an avalanche transceiver (beacon) that transmits a signal for location during burial, a collapsible probe to pinpoint depth, and a lightweight shovel for rapid excavation, enabling group rescues within critical minutes" and decided to read up on the part of Norway where it was invented, Rjukan, halfway between Oslo and Bergen. The tallest mountain in Norway, and it has an internal funicular in the mountain.

So now I'm into googlemaps wondering if this is close enough for my son to go from Tromso - not likely - and it occurs to me, as I'm sure it would all of you, whether it was easier to drive from Rjukan to Murmansk by going up Norway or going through Sweden and Finland. That's the beautiful thing about maps versus terrain. "Easier to drive to Murmansk" takes on an actual meaning.  It may be that no one has ever driven from Rjukan to Murmansk, and googlemaps just assembles the shorter segments. So now I am wondering why someone might drive from Rjukan to Murmansk, whether the easy way (29 hours) through Sweden and Finland, or the long way (37 hours) through Trondheim and Alta. A Russian ski bum, maybe. I imagine the Russian ski bum for a couple of minutes. Norway is about 1500 miles long, and about half of that it is less than 100 miles wide, including the many islands. For perspective, New Hampshire is about 100 miles wide at its widest point. So now I'm trying to look up exactly how long and how wide it is, and I remember Svalbard.

Does Svalbard count as part of Norway? Yes, but you have to cross 500 miles of ocean to get to it, and then it's another 300 miles long. They share it with the Russians. Were there fish there?  It was discovered before 1700 (actually well before, 1596) but why did they stay? It's less than 1,000 people and the primary employment is coal mining. Then tourism, then research. Tourism. Cruises are $8K, flights are $500 RT in summer.* I see the point of going someplace really far north, just to do it, but one you have landed and said "There! That ought to shut my cousin Richie up!" what do you see? Tripadvisor says there are private tours focusing on spectacular views or the coal mines. They run over $1000 per person. There is one tour that is only $10, so I had to check that out.  I mean, who is hunting for a bargain at that point? Longyearbyen’s Downtown GPS Self Guided Walking Tour. 60-90 minutes, currently only $9.75 No reviews yet. I recommend the photos at the link. Sums it all up nicely. 

All this took a little more than an hour.  Very satisfying. 

*Less that $225 RT in January.  Seems impossible. But I'm finished and am not going to research it further.

How Bad Are Things Really?

Another solid, numbers-and-logic based essay at ACX: Vibesession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. I have seen a few people trying to sort this out, and this is as good or better than any.

Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass.

Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.

Are the youth succumbing to a “negativity bias” where they see the past through “rose-colored glasses”? Are the economists looking at some ivory tower High Modernist metric that fails to capture real life? Or is there something more complicated going on? 

Alexander first assesses the vibes according to usual metrics of consumer confidence and optimism. Are people, especially young people that discouraged and pessimistic or is this just click-seekers on social media? Answer: It's overstated but real. Next he looks at economists assessment of how we are doing, over the last five months, five years, and five decades. The short answer: Things are unevenly better all the time, but a few key things are worse.

And in particular, housing costs were at historic lows 2010-2012 - mortgages, interest rates, rents - and have risen since then. So they aren't bad until the covid years, but if you are young, they sure look it. That could be your vibes right there. 

What looks like a throwaway line jumped off the page at me: Partly because the bill for ~50 years of NIMBYism has finally come due.  Maybe I am overreading that, but it rings true. Housing is expensive because we don't have enough of it. Contractors make more money on bigger houses on more acreage, so that's what they build.  Everyone knows we need to build more houses of less than 2500sf on 2 acres that cost half a million, but all the ways of getting there run into the roadblock of towns and neighborhoods not wanting that. 

I was going to guess that getting more people into affordable houses would solve both the wealth accumulation and the vibes, because once people are in a house they are more likely to give up their weekends and travel, stay married, and volunteer in the community. But that's the reasoning that got us into the housing bubble of 2008.  Maybe that would have not been as bad if we had regulated the mortgage market more tightly.  Rule of thumb: When a percentage of Republicans asks for tighter regulations while everyone else is opening the throttle, that counterintuitiveness is worth examining. 

Still, I have to think getting to the More Housing side of things would help. 

I draw your attention to the section "The Brooklyn Theory of Everything," for some additional surprising insights. 

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

I mentioned our home Advent liturgy, which we use as a table grace. We have a responsive reading from Isaiah, a short reading around the themes of each week - light, lamb, king, hope - light the candles, and close with this.

The lyrics are Charles Wesley, the tune is Stuttgart.
 

Tallis Canon

It is also a round.  But it doesn't have to be, does it?

 

Testing the Limits

 Evolution is as lazy as it can possibly be without you dying. That's what efficiency means.

Nature Nurture Debate

 The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate A simply great summary of the recent controversy on heritability over at ACX.  

…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one 

 The hereditarians declared victory (Cremieux on X, Emil Kirkegaard on Substack) 

But the nurturists declared victory (Sasha Gusev on Substack) 

I have leaned toward the former view for years, but want to get this right.  Cremieux and Emil Kirkegaard claim that their opponents are wrong because of initial bias and not wanting to look at the data. Sasha Gusev claims that his opponents are wrong because they are pig-headed fools and generally stupid.  Longtime readers know where I am going to put my trust on that one.

But still, I want to get it right, and Scott Alexander explains it to me in terms I can understand. I commented there. 

Somalis

I don't object to making group immigration decisions on the basis of the best group information we have available of who will be most likely to adapt to American ideals.  These are people we don't know all that well, even after vetting, and we are asking current citizens - often our poorest citizens - to absorb the risks while the wealthy are separated from the problem.

