Darwin Among The Machines

 A letter-to-the-editor by Samuel Butler in New Zealand in 1863.  I had not heard of it, but apparently it has become important in AI circles as the first prediction that AI would supersede us.

Wikipedia has a good summary, as this is the sort of thing it does best. I extract a bit from that, because it was the exact section I was looking for.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

The letter ends by urging that 

War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.

Well, that seems clear.  This thinking later went into Erewhon, a society where the machines had already been destroyed.

If it seems awfully quick that machines are suddenly passing us in so many ways, including intelligence, despite our million-year head start, it pays to remember that interlligence is very expensive to the body.  It takes an enormous amount of energy. The energy-demanding needs of AI is just the individual needs of billions of humans (and prehumans) writ collectively and large. Extra intelligence is always nice, but most organisms benefit far more from a little more ability to digest, or recover from disease. This is true even of humans.  We all could use more brainpower in our daily lives, but we might benefit more directly from patience, strength, resilience, dexterity or a hundred other abilities. If we falsely imagine the equations of energy needed, we think we would never want to give up any intelligence!* We need that, need it desperately.

Yet what if the real equation is "AVI, if you trade in one IQ point you get double the ability to keep your temper?" Hey, I'm in. If I didn't and my family later learned about it they might conclude I am a complete narcissist who doesn't love them very much. I have terrible fine-motor coordination. How much more could I get if I deducted a second point? It gets to be a game of Jenga, but I might play.

*Oops.  Forgot the asterisk. And yet we drink alcohol and take drugs and do things that risk concussions. For fun.

Babylonian Inflation

 From Matt Parlmer on X 

Apparently there were cuneiform spreadsheets

To which Lyman Stone points out that because there are so many cuneiform records for ancient Babylon, economists can calculate the rate of inflation for its version of the Consumer Price Index for a thousand years.
https://x.com/mattparlmer/status/1885049428853350594

Beany and Cecil

I don't know if I liked it.  It was on and I watched it. That's what 9-year-old boys did on Saturday mornings in 1962 until our mothers kicked us out to play. Then we stayed out until she told us to come in. Rinse, repeat. 

No wait, it was more complicated than that.  WMUR, the ABC affiliate on Channel 9 was three blocks away and the cartoon show had a host, Ring-A-Ding the clown, with kids getting to be on TV marching in and waving to the camera, cheering on cue, and participating in games like identifying states on a map. Ring-A-Ding quickly learned not to call on me because I got them immediately which wasn't very good theater.  Just like at school. I resented it deeply.

I knew that my great uncle collected clown memorabilia, but I don't recall being told that he was the original clown on that show in the 50s. Nor that my great-grandmother and her five daughters lived four houses away in the 1910s. I figured my mother must have told me a dozen times but I didn't take it in. Except that is exactly the sort of thing I was fascinated by...

I didn't remember the whole song at the end, just some sea creature with an accent (I think it was supposed to be French) singing the last lines. "Put that treazhure map togezzer, a million dollaires in goldFeesh!" The joke was that Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent had spent the episode with a ripped treasure map that promised "$1,000,000 in gold..." He fights Dishonest John ("DJ you dirty guy!") and Billy the Squid and finally reaches Treasure Island with the aid of what I now see was a swordfish. The last scrap of the map is there, reading..."fish." Beany and Cecil was not laugh-out-loud stuff. Most cartoons weren't. Smiles. Chuckles.  Nobody laughed at Yogi and his pickinick basket jokes, or Fred Flintstone being impressed by guest appearances of Ann Margrock.  Warner Brothers might make you laugh, but mostly only when you repeated the lines yourself. There was a summer when we said "I'm gonna get my Wabbit Ewadicator" a thousand times.

I vaguely remembered that Beany and Cecil were based on a 1950s something.  YouTube reveals it was a puppet show.  I doubt I ever saw it.

How Does She Know So Much...

...About Opera All of a Sudden? 

She doesn't.

