Teach This In Highschool

 ...and no one will forget it.  It's a good start.

 

Counteraccusations

I do not have all the facts and I am no expert. But I am wondering what we expect the people at the National Weather Service to do.  The first complaints I saw were that Trump's cuts had impaired their ability to respond. Then it quickly came out that no, they had extra people, and working extra hours. Their warnings were questioned.  No, they had major warnings twelve hours before and three hours before. Now the complaint is that they cry wolf so many times that people ignore them. So we want them to know a few days before that this is going to be the one where the river rises with unbelievable speed, and don't tell us about the others.

People in Florida ignore evacuation orders, or defy them, and even tell others "Oh, they always say that. I'm sick of evacuations. Did you know that sometimes people put themselves in more danger..." Up here, people make trips during blizzard warnings.  I've done it myself. Heck, I'm resourceful (not really). I can size things up in the moment pretty well. (Maybe average.) Tornadoes. High seas. So some people are always going to resist acting.  Others are going to panic and evacuate too easily.  Some are going to get sick of the warnings, some are going to insist they were never properly warned. Different people respond to different warning signals.  What is the warning schedule when the range of results is wide and people hear the same message differently?

What on earth do we expect them to do? 

ChatGPT Psychosis - Part I

 A friend sent the following tweet from NIK on X, wondering what my take was on the whole topic. I started small. 

NIK

@ns123abc

CHATGPT IS A SYCOPHANT CAUSING USERS TO SPIRAL INTO PSYCHOSIS  

"ChatGPT psychosis" 

> users are spiralling into sever mental health crises 

> paranoia delusions and psychosis 

> ChatGPT has led to loss of jobs and become homeless 

>and caused the breakup of marriages and families

> "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."

NIK's X account is mostly about what can go wrong with AI - how the CEO's are power-hungry jerks who haven't thought things through, how their decisions are going awry, how the whole enterprise is more dangerous than we suspect. As you can imagine, there's plenty of material out there for him to draw from. So I went looking for where NIK gets his news, and that led me to fields I used to wander in years ago but had mostly forgotten. 

The short version is that AI may turn out to have terrible effects on us, individually, as societies, and even as a species. It may be the downfall of us all. But it's not going to have this particular effect. 

Crow

 

Keffiyeh Fashion

 Why the Keffiyah is a Timeless Accessory from Al-Aniq.  Okay, everyone's gotta make a living, right?  I shouldn't be so critical.

The keffiyeh/shemagh is a must-have for your wardrobe, as it can be effortlessly styled with everything. It will always stay in fashion and is easy to maintain. It will elevate your outfit and make you stand out in style.

BC/AD; BCE/CE

I got into an argument that Jews and Jewish scholars, however much they may have resented the preference in Western society for BC/AD, it was now more an issue mostly for secular academics who did not want as strong a religious foundation for our dating system. The issue is now that it is religious, not that its use is perceived as antisemitic. I based this on both online and live discussions, with both everyday and academic Jews, who tended to shrug off BC/AD. They do not regard it as antisemitic.  They likely would if someone were to make a big deal about it, such as if Donald Trump were to declare that all government documents, no matter the context, were required to be in the old form. That would arouse suspicions.  I am guessing about that, but I think it likely.

My disputant stated that BC/AD was considered antisemitic among Jewish academics.  The argument went to related places but we did not go much longer on that in specific. I felt he was not understanding a distinction I was making, but no matter.  That bears on this discussion only slightly.  He is an academic and knows more Jewish academics than I do, and it would come up in his specialty.  I know psychology researchers, med school researchers, and online I have heard academics in genetics, history, literature and other liberal arts. His numbers would be greater.  

Yet it occurs to me that even outside of the cross-understanding, I may have been wrong in my original premise.  What do you know from your own experience.  Granted that it may have been Jewish scholars who originally pushed for the change and both secular and practicing Christians who led the acceptance, what is the situation in 2025?  Is there any energy in popular intellectual or academic discussion on the topic now? 

 

I kept thinking of the ban on Brown Bag Lunches because they were supposedly offensive to black people because of the exclusive clubs where you had to be lighter than a brown bag to get in decades ago.  No black people actually made that association, it was white people showing off. I may be imposing that fraud on this unfairly. 

Armenian Script

Before I research it myself, I wanted to put this out there in case any of you already knew the answers. We were at the cemetery today and because we entered by a different gate, took different routes to get to our 6 sites (13 relatives) to plant flowers. This brought us by headstones we had never seen before.  A large mill-city cemetery is interesting as it exposes you to previous names and burial customs from groups you know little about. 

We saw this and neither of us recognised the script.  At first glance I suspect it is not how it would have been written on paper, but based on letters made more angular for ease of carving. It is not Greek but I wonder if it is related. Latin seems farther away. I know that Cyrillic is related to Greek letters, but this looks farther away.  I know there is a Coptic alphabet, but I can't recall ever seeing it, and this Armenian alphabet does not look Arabic to me. I guess that fits the geography and the trading routes pretty well. 

Take your guesses, and if you actually know something, so much the better.

Best rabbit hole so far: The Zok language. The Caucasus has an unusual concentration of languages, largely because it is mountainous and here are so many adjoining valleys that have little contact across the ridges.  They go downstream to larger communities to trade, and have contact there, but are just as likely to trade with someone from the city, or any of the other valleys that flow into it. Though descended from related languages, they are isolated from each other and do not influence each other much, becoming unintelligible to each other over time. 

The above may be in the Armeno-Turkish script, daughter to Armenian.  The last three letters could be "-yan" and -ian is a common ending for Armenian surnames, so that fits. The letters before that might be the -dz- sound, which would fit with the cymbal makers Zil-djian, who were Armenian. Work in progress.

Update:  Nothing much to add.  I learned a lot about Armenian scripts and headstones, but nothing further about the two together.  Before WWII, most Armenians coming to America came to the northeastern cities, especially NYC, Philadelphia, and around Boston. In Massachusetts they spread to other mill towns.  After WWII Los Angeles became the destination of choice. 

When I go back I will have to find it again and look at the other side rather than just stopping by the road.  There may be other Armenian stones nearby that give a clue.  I have seen occasional Armenian names growing upo here, but never the old script.

Graph Paper Diaries

Bsking's blog has been inactive for three years, in which time I have taken it off my sidebar. She has a new post up comparing wait times and health outcomes under the medical systems of English-speaking countries.  Some NHS thoughts on the 4th of July. She has a great deal more information on the subject and I hope she will continue along these lines. If so, back on the sidebar she goes.

I am also hoping she will weigh in on the Karen Read case - she sent me the link I just posted, and one of her commenters has already asked for a COVID stats retrospective now that the dust has settled. We'll see if she nibbles at either one.

Varied Links Again

 Would you be nervous if your son were dating a girl who reads so much of this?