But once you are here you are judged as an individual, and Trump is simply wrong to judge the group. 

The opposite argument, that "most Somalis are not criminals" is a mild version of the identity politics that conservatives and libertarians are supposed to reject. That is true.  90% of everyone is not criminals, and on the front side we are allowed to differentiate between 90 and 99% Not Criminals. But once they are here that goes out the door.  We don't accept that they should have more lenient rules because they are marginalised people; we should not accept that they have stricter rules because their countrymen have done poorly. Whether there should be heightened scrutiny is a bit different, and I think those things can be hard to separate, but we should strive to. 

The Sudanese came to America in two waves.  I know something about this personally.  The second wave was South Sudanese and did not have high criminality.  Many have had trouble academically, but that's another subject. The first wave of (North) Sudanese had a great deal of trouble adapting to cultural norms, especially as regards women. It is fine with me that discerning who was who in this informs our future decisions on which Sudanese are admitted. 

But once they are here, they are here and stand or fall on their own. We can't have this both ways. 

Substack

Because I am signed up for it I could put up my own articles very easily. I would just write them here and then copy them into the other form.  In light of the previous post, I wonder if that might go wrong in unexpected ways and I because a different writer, likely worse. I used to cross-post at Chicago Boyz as well and still could, but fell out of the habit.

Well, I have other things to think about at present, and this doesn't seem interesting or important enough to me. 

The Business of Outrage

 Karen Read and the Business of Outrage at the True Crime Times.

Like the author, I was not surprised that the mere mention of her name increased clicks, but I was surprised at the extent of it.  I do believe in rationality and choice.  But sometimes we are just pigeons hitting the bar for another pellet of food.

 He’s building his brand, finding it difficult to get traction, and every post has a couple hundred views and maybe a handful of likes. Then he tweets something innocuous about Karen Read, and suddenly the views are in the thousands. He does it again, this time with something more provocative. And the views grow. And he begins to learn that the quality of the reactions—good or bad, pro or con, supportive or troll—doesn’t matter. A view is a view. A hate retweet gooses the stats just as much, and sometimes more, than a supportive one. In the ancient days of social media—circa the year of our Lord 2008—the “ratio” was a thing to be dreaded. Now, it’s all engagement, whether good or bad.

Thank you to bsking for the link 

Hard Launch

 Let's do a hard launch for Advent.  It caught me by surprise this year until my wife brought out the Advent wreath and the nightly liturgy we have been doing for over forty years. But we can catch up with a suicide clutch on the music for you.

 

Ancient Humans and Empathy

Bringing Emotional Cognition to Deep Time, by archaeologist John Hawks. A recent paper looks at evidence of giving care to family or tribe members, both infants and mothers, and those who have been injured. Because of our recent discussions of empathy, I might be tempted to switch to the word compassion, but looking at it as piece of the social interaction of a connected band is different than a political use of the term, and I think appropriate.  Not that empathy cannot enlarge and might be the mark of a great soul, but I believe it has to expand naturally according to situation, not in forced imitation.* 

Why do we care for the sick? I don’t know how many times I’ve read previous writers suggesting that ancient people were sneakily rational: Sure, they cared for aging individuals, but their real motive was that the cultural knowledge of older people had great value. But I think it is short-sighted to see Pleistocene healthcare as a quid pro quo. Empathy is a building block of social cognition in hominins. I doubt that it’s possible to build a system of social collaboration without that empathy sometimes manifesting as care. 

Notice the context here.  This is empathy for those we know and can actually see. It developed over hundreds of thousands of years and is part of an overall social communication that binds people together.  

 It is fascinating that some ancient people and other hominins ventured far into caves to make marks on their walls. But the important bit is not the marks—which are, after all, found fairly widely across the Pleistocene world. What’s actually fascinating is the shared journey. 

*The theosis of putting on the mask of a god in order to become like it, or the mind of Christ, or the whole armor of God is real. Making someone else put the mask on has a different history in paganism, of preparing them to be a sacrifice. For those who have read Lewis's Till We Have Faces the painting and sacrifice of Psyche might come to mind. We are not bound by what pagans have done with their symbvols and enactments, for we see them as precursors.  But it pays to have a look at what the meaning was to those who believed in them.

Gluggaveður - Window Weather

 Window-weather a word that exists solely in Icelandic.  The pieces of it exist in other Scandinavian languages, glugga meaning "window," related to all those other Germanic gl- words glimpse, gleam, glass; and veður meaning "weather." 

It is weather best appreciated through a window, sunny but with cold and dangerous winds. A wonderful little essay by Bryndís Víglundsdóttir at the link.

Wexford Carol

The choir sang this Sunday.

Listen slowly. 

 

Tuesday Links

 Chesterton 's Fence 

Jesse Tree  One of the now-grown children of our weekly Bible study - Sponge-Headed Scienceman's daughter, in fact - wrote this up for her church community, what it was like living in such an informal cousinage growing up

Sumptuous Meals during austerity. Lewis later uses this as an analogy for sexual morality in Mere Christianity. In fact, it wasn't really later.  Mere Christianity was based on a radio series "Broadcast Talks" for the BBC during WWII, from 1941-44. 

What Changed in the Sexual Revolution?  Bsking identifies the two usual factors, abortion and birth control, but notes two more that had huge impact as well.  She mentioned it a few years ago to me and I have been waiting for this one.

The Therapy Elite Won't Like This "If nurses, hospital staff, and doulas with a handful of hours of structured training can perform as well as clinicians with graduate degrees, supervised practica, and years in the trenches, then the barrier to entry for providing effective therapy is clearly lower than we pretend." The non-clinicians were taught the basics and then put in a supervised internship for a particular type of short-term therapy. Internship matters in a lot of fields, including this one.