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.
Sunday, December 14, 2025
Saturday, December 13, 2025
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.
Friday, December 12, 2025
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.
Thursday, December 11, 2025
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.
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.
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.”
Wednesday, December 10, 2025
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, December 09, 2025
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
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?
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.
Monday, December 08, 2025
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.
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.
Sunday, December 07, 2025
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.
Saturday, December 06, 2025
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"
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.
Friday, December 05, 2025
Thursday, December 04, 2025
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.Wednesday, December 03, 2025
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.
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
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 BryndÃs VÃglundsdóttir at the link.
Tuesday Links
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.
Monday, December 01, 2025
Academic Petitions and Open Letters
Noah Carl at Aporia has just put up a research article Academic Petitions and Open Letters. It is fairly brief, and I am appreciative that he is making an attempt to put them all in one place and look at what they have in common. I have seen a few over the years, and have had people throw them at me about someone I have quoted as if they proved something.
In 1931, a large group of German scholars published a book titled A Hundred Authors Against Einstein, criticising the theory of relativity.¹ This was an early example of academics getting together and leveraging sheer numbers to try to discredit a colleague’s work.² Einstein, for his part, was unfazed. Commenting on the book, he’s reported to have said, “Were I wrong, one professor would have been quite enough.”
Precisely. I am seldom well-versed in any of the topics covered - I am at best a talented amateur - but even I can notice on sight that "This has been disproven many times so the author must have terrible character" is not an intellectual argument unless the disproofs are identified. It is a social argument, "We are the experts and we can exclude you just by saying so." Such statements undermine the concept of expertise even more than everyone being simply wrong. It is mere hand-waving to claim that "all the best people simply know" that something or other is true. The things that "everyone knows" are in fact a good source for identifying those things which need immediate examination. They are beliefs everyone wishes were true and doesn't want to discuss. They want only to dismiss you with a killer exit line and have done with you.
At one level I sympathise with them. Having been in mental health for decades, I am familiar with the usual myths people believe, and it is wearying to constantly re-explain to Townswoman #5 why her belief does not hold up. People assure me in the narthex some claim about the field I made my living in. It is usually from some self-help book that was fashionable a few decades ago. Yet it is still unfair to dismiss the argument with the essentially social assertion that anyone who knows anything rejects the idea. You have to give people something more. What I usually do is present some real research or discovery as if it is a refinement or recent improvement on that very idea, even if in reality it goes in another direction.
There is a second level of this, a set of arguments that the hidebound have become fond of putting up when challenged that look at first to be an improvement but are not. I encounter them about the supposed egalitarianism and nonviolence of early man, or the association of language and thought, or anything that mentions standarised testing.
I have gone on too long and am keeping you from Carl's article which is much better than this.
All My Lovin'
James's comment about Clyde Crashcup caused me to "research" whether there was any connection between Jay Ward and Ross Bagdasarian. They used overlapping voice actors and they were very much the same era - I didn't find anything else.
But this was fun. Clyde is from the same shop as Alvin and The Chipmunks. There are lots more "Chipmunks Sing The Beatles" if you like the genre.
2013 Links
No links, but I had a small batch of posts about the countries that liberals want us to emulate all being very white and now having trouble with immigration. Japan is something of an exception, but I still see as many posts "Japan is just weird" as I do "Japan does stuff way better than us." I would add now that most of these magical countries are not as socialist as advertised, having trade-offs for the stuff they provide. You will get free college in a lot of European countries, but only a small (by our standards) percentage qualify. Much health care is paid for but there are bottlenecks, and the diagnosis and prescription are worse. They aren't terrible people or incompetent, it's just an irony.
Glo::al Stop Since then I have learned that this is increasing, and yes, it is young women who are most often the leaders in language change.
One reason people believe the economy is static is because their part of it is. 1%, Quintiles, GDP
1950's Creed. That optometrist has retired. I don't think his son, his successor, kept it up. The ground shifts beneath us and we do not notice.
Celibacy The internal link no longer works, but it's not necessary to the overall.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Sunday Links
If you like paintings of the sea, there is William Trost Richards.
Beyond the Binary is a Sea of Nonsense Philosophy Professor from MIT goes after this year's two big books on gender.
We are in "crisis" because we now educate everyone
Continental Philosophers Bentham's Bulldog signals his displeasure. I gave up shortly after "writing considered as mediation of mediation..."
This week at the Free Press - Just the first couple of paragraphs of each, as usual, but intriguing.
Nine fascinating findings from personality science. Only three here, but they are fascinating. We've been saying this for years here, which shows how smart we are.