Karen Read Did It.  "What I want to do in this last post is explain, comprehensively and for posterity, why Karen Read is one of those lucky 10 guilty people who gets to go free." It is long and very thorough.  The interesting question is why so many originally uninvolved middle-aged women supported her vehemently, frequently mentioning how pretty she is.

The Hit Job  The NYT covers Skrmetti and gender transitioning clinics for children.

Orwell on Gandhi  I must have seen parts of this, as a few sentences seemed familiar.  But I am quite certain I had not seen the whole thing.

 

"Prioritising Moral Posturing"

From Aporia, by Bert Parlee and Keith Thompson  Communal Narcissism. 

A great deal of this resonated for me from what I saw working in Human Services since 1976. There is a brash, obvious narcissism which grates on nearly everyone, but there is an equal and opposite narcissism that is certain it is not narcissistic at all, because its self aggrandisement is more subtle.  In some individuals it is not at all apparent because it is suave, it does not need to raise its voice, its rudeness is condescension and disdain. 

Of course, the pathological aspects of the new condition announce themselves in markedly different words and gestures. It had previously been assumed that these characteristics were healthy—unlike the well-known characteristics of overt narcissism so readily apparent in people like Trump. Remarkably, the experts nearly missed telltale signs of what they would go on to characterize as communal narcissism (“communal” indicating that individuals seek validation and admiration through their perceived contributions to social groups or communities, rather than through personal achievements). To our surprise, and that of the researchers themselves, communal narcissism turns out to be the equal and opposite variant of the self-centered overt type in which individuals boast about being “the best”. 

Many of the cultural figures, including politicians, who are regarded as humble, tolerant, and welcoming grate on me worse than Trump. Donald is the kid you wanted to smack in hall in high school, boisterously challenging and insulting others.  These others are the ones who cut you effectively in front of your prom date while smiling, because they were hoping to get into her pants. 

Life Isn't Fair

 From tonight's pub night.

 

Empathy Continued

The comments under the previous entries have been good, but I want to bring the topic out into the light, beyond just a few of us advocating our positions, so I when a new piece occurred to me, I elected to make it a new post.

 Most cultures have beast fables, such as Anansi in West Africa and the Caribbean, Chanticleer in medieval France, Panchantantra  in Sanskrit, Aesop in Greece. But the design of these stories is not to tell us what animals feel like, but to use animal characteristics to teach us something about humans. Even in the time of Lewis Carrol the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat are disguised humans.  

Yet in the present day the animals in stories are in movies, and we are increasingly imposing human characteristics back onto them, so that we believe we understand what their lives are like, and are encouraged to sympathise with them via empathy. Fish don't really have family lives and go on adventures, but they have been expanded from one-dimensional lesson examples to beloved friends. Many animals are still just animals in Snow White.  All animals in modern Disney films are fully conversational and emotive, even literate. 

We think we know what their lives are like, but it is all projection. I suggest that this relates to Grim's worry about empathy leading us astray in dealing with humans.  We think we know because we have feelings about the lives of others, based on identification rather than sympathy. 

I should mention, not for the first time, that much of this underlies environmentalism, as opposed to conservation. 

The (Not Very) Good Old Days of Education

From 2012 - I had had strong opinions about education before this, but doing the remembering, research, and more than anything thinking bout the topic then crystalised my approach.  I have added much to this over the years, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, but this remains the foundation.

Part I - (Regarding the CCC in the 1930s. Italics mine.) Approximately 55% of enrollees were from rural communities, a majority of which were non-farm; 45% came from urban. Level of education for the enrollee averaged 3% illiterate, 38% less than eight years of school, 48% did not complete high school, 11% were high school graduates. At the time of entry, 70% of enrollees were malnourished and poorly clothed. Few had work experience beyond occasional odd jobs. 9 comments

Part II - No, we had hours of penmanship drills – not very useful even then.  We copied things a lot, and not always as punishment. A “beautiful hand” was much admired, and usually harder to read than the ugly writing, as anyone who has tried to read archival records can attest.  And we learned recitations – often the same one for everyone, and had to get up in front of the class and say it, one after another.  That’s useful.  And maps to color after labeling, and children in ethnic costumes to color, and lots of natural science to color.  Shop Class and Home Ec.  We scrubbed our desks.  We lined up and waited a lot, and sometimes marched to music.  We diagrammed sentences – kinda fun, sometimes, but not as helpful in composition as one might think.  We learned grammar, much of which turned out to be wrong, and most of which was not focused on improving our writing, but in shaming us out of using slang.  Spelling drills. Somewhat useful – not huge. 4 comments

Part III - My younger brother had a special program in elementary school - they put his desk in the hall.  In the tracked classes he was put in the bottom track of 17.  He wasn't badly ADD, but it was compounded by being only three weeks short of the age cutoff for his class, and his poor fine-motor skills.  He went on to teach college, after a long and winding road. 4 comments 

Cursed Film

Story at The Hard Times: Everyone who worked on the film "Nosferatu" has died.

 

Varied Links

 Spider Robots for Surgical Interventions.

Empire State of Mind. 

America's Incarceration Rate is About To Fall of a Cliff.  Very interesting numbers, but I wonder about dynamic effects.

"Dog" is a weird word.  It appears out of nowhere about 1200. I am going to go lose some time on this website.

Cremieux knows how to revive America's dying malls. 

CS Lewis on Prayer

 

Subtle Slanting

The Free Press writers split fairly evenly 3 ways in the last election, Harris - Trump - 3rdparty/none, according to Bari Weiss. That's encouraging, as it reduces (though does not eliminate) the chance of reading someone on your side or another who is not completely starkers. It always has a few articles about everyone simmering down and trying to be gracious. I am not a subscriber, and you will only see the first few paragraphs, as usual. You Don't Need the Same Politics to Surf Together. The author is trying to be fair, low-key, even affectionate about his brother-in law. Yet look at the choices made and not made in the descriptions. His brother-in-law is described as vaccine skeptical, but he does not describe himself as vaccine obedient.  Perhaps that would be too strong, but it is there. Not even "vaccine advocating." It just sits there that he believes the default, his brother-in-law is the one who is a bit unusual.  He describes the other as Joe Rogan-listening, but does not put forth any similarly controversial or stereotypical figure who he listens to that might allow others to slot him negatively.  He mentions that his brother-in-law is an electrician, fine. He "mentions" that he wrote for the Obama White House (at 24!) and went to Yale.  Not college, mind you, not a political speechwriter, but at the White House.

So are we all, I suppose, and I likely notice it more coming from one direction than another. Yet I think such things are more persuasive in the long run because they slide behind our intellectual awareness to our social sense of who are the best people, the right people, the ones we want to be part of. When I was a child, "batteries not included" was a joke illustrating that we were smart enough to have seen through the advertiser's pitch on TV.  Direct propaganda we defend against more easily. When it is under the radar we are tricked into thinking that we have figured all this out ourselves, that no one has put one over on us.  We are independent thinkers, after all. 