(From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine)

China Law Blog

Recommended today by a Silicon Valley guy who does a lot of business with China and whose wife is Chinese.  He says they tend to be liberal in the recent history sense but are realistic.  China Law Blog

Miracle Whip

I know, I'm supposed to be talking about the firing of Inspectors General, or Trump's order about removing the transgendered from the military, or the sale of TikTok, or whatever*, but I have a matter of greater personal importance.  In Razib's excellent interview of Megan McArdle on American food culture, she mentioned that Miracle Whip, that despised cousin of mayonnaise tended to be favored in Middle America by those of Scandinavian or Eastern European heritage, and thus concentrated in the Midwest. It is sweeter and more vinegary, while Hellman's, Kraft, and Duke's are richer, creamier.  Kewpie, which I have never had, is supposed to be the anti-Miracle Whip, much lower in sugar and vinegar. I may try it.

The Scandinavians and Eastern Europeans favored sweeter and more vinegary dressings from their home cultures.  (Everything from Eastern Europe seems to be vinegary, frankly.) Therefore, when it came out during the Depression as a cheaper alternative - it was mayo mixed with cheaper ingredients - they took to it readily. I don't get how the chronology of this works, frankly.  The Swedes, Poles, etc who came to America were pretty much here by 1930, and most had come at least two generations before.  So these sweeter, more sour dressings from Europe must have been kept alive in the households, as there weren't many Danish or Polish restaurants to spread their popularity. That seems a stretch.

OTOH my Swedish Nanna preferred Miracle Whip, as did her daughter my mother, as do I. So the proof of the dressing is in the spreading, as they say in the Old Country. I have taken a lot of heat for this preference over the years. This has usually taken the benign form of my wife's family simply preferring it and making their tunafish that way. There are snobs, however, who struggle to take air at the mere mention of the stuff. 

Full disclosure: most of the complaints leveled against me comes from my PB & Miracle Whip sandwiches, which are quite lovely but highly disfavored among those who won't try them.  The moisture complements the sticky nut pastes, and jelly is too sweet. I have heard that some like to add banana slices.  I have no objection and those may be fine.  It's just that this leaves half a banana lying around to rot and my original version seems fine as is. I have no need to search farther afield.

*I think the strategy of so many controversies is to dilute the opposition to them.  Liberal groups get a lot of support from unrelated liberal activists who don't have anything of their own going at the moment and are content to wait their turn.  They lend their outraged voices to create a game of whack-a-mole, catching majorities who would allow an actual discussion flat-footed. Trump is whacking many mole-holes at once, whether a head is popping up at the moment or not.  Will it work? Moltke wrote that "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces," which is usually rendered more like "No plan survives first contact with the enemy," or Mike Tyson's "Everybody's got a plan until they get hit." We'll see.

Collage

 My wife went to a Soul Care event for women of the church Saturday afternoon. After she was back I asked her what it was. "Was it like a retreat?  A workshop?"

"It was like a mini-retreat."

"Is that what they call retreats now?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

I looked at the white cardboard poking out of her bag, with pictures and text from magazines pasted to it. "It looks like a collage."

She smirked.  "It's called a Vision Board."

I'm just helping all of you keep up here.

This Was Fun

 

Inauguration Day

 Maybe we should play this at every inauguration.

Richie Havens did a folk version just before Obama was elected. Ambiguous who he means in that context, but in our context, it doesn't matter

There's a cheery bluegrass version.

There's a classroom instruments version. 

Marching band  

Reggae

You Can't Argue With A Shudder

I have a friend who I discussed politics with in the early 90s. She told me that her parents "loved Pat Buchanan" and she shuddered while smiling a bit.  I had not long been conservative, so I was suspicious of Buchanan myself, so I understood her regarding him as thoroughly beyond the pale, but I noted the shudder. He was nowhere near shudder category for me. She would also make her points by rolling her eyes as well, as did my brother, who had a Jon Stewart caliber eye-roll.

It pays to notice that shuddering is not actually an intellectual argument, but it is a powerful social argument. Because it is sometimes entirely involuntary, it carries the message of "any decent person feels this way." But shuddering is not always involuntary.  It can be consciously initiated, after which the remainder is involuntary, mimicking the full involuntary nature. These semiotics circulate among groups, so that a shudder or something like it becomes not merely an acceptable but a preferred response.