Saturday, November 29, 2025
London vs. Everywhere else
Ed West: Visitor From a Dying Empire. I have been hearing for at least a decade that in discussing Britain, the division is not England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland, but between London and Everything Else, with the everything else being divided into the four "countries," further subdivided into North, Midlands, and South England, Cornwall, East and West Scotland on down. I posted the 15 Real Nations of Great Britain twenty years ago, and while much of it remains valid, London is now only half-right. Or so I hear. In keeping with my recent links to "I thought I knew about (South Africa, Japan) but I didn't," this is fascinating. West's substack is The Wrong Side of History
In response to a question about the history of the housing problem.
The 1977 Homeless Persons Act. It was partly a reaction to a TV show. So British elites, they watch a TV show which is fiction, and they think that's terrible, we have to change all our laws because of this TV show, okay? And they change the system.
On Immigration
If you look at all the data on immigration most immigrant groups are a drain on society, even when you take away, like, the social issues, whatever. Especially true of Middle Eastern groups ...Denmark is the noticing country. The Danes are kind of unusual in thst they make all this data, which is basically illegal elsewhere. The Swedes have just said, you can't ever make this, and the Germans also...the Danes just do it. They get crime, the surnames, they do ethnic background. They do it. And they're not just foreign born, but where your parents are from and they get all the data, and it's exactly as you imagine. You know, it's like, I think, like the Algerians have, compared to Japanese, are like 5000 times more likely to commit crime...So yeah, the Palestinians, the Danes let them in. A few of them. There's that famous quote, Elon's mentioned it, and, like, a large portion them ended up - and Britain's trying to let in loads of Palestinians right now. I mean, it's kind of funny watching it, because it's like politicians saying, "Oh, this, this is really nice." We're gonna need, and, like no kind of concept of the second order effects that this is gonna lead to chain migration. And, you know, Palestine has had a massive brain drain, like the middle class.
More things we are not supposed to know.
Requiescat in Pace, Tom Stoppard
I consider him the greatest playwright of the last hundred years, likely more if I think about it. You will read much reminiscence about him in the next few weeks and I'll not add mine, except that we read "After Magritte" aloud when the boys were young. My father had played Inspector Foote in community theater. What I will give you is the best piece about his use of philosophy, physics, and especially mathematics in both comedy and drama. Order Versus Randomness: What Math Can Teach Us About the Stage. Chaos Theory, The Seven Bridges of Konigsburg, prime numbers, recursiveness, sensitive dependence - lovely stuff.
As I don't see movies, I don't know much except that he rescued several under pseudonyms.
State Birds
New Hampshire's Purple Finch
Decorations
It's nice that people have their traditional Christmas Skeletons up so soon after Thanksgiving.
Post 11,000 - Just the Facts, Ma'am
In the arguments about whether young people have it easier or harder than Boomers financially, people rely on stories, either personal/family anecdotes, or statisticky claims.
In the 1950s you could support a family on a blue collar income, buy a house and a car and send the kids to college.
People went on zero or one trip to Europe in a lifetime, and going anywhere else (unless you lived near Canada or Mexico) was unheard of.
Here are the boring statistics you can play with yourself
This is how much people made at every level of society 1967-2022. It does not define poverty, middle class, or rich.
This is the amount of inflation every year from 1967-2025 It includes purchasing power by sector. Medical is more expensive, apparel is cheaper.
I don't recommend you try and decipher how the Congressional Budget Office figures out poverty, but it helps to know that the number is different before the county or the feds gave you any money or after. Were you poor before we helped you? How about after?
They do not include the qualifiers, such as having only one car and no dryer, square footage of houses, availability of varieties of food, women in the workplace, what taxes were, and whether kids these days even know how to shoe a horse. Those things are helpful in terms of understanding what lives were like then versus now, but I don't cover those here.
Friday, November 28, 2025
Friday Links
High-status boys bully low-status boys; low-status boys bully high-status girls. An interesting example of this from observing games of HALO. Also of interest: none of the females spoke during any of the games.
Support for violence to prevent "harmful" speech Witness the change over the age groups. The lowest support comes from the oldest and next-oldest liberals. The highest support comes from the youngest and next-youngest liberals, and even the younger moderates are higher than the others. Whether the generations are different or people change as they age is not measured.
Gypsies and Jews by Cremieux. The effects of stereotypes long term. In terms of gypsies passing as other ethnicities in Europe, my Romanian sons had a brother and sister that they were separated from and did not come to America. They reestablished contact after they got here. They tried to help the sister who did not work and had a boyfriend, then husband who was not honest. Not only did they not pick up that he was Roma, she did not pick it up until they had been married a few years and she went to a village wedding of his family.
Also Cremieux The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians. I had never heard even rumors of this.
Canada's top First Nations writer, Thomas King, reveals he isn't Cherokee after all.
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
Wednesday Links
I hate to admit it, but Virginia probably did have the first Thanksgiving. It would be hard for the Pilgrims to have held one before they even got there. Berkeley Plantation
A Swedish study shows that winning a lottery does not reduce crime in either the winners or their children. This rather undermines economic explanations for crime. Sumus quod sumus "We are what we are."