Cosmic Justice

The issue is not whether you think Harvard (or Columbia, Cornell, etc) or Trump is a greater force for good in the grand scheme of things, the issue is whether Harvard broke the law, and if so, how badly and how consciously; and whether Trump is breaking the law in what he is doing to them. The verb tenses are important because one is a determination about a series of set facts that have occurred.  Trump is mercurial and might modify his actions against Harvard a few times before he is done.

I don't write this to call other people stupid.  I have been guilty of focusing on the cosmic justice rather than the actual legal issue a few times in my life.  It's hard to give up the grand cause. 

America Party

Well, if Democrats were worried how they were going to get back in power, Musk forming a new party likely has them relieved. They wouldn't even have to pivot to the center or learn how to talk to young men.

Climate Emotions

Via Instapundit and Just the News*, a study in The Lancet about how worried young people are about climate. This came up in relation to a discussion of Greta Thunberg and her mental health issues. She had a sense of foreboding before she became involved in climate affairs.  She and her parents discovered that her symptoms were reduced when she was allowed to dramatically tell others what to do about climate. As she adopts other limelight causes this becomes more apparent.  If it were not climate, it would be something else.

Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events 

I suggest that The Lancet has the arrow of causality reversed.  As with paranoia and depression, anxiety usually precedes its eventual focus.  Feelings of anxiety in response to events is more properly thought of as nervousness. You can see that the once-respected British medical publication has begged the question right at the outset in the abstract.

 Climate change has adverse effects on youth mental health and wellbeing, but limited large-scale data exist globally or in the USA. Understanding the patterns and consequences of climate-related distress among US youth can inform necessary responses at the individual, community, and policy level.

The possibility that they were going to be nervous anyway apparently did not occur to the authors.  It might be an interesting question to ask why young people settled on climate as the thing to be unsettled about. That question would lead us to examining what young people had "emotions" about before. Whether adolescents are more anxious now than they were in 1825 we do not know.  We develop a sense of that from correspondence, diaries, and the arts, but we do not know. My belief is that young people are about equally anxious in all eras.  They quite naturally become more nervous in the face of war, famine, disease, or being orphaned. We are evolutionarily wired for a certain level of anxiety, likely modified by the environment activating programs we already have on disk.

 *As predicted by one of my rules of naming, a site called "Just the News" is going to in fact be highly slanted. I am wary of the word "truth" in a title, or many uses of the word "just" as in We were just trying to educate the public about their right to photograph the police. We were just hanging out near the girls' locker room. The site is indeed slanted rightward. 

Julian Bream - Renaissance Lute

 

Schizophrenia and Gut Biomes

If you had run across this theory and wondered if there were something to it, Scott Alexander explains why he thinks it doesn't hold up. Contra Skolnick on Schizophrenia Microbes.  The usual style at ACX.  Point 1, Point 1A, possible objection considered and answered, Point 2 brief point with promise of later discussion, Point 3 referring to previous post...

Sterphen Skolnick answers in the comments.  Not very effectively, to my eyes, but I admit I was already unsympathetic at that point. 

Track Records

 Karsten Warholm WR 300mH

Nico Young US 5K  

Watch this kid with the memorable name. 17 y/o Gout Gout with the Australian 200m record.  Goes under 20 wind-aided with a tentative start.

Jakob Ingebrigtsen World indoor mile. 

 

Empathy Again

The overall sentiment is true, and important.  "Sparing the wolf is shallow, not deep empathy." But as we have covered here, and Grim covered in some detail, empathy is not the word Musk is looking for. The simple word "kindness" would have been better, and in line with the advice to use a simple word rather than a complicated one. That someone as smart as Musk uses "empathy" in that manner tells me that it is already well on its way to being a mere mild synonym for kindness, fellow-feeling, goodness.  It's a shame when a useful word with distinct meaning gets watered down to a vague approval.  We have plenty of those already.

Other words will rise to take the place of the weak ones. 

Missing Heritability

Once again, I find that I know very little.  Much More Than You Wanted to Know over at ACX. I hope my 20 years of misleading you has been much less than half. It is as long an article as you would predict ACX would devote to it. But as it flips everything up in the air and we are still waiting for the fried goods to come down, it would sort of have to be.  

There is a whole new group of Anti-Hereditarians over the last decade or so, who have applied very strict standards to what we can predict from genes, causing our previous estimates to look much more fragile. 

It seems like we have to accept one of three possibilities:

Either something is wrong with twin studies.

Or something is wrong with Sib-Regression and RDR (and then we can explain away GWAS and GREML by saying they’re missing rare variants).

Or something is wrong with how we’re thinking about this topic and comparing things. 

The hereditarians are fighting back with some compelling evidence that there are some things we do know by gross measurement, even if we are unable to make that more granular. Dr. Alexander gives a good personal example.

 During residency, I spent a few months working in a child psychiatric hospital for the worst of the worst - kids who committed murder or rape or something before age 18. Many of these children had similar stories: they were taken from their parents just after birth because the parents were criminals/drug addicts/in jail/abusing them. Then they were adopted out to some extremely nice Christian family whose church told them that God wanted them to help poor little children in need. Then they promptly proceeded to commit crime / get addicted to drugs / go to jail / abuse people, all while those families’ biological children were goody-goodies who never got so much as a school detention. When I met with the families, they would always be surprised that things had gone so badly, insisting that they’d raised them exactly like their own son/daughter and taught them good Christian morals. I had to resist the urge to shove a pile of twin studies in their face. This has left me convinced that behavioral traits are highly heritable to a level that it would be hard for any study to contradict.

 (I am a big Cremieux fan, BTW.) 

The Anti-Hereditarians strike back!

 Sib-Regression is a clever way of avoiding most biases. Its independent variable - the degree to which some sibling pairs end up with slightly more shared genes than others - is even more random and exogenous than the difference between fraternal and identical twins. It can sometimes have biases related to assortative mating (which would falsely push heritability down), but otherwise it’s pretty good. RDR has many of the same advantages, and allows more diverse relationships and so larger sample sizes. It’s hard to think of ways these methods could be wildly off.

And the "maybe we are just looking at this all wrong" group has some power in it as well.  Some traits like intelligence (IQ) and educational attainment (EA), where we (think we) can easily see how they must be related, but also can easily see they would have some wild variance may be related just about as much as we have been measuring, but for completely different reasons, so that our further testing is leading us down false paths.

Each of those possibilities would mean we have a lot of humble thinking to do.  So I will start by learning more humility, as that is one thing that is going to clearly be needed.  

The Smell of It

For a moment as she started, I could smell the interior of the guitar.  Unfinished wood. I don't know if it was the appearance, or expectations, or maybe even something about the musician.  I am not usually noted for intensity of sensory experience.  But as I get older I find uncomfortable sensory input such as brightness, echo, and skin irritation* are more noticeable, so perhaps this is related.