We had lunch last week and one of us mentioned JD Vance.  She shuddered.  I asked why she hated him, and she gave an answer that made some plausible sense, but was thoroughly unconnected to any disgust or horror response.  It was a mere disagreement. I concluded that she has some other reason for her disgust that she did not say.  Perhaps she is herself unaware of her true motive. As she shudders at the mention of a large percentage of her political opponents, that may be the bulk of it, but the "childless cat-lady" incident, which had mentioned when it happened months ago, may represent the type of disagreement she has which is especially visceral.

The list of who conservatives disagree with is long, including each other. But I can't think of anyone who is regularly in shudder category for them.  My claim that liberalism is primarily a social position would fit with that - eye rolls are less common, and shudders nonexistent. The liberals who use them are often fully capable of intellectual arguments. Jon Stewart can do that well when he chooses to, for example. Yet they choose the purely social she-is-beneath-consideration as a primary means of persuasion anyway.

Yet that can't be.  There must be someone conservatives shudder at.

Pipedream

The Blues Magoos were considered a bad-boy group in 1967. I knew every song on "Electric Comic Book" by heart, because I was cooler and edgier than the other kids.

Time Travel Joke

Time cop: "Captain, I know you sent me back in time to kill baby Adolph Hitler, but I killed Woodrow Wilson instead."

Captain: "Who's Adolph Hitler?"

Piranesi

Piranesi is new enough (2020) that I don't want to give any spoilers. I went with my wife to her book club last night to discuss it. We are uncertain who the main character is at first, nor the Other - the only other living person until well into the plot, nor the bleached bones which Piranesi names, tends and gives offerings to.

Nor the House itself where Piranesi lives, which is populated by hall after hall of statues and is washed over day by day with interacting tides. Everything is uncertain at first and we leap at guesses. There are multiple references to CS Lewis, especially Narnia; to Jorge Luis Borges "The Library of Babel" and "The Minotaur," to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose and as we speculated last night perhaps a half-dozen other writers and artists. I recommend rereading The Magicians Nephew beforehand. 

We gradually learn that the mysterious aspects are part of an actual murder mystery with multiple victims. We are in the dark because the narrator has remarkable clarity in some thinking, but is misled and deceived in other aspects.  I was particularly taken with its issues of identity lost and gained, and the hypothesis that it is intended as a Planet Narnia example of being under the influence of Neptune, and the effect of the occult on the good versus the evil characters.

Highly recommended. Short but full.

Belichick Politics

As I read complaints from conservatives about various Trump appointees, I am increasingly leaning to the GOAT coach who drafted and acquired talent by saying "Don't tell me what he can't do.  Tell me what he can do."  It's not perfect, but I think conservatives have swung too far in the other direction looking for reasons to veto someone.

Obama 2004 Convention Speech

I remember thinking at the time that this was an encouraging sign.  Maybe the newer Democrats were finally getting it.

As Mike over at Chicago Boyz wrote: I'm still waiting for that guy to become president

Dignity

I took a walk after that last post, came back and made some edits.  Then I took another walk.

This book came to mind again.  Maybe it will enjoy a resurgence.

Fractures, Divides, Realignments

 (This one is long, and the internal links at Grim's and Breitbart [via Althouse] are long as well. And I think it's a good one to talk a walk after reading as well. We are in the beginning of major realignments in our politics, and there will be a lot of false starts and theories before we work this out.)

It was only three weeks ago that I mentioned that Public Radio was trying create a self-fulfilling prophecy by announcing fractures in the Trump coalition. I did not mention at the time, but certainly mentally included until a few days ago the split over immigration between the techbros and the cultural nativists. I thought they were only arguing over a middle ground and uneasy compromise.  I now believe I was wrong about that.  While both sides are against illegal immigration, there is not general agreement on legal immigration. There are work visas and there are work visas, after all. The agricultural workers from Latin America and the H1B Silicon Valley visas affect entirely different groups. The latter are only 85,000 individuals a year, but they make far more than then could in say, India, so they settle in, keep getting extended and can eventually establish chain migration an turn into an estimated 600,000. That adds up.

