I did not consciously choose this to go with the previous post. I'm not sure there is any connection beyond both being about the early 1900s.
"Put on you gingham gown, dear..." I didn't think of gowns as being made of gingham that much. Maybe in 1911 that was more common - or maybe the meter just had to scan and the alliteration was nice. It comes from a Malay word for striped cloth.
I have noticed with the pre-1940 songs that they often have longer introductions than we are used to now.
Book group is finishing A Time of Gifts and moving on. It is travel writing, and some consider it the peak of the form, of an older man recalling with the aid of his diaries his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933, when he was but 18. I have found it difficult, and eventually decided this is because it highly descriptive, and I have little gift for visualisation. As I think I have mentioned, I even dream in dark sepia tones. Conversation I can recall. Ideas I can recall. I get outside references, though unevenly. I can be remarkably unaware of the obvious. ("Oh, their names are George and Martha! How did I miss that?") I have read enough in my time that I can recognise something that is supposed to be a telling detail, like a clue going by in a mystery novel, but the detail tells me nothing. I'll bet people point to this section as an example of good writing.
One of the other members had read the book before, liking it the first time but growing irritated this time. He found the author to be unrelenting in showing off his vocabulary and knowledge of the arts. "Okay I get it! You've read a lot." The first time around, the reader might be eager and even grateful to learn new stuff. The second time through one would be more concerned with what deep understandings this had led the author to, and Fermor does not pay much direct attention to this. The reader has to intuit this from subtler cues. I guess. I didn't bother, myself.
So I cannot recommend it myself, but I can say for those who like this sort of thing, they will like this. There are some remarkable incidents with the people he meets.
A commenter at Cat Rotator's Quarterly reminded me of this passage from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.
It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.
And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.
You will notice that it improved rather than hindered his ability to face down evil in others.
I am not an especial Rowling fan. I read the first of the Harry Potter books and liked it well enough, but was not excited. The new magic was too dense. People were doing magical things everywhere. In the older fantasies the magic was often more of a poorly understood natural ability with actual magical events ancient and accumulated, brought forth for a purpose into essentially non-magical worlds. Still, she was clever, could write a good combo fantasy/school story and my family loved her.
I have become more of a fan in recent years when she has come under attack for cultural and political reasons. She has struck the balance between firmness, even harshness, and graciousness and sticking to reason rather than fashion.
Ann Althouse ran a post about her this morning which is among the best I have seen on the topic. Now that the Harry Potter stars have become adults and have taken to a very showy form of trashing the woman who made them famous, Rowling has subjected them to adult treatment. I doubt they will like it.
David Foster and I were trying to remember a joke today to tell to Jean, known to some of you as The New Neo. We kept screwing it up and couldn't get it right. I finally figured it out.
A man is given the gift of time travel for one event. He decides to go back and kill baby Adolph Hitler. He comes back discouraged and his friend asks him "Didn't it work?"
I'll be having lunch with David Foster of Chicago Boyz and Jean of The New Neo in Epping today at The Holy Grail. If I recall, they have Old Speckled Hen there.
Science Fictions has Insectageddon, trying to figure out whether we really are in danger of losing bees and other insects.
Tune in to hear how, in exactly the same way as they affect our episodes on psychology and psychiatry and medicine, really difficult issues of measurement are at the bottom of the entire debate.
Google Admits to Censoring YouTube content, and that the Biden administration pressured it to, but maintains that the two are unrelated. Snopes accepts its reasoning. I wouldn't. Snopes is better than it was a few years ago, but still not on my completely reliable list. This follows Zuckerberg admitting approximately the same thing in August.
Also at the Chicago Tribune, some letters about dogs in restaurants. I am opposed, but it probably based on a professional bias of hating the ridiculous claims about some unapproved "emotional support animals."
AI Isn't Replacing Radiologists, with dramatic graphs
I was a paid subscriber to Rob Henderson but no longer am. This one with Louise Perry looks intriguing enough that I might try again. A lot about intra-elite competition.
According to Powerline, this was not the indictment of Comey that we wanted, and it might not fly. Thanks to Maggie's Farm for the link.
It keeps giving me feeds of punks getting beat up because they deserve it. I must like that more than I thought.
Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, has a book out, The Sword of Freedom. I have only read a few excerpts. I used to read a lot of spy stuff, both fiction and nonfiction. I would have been a terrible spy myself, but in the pre-computer days I would have been a good cryptographer. I don't know what use any intelligence agency would ever have had for me. Maybe I should have gone and knocked on the gate at Camp Peary when I lived down there and see what they had.
Update: Also new from Free Press Born Lucky by a son with High-Functioning Autism whose dad shepherded him into adulthood. Excerpt here
But my dad knew that there wasn’t a teacher or therapist who could step in and suddenly make me fit in. The world wasn’t going to adapt to me, and he wasn’t going to try to make it. There would be no therapists or accommodations. If I was going to succeed, he would have to adapt me to the world.
Seen on FB: We shouldn't use plastic skeletons for Hallowe'en, they are bad for the environment. We should use all-natural locally sourced skeletons instead.
This guy is obsessed with the kicking game and special teams, and this is a good time for it. There were 8 field goals over 50 yards this week and one for 64. There are also new strategies for blocking kicks. A few punters are able to reliably back the return game way up and average 50 more yards/game in field position. But it's kickoffs where you are going to see new strategies for a while until it gets sorted out which one is best. This knuckleball style kick looks promising. It looks like a nightmare to field when you know large people are running at you quickly.
I am not allow to embed, so I will just link to his channel. It's great fun to pay close attention to a part of the game that most of us miss.
Punishment is often just, and good for the maintenance of society. We have had the discussion before about the Christian understanding that mercy is superior, though I always provide the qualifier that mercy does not exist except upon a foundation of justice. We should not try to be more merciful than God.
But that is not today's subject. I want to contrast justice not with mercy, but with practicality and usefulness. When I worked with sexual offenders (or supposed sexual offenders) one of the difficulties was getting the staff to keep focus. Staff would want to punish them, or as the prisons do, allow them to be punished by the conditions and other inmates, because they were horrifying people who deserved no better. One difficulty of this is that when one staff member moves to punish, another will move to rescue. That will in turn set off balance/counterbalance effects, especially with personality disorders. From this comes shift wars, department competition, challenges to authority and other ills.
A speaker at a conference described the more important problem succinctly. Your first job is to protect the public. He went on to point out that if we punish offenders until we are bored or spent, and some rescuer intervenes to give them added freedom or even discharge and they reoffend, then we have failed in our primary task. I have heard nurses mutter about castration for child molesters. But even the castrated can still molest. The desire to punish may be just, but it may not be the best choice.