 *Autistic children are sometimes upset by the feel of their clothing labels, especially shirts.  I could not recall that ever happening to me as a child.  But recently it has started happening.  I notice the feel of the label on my neck and don't like it. Interesting.

Let's add this one in, because I found it along the way and liked it. 

 

Birthright Citizenship

From Amy Coney Barret's majority opinion:

"JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: '[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.' Ibid. That goes for judges too."

Damage Reports

When it comes to intelligence reports showing up in the media, there are always feints and double-feints. Sometimes the intended audience to be fooled is not the general public but another country's general public, or its intelligence service, or some intricate balancing act many audiences. It causes me to forget my role as the person pointing out the obvious. The chorus in the ancient Greek dramas was usually supposed to represent to what the audience wanted to say, or what the community would wish to ask. It's a useful part of the play.

There are reports that the American bombs destroyed nearly everything of importance at the Iranian nuclear sites. Then there are reports that much of the good stuff was taken away in the nick of time and it was merely a flesh wound. All reports are careful to say that they are being cautious because it's all way underground and it hasn't been analysed yet, then they are not the least bit cautious at all and make some pretty declarative statements. 

It occurs to me that if they weren't destroyed the Israelis would want every one to know that so they could bomb them some more.  Heck, they might want everyone to think they weren't destroyed even if they were, for the same purpose of public opinion about more bombing. Am I just being naive here?

Botswana

 Hot take from Magatte Wade Director of Atlas Network's Center for African Prosperity, at her substack, Africa's Bright Future.

The results speak volumes. 

From one of Africa's poorest countries to middle-income status in a generation. 

Consistent growth while socialist experiments collapsed around them.  

Alpha School

 ACX runs an essay contest every year, not revealing the authors until after the judging. This entry reviews "Alpha School," this year's magic educational fix. He seems both as skeptical as we would be, except he has tried it out on his own children.  He faults the program for not describing what they are doing quite accurately.  He worries that it will not scale up, as other methods have not. It is not only 2 hours a day.  It is not teacher-free.  It does not use AI. However...

…Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age‑matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.

That would be worth studying with more effort than a lot of things we are studying about education now. 

Horrible to Contemplate

 IDF soldiers ordered to fire upon unarmed Gazans. Much was made of Hamas killing Palestinians coming to humanitarian aid sites of the US-Israeli food outreach. Now it looks like some Israeli officers are ordering the same thing.  I would have more doubt about the story if it came from a Palestinian-favoring site, but this is Haaretz.  The IDF promises to investigate.  Chilling.

 Soldiers quoted in the report called the locations a "killing field," saying commanders authorised the use of heavy machine-guns, grenade launchers, mortars and tank fire rather than non-lethal crowd-control methods. One soldier said between one and five people were killed every day in the sector where he served, an operation informally dubbed "Salted Fish". 

2012 Links - Highly Varied

I must have been reading widely on the Internet that month. 

 Liz Warren's Authentic Cherokee Gefilte Fish.  At No Oil For Pacifists

Supportive Community 

Dave Barry's Best Ever The Story of Roger and Elaine. 

Fairytale - 2009 Eurovision Winner 

Express Lanes  

The Proverbs 31 Woman  Not as well-written as I would like, but the concept holds.

History of Cricket

 Sort of.

 

It was a relief to find this.  I had been bothered all afternoon wondering if Leg Before Wicket was a rule before Lexington and Concord or after.

Erica Rhodes

 Have I posted her before?  I watch female comedians in binges, men intermittently.  I have no explanation why the difference.

 

Trick Question - Update

The Oklahoma City Thunder just won the NBA title.  Would we consider this their first championship or their second? Their precursor Seattle Supersonics won in 1979.  They left Seattle in 2008. 

This is an opinion question, though there are purported official answers.  And it's a setup for me to get snippy. 

Update:  The answer, of course, is no, or even hell, no. This isOKC's first championship, Seattle is irrelevant.  Why, then, do we insist that the five championships of the Minneapolis Lakers count toward LA's total? 

New York Mayoralty

There is a lot of worrying about the corrupt Andrew Cuomo and the socialist empty suit Zohran Mamdani duking it out over the likely mayoralty in NYC. It's mostly the city's problem, though anything that affects the country's and the world's largest economic center does have trickle down effects. And the uniqueness of New York does bring ideas into a cleaner abstract focus for us to discuss. 

If Mamdani were some kind of Northern European socialist I might spring for that. But for everywhere else in the world, the socialist is going to become corrupt anyway, it is only a matter of time (or ability to disguise).  That would bring us to competence.  Cuomo has little, Momdani none known, advantage Cuomo. A practiced corrupt politician can really double down if they get encouraged, as in Joe Biden. Momdani might at least graduate to being a basically honest fool.

The outcome will not be good for NYC.  But what kind of Not Good, and what people learn from it might matter. I haven't a clue about that.

When A Progressive Utopia Burned

This article and the next suggested by Rob Henderson.

When A Progressive Utopia Burned by Johann Kurtz at the wonderfully-named substack Becoming Noble. 

Note that the incident described comes from 1991, not 2024. There was a town destroying fire in California, and a feminist anthropologist is honest but distressed about the reversion of all those progressives to traditional gender roles. Her comments in italics, Kurt's in plaintext. 

With the domicile gone, women on the other hand found themselves thrown into utter domesticity… A constant topic in my women’s group was how to deal with food needs, where to get meals, what to feed the family, how to maintain some semblance of a proper balanced diet.

Hoffman never quite manages to offer an explanation as to why this should be so, resorting to vague abstractions like tasks ‘fell to women’. She seems unwilling to contemplate that these women - most of whom were intelligent, experienced, and successful - sensed that they were better suited to take on these duties; that they might want to take on these roles, finding satisfaction, consolation, and purpose in them.

Men’s rapid psychological recovery from the fire (most returned to work within a week) is presented within a critical frame, as if they were uncaring. There is an implication that their lack of sympathy might underpin the heightened and lasting emotional distress of the women:

…the women, uprooted from or severely diminished in their venues, outwardly suffered more depression and longer recovery periods. The Alameda Health Department tallied a far greater use of health services and recommendations for therapy and therapy groups for women than men…

 

All-Class Therapies

Mental-health lessons in schools sound like a great idea. The trouble is, they don’t work Lucy Foulkes

And from the Guardian, no less!

 I have now reached the conclusion that we should stop these all-class mental-health lessons. My view is that the only information we should teach en masse is where a young person should get help, both inside and outside school, if they’re struggling. That’s it. Then we should focus the time, energy and money on supporting the smaller group of young people who are actually unwell. (Her research at the internal link.)

You're A Grand Old Flag

1906.  I'm not sure about that "never a boast or brag" part

 

Out of Control

I just spent two hours answering a single post over at The Bluestocking. It will affect nothing. I did invite the comment readers over to discuss the issue, and said nice things about all of you.  That last bit will probably have more effect on the universe.