I asked ChatGPT many questions about this blog. It made some mistakes of emphasis but was pretty good. It offered to make me a timeline of the major themes. Not bad.
Capitalism Isn't Responsible for Society's Flaws; You Are. At an interesting libertarian substack The Black Sheep. The capitalist is controlled by the consumer.
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Seeing With Fresh Eyes
I am in a book group that will tomorrow start The Everlasting Man by GK Chesterton. GKC is known for paradox, but paradox is only a tool of his to see things afresh. We do not see the amazing things that surround us, but Chesterton shows them to us. I was worried that because the book begins with seeing man with new eyes, especially early man, that the updating of science would render the examples uncomfortable in their wrongness. There is some of that in the book, but I was pleased to find right at the beginning an example that is even more true now that we know more about our ancestors and the domestication of the horse on the Steppe. It was a lucky chance (if chance you call it), for the horse was good food who fed himself even in winter, but was impossible to ride. One of the very few barely tractable ones - perhaps even the only one in a century - was seen by a reckless herder who had a wild idea. Chesterton's paragraph about it was a bit prescient.
Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.
Rage Farms
The claim is out there that of the foreign sites stirring up anger in America, both tactically and to make money for themselves, were more likely to be conservative than liberal. That could be. There are plenty of easily fooled conservatives out there. I don't know that to be true. The claim was in the NYTimes, Newsweek, and Richard Hanania that I saw. I haven't looked at the numbers myself. I suppose I would have had a mild preference that it was lots of liberals who were taken in, har har. But if it makes gullible conservatives more cautious, I'm all for that. It guess it must be easy, and there is some discussion about imitating tone versus relying on images, which I suppose I could get interested in if I were reading someone I trusted.
But it's exposing frauds. I'm all for that. It's a win. Bring it on.
I have seen many reports that pro-Palestine sites are much more likely to come from outside Palestine than pro-Israel ones come from outside Israel, which come primarily from Israel and America. I don't find that surprising, as internationally, the topic is largely about political tribes, with the conflict itself used for examples of fairness/unfairness rather than tracking the results.
Monday, November 24, 2025
Don't Ask "Why Is There Still Poverty?"
Don't ask 'Why is there still poverty?' but why any place got developed at all by Tibor Rutar, University of Maribor (Slovenia)
There is strong evidence that democracies above a certain income threshold – roughly $6,055 of GDP per capita in constant 1985 purchasing power terms – rarely break down, with only a few exceptions. Adam Przeworski et al. first established this pattern in a dataset spanning 1950-1990. Above, the figure shows the pattern still mostly holds from 1990 onward.
2013 Links
Statistics - Presidential Grades
Seasons of Friends Includes a link in the comments to a Sarah Hoyt essay about exchange students, which I have recalled many times
The Froude Society In contrast, this idea never caught on with me. I had completely forgotten about it. Still interesting, though
QOTD Proof
When meaning well replaces Research in the church. Not even informal research of "we compared a dozen small groups over a three year period," but just "I talked to other people who think like me and they think so too."
Sunday, November 23, 2025
Pervasive Unrest
I had started a post on pervasive unrest, that when discord occurs in a society around one issue it tends to bleed over into others when Cranberry popped in with the news that foreign "rage farmers" were posting a lot of the highly charged political information on X. Presumably similar things are happening on at least some of the other conflict sites: bluesky, instagram, Facebook, snapchat, TikTok, substack, and whatever else is out there. Likely all of them.
I wondered what effect this would have on my thinking about the subject and decided it reinforced some of what I wanted to say, but in quite a different way than expected. So I am just going to put down my bullet notes for now to give you ideas to play around with.
*****
There is a concept of evaporation of groups, analogous to what happens to a liquid as it evaporates. The elements that do not evaporate off become more concentrated. Think of salt water left outdoors in a basin for a few days. When you come back there will be less water, and it will be saltier. The social analogy is that as fads and fashions "simmer down" (hehe) the less engaged wander off, pay less attention, and bring less energy, leaving a concentration of core believers behind. I don't know how well this has been demonstrated, but the idea at least makes some sense. I had a related post about the SPLC and Hate Groups in 2013.
The people who went online and finally found communities of people who like to collect old license plates or are interested in the War of 1812 mostly found each other 20 years ago. It's one of the benefits of social media, but it's not likely to expand much now.
If concentrated groups encounter each other, whether IRL or online, they are more likely to spark conflict, even if they are surrounded by "mostly peaceful" protests. So the impression that people have that bluesky and Twitter have become crazier may be spot on. Facebook is for Boomers, community groups, and young parents now, and the residual is a few people with very confrontative politics. Hell's Grannies come to life. I've about had it with a lot of my wife's old sorority sisters and elementary school staff.