I am seeing a lot of this on the right in politics and culture these days. I understand it, and it is often just. People who deceived us, got rich off us corruptly, or insulted us deserve punishment. But the more important task is to get those agencies functioning correctly, so they do not do further damage. If we punish all the bad guys at the DOJ, the CDC, the ATF, and EPA but they just just lay low and start again - or their replacements capsize the boat on the other side, we will feel deeply satisfied for a while, but we are not better off. Sometimes punishment is the best choice. Sometimes not.
Keep focus. This is a Keep Your Eye on the Prize era now.
Just to get you in the habit, Graph Paper Diaries has the second entry in its True Crime series The True Crime Replication Crisis. I did not see that fusion of topics coming.
Grim, who knew little about Charlie Kirk before his death (as did I and many others) offers that we are learning two lessons, "one from those who loved him, and another from those who hated him."
Over at N-N-N, Police Killings: Perception Vs Reality
Many believe US police kill hundreds or even thousands of unarmed Black men every year. The real number is about a dozen.
The American Boy by Theodore Roosevelt. We don't get many uses of the word "pluck" in context these days in the US.
Toward a Sociology of Unmasking by Jason Manning. I had a cartoon on my office door years ago of an old man on a beach chair looking out to sea, saying to the old woman next to him "I've come full circle. Things are what they seem." We love being in the know with hidden information, known to but a few.
Peer-Reviewed Research: Men find looking at nearly-naked women distracting But have they proven it really? The men were distracted from their card games. Are we sure that generalises?
No link, but just wondering what Trump's continued turnaround on Ukraine means. The simplest explanation is that Trump believed he could negotiate a deal with anyone, but has decided that Putin is impossible and is saying "screw you."
A site to keep you up on the latest research. The Age of Arthur. I am currently reading about the Picts.
Update: Bernard Mees is a strong believer in the historical existence of Arthur, with contemporary record of him leading the battle at Mount Badon in 516 and his death in 537.
"Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. " The Philosophy of Composition.
It certainly seems that way when you are under its spell. It looks different from the outside.
Poe did not publish the poem in his lifetime. It was discovered after his death.
Althouse puts up the video of Steven Colbert claiming he is the only martyr in late night. She thought using the word martyr was ill-advised given current circumstances.
A lot of black people and a few white ones were martyred in the Civil Rights era, and everyone has been trying to look just as oppressed and endangered since. Martyr carries an extra implication, that you are being sacrificed not just because of who you are and what you have done, but because you represent a group. "I'm doing this for all of you," is the secret message being Colbert's declaration. They hate all you wonderful people so they are punishing me." Trump didn't use the word, but said something similar a couple of years ago telling the crowd "In the end their not coming after me. They're coming after you - and I'm standing in the way." When it is a killing, and there is a fair connection between the victim and a cause I can see the justification. But not every Hispanic who is killed is being killed for that reason alone, or even mostly. Losing your job? Okay, that's a bad thing, though with celebrities it doesn't inspire pity, just anger.
We have martyr inflation. People want to look like they are just as brave, their cause just as noble, and their enemies just as evil as more traditional martyrs.
...does not cause autism. That's it.
I had been neglecting to read Cremieux Recueil, one of my favorite stats guys. But I was cued to check out his latest on the HHS dropping their declarations of what causes autism. It's just madness. There is decades of abundant evidence that there is no connection, and we can go back and relook at the data old and new with fresh eyes and see the same thing. Vaccinations do not cause autism. This nonsense is already causing the reemergence of measles and it's just starting. Ann Althouse is taking a "you made your bed" point-of-view that this is an opportunity to demonstrate Tylenol safety, because we are going to have tremendous before-and-after numbers with many participants. I think that is overly-optimistic. They are already ignoring clear information now, more information will not change their minds.
Death will change other people's minds. Eventually.
Update: Douglas2's objection noted. And ad hominim is a bad sign, yes. Cremieux's belief is that the increase in diagnoses follows from increased funding to treat that diagnosis, something cynics have been suggesting for at least a decade. I would put it differently. There would not be a clamoring to fund for ASD diagnoses if there were not something happening at ground level. The increase in 25% in a year likely includes some pent up demand, and some shifting of special needs children to slots where there is money to treat them. But the money does create demand. The beds at my acute hospital were very few and very expensive. If we opened a new unit of 24 beds, it would be about 6 months of sighing with relief before we were bursting at the seams again with a waiting list just as long.
With all that said, the choropleth map below does seem to fit with the idea that one year your kid had "autistic traits," and the next was diagnosed with autism. That is not a cause of autism, but a cause of society's response to the symptoms. Put part of the reason we are having a panicked search for causes, even minor and indirect ones, is that there seems to be so much more of it. We notice the symptoms more, it seems different from what we remember from our own childhoods, and we learn that there is significant genetic influence, which we can't fix. So we look for things to blame that we might have some control over.
Notice that Earl Scruggs is on guitar here, not banjo. He's pretty good.
Science Fictions just did a podcast on Brain Training. I have some things to add but will also use a lot of their info here. Not a full summary, they've brought more out of the pantry there.
I wonder if our belief in brain training is conditioned by our analogising it to physical fitness. Challenging your muscles making them stronger is called hormesis. We know it works for muscles and Nicholas Nassim Taleb believes it works for a variety of systems. We have an idea that it works on cognitive abilities because it doesn't look that different from ordinary development. Fifth grade is more difficult than first grade. But in practice it is hard to differentiate between people who get smart because they challenge themselves and people who like challenging themselves because they are smart. We are comfortable with the idea that challenge makes us smarter but the evidence for that is surprisingly weak. Doing crossword puzzles definitely makes you better at doing crossword puzzles. There is mild evidence that it makes you better at other word puzzles, the more similar to crosswords the better. This is why the programs and books have names like Brain Gym and Brain Training.
But what we want is for there to be brain exercises that help us think better in general. Something you can do that sharpens your focus, staves off dementia, improves your memory. Lumosity claims to imnprove memory. Processing speed. Problem solving.
William James believed brain function could be improved, and tested his theory on himself and his students in a fairly solid way, long before experimental psychology developed procedures. Quoting from Science Fictions' episode on Brain Training "...back to William James. After many days spent memorizing Milton's Paradise Lost, he observed no savings in memorizing a different set of 158 lines from (Victor Hugo's) Satyr at 57 seconds per line. Admitting that he was tired from other work for his second bout of memorising, he recruited four students to repeat the experiment, two of whom showed savings and two of whom did not. Given such weak evidence, James held to the view that one's native retentiveness is unchangeable."
If only that had been the end of it, but James was one of the originators of the myth that we only use 10% of our brains, and our capacity is shamefully underused, which fits loosly with the brain exercise model.