Abstracts, Research, Discussion

The Genetic Lottery Goes To School: Better Schools Compensate for the Effects of Students’ Genetic Differences. The data is getting better. Schools help the students at the bottom improve a bit in reading but not numeracy. 

Superhuman Performance of a Large Language Model on the Reasoning Tasks of a Physician. They said this day was coming soon, and it's here. LLM Diagnostics perform much better than actual physicians.

 Black-White IQ gap sure looks genetic. 

Bicycle Helmets.  Ummm. 

 

Ears to the Ground

 Tell me if you hear or read anyone who actively retracts a previous Trump/Russia position. 

First Salmon of the Season

 Pinay sa Alaska 

W H Auden

 

I increasingly find I cannot even tell the past, let alone the future. But I want to tell both and am trapped between them.

2012 Links

Global Warming Catastrophists. Is the National Wildlife Federation mainstream and respectable enough for you? Because this is from page 1 of their new report, "The Psychological Effects of Global Warming On The United States," and it is flipping insane.

Comparing Mountains Good comments about climbing

Geography Geek. Obama's poor grasp of geography and his general intelligence.  Lots of comments.

Daywalkers vs night shift

Village Closeness in the Balkans

Picnics

On a slide show presentation I saw today, I saw an old ad that showed people having a picnic.  It had a blanket spread on the ground and a picnic basket and bottles. I have never liked picnics, because one sits on an uncomfortable position on the ground made worse by trying to eat at the same time.  It is a little better on a beach, and we have gotten stuck at the occasional picnic, usually for church events.  I have never suggested we go on one.

Today it occurred to me that my picture of what a picnic is is at odds with the reality of picnics, including many picnics I have been to.  One could more comfortably sit up higher and put the food on some sort of platform.  Hence the phrase picnic table. That sounds like a lot more fun.  I told my wife about my decades of false impression and told her we should start looking for places to go and have a picnic.

One More Reason...

 ...to read Niall Ferguson, interviewed by Nathan Gardels of Noema: America is in a Late Republic Stage - Like Rome.  I admit that I am tired of the decades of discussion that America is Rome (which fell, doncha know, so smarten up) but he makes some excellent points here.

 Let’s just break it down briefly. Many people wrongly thought that it would be beneficial to Vladimir Putin if Donald Trump were re-elected. I don’t think this war is going to be ended on Putin’s terms, if it’s going to be ended. Secondly, maximum pressure is now back on Iran. That’s important. Thirdly, tariffs have been increased on China, so the pressure is on China. Little Rocket Man in North Korea is still waiting to get whatever is coming to him, but I don’t think it’s going to be a love letter from the Trump administration.

 I got this from a link from The Free Press.

Virgil Wander

Book club discussed Virgil Wander tonight. I found the discussing of it more enjoyable than the reading of it.  The plot starts slowly, and I could tell that something was important - such as the recurrence of the uncertain boundaries of land, water, and sky/fog intersecting with questions of people who were almost dead or thought to be dead coming back or recovering their lives - but I could not discern what any of it was about at first.  But even I, who hates it when authors toy with me that way with a striptease of a novel, appreciated the layering of it in the end.

If you give it a go, I think I can give you just a few things to think about while you read without giving any spoilers.

I wondered where on the spectrum from mere evocation to allegorical retelling were the names.  Was Virgil supposed to represent Wandering Aeneas in the first half of the Aeneid, have elements of him, or merely evoke something about the continual journeying of man?  Or was this Virgil the guide of Dante in the Inferno, and how strictly? I came up with an answer I liked by the end, but no one was excited by it. Still, there was general agreement that the names were important, especially of the male characters. 

What's with all the fish?

Is Adam Leer an evil character, one who is unlucky and easily blamed, or tragically trapped in having evil occur around him?

One of the discussants thought the book had a lot of understated humor, which I did not pick up but can see now that he mentioned it. 

Now That I've Held Him in My Arms

 

Subsistence Curriculum for This Week in Alaska

 

Looks like quite a week.  I hope Aurora can stop looking at her phone and talking with boys to learn this.

ChatGPT Effect on Student Cognition

I am usually suspicious of such claims.  Dime novels were supposed to ruin youths, as were radio, artificial light, television, rock music, computers, D&D, the internet...anything new was blamed for whatever was wrong with Kids These Days. But all of those things did change society, and change might be good or bad.  So with the natural Bayesian structure of our thinking (though we vary widely in how well we do that), this weights the balance pan slightly in the direction of Concern.

This preprint from MIT uncovers some possible problems for students using ChatGPT Your Brain On ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI assistant for Essay Writing Task 

Across the four-month trial, the ChatGPT group showed the weakest neural connectivity, roughly a 32 % lower cognitive load than peers who wrote unaided, and struggled to recall or summarise their own work. Their essays scored well on grammar and structure but were markedly uniform and short on original insight, according to human graders and automated analysis. When the same writers were later asked to compose without AI, performance lagged behind that of participants who had never used the chatbot. 

Proprioception

Science fiction used to have great fun hypothesizing further senses that an alien might have, beyond or instead of our traditional five. But even here on earth there are abilities we recognise as senses once they are presented to us as possibilities.  Animals that can detect magnetic fields or that use echolocation would qualify.  A sense of balance is based on internal awareness rather than external stimuli, as is spatial awareness.  Would we call hunger and thirst senses?  Sure, once we think of it.

It was years ago that someone described proprioception, our sense of body position, as The Sixth Sense, so that one has always stuck in my mind as the best example. It is both conscious and unconscious, as the five we are used to. If we stand in one place and close our eyes, we can tell without looking if our knees are bent or our arms raised. We can describe it instantly.  But it also goes on all day without our attending to it, so that we don't bump our head or hand against something as we walk. Even in the dark we can remember where objects are and have some idea whether we are in line to run into them.

I remember marveling at such a thing when first told about it. I remember closing my eyes in class in sixth grade and checking where all my pieces were. When I checked by sight, they were exactly where my internal sense told me they would be. Mrs. McKeon, long-suffering, asked me what I was doing, but in a less exasperated tone than my previous teachers. Perhaps she was proud of me, perhaps she had just given up.  Either way,  she told me to focus on my work.  I had learned under previous teachers not to counter that I had finished my work.

I have thought only occasionally - less than once year or even decade - about it since, but each time it pleases me. But I have noticed it lately, because it is less accurate than I remember.  My hand might be turned an inch more outward than I estimated, or be a bit higher or lower.  As I have always been clumsy, so maybe this is just noticing what has always been there.  The sense does deteriorate with age, and leads to worse balance and more falls. Yet if anything, I am falling less than I used to.  I don't know if anything is really up or not.

Nor do I much care.  One thing I learned from working in mental health is that if something is not a problem, it's not a problem.  If it gets worse, it might become a problem, and then I will worry about it.  As Tevye says "Good news will keep and bad news will refuse to go away." 

2012 Links

 Scrooge was a Liberal.

Mystery People Vs Research People Or is this a Male/Female difference?