Jesse Singal is a major target for hatred on Bluesky. Who knew?
*******
Maybe we are less angry than we thought. If the angriest people we know ratchet down a bit we might all do better.
Retraction
I linked to a link from Rob Henderson about women recommending more attractive women cut off more hair, which he interpreted as intrasexual competition, sweet sabotage. Bethany picked that up and ran with it and though she found some positive things about the study and its followup, she found that the study mostly did not support the competition idea very well, and actually pointed in the opposite direction in some ways. There was a telltale sign that the authors were prepared to regard any data as supportive of their hypothesis somehow.
That should remind me not to rely entirely on reading only the abstract when I relink a study. I hope you didn't repeat the claim to a lot of people on my say-so. If you did, please blame me. Reading only the abstract is common for me, and it has its dangers.
Ancestors
Ancestor worship is one of the earliest and most common forms of religion. I wonder if the robots will worship microwaves.
Sunday Links
Colin Wright of Reality's Last Stand on the lack of evidence for gender transitioning medicine. Pray that whatever diseases and conditions you get have no political implications. Doctors do well with those. But part of succeeding at school is knowing what answers get you good grades. Medical school selects for many things, but one of them is discerning the fashionableness of an idea, because you need to adjust to that to get through to the next level.
James, can you explain this to us? Or any other scientists I've got aboard here. Is this some superadvanced analogy to casting out nines, where you can get enormous amounts of information out of the way?
Cats Greet Men More Than Women Not at my sons' houses, they don't.
Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond by Jane Psmith. Three books, two of which we have discussed here. I like any arguments against Jared Diamond
Epiphaneia at Cosmos and Taxis In Defense of Free Markets I had not heard of the site before this evening. I clicked on it because of the recommendation "Best defence of free markets I have ever read. I have read Friedman, Hayek, Rothbard and Mises—but this is the best by far." It was worth it.
I also want to mention computational market simulations as a source of evidence that market can self organize to achieve favorable outcomes without needing perfect competition. Gode et al. 2013 find that even when artificial traders use random, "zero-intelligence" bids, they can achieve near perfect market efficiency as long as a budget constraint (i.e., not permitting traders to sell below their costs or buy above their values) is enforced. This indicates that the market structure itself can produce efficient outcomes, supporting the idea that the "invisible hand" can work not only when individual traders are irrational, but also when the traders have zero intelligence. All it takes is a budget constraint.
Saturday, November 22, 2025
David Wyman
As substack has gradually acquired more slop, there has been an informal move for some readers to trust only those using their real names. I think there are places where people should be allowed to be anonymous, and have found the handles people have taken for themselves informative and humorous about them, and human nature in general. Yet I don't mind different platforms having different rules, and prefer social influencing to mandates. I see their point. A lot of the newer sites coming on board are just copying AI information and trying to get people to follow their links so that they can get advertising money. So I will remain Assistant Village Idiot in most places, but am signing as David Wyman on substack comments. David Foster's substack is already well-prepared.
The Issue is Not the Issue
People say "follow the money" but that is only a specific case of a more general perspective. People want lots of things other than money: status, mates, predictability, jobs, safety. Looking at our behavior in terms of getting those things can explain a lot.
Wokeness arose largely because powerful people were in the way of others. They needed to be gotten rid of so that jobs and status would open up. Because they were mostly older, mostly male, and mostly white it paid to put those categories under immediate suspicion at every starting point and watch what they said like a hawk. Cancelations were more intense in academia, media, and entertainment - exactly those places where young left-leaning people were trying to get in. So it didn't matter if they were actually sexist, or homophobic or whatever. Some were and some weren't but that wasn't primary. What had to happen was a blanket reduction of people in the way, and let God sort them out. This is why there was only some protection for being female or black or gay yourself.
Connections to the word "patriarchy" may come to mind, here.
Even though Jews were longtime supporters and powers in the Democratic Party and the left in general, they were also often in positions of power. Obama's speechwriters and political operatives were predominantly Jewish. That was much less true under Biden. Media, academia, entertainment had powerful older Jews gumming up the works for people who wanted those slots.
If you look at the insane and contradictory support for the Palestinians on the left from this perspective it starts to make more sense. There's no rationality to it. The Palestinians treat women very badly, as does much of the Islamic world. Gays can be executed, and are certainly not allowed into positions of power, nor are Blacks or East Asians. (Indonesia is a huge Muslim presence that has almost no influence in the Middle East. Too far away and the wrong color.) There is no natural alliance with the Western left.
But those Jews have to be gotten rid of somehow, so the alligator eventually came for them too. Being good liberals who had written many books or contributed large sums no longer mattered. The kids want those jobs in those industries.
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