Starting with physical activity itself, might help during testing simply because of blood flow. The evidence for some cognitive improvement is not good, but there is some for regular activity sustaining what you have. The reason that it looks like improvement is that inactivity decreases the flow of blood to your brain, but only a few percent, and once you have that circulating, you don't get more improvement. There may be some small effect of having that blood flow often, but it is small, and this is one of the areas where publication bias is strongly suspected. No one wants to hear it has only negligible results, so if your study shows that, you don't even submit it.
The health journal from Harvard Medical School assures us that different kinds of activity, like journaling, musical instruments, or dancing are what do the trick. If you read closely, you will see that any proof beyond "A lot of smart people think so" is curiously lacking. "You have to always challenge your brain in order for it to grow." Grow. What do you mean grow? Like a muscle? Like a tree? This is very much in line with the reposted article I just put up about Experts.
As for stimulating different parts of our brain, that is also related to an older model of the brain, that various abilities are contained in discrete areas of the brain. fMRI's show clearly that the whole brain network is involved constantly in every kind of cognitive activity. There are differences, but your whole brain is used at least a little, unless something has gone wrong. We have been down this road before, with the Graduation 2010 program in Daviess County in Kentucky. Every child in the public school system was taught chess, a musical instrument, a foreign language, and folk dancing for 13 years, to see if it created any overall improvement. It didn't. Disappointing News.
Here are the claims from Verywell Health, Verywell Mind and if you like your unsupported speculation to have a lot of scientific temps in it, California Learning Resource Network will tell you about "synaptic plasticity" and "cortical reorganisation." These are the things that would be affected if this mental decathlon worked.
We have seen a similar example of the effect of these interventions for decades, back to TV commercials in the 70s. These training modules are part of a complete breakfast. Or they contribute to improved circulation. Or they encourage heart health.
They are selling you Lucky Charms as healthy food.
I had a post about Experts in 2016, based on a cautionary opinion from Nicholas Nassim Taleb. This was pre-Covid, before we polarised about the very word "experts." I think he makes a good distinction that experts really are good at what they are good at, but become no better - or perhaps even worse than the interested amateur - when they start guessing. You can follow it up at the link, but the basic idea is that because they spend a lot of time speculating in their own field, they produce not only new insights, but also shared errors that need to be unlearned before they can improve.
The great Indian mystic Yogi Berra once said "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." There is also the story about the economist who saw something working in practice and ran hurriedly back to his study to see if it worked in theory.
I have linked to the post instead of reposting it because the comments are good.
I used to be comfortable driving long distances, driving down to southern colleges or military installations for family, going five hours each way for a day conference, that sort of thing. As I have gotten older, sharing 20-25% of the driving has become more important. I can daydream just as well or even better, but sleepiness slows me down with stops. I like driving medium distances now, and actively look for occasional excuses to do so. Small adventures look promising but not enough to drive far. Helvetia, WV is a small Swiss-founded village that has a Swiss restaurant in season and some old Swiss-influenced buildings. Nearby Pickens has a maple-syrup festival in March. But we have lots of maple syrup events in NH, so the latter is not much of a draw. At most it might choose my date for a Helvetia adventure.
I ran across a Russian Orthodox Monastary that keeps silence 9am-9pm and is available for retreats and spiritual direction. It is even farther into WV, on the border with Eastern KY. As I have only driven through WV on Interstates, getting into the mountain roads looks interesting. But not interesting enough to drive 13 hours, because we have back roads in the mountains here in NH, and silent retreats an hour or two away - though not together. The skiing areas have Swiss-looking chalets, also.
To cut down on driving I could fly into Pittsburgh and rent a car and still have plenty of back roads. Yet Tripadvisor is not showing me a lot I want to see in Pittsburgh. Any decent art museum will show you things you can't get elsewhere, which makes them good secondary stops wherever you go. Ditto small specialty museums. But even though the National Lighter Museum, the National 4-string Banjo Museum, and the Frontier Drugstore Museum are all only a half-hour outside of Oklahoma City in Guthrie, the only other draw would be to watch the Oklahoma City Thunder play basketball. Which they do in Boston once a year anyway. If I were in OKC for some other reason, those would be good add-ons.
I could see the Red Sox minor league stadiums in Salem VA and Greenville SC, and if I were driving that, I would be passing through Grim's territory and add him to the adventure. But Grim has talked about his own adventure coming here, and we read each other enough to be in frequent contact anyway. Plus, that doesn't connect that well to the West Virginia visits, unless I decided to do an entire 10-day Appalachian tour. Which I might. I have friends in the Shenandoah Valley as well.
So these are separated half-adventures and quarter adventures that don't add up to a whole reason to go, but hover in the background in case some other half-adventure comes along to attach to them. But for the moment, they look like a lot of money to spend for an uncertain payback.
We will drive up to Quebec City next month. That's a whole adventure for my wife and a half one for me.
There was an article about some of the nurses at my old hospital having gone through the shooting death in the lobby in 2023. They talked, as psych nurses do, about the self care and care of each other that is needed to just get through but still "be available" for their patients. One supervisor told the others "You can't pour from an empty cup." I think that part about caring for each other is true. I am suspicious of self-care, however much it is on everyone's lips these days.
Perhaps the opposite is also true, or more true. It may be that we can only pour from an empty cup. The cup-filling, cup-pouring analogy might lead us away from the truth. Scripture uses the analogy of an overflowing cup, but also one of being an empty vessel.
Ann Althouse has a post about UK police invading a woman's home in order to see her underage daughter's phone. If you watch the video, you will empathise with the mother and be horrified at the police. But when you get the other side of the story, that the video has been edited, leaving out the part that the daughter is not suspected of merely viewing inappropriate material, but of committing an actionable crime against another girl. Your empathy might shift to the police, who have a victim out there to protect.
A third possibility is that you may still think the police acted wrongly, even if legitimately investigating a crime, and not empathise with either party very much.
It shows how easily empathy can be manipulated, and why it is dangerous.
I used to follow the decathlon as a boy. Not too many 5th-graders knew who CK Yang and Rafer Johnson were, but my obsessional qualities were showing even then. My interest waned over the years, but it does still catch my eye. World's Greatest Athlete is true, but it doesn't translate well to spectators. The greatest athletes in sports could likely have been good decathletes. Calvin Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Bo Jackson would likely have excelled there. Today, someone like Mookie Betts would be a good nominee. We think that Decathletes might be stars in other sports if they had specialised, but I wonder about that. Competitive sports do require some all-around ability, but each sport requires a few particular abilities at not only the 99th percentile, but 99.9th. I suppose that is true of any ability: writing, music, leadership, organisation. The best all-around musician might not be a star, and a star might have some things they aren't superlative at, offset by the few things they are.
I enjoyed this enough to watch it all, but that's probably enough for a year for me.