The Little Black Egg 

Cost of Your Health Care. 

Anniversary - Bonhoeffer 

Reading Homer After October 7

I taught my students the 'Iliad.' Then they went to war. by Ido Hevroni, professor of Classics at Shalem College in Israel.

Amir approached me after the second class and said he was frustrated. He couldn’t get into the Illiad. We had a short conversation, and by the next meeting he came prepared like a skilled warrior, not a young man enjoying a cultural experience. He learned the text as an officer would learn a map before navigating his company to its destination. I expected to meet him again on October 9, 2023, at the opening of his sophomore year, but instead, I stood before his grave and eulogized him. Two days earlier, Amir had led a team of soldiers toward the Gaza border communities that were being attacked by terrorists. He was one of the Israelis killed on October 7.

Unfortunate Miss Bailey

This occurred to me because we are thinking of visiting Halifax. My mother and her then-boyfriend* were big Kingston Trio fans, so I grew up on this album and knew all the words to every song.  I had not realised that the song was that old, though.

 *Had she married him, as looked likely at the time, a lot of my childhood would have been Greek.  I sought him out years later and decided he was quite the jerk, and was glad my mother had not married him.

Examples of Fakes

 This guy is providing a public service.  But does it work?

 

Resting Hunt Face

 I am suspicious of the theories that explain modern human inefficiencies as evolutionary leftovers that no longer work.  It is not because I think they are mostly untrue - I think there are some very good ones out there.  But the explanation is so tidy and so congenial that I think it always brings a risk of being a Just-So story.

Having said that, I've got a fun one, by Jesse Bering Resting Hunt Face.  

Just look at the corporate world. Studies show that the selection of CEOs, along with those eye-watering salaries that companies are willing to offer them, vary as a function of the candidate’s facial appearance. It’s a powerful unconscious bias. It’s also just plain ineffective, as these automatic face judgments fail to predict actual profit-driven performance. That our species is so prone to making such costly errors, using faces to make rapid-fire but erroneous inferences about competence, is something of an evolutionary puzzle.

The idea is that we poorly evaluate modern leadership skills when we bring faces into the equation because we are very good at assessing hunting skills from faces, and consider that to be similar enough to sign on for that guy. 

We naturally think of ourselves, our families, and our friends when we hear such things. I do not hunt or even shoot myself, largely because I am so clumsy that it would be a waste of money and effort.  As I like to say, I would be more likely to take out the picture window or the refrigerator; if the neighborhood became so dangerous that I pretty much had to have a try at it, we're probably pretty much screwed already.  I don't know if coordination shows up in the face, but it is also true that I was always much better at being an advisor than a leader.  I never had any side hustles that brought home much money.

Four of my five sons have been shooters - one a hunter, two in the military, one at target ranges. Those are the four who also have side hustles besides their regular jobs. The hunter has the most side hustles, by far. He also has a slender 14 y/o daughter who can butcher a reindeer, though I can't say she looks much like a hunter.  Maybe that comes later.

So I have to think that "resting hunt face" could correlate with some job success, though maybe not CEO's or particular industries.

QOTD (x3)

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." George Box 1976.  He was an applied statistician.

"The truth is too complicated to be represented by anything but approximations." John non Neumann 1947.  He was a mathematician and physicist.

"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." Alfred Korzybski 1933. He was a philosopher of language and reality. 

Seems like pretty close to the same idea from people at the top of different fields. 

 

Sleight of Hand

When you link to an illusionist's performance you start getting lots of magicians on YouTube. It's been fun.

 

Does China Have Enough Food To Go To War?

 This is nothing like my usual topics, and I only read the first few paragraphs and skimmed the rest.  But I know that some of you think about these things at a deeper dive, so I figured I would pass it along. Does China Have Enough Food To Go To War?

Despite this remarkable progress, Chinese authorities are increasingly challenged to feed their 1.4 billion people. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, several outbreaks of African swine fever, floods sweeping southern regions, and severe droughts in the northern areas have revealed weaknesses in China’s food security.³ For instance, these events caused pork prices (the main source of protein for Chinese population) to spike and the imports of grains and oilseeds to soar to unprecedented levels. China is now the world’s largest buyer of key agricultural commodities, and it imports nearly 60 percent of global soybean export flows.⁴ These developments are in clear contrast with China’s decades-long efforts to develop and implement policies aimed at grain self-sufficiency.

Guys at Baseball Games.

 I went to a Woosox game last night, partly because of wanting to see Red Sox players who might come up, but mostly because I like seeing the crowd at a minor league game once a year.  I usually go to see the Fisher Cats here in Manchester, but I had never been to Polar Park before and was still bummed that my earlier attempt this year was called on account of wind and cold. But not until after I'd driven an hour to get there.  So of course I did the smart thing, choosing a game that was in danger of being called because of rain and driving over an hour to that.

I had never gone alone before, so enjoyed myself wandering, not having to worry that Someone Else was worried that I might have gotten lost. I reflected on the number of older men - men who were both portly and starboardly, if you get my drift - who came to baseball games alone.  They were a rather sorry, weird-looking guys, and I wondered what that was about. 

Then I remembered that I was an old guy at a minor league baseball game by myself and decided not to think about it anymore. 

On the Rail Trail

So I did.

Rioting

Over at City Journal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit by Charles Fain Lehman

The summer of 2025 has not yet officially begun, but it already looks like another long, hot one. Los Angeles has faced days of anti-ICE protests and rioting, which have spread to dozens of other cities, provoking clashes with local, state, and federal law enforcement. The burning cars and mask-clad demonstrators are disturbingly reminiscent of the riots for “racial justice” in the summer of 2020 and for “Palestine” in 2024. The cause changes; the personnel and methods remain the same.

He left out a lot of urban racial violence. the Kyle Rittenhouse acquital and Derek Chavin's conviction both brought riots. Atlanta 2023, Minneapolis ongoing. The usual method is for professional agitators to glom on to a peaceful protest, hoping to either bait the police into escalating or get the peaceful protestors to start getting physical, not necessarily by shooting or fighting, but by forcing their way into places or refusing to follow police orders. Rioting also provides an opportunity for looting, much as raping and pillaging were considered part of a soldier's entitlement for taking a city. 

The linked article talks about how this is longstanding, quoting from  Edward C Banfield's 1970 book The Unheavenly City.  

Put more succinctly: while Banfield’s contemporaries blamed riots on “root causes,” Banfield blamed riots on those who blamed them on root causes. People riot for all sorts of reasons, but the most tractable one is that they feel permission to riot—because their leaders give it to them.

Stamps and Coupons

Thinking about supermarkets and my grandmother led immediately to memories of S&H Green Stamps and Raleigh Coupons. She smoked two packs of Raleigh filters a day - and looking that up it was surprising how familiar all those brands still looked to me.  I could remember someone who smoked most of those brands, even though most people smoke Marlboros, Winstons, or Newports. Non-filters were considered old-fashioned and less safe.  The filters actually did nothing, but did at least keep flecks of tobacco from going in your mouth. My dad smoked two packs of Luckies a day, which dropped to one pack, mostly in secret, after his quadruple-bypass surgery.