There is currently irritation among many in the tech world that in contrast to the original intent of the visas, which was to get from other countries specialty workers that we don't have enough of here, these foreign workers are replacing Americans because they will work for less. This is not always said out loud because they want to keep working somewhere and don't want reputations as troublemakers.  But some are forced to train their replacements as a condition of their severance package.

But the CEO's love it, and here is a part of the Elon Musk story: his goal is to go to Mars, and he felt the Democrats kept putting up barriers.  I don't say he doesn't believe the other things he says about America and entrepreneurship and competing in the global market.  I'm pretty sure he does. But all of that is in service to Mars.  Getting the most engineers into America at the best price is something that needs to happen, in his mind. His goal is America First in terms of global competition. Vivek Ramaswamy's comments in December articulate the position well. (Quote from a House of Strauss transcript.  Apologies if I got any of it wrong.)

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers over "native" Americans isn't because of an innate American IQ deficit, a lazy and wrong explanation. A key part of it comes down to the c-word, culture. Tough questions demand tough answers and if we're really serious about fixing the problem we have to confront the truth. Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long, at least since the 90s and likely longer.  That doesn't start in college. It starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympian champ or the jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Corey from Boy Meets World or Zack and Slater over Screech and Saved by the Bell or Stefan over Steve Urkel and Family Matters will not produce the best engineers. Fact.

I know multiple sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity.  And their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates.

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends, more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers, more weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons, more books, less TV, more creating, less "chillin'." More extracurriculars, less hanging out at the mall, Most normal American parents look skeptically at those kind of parents.

More normal American kids view such the kinds of kids with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve. Now close your eyes and visualize which families you knew in the 90s or even now who raised their kids according to one model versus the other. be brutally honest.

Normalcy doesn't cut it in a hyper competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we'll have our asses handed to us by China. This can be our Sputnik moment. We've awakened from slumber before and we can do it again. Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America.

But only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity, nerdiness over conformity, hard work over laziness. That's the work we have cut out for us rather than wallowing in victimhood and just wishing or legislating alternative hiring practices into existence. I'm confident we can do it.

Well, there's a lot to like here for a certain type of parent - we had no TV, we stressed science fair, etc. But there's few things wrong with it as well. The Brahmins will work for less because the company controls their H1B. South Asian IQs are far below American, but the superselect group of Brahmins is higher than the American average. So this "well, our kids just work harder" is mostly self-congratulatory nonsense. Look also at some common American virtues that aren't mentioned... Generosity, community service, compassion, honesty.  Plenty of Asians South and Northeast have those qualities, but if we are going to talk about culture, as Vivek says we are, how often are those mentioned?

Which culture is American, sleepovers or science fairs? What have you got against normalcy? Do we trust people who think all those blind people could see if they just tried harder? Learn to code? When we have the discussion for the 1000th time that lots of kids should go into trades like welding because they could make bank, while our betters are expressing contempt disguised as motivational speeches for them, do we then get why they don't go into trades? People want importance, respect, not just money.

This would be a good place to go over to Grim's and read his post Triumphant, Broken America. He focuses on the rural/urban divide which I also think is neglected. But that bleeds over into the suburban, small town, family farm vs agribiz, and tech island - y'know, this is getting messy fast - divides. America First has at least two powerful meanings in our culture. Foreign Affairs is not the only one. Steve Bannon says he will have Elon Musk out of the White House immediately. He is more for cultural America First rather than America First to Mars. 

Trump is definitely America First, but which one? I think both. His thought is to get rid of the illegals and the rest will fix itself. He will support both versions of America First and try to paper over the division, largely because he doesn't see it as that large. Neither did I until a few days ago.  This is only the beginning. The Democrats have a different version of the same divide.

True Patriots

 

Breadhenge

There was a gingerbread house competition at Old Sturbridge Village and many of the entries were quite creative.

The thatched roof is made with shredded wheat, which is quite clever.

But I liked Breadhenge best.