When I added Earl to the sidebar (Wind Off The Hilltop), we both noticed that his was not one of those sites that automatically bumps up the latest post when it is on a sidebar. He thus promised to let me know when he had an update so I could note it. I don't know if the list is long because he gathered a lot of things and put them up just now or if he suddenly remembered he was going to send them to me.
It gives a security risk notice because of the site certificate, but I just clicked through with not problem. If you are worried about it, you can go to his home page and then track them down.
Sometimes events come together in remarkable coincidences. Good friends had a horse, Wylbur, who has been frequently sick. The five children and some of their friends were quite attached to him. He had colic, his intestines all tangled, and died this week. Everyone was worried how the children would take it, especially Willow, the 7th-grade daughter. They decided to have a funeral for Wylbur, and a few people from outside the family attended. Getting a hole big enough for a horse is a project, but the Dad shares a backhoe and a hole was dug.
We hadn't heard anything, and worried what was up. One of our sons saw the children at youth group on Wednesday and asked how they were doing. They didn't get what he meant until he asked about the funeral, whereupon they started laughing about it telling him. Shortly before the scheduled funeral, they realised that no one had figured out how to get Wylbur INTO the hole. Where he was lying wasn't that close. So the Dad looked it up online and found that someone had successfully lifted a horse with ratchet straps.
So he ratchet strapped the horse to his tractor. Then he drove for the hole.
"The parts of the horse that were ratchet strapped came with it, but the rest of the horse just dragged behind." The children started screaming because it looked like Wylbur was going to lose his head, but Dad kept going and managed to get all the horse into the hole. The children decided afterwards that this was all really quite funny and have enjoyed telling the story. It's probably a bonding moment they will share on holidays when they are old.
Today at the library program one of the last NH commercial fishermen gave a talk about his new book of reminiscences. One of the best ones was bringing a net with whale goo all over it to the dump, which tried to refuse it. I thought immediately of the Dave Barry story about the exploding whale and associated it with dragging Wylbur across the landscape. As I was wondering what I was going to do about all of this, Earl Wajenberg sent a bunch of new links from his site which included...Dave Barry's story about the exploding whale. I am not linking to it here, but you will be seeing it presently. If you have any other funny stories about dismembered animals, now's the time.
I am including the film of the exploding whale here, because putting it in Earl's list from Wind Off The Hilltop would distract your attention from everything he put there, including some serious writing.
Please do not bother me with your pedantic accurate history. All available records tell me my ancestors from the area were commercial fishermen and small householders of mixed farming. Bah. It's all a lie. This woman and these guys are my real ancestors.
My wife remembers that the first lesson of chem lab was "hot glass looks exactly the same as cold glass." An excellent bit of information to have.
Let me add to it: "Hot cast iron looks exactly the same as cold cast iron."
I will be adding Gurwinder to the sidebar. This post of his, and the conversation that follows, is a good example why. It begins
In a 2022 newsletter, I gave one reason why I think leftists are more likely than rightists to celebrate opponents’ deaths...
Some people try to keep their sidebars thorough, as a friendly nod to the many writers they find stimulating or agreeable. I have been increasingly weeding mine, limiting it to people I actually go and read. I derived great pleasure from Dwarkesh Podcast for a few months, but seldom find the interviews all that engaging these last few months. I have learned so much from Manifold and Conversations with Tyler over the years that I am reluctant to remove them, but I click through and listen only about 20% of the time that a new episode drops now, and I don't listen to those all the way through.
Please go and check those two, looking at the recent topics BTW, to see if the interviews attract you. Talk me out of dropping them. I don't know if it is because they have used up their best material* or that my dilettante mind has just tired of their favorite topics. I dropped Maggie's Farm during Covid because of too many annoying people in the comments - too much of a temptation for me. But I go there all the time, so it is went back on. Just be warned about the comments. Even the people I agree with I skip in irritation now.
Even Astral Codex Ten seems less gripping. Yet ironically, because of that I will be adding it on. I have enthused about it so often that I resisted plumping for it further, as I have a couple of issues on which I disagree sharply, and didn't want to fully endorse it. Now that it is lower down my list, the objections bother me less.
When I go to a site I like I often check out their recommended list as well. I am far more likely to do this if the list is short. Also, I know your time is short and I want to put my best goods out front.
*I suspect this is why The Great Books podcast shut down. When you are over 300 books you could do one more Shakespeare, but the drive is less.
Steve Stewart-Williams at N-N-N, Imaginary Enemies.
The total sample size across the five studies was just under 5,000 participants.
Six Key Findings
1. Both Sides Exaggerate the Other Side’s Agreement with Extreme Views
Even authors that use symbolism come to deny it. They get tired of people making tight allegorical claims. I looked up Piggy's glasses and got more than a half-dozen explanations - admittedly related. The first three explanations of what Robert Frost's "The Rabbit hunter" means were quite different, but all three were asserted confidently. Tolkien said he hated allegory even though he wrote one ("Leaf by Niggle"), because of the brainless symbols people kept finding. Beorn symbolizes the adaptability of man, his greatest strength. I suppose that's not false. The short Father and Daughter that I just linked to has a first comment that tells us that the bicycle wheels represent the circle of life.
Hemingway said in a letter "The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit." He did allow that people could find meanings in his work, though he seemed to be a bit grudging about it. As he should. Writers evoke.
Update: Grim illustrates in the comments that I am at least partly wrong, in thorough fashion. Wonderful list.
I find myself saying this in my head often. Ideas for gun control. They Don't Work. People are just sure that something - some "common-sense" gun control should work. And if by chance it does occur to them that their idea won't work, then they are sure someone else's similar idea will do it. Educational ideas, a new crop every September. Sometimes they even look like they work, until we try to scale them up. But let the subject come up, and the same ideas get floated repeatedly, just dressed in different clothes. Mental health. Poverty. Say those words over at Maggie's, or at Althouse, and you will sometimes get some better, or at least more original answers - but even there, usually not. Kids succeed if you have high expectations. If we didn't give tax breaks to billionaires, we could afford this. Other first world countries don't have this problem. Did you look under the seat cushions?
Nothing more to say. Mostly just whining, but also grateful for the people here. You're a smart group.
I finally had time to go check for myself. One can find overclaims about him on both sides, though I have a strong opinion which strays farthest from the truth. His opponents claim he was mean, and abrasive, and provocative. Because he also supported Second Amendment rights they claim that he thus supported allowing people to be shot. This is the same as saying if we didn't have motor vehicles we wouldn't have motor vehicle accidents, but they get unwired whenever guns are mentioned and lose the ability to do arithmetic and engage is basic logic. Guns equalize the weak against the strong and have done wonders for the rights of the weak, oppressed, and reasonable against the merely powerful. Even today More guns, less crime is not an enormous numerical advantage, but it is measurable and significant.