I remember looking through the coupon catalogs, wondering why we never bought anything cool, just end tables and the like.

George Jones

What do you do when you don't like the song but everyone wants you to play it?

You don't go half-way.  You pull out all the stops.

 

Grand Union - Champagnes.

Supermarkets are one of those places that retain their old name long after they have been sold and resold and haven't been called that for years.  Its name is its name, to the people who knew it in childhood, and sometimes there were differences even then.  On of my sons tells me it is the same for stadiums and arenas, and I thought of a local one immediately.  Many people still call it The Verizon Wireless Arena even though it has been the SNHU Arena for a decade, and all the signs leading to it from the highway exits still call it the Manchester Civic Center, left over from 25 years ago. The official names of the parks in many cities are known only to the police and the mapmakers, but in Manchester I think there is only one known almost entirely by its unofficial name, "Pretty Park."

This came up because of Demoulas/Market Basket.  It has been a mess for years, with a family that tries to skirt laws but has also inspired employee loyalty.   There are about a hundred of them now.  It was originally Demoulas in Massachusetts, gradually spreading to other New England states, but there was a limit on how many of one store could sell beer and wine, so the family split off some and renamed them Market Basket.  It was largely a ruse. Still, there are stores that are still named Demoulas and others that have been Market Basket for years but are still called Demoulas by most of the locals. If you move into Concord, NH and call the downtown store Market Basket people will look at you in puzzlement.

A&P and pieces of A&P were bought, sold, combined, split, and recombined for 150 years. A few blocks down from where I lived as a boy it remained a supermarket after being sold off, and was just called "The Old A&P" for years after.  I don't remember its new name, and I doubt anyone else does either without looking it up.

But the interesting ones in Manchester, NH were the three Grand Union - Champagnes.  The first was built on the deeply French-Canadian West Side, the second was built in the South-Central part of the city, which was all ethic groups, and the third was built in the very fashionable not-very French-Canadian North End just before the lot of them (plus a few in other towns) were all sold to Grand Union.  Even though they were technically all named the same thing and their advertisements and fliers were identical, the one on the West Side was always just called Champagnes, the South-Central one was usually called Champagnes, and the snobby North Manchester one was always called the nice WASP-y Grand Union. My grandmother, a bit of a social climber who always resented that her husband had built their house just four blocks short of the North End, gladly switched from A&P to Grand Union in the 1950s.  She would never have gone to a Champagnes.

Full story of Romeo Champagne from the wonderful Cow Hampshire site. 

Mondo Duplantis Again

It's the beginning of a new outdoor season, and he is going to take it up a little bit at a time, to break the record over and over. He gets paid by the sponsors every time he breaks it, so why not? Sergey Bubka broke it a centimeter at a time once or twice a year for a decade. 

 

The only downside I can see if if he gets injured badly enough to shave off the very top of his career, he will always have to wonder how far he could have gone if, if, if... But that's what athletes live with anyway.  No that I think of it, that's what all of us live with anyway.

The conversion is 20' 7 1/4". For comparison, the record in 1950 was 15'7"; in 1975 it was 18'6"; in 2000 it was 20' 1 1/2".

Through Running

For those of you who enjoy learning and thinking about the costs and efficiencies of suburban rail and metros, there is this from Works In Progress.  The Magic of Through-Running.  

By the 1920s, the shortcomings of the system were becoming increasingly obvious. The population of Munich increased sevenfold between 1850 and 1930, with most of the growth in newly built suburbs. But the capacity of the suburban network could not be easily increased to meet rising demand. For the reasons explained above, the two central termini were the key constraints on capacity. There was also continued discontent at the fact that suburban services did not reach the city center, a fact that had been made more obvious by the development of trams that could do so.

On the other hand, there were fewer capacity constraints in the termini at the suburban end, because they usually only handled one type of service (i.e. just a single suburban service, not multiple suburban and intercity ones). This meant they could handle more trains per hour without major risk of generating chains of delays. If they did face capacity constraints, it was normally easier to solve them through expanding termini, since suburban termini are surrounded by less development, and land is cheaper. 

I didn't find the map density much fun, but I think it is necessary to absorbing the concepts. 

I am less willing to invest any pain in my learning as I get older.  I like to be spoon-fed delicious and high-energy concepts at this point. 

What Makes Europe Better?

Even without a subscription, you can get the gist of Chris Arnade's Free Press article. 

Something about style, something about elegance, something about appreciation for the everyday things... yes, we have all heard things like this for decades.  Collectively, we have heard them as long as there have been Europeans in the New World. "English goods were ever the best," said a character in The Story of A Patriot, shown at the Visitor's Center of Colonial Williamsburg since the 1960s. 

Yet it is comparing apples and oranges.  We have charming comfortable breakfast places like the one he described in Italy.  We have a fair number of them.  In vacation places. When we choose them for breakfast, we like them very much, and for the same reasons. The slowed pace of vacation breakfast in America is similar tho the slowed pace for Americans when they vacation in Italy. But generally we don't choose them, because we are going somewhere and we value our time, down to smaller intervals than are valued in much of Europe. 

Europeans complain about McDonald's and the like, but they go to them. They like clean rest rooms, heat and air conditioning, a reliable menu, low prices, just like everyone else.  If there were a big demand for outdoor Italian cafes with bakery, you can guarantee someone would build it.  The closest thing we have to that are cafes inside malls or hotel-based shopping centers We like those fine, but often people want a quick bagel or croissant to go, to have something nice at work.

In most Dunkins in New England, there are regular groups of old guys who meet together for breakfast weekly or even daily. They sit and talk, they don't hurry.  

It's only a slight exaggeration to say that we like this slowed down elegant unpressured life wherever we like.  Because it's vacation, and we like vacation. 

Pretty Girl

It used to irritate me during my mental health career that "people" (but keep reading), seemed more upset if death or a life ruined by mental illness happened to a pretty girl. Once I even said "Would it have been less tragic if she wasn't pretty?" Thinking it through over the years that this was part of a larger pattern of something valuable going to waste. If the person was smart, or a talented musician, or an athlete, similar comments might be made.  Youth was a powerful driver of this as well.  More was going to waste if fifty years were being lost than twenty. The time schedules worked in reverse directions depending on the quality being wasted.  Intelligence and music lost were regarded as tragic because of what could have been; beauty and athletic ability (or perhaps dance, charm) were something that was being lost today.

James Dobson in the late eighties or early nineties pointed out that beauty and intelligence were the gold coin of worth and silver coin of worth for boys and girls. Though first and second place were switched for the sexes, they were still the top two spots for each, and he saw the gap narrowing. I thought that was true at the time because I had children and heard what people said.  I don't have an update whether the gap has narrowed further or not, because I am no longer in a front row seat on that. 