Sea Shanties

Since I got thinking about sailors, sea shanties came to mind.  The video I used in 2020 has been taken down, but you can still learn a bit about the origin of the term. And to make up for the one taken away, here are two for your enjoyment.

He claims all shanties sound better as heavy metal.  He's got a point.

Hornpipe

 Vigorous, eh?

Vision

Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no vision, the people perish.

I dunno, I think there's a lot more perishing when your wife has vision.

Wives are encouraged to contradict, explain, or reinterpret this sentiment.

Fetterman

John Fetterman, Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania had a stroke and seems to have become one of the most openminded senators since than.  Maybe all our Senators should have strokes. There must be a way to induce them, right?

I used to tell patients apprehensive about receiving ElectroConvulsive Therapy that a crude but surprisingly apt metaphor was rebooting your brain the same way that one reboots a computer. I wouldn't think a stroke would function in the same way, but I wouldn't have thought that inducing a seizure would treat mania and depression either.

I don't think a lot of TIAs would give you the same effect - and I'll bet that's occurred fairly regularly already with no noticeable improvement in the Congress.

So we should start with the oldest first or longest-serving?

When Liars Try to Tell the Truth

There are consequences to lying, and one is that people won't believe you even when you are telling the truth. This is so well known that there has even been a fable about it for millennia.

Some examples...

I believe there are endangered species.  I believe that we should make at least some effort to preserve them, for a couple of reasons. Yet now it turns out that the infamous snail darter never existed.  It is genetically identical to other fish in other similar environments, and there are apparently plenty of them.  But a dam wasn't built, and just now that water would have been useful in SoCal.

I believe climate warming is real, and that human activity is responsible for at least some of it. Yet it turns out that despite the widespread belief that it is causing more and more powerful cyclones/hurricanes, the trend over the last fifty years is neutral, and in one ocean actually a bit less. Tell people that and they will insist you are a climate denier. Claim that the temperature figures are being jacked to make them look worse and you will get sued and ruined by people who have deeper pockets than you.

Many people, especially Boomers, still think the world is becoming overcrowded and don't know about plummeting Total Fertility Rate. At least in the medium-term, it's going to be a lot of problem for a lot of countries.

Covid-19 was real and the vaccines do work, but now there's a lot of people who don't believe in any vaccines and we are seeing a return of conquered diseases.  How did that happen? Well, there was something of a conspiracy to lie about the origins for openers, insisting that it must be bat soup instead of the lab next door that was one of the few working on coronavirus gain-of-function. When Trump cut off international flights he was called racist and Democrats made a point of attending Chinese New Year. Then when everyone was feeling cooped up, a spring protest just made for liberals to get out and walk around for an afternoon pops up around George Floyd - a sad case and worth a look and some complaining, but not a poster child for racial injustice.  Too ambiguous. Kamala Harris said just before the 2020 election that she wouldn't trust any vaccine that came out under Trump. Donald deferred to the states a great deal and his symbolic actions were sometimes destructive. But the important thing was that he must be blamed - and more people died. Oh gee... too bad, mate.

No one thought that any kind of coup was under way on Jan 6, 2021. People worried that the protest might get out of hand and some people might get hurt or even be killed. But mostly people laughed nervously. The few out of the many had some dangerous characters but were mostly ridiculous. News outlets got lots of up-close action photos. Did they get those at the other protests that year? Or in Ukraine?  Or of Mexican cartels? One guy carried off a lectern and my son said "It's clear he was just taking a political stand." Trump's behavior was atrocious, yes. He made things worse when he had at least some power to make them better. But The Insurrection? Really? Yet that is the approved pearl-clutching terminology now, as if we all suddenly holed up in our houses and started living off canned food in fear. 

DEI has some nice ideas behind it, but it should not be an overriding value, or we get dead people in Los Angeles. And Chinese universities start outcompeting us in key areas.

Consequences of lying.

The Wheel of Fortune

I had monthly lunch with my St. Paul's guys, and as we are over 70, we talked about medical issues again, however much we try to avoid it - our own, our spouses', our friends'. We mentioned assisted living facilities that parents or friends had gone to and the exorbitant costs for services we could still easily provide for ourselves. Yet for those that seemed best, allowing the most flexibility and freedom, we wondered when the optimal time to apply would be.  Some have ten year waiting lists, and we try to calculate. It helps if you Know Somebody, but the main criteria are your immediate need at the moment of moving in and your ability to pay.