This week I read "I am not in support of what happened to Charlie Kirk. But Charlie Kirk was in support of what happened to Charlie Kirk." I don't recall Kirk being in favor of assassinations, so this can only mean "Well, he was a gun guy, he should expect this." Horrifying. Try that on the dangers of skiing, or power tools, or walking downtown, or anything else you did today and see how the logic holds up. It'sjust a self-righteous way of saying "He deserved it."
On the other hand, his supporters have taken to saying "He was just going to college campuses and talking to people." We recently covered in Stuart The Just what it means when someone is "just," or "only," or "merely" doing something. It usually means they were doing more than that but are trying to back away from it now. Kirk was abrasive and confrontational. It is fair to say that "He didn't suffer fools gladly."
Well, as Eddie Izzard said "Who does, really?"
Sometimes we should be abrasive and confrontational. I'm not claiming that Christians should never go there. Yet in general, we are asked to suffer fools as gladly as we can, recognising that this is most of humanity and (gulp) sometimes includes ourselves.
I had not heard of Warren Farrell, but his Top Ten Quotes over at Nature-Nurture-Nietxsche are interesting
4. “We always look at the ‘Fortune 500,’ and we say, men in power, but we don’t look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren’t properly supervised for safety hazards.”
The 100% CI is a recommended stats and metascience site because they are over my head but look good to me, and they are funny. The article linked by Works in Progress is What's In a Correlation? by Julia Rohrer.
It’s a less helpful feature if one or even both variables have a unit that is actually interpretable. For example, researchers have calculated correlations between birth order position (first-born versus later-born) and personality traits. I personally don’t know what a standard deviation of birth order coded in such a manner means; “How many SDs is your birth order position above or below the mean?” is not a common smalltalk topic. But I can easily make sense of “On average, first borns score 0.2 SD higher on intelligence”, so a semi-standardized metric would probably be more helpful for communicative purposes. Likewise, I’ve seen people report correlations between personality variables and income, but I have no idea what to make of one SD of income.
In the essay you can also find out that there is a measure of life satisfaction related to attitudes toward sex doll ownership. You can infer from that, because I noticed, that you can be head researcher into topics like this with pretty grad students and associate professors as a career, at least if you work at Nottingham Trent University. Dr. Rohrer has fun discussing the limitations of research like this while using it to illustrate lessons about correlation.
It's not going on my sidebar, but it may make it to bsking's at Graph Paper Diaries.
From The Fantasticks. I had forgotten that it was based on an earlier play by Edmond Rostand, more famous for "Cyrano de Bergerac."
Is this my favorite song? Might be. Knowing it in the context of the play gives it extra poignancy (if such a thing is possible), and the only time I saw it, my father played Mortimer, magnificently.
Shreeda Segan at the Free Press introduces us to TBPN, a Silicon Valley insider talk show.
Guests include some of the most influential CEOs and investors in tech. People like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. “I now only respond to VC cold emails/DMs if they’ve been on @tbpn,” tweeted Cy Sack, the head of business systems at Anduril.
Not my world, but if it's yours you may want to get on it.
I would take better to the theology that "God is still speaking" if it didn't seem to always come up in the context of a single doctrine that a group had a special interest in. It seems like special pleading. When I played in a band in college, guys would come up and say "Y'know what this band really needs? A harmonica." My roommate would reply "Hey, that's interesting! You wouldn't happen to play the harmonica would you? Yeah, I thought so." He would then inquire what they guy liked to play and politely dismiss him on that account. The same thing would occur with girls who thought some of our songs would be improved with a female vocalist.
In mental health, art therapists would tell us that our patients needed more art therapy. The list goes on.
Over the last 20 years, the idea has become strongly attached to the blessing of gay ordination and gay marriage. When it broadens at all, it seems to have settled on being a late-60s, early 70's liberal. Not even an early 60's liberal. God was apparently not speaking quite clearly enough then. To be fair, they would say the Church was not listening clearly enough.
There are brands of conservative Christianity that don't use that exact phrase, but mirror the concept. These are usually around end-times prophecy, and wouldn't you just know it? Our own Reverend Elijah Blanchard and his wife Blanche are anointed preachers bringing a powerful message that is going worldwide.
This was a lot of the trouble with the various Gnostics in the early Church, that they believed in continuing revelation, as if Jesus had just missed coming to the final necessary conclusions. The Montanists had this new convert to Christianity Montanus, who may have been a priest of Apollo or Cybele (a Great-Mother goddess. That happens a lot, too.) Whatever he had been before, he claimed to be a prophet in the 100s. About the same time Marcion had new ideas about Jesus and edited the Gospel of Luke into the Gospel of...Marcion.
It never stopped. In the next century Manichaeism, from the prophet Mani, went for it all and claimed to supersede Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus with an elaborate dualism that included bits of every religion in a thousand mile radius. Make that two thousand. Mohammad was the new and final prophet until Baha'ullah became the final prophet much closer to our time. In between The Albigensians had this new (not really) idea of dualism, that the material world was evil and the spiritual world was good. Rinse, repeat for other new philosophies. Ferdinand and Isabella though that they were going to usher in the Last Days by getting the last of the Muslims - and oh yes, Jews now that we are at it - out of Spain which would then rule the rest of Europe and who know? Maybe the whole world. Rinse, repeat for other secular rulers.
Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russell, Joseph Smith - new revelations, and the 20th C is chock-a-block full of them. Are there any out there who believe in this ongoing revelation idea who don't have something to gain from it? As I said, I'm not opposed to the idea, but it doesn't seem to have a good track record.
Before people get into it, yes I have thought of this in terms of slavery and am not convinced that it qualified as a New Revelation in the church. I admit the defining of terms could get messy, but I think I could at least get the defense of that started, though others with more intelligence and wisdom might have to finish it.
This was my brand when I was young, but it waned in popularity over the years of my smoking. They were supposed to be very different because they were cured and thus less harsh. Well, maybe. The brands are largely the same, but we spoke about them as if they were distinguishable, in much the same way that we thought each of the American lagers was identifiable. Menthols are certainly different, but they are much like each other. (No one has ever explained to me why those are more popular with Blacks.) Nonfilters are like each other and lights are also very much like each other. The lightness comes from the holes that are punched in the filter, which caused the smoker to take in more air relative to the smoke. Without noticing it, smokers would grab the filter at the holes to intensify the draw, making it more like a regular Marlboro or Winston. Ultralights had more holes, sometimes in two rows. My Dad smoked two packs of Luckies a day, though went down to one (in secret) after his multiple bypass surgery. My mother switched from Winstons to Merits, and my mother in law smoked Mores because they went out easily when she left them in the ashtray and went to do something else.