There may have been some "babies lost for the tribe" aspect, because younger women are regarded as prettier, but I don't know how to measure that even approximately.

Yet because I have long been annoyed at others about this my shame was greater when the Minnesota representative was killed and I thought "Oh and she was a pretty woman, what a pity." We do not live up to our own values.

Fly Me To The Moon

 

LA Riots

Leighton Woodhouse at the Free Press has written one of the better articles that I have not seen widely shared.  

The usual choreography of these protests goes something like this: Thousands of normal people show up, along with a smaller contingent of organized agitators. The agitators engage in enough petty property damage to create a situation in which there is a standoff with the cops. Under the cover of the crowd, they then engage in more serious property destruction. If they are emboldened enough, these agitators might launch some largely symbolic attacks on police lines: throwing trash, vandalizing an unattended police cruiser, that kind of thing.

If the strategy is successful, it provokes a violent reaction from the police that is directed at the general mass of protesters. The experience of being attacked by the police when you haven’t done anything illegal outrages the nonviolent majority of the crowd, which then becomes incrementally more violent in return. The situation escalates.

Sunday did not follow that script.

Assassinations and Threats

The spinning and counter-spinning has begun.  They are after "our" people.  No, they are after our people.  They seem to have been after some of both people. There's a manifesto, which will also be spun and counterspun. There will probably be some personal; issues behind it, which may be important or may be a red herring. I am grateful for each public figure who is only expressing sorrow rather than trying to capitalise on that, and already getting angry and those who are.  But I have no sense of the overall percentage of each, because reporting that is spun and counterspun as well.

Wait and see. For now, it's horrible, and I am sad that we are seeing more of this. While that's an obvious thing to say, it's the only thing I can think of that doesn't make things worse.

Lobster Riots

The story has long been told that in colonial Massachusetts, lobster was so plentiful that it was considered a pauper's food and was fed to prisoners so often that they rioted in protest.  It's a great story, and as a person who thinks lobster is overrated I have told it myself.

But it's not true. Boston.com's local history section Wickedpedia decided to be spoilsports and check into the historical sources on this. Did New England Prisoners Really Eat Lobster In Colonial Times?  The mythbusting was straightforward: the story doesn't show up until the 1900s, and was as often about Maine as Massachusetts. But Maine was part of Massachusetts in the 1600 -1700s and didn't have much in the way of jails of its own.  The bits of truth in the legend come from references to lobster being so common and easily caught, as far back as the 1620s. Yet this was a point of advertisement to those back in England, to encourage them to come. 

Sandy Oliver, a food historian and writer based in Isleboro, Maine, shared our suspicions: “Who the hell is going to pick all the meat off the lobster to produce enough for a prison full of people?” (Ed. Good point.) ...Oliver did her own digging and found no contemporaneous references to New England prisoners eating lobster during the 17th or 18th centuries. And when the story did materialize in town histories later on, it wasn’t even initially about lobster. It was about salmon.

Sometimes almost word for word.  Very suspicious. 

Liberace and The Young Folks

 

The Claude Bliss Attractor

Astral Codex Ten discusses the fascinating topic of when AI characters are recursive, so that slight, even invisible biases get magnified and cause us to wonder what is under the hood.  Recursion is an excellent strategy for testing bias. In typical fashion for him, Alexander goes through every possible explanation for why this is happening, saving me the trouble of working it out for myself. It's interesting enough stuff in its entirety that I won't comment much and won't link to a particular section.

The concept that other, seemingly unrelated traits get carried along under recursion reminded me of The silver fox domestication experiment carried out over decades. Also, the effect of the gravitation of the shooter of a billiard ball on the speed and angles nine collisions out is crazy large, as NNT described in The Black Swan. 

Ordinarily this would just be a curiosity of the more extreme effects of recursion.  But as AI's speak to themselves and each other more and more, without supervision, so to speak, this is increasingly the world we live in.

Dueling Something

 I would never have thought of this.

 

Homeless Sex Offenders

You may remember my links on the housing problem from 10 days ago. I hope you remember.  It was only ten days ago. I also recently linked to my old post on Sex Offender Registries.

City Journal has weighed in. (Paywall, but a few paragraphs will give you enough to grasp the idea, though not have it proven to you.) CJ was one of the links suggesting it was a drug problem.  This is unfortunately not necessarily a contradiction.  A lot of my clients during my career had impulse-control problems of all sorts, which meant no one wanted them in their house or their apartment building, or their neighborhood or even the shelter.  Shelters that accept families don't want anything to do with sex offenders.   

Again, trust no one who tells you that homelessness could be easily addressed. I should say, trust them as good people who are likely generous, kind, and compassionate - but not their infuriated (or despairing) sense that this would all be fixed if this rich country would stop being so prejudiced. A friend at Sunday school said something like that a couple of weeks ago.  Price of a fellow, smart, balanced.  Their hearts go out in pain for those they see. It's what they don't see that is the problem.

Classical Reference

 (Deep inside Communist Martyrs High School)

Man with an Hispanic accent:  Hiya, kiddo!

Porgy Tirebiter: 'Shoes for industry' compadre. 

Man: Hehehe sure. Hey you guys holding?

Porgy: Gosh no!  The means of production are held by all of the people. 

Bottles: That's right.

Man: Ah no, man.  Y'know, got any uppers?

Porgy: No, there are no classes in our society.

Mudhead: Or in our high school.

Bottles: Quiet, stupid.

Man: C'mon baby, you can tell me.  You got any pot?

Porgy: Oh not yet.  But soon, heavy industry will make it possible for all the people to have everything it desires in a free marketplace.

Man:  Oh Daddyo, you guys are so crazy! 

 

 

This was prompted by a long chain of thought after I accused someone over at Maggie's of resorting to hand-waving as an argument. The comment in bold from Firesign Theater came to me.

Empathic Conservatives

This study tells me what I want to hear, so it must be true, right?  Empathic Conservatives and Moralizing Liberals.  Political Intergroup Empathy Varies by Political Ideology and Is Explained by Moral Judgment.  University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. 

 Empathy has the potential to bridge political divides. Here, we examine barriers to cross-party empathy and explore when and why these differ for liberals and conservatives. In four studies, U.S. and U.K. participants (total N = 4,737) read hypothetical scenarios and extended less empathy to suffering political opponents than allies or neutral targets. These effects were strongly shown by liberals but were weaker among conservatives, such that conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives. This asymmetry was partly explained by liberals’ harsher moral judgments of outgroup members (Studies 1–4) and the fact that liberals saw conservatives as more harmful than conservatives saw liberals (Studies 3 and 4). The asymmetry persisted across changes in the U.S. government and was not explained by perceptions of political power (Studies 3 and 4). Implications and future directions are discussed.

Update:  Grim expands on his comment about sympathy vs empathy over at his site. "Empathy is really dangerous."