It occurred to me that we are in the exact reverse situation we were in fifty years ago, trying to impress a college that we had amazing abilities, especially cognitive, but very little ability to pay for their services, so that they would offer us as much as possible. Now we are attempting to show we are on the verge of qualifying for significant services, especially ones to compensate for cognitive decline, but have an unquestionable ability to pay for them indefinitely. We once wanted to look as competent as we could, now we are trying to shade toward showing off our incompetence.

I am thinking that Boethius, he of Wheel of Fortune fame, might have some apt quotes for this reversal, but none are occurring to me.  That's what happens when one is but a dilettante, with partial knowledge of many things.

Quicker Than Camels

 Gifts of the Magi

"And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way."

Dutch Skating A Century Ago

 

Pine Haven Boys Center

I worked at a school for "emotionally disturbed" boys 1976-1978.  Most had been diverted from juvenile justice because someone hoped that they weren't really criminal and could be rescued with some sort of a behavior program. It was run by an Italian order of priests and brothers. We used corporal punishment, such as having to kneel in the hall at night. The bigger boys preyed on the smaller ones a lot, and a lot of staff physicality stemmed from breaking up fights or restraining one boy from another. But sometimes boys were struck.  I remember doing it once myself, and if you told me I had done it other times I couldn't contradict you. I now wish I had done much better at holding my temper, especially verbally. I suppose it is good for an arrogant young man to learn that there are things he is just not good at. Yet not at the expense of others, which this was.

I got a call from one of the boys today, now sixty. I remembered a good deal about him, though he is one of the few whose memory for events is greater than mine.  He updated me on who had done hard time for murder, who had been murdered in prison, who had died of overdoses.  He is seeking civil damages because one of the staff, who I vaguely remembered, had sexually abused him. I know a couple of the boys had grown up to end up on sexual offender lists in various states, but didn't mention them. 

I doubt we made anyone any worse.

I wonder if we did any good.

Are Beliefs in Free Will and Determinism Genetically Influenced?

Plenty of ironies in the topic, rather like the joke that  Kierkegaard disproved the idea of determinism, and believed he had been destined to do so. 

The preprint The Freedom to Believe in Free Will: Evidence From an Adoption Study Against the First Law of Behavioral Genetics essentially strikes a blow against the idea that our belief in free will is influenced by our genetics. 

Philosophers and psychologists alike have long debated the etiology of beliefs about human agency. Recently, empirical investigations have shown that lay beliefs about free will and determinism represent stable and important individual differences. Despite a perennial interest in the sources of agentic belief, genetic and environmental influences on such beliefs have never been studied. We administered a battery of items assessing these beliefs to a unique sample of 394 adoptive and biological families with adult offspring to investigate the origins of agentic beliefs and their relationships. We found significant differences between adopted and biological offspring and between the parents of such children, particularly in beliefs about determinism. Biometric modeling revealed especially surprising results: unlike the vast majority of traits studied in family designs, agentic beliefs appear to be weakly or not at all heritable. Since genetic factors might be regarded as typical of the "initial conditions" in philosophical thought experiments about free will and determinism, it is especially ironic that beliefs about free will and determinism may be among the traits least influenced by genetic differences.

This is one of those ideas where you walk around and and stop suddenly and say "But wait, then that means..." Fun.

Joke du Jour

For those who don't read Maggie's Farm, there is this.

Joke du Jour.

Muktuk

I ate whale New Year's Eve, in the form of muktuk, which is the skin and blubber together. John-Adrian brought it from Nome.  In general you cannot buy it, you can only trade it with a Native for another subsistence food.  In his case he trades his smoked salmon for the stuff, which he loves.  "I could eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner." I thought it was almost flavorless and tough to chew. Rubbery. His wife and daughters don't like it.

Three of the four liked Moxie when they tried it, though, so I guess we are even.