I am not sure what the "treatment" angle was about Old Golds, but several brands were advertised as being recommended by doctors for calming the nerves.
Folk etymologies occur most often when languages first come in contact and need words for each other's objects and actions. It is something like sparrow-grass for asparagus (though that might more properly be considered an eggcorn). An unfamiliar word changes in pronunciation to match with a word in English of similar sound. People then think that the word must come from"sparrow grass," because the grass part seems obvious and there must be some old story behind the sparrow part.
Crayfish from ME crevice, small freshwater crustaceans, which is from 13C Old French. That is in turn from Frankish krebvitja, related to kreb, the Germanic ancestor of crab. But it was not a "cray-fish." It just sounded like "fish" must have something to do with it, being right there in the stream and all. The "veess" sound morphed into "fish" by association. The pronunciation "crawfish" was uncommon in England but took off in the American South, likely tied to an unknown regional preference in the British Isles.
The first reference is in 1612, " I have caught with mine angle pike, carpe, eele,..creafish, and the torope or little turtle." Alexander Whitaker, in a letter from Jamestown. Angle meant hook, so you can see how it is related to the other type of angle, meaning a bend. It was already becoming a synonym for rod and reel. The art of angling to catch a fish also involves the angle at which one casts the bait or lure in front of the fish.
If you were alert to that "torope" in the sentence you may have connected it to the modern word terrapin, meaning a sea-turtle. Tortoise is used for land versions of the shelled reptile, and turtle became a more general word for either in North America. But we are not done with the oddities. Turtle originally meant a bird, as in turtle-dove. To turtle meant to speak fondly of a sweetheart, but later took on the meaning of fishing for turtles or of being turned over, unable to flip back or get up.
I was sure there must be some version of turtling that referred to hunkering down or retreating into a protected place, but I didn't find one. My OED is a few decades old, though, and it may have started coming into play. If I were to write "After Miss Bascomb humiliated him in front of the ladies, Algernon turtled into the background for the remainder of the evening," People would know what I meant.
There have been fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic this year. There are none on the horizon. Six to ten hurricanes were predicted; there has been one. But because we are only halfway through the season, the NOAA assures us that we are still in the range of the predictions. I don't know enough about hurricane prediction to say they are wrong in that. I will say that it sounds wrong.
Weather varies.
Graph Paper Diaries has put up the Intro to its True Crime series. I think she is back enough that I have to put her back on the sidebar, no longer inactive.
I will not, generally speaking, be commenting on court procedures or rules of evidence etc. There are many other people much better placed to do that than I. What I will be covering is how I’ve covered data here in the past: how should you as a media consumer evaluate a claim you hear? If you watch a true crime documentary or listen to a podcast, what should you look for? How should you think about the different claims? One of the reasons I’m not naming the specific case I got familiar with is because I think most of this should apply to every case you hear about.
The Algorithm has become like The Matrix, including all-there-is, hasn't it?
I have bad news and good news. The algorithms steer you, but they also reveal you. You are clicking because it figured out what lures you will take. Flash of red! Nibble. Caught. It doesn't lie. You're busted, and it is likely worth some reflection what you keep clicking and then thinking "Well that was a waste of time."
Here's the good news. That's not the real you they are catching, just your automatic responses. It is largely emotion-driven. You've been hacked. It doesn't care whether you are a better person underneath. You probably aren't. You certainly aren't any worse.
I get irritated that people don't get that these are fictional characters in those videos and treat them as real. Long before social media I had complained that people treated book characters and movie characters as real and their situations as real. Philip Yancy not only took Jean Valjean as an example, but proof that a certain approach would work in interacting with others. A couple started bringing a handgun when backpacking after seeing Deliverance. It's not that those readings of reality aren't true, but that they are only true by accident of the author getting it right. If the author decides to sell you an untrue reality and you fall for it, it feels exactly the same. See also news.
Keyword: Fiction. Or more generally, Art. Do you know what it's called when an artist gets you to care about something? Empathy. Even if it's false and propaganda, it's still your empathy being targeted. The algorithms have found ways to hack into your empathy. Which makes two levels of worry, because empathy is itself a hack, a shortcut to deciding who and what to care about. It is likely an evolutionarily useful shortcut. But you've been hacked. Someone has discovered your passwords.
Core Europe: I once killed time in a meeting by trying to list all the European countries, then their capitals. I stopped at about twenty countries but suspected there were more. The next month I got up to thirty and wondered what the real number was. Malta? Azerbaijan? Really? Fifty is the approved number, but I do not approve.
How to win Rock Paper Scissors
New Theory. I still like it.
Always check what the Zero Point is
Suspicion I expand on an idea from CS Lewis's Miracles. In Mere Christianity he noted that people will say there is no foundation to morality but in the next breath get angry at you for cutting in line. Those refuting Lewis's claim that Materialism cuts off the branch it sits on do much the same. They find technical arguments that show there remain possibilities that the evolution of approximate reasoning is enough to trust it. But they don't believe it themselves.
This will be the last from 2012 for a while. I get carried away at times.
Near the close of worship today the pastor reminded us that with terrible recent events - and he listed a few - it was important that the Church be the Church and that we not give up hope. He reminded us that we need to forgive our brothers and sisters. As I had been strongly resenting my literal brother for things he posted this week, it hit home hard. The events of this world go away, but we remain. What we accomplish matters much less than how we accomplish it.
That's what I've been telling everyone else for years anyway. It seems I don't quite believe it for myself.
Well, I missed this one. It came up indirectly in class today, I made a short leap, and the sermon confirmed it. At Jesus's first miracle, another of those announcements of "Look at what God is doing here," the old wine is not as good and eventually runs out. It's not unacceptable wine. It's fine, but finite. The New wine is better and not only does not run out, but remains in abundance. After the guests leave there will still be lots of wine, same as the pieces of bread left over after the Feeding of the 5K.
It's a tight little symbol of the Old Covenant being superseded by the New. The OT by the NT. I mentioned this sheepishly to a young woman in the worship band, admitting I had never seen this before. A smile played at the edge of her mouth, as they say. "Old wineskins?"
Hmm, yeah, I missed it even with the hints. They teach them well at Grove City College, don't they?
One of my book groups is reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Right out of the gate in the introduction was the line "The greatest happiness is to be found in longing." (The Autobiography of Goethe) I disagreed with it, remembering CS Lewis's take on the statement "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive." If there were never any arrivals, then there would never be any hopeful travel. That seems logically very solid to me. I never much thought about it again.
But with my long Nostalgia Destruction Tour, long after the final result was inevitable, still I kept on, making sure - as with Pooh and Hunny Pot - that is was going to be a disappointment right the way down. I used words like nostalgia and reverie to describe it, but the words longing or yearning did not occur to me. This time it jumped out at me. I do enjoy longing - not to the extent that Werther or even Goethe did, but I recognised the idea. With nostalgia now discredited in my heart, I find that I long for something to long for. I like the thing itself. I have harbored an opposition to longing, suspecting that it is unhealthy. I associate it with whining. Yet the Psalms describe longing for the Lord, and Jesus tells his disciples that prophets longed to see the days they are seeing now. Even more, Jesus himself tells Jerusalem that he has longed to gather it as a hen gathers her chicks. So longing cannot be entirely unhealthy or forbidden. Longing for longing may not qualify.
When I first heard "Take Me For Longing" by Alison Krauss it irritated me. No, you silly girl, you want to be loved for your good qualities, your kindness and faithfulness. Any beagle can long for you. Don't encourage other women to think this way. Spoken like a longtime husband and a father of sons. Nor do all young people want to be yearned for. It seems to make a fair number of people nervous. But some are built for longing, and some hope to be longed for. I had forgotten that. It's dangerous stuff, but when I related it to my own longing I get it. There is a pleasure in it. A dangerous pleasure, but not necessarily a forbidden one.
If you worry that your longing is inordinate, reading The Sorrows of Young Werther may be the cure of it. He longs for nature, he longs for greatness of soul, and mostly, he longs for Lotte, a betrothed woman whose fiance he loves almost equally. I have always tried to limit my exclamation points and tried not to gush. Werther revels in it.
When I first came here and looked down into that lovely valley from the hill, the way the entire scene charmed me was a marvel. —That little wood!—Ah, if only you might walk in its shade!—That mountain-top!—Ah, to view this vast landscape from there!—And the chain of hills, and the gentle valleys!—Oh, to lose myself amongst them!—And I hastened there, and returned without having found what I was hoping for. Oh, distance is like the future: before our souls lies an entire and dusky vastness which overwhelms our feelings as it overwhelms our eyes, and ah! we long to surrender the whole of our being, and be filled with all the joy of one single, immense, magnificent emotion.—And then, ah! once we hasten onwards, and what lay ahead becomes the here and now, everything is just as it was, and there we are, as poor and confined as ever, our souls longing for the elusive balm. In the same way, the most restless of travellers ends up pining for his homeland once again, and discovers in his cottage, in the arms of his wife and amidst his children, and in the labours that are necessary to support them, that joy he sought in vain in the wide world.
Just stuff it, willya? Who asked you? You're acting like a poodle trying to hump someone's leg. I find it hard to believe he was such an inspiration to the young of Europe in the 18th. They must have been longing for Romanticism pretty badly. It was hard through much of the book to take seriously that Lotte might ever consider being in love with him, or that her boyfriend then husband admired Werther so greatly that he let him hang around. But then Lotte goes into a little speech of her own at the end and she's just the same, perhaps dialed down only 10%.
A canary flew oʃ the mirror and perched on her shoulder.—‘A new friend,’ she said, coaxing it onto her hand, ‘which I got for the children. Isn’t he a dear? Look at him! If I give him some bread he flutters his wings and pecks oh-so-daintily. He kisses me too: watch!’
She held the little creature to her mouth and lovingly pressed it to her sweet lips, as if it were capable of feeling the bliss it was enjoying.
‘He shall kiss you too,’ she said, and held the bird towards me.—Its little beak moved from her mouth to mine, and when it touched me with a peck it was like a breath of love, a promise of pleasure to come.
‘His kiss,’ I said, ‘is not wholly free of a desire; he wants food, and these empty endearments leave him dissatisfied.’
‘He will eat out of my mouth, too,’ she said.—She offered it a few crumbs on her lips, and smiled with all the joyful happiness of innocent and loving fellow-feeling.
It just seems it would be hard to wake up to a wife like that every morning.
She does make a wise observation near the end, as Werther grows madder and rushes toward suicide.
I fear, I very much fear that what makes the desire to possess me so attractive is its very impossibility.’
Exactly.
Over the last few letters Werther becomes completely unraveled, unable to contain his emotions. His last missive is a fevered, overwrought riffing on the poet Ossian. It wasn't the real Ossian (Oisin) of course, but a Scottish poet claiming to translate/channel/interpret the Celtic bard. It is long minutes of listening to our hero clutch and breast, wail and bury his face in his hands. It reminded me of an angrier explosion of emotion in Chap 9 of The Great Divorce.
...come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs, the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the "haves," what they thought of them
Werther believes he has a great soul but has only a shallow one, crabbed and deprived of air. There is no room for anything but longing. A very good cautionary tale for the nostalgic to keep in mind.
Ethan Strauss and Pablo Torre were discussing the True Crime interest, which is primarily female versus the Sports universe, which is predominantly male. Strauss suggested that sports is about renting war, and True Crime is about renting death. That didn't ring true to me, and I sought a better description. I think both are about identification with others. Sports is used to physically identify with someone, while True crimes is about identifying with a victim or the unjustly accused.
Play with it and see if you can improve on that.
Women interested in sports other than what their children are playing often use it as a social identification with their town, state, or region. Men do this as well, but are more likely to be fans of both teams and of select players whoever they play for.
I saw a clip of someone accusing Charlie Kirk of being a Christian Nationalist. He separated the two terms, saying that he was a Christian and a nationalist, but didn't really know what a Christian Nationalist was. That is another sliding definition when people want to accuse you, throwing any additional things they have heard about Christian Nationalists into their basket of accusations.
I wonder if they would believe the same thing about National Socialism, that if you were both of those words (As a Swede or a Greek would be) you must be a Nazi, or an International Socialist - that if you are both an internationalist and a socialist you must therefore be a communist. But I jest. They would deny that it works that way. Only in one direction, when they want to find a stick to beat you with.
Noah Carl at Aporia shows that all the common theories, left and right, are inadequate explanations. He offers some additional ones but believes it is ultimately going to prove multi-variate.
Update: Grim, check the comments
Update: It occurs to me that because I only vaguely knew who Charlie Kirk was, it is possible that the people of the left my age may not have heard of him before this week. Now that I think of their comments, there was usually reference to one of the 3-4 out-of-context quotes that made the headlines in the last few days. I used the word disquieting below. This is one step worse, but the best word is not occurring to me. But now really...really...why say anything?
Update 2: The Free Press gets it. Even without being a subscriber you can see the first part. Signalling our tribe is more important than basic human decency.
************
People who felt positively about Charlie Kirk want to say something positive, or inspiring, or constructive about him. That makes sense. That's what we do when people die, not just famous people.
I understand that people who make their livings giving political opinions think they are obligated to tell everyone what they think about Charlie Kirk even if it's negative. They aren't obligated, but I can see why inertia would make them reflexively just say something. I am growing tired of the repeated "I don't support what happened to Charlie Kirk, but he did spread hate..." But. Content providers. They think they hae to say something.
But I don't understand why everyday people feel like they need to go on Facebook or TikTok and say anything negative about him, however much they disagreed with him. Why say anything at all, or at least - save it for later. I say this because I have seen people who I know personally, who would think of themselves not only as nice people but much nicer than average (though they likely wouldn't say that). Being nice has been part of what they have shown to the world for 40, 50, 60 years. Years ago I would have agreed with them that they were much nicer than I was* - and I would have agreed with them on that until recently.
It is dangerous to assume that the terrible examples that the left and the right take to show the world how terrible Those Others are represent the general reality. Out of 350,000,000 people there are going to be some terrible ones of all kinds. But these are not cherry-picked worst case examples. These are people I know. In one case it is a person I will worship with tomorrow morning. And of course my brother and cousins are prominent among them.
It is just disquieting to read people immediately saying "I'm sorry about what happened to him but!...but!...but!...oh, and it is terrible about his wife and children." I went looking at my usual sites and I do not see the same about the deaths of people they disagreed with. In one case a writer had something very critical of Jimmy Carter just before his death, but said as good as he could after.
Say it later. You are just showing how quietly consumed by hate** you are, unable to contain yourself. I don't worry that you will cheer if it somehow came to be my turn, but I am pretty sure now that you will shrug.
*Okay, maybe only half of them.
**Given the update above, maybe it's more virtue signalling
Magical Systems Thinking This is a thing we all know but have a hard time generalising to a new problem.
Le Chatelier’s Principle provided an answer: systems should not be thought of as benign entities that will faithfully carry out their creators’ intentions. Rather, over time, they come to oppose their own proper functioning. Gall elaborated on this idea in his 1975 book Systemantics, named for the universal tendency of systems to display antics. A brief, weird, funny book, Systemantics (The Systems Bible in later editions) is arguably the best field guide to contemporary systems dysfunction. It consists of a series of pithy aphorisms, which the reader is invited to apply to explain the system failures (‘horrible examples’) they witness every day.
I already posted How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Irrational by Gurwinder in my Friday links, but rereading it in order to extract a quote to send to someone, I am convinced it needs more emphasis.
The main use of empathy is to help people form personal connections with others. It’s a social guide, not a moral or judicial guide. And yet people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, and in this capacity it becomes dangerously delusional.
A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathize with people, only with the people we think they are. We take the bare bones of what we know about them, and flesh the rest out with assumptions. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for them, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealize them.
Empathy is an act of opening ourselves up to the feelings of others, and in doing so, we become vulnerable to feelings that can cloud our judgment. If we identify too strongly with someone, our emotional connection to them can cause us to behave like their lawyers, engaging in mental gymnastics to defend our idealized image of them.
When I see that something happened in 1955 I automatically think "Oh, I was two years old then." For 1958 "Kindergarten with Miss Ashley" and even have some pictures in my head. For 1951 I think more vaguely "Was that the year my parents got married?" I am not in that picture. For any year before I was born I can build a picture from other things I know, but in none of them am I there, anywhere on the globe. Solely in the Mind of God, and He seems content to not give me any pre-AVI information I haven't earned. My parents were born in 1927 and 1930, and I sometimes piece together family history from them into my launching point. Childhood pictures of my grandparents are only hazily connected to the people I knew later.
Older people are aghast what young people don't know about recent history, but I recall my knowledge of the 1910s was nearly as good as my uncle's. Before that, he knew much less than I did, and he was an intelligent man. I suspect at least part of the "kids these days think that life in the 80s..." comes from this pinning ourselves on the bulletin board of eras we know but playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey before that until we learn hard information.
I don't think this is absolute. My granddaughter plays a mean game of Chronology because one of her anchors is Disney history. Steamboat Willie has a visual representation in her mind. Photos or buildings or various arts that we know send shafts of light back into an era. But even then, realities like poverty, lack of medical care, outhouses, poor roads, and repetitive food are not what was usually portrayed, so we miss the feel of eras before our own.
There is data about threats of violence to members of Congress in the last decade. It starts off very low in 2016, rises through 2020, declines in 2021 and starts rising again. It is very high already in 2025, way above any previous year.
You can read that as conservative wackos feeling emboldened by Trump, or as liberal wackos being angrier under Trump. Or both.
Be careful out there.
This may be the last one. Perhaps the discipline of daily links is good for me, but I am avoiding self-improvement more and more these days.
West Shawnee Amusement Park Closed in 1966, the rusting rides are still there. Because there were deaths there, an incident from the area before the park was built was plucked out as the explanation for the curse which reportedly overshadows the place. A forensic psychologist discusses why we attach such stories to places.
From Fergus Mason's Substack Singer Ellie Goulding says protests against migrant hotels make her “ashamed to be British”.It’s all very well for her to say that, but Ellie Goulding lives in a six-bedroom country house surrounded by a big brick wall, and further surrounded by an area of the Cotswolds that’s at least 96% white.It’s easy and cost-free for Goulding to say we all have to tolerate migrant hotels - because her kids will never have to walk past one on the way to school.
A conversation
Bill Maher: I know you think liberals want to destroy the family.
David Mamet: No, no. I don't think they want to destroy the family. I think they have destroyed the family.
Bill Maher: But they didn't really do it on purpose.
David Mamet: Wait a second. What you're saying is I didn't know it was loaded, right?
Bill Maher: Yes. Okay. But liberals actually think they're doing good. I know a lot of times it's really just about making them feel good, which is what's so obnoxious. But they're not actually trying to destroy...
David Mamet: We understand as dramatists is that nobody ever did something for a bad reason.
Remember the 12 y/o Scottish girl who was charged after trying to defend herself and her friend against a man who tried to attack her and then taunted her? The video was shared by "right-wing" accounts on X who accused the man instead. Those accounts also identified him as a Bulgarian Roma immigrant. The Scottish police warned the public about "misinformation" being spread about the incident. Well, The man in question, Fatos Ali Dumana and his wife have now been charged. and yes he is a Bulgarian Roma immigrant.
Denmark has banned the burqa in schools as well as in public, stating it will promote adaptation to Danish culture. I get it, but I worry that it may have an opposite effect of keeping women farther out of view and girls away from school.
People are detecting so many fascists not because there are more, but because there are rewards for detecting them but not punishment for being wrong. The same thing happened with sexism and racism. "You can detect sexism in Emily Bronte? Hold my beer. I can detect sexism in Betty Friedan. " It is the Princess and the Pea again, with only a True Princess able to detect the fascism under so many mattresses. Being correct has nothing to do with it. It is not even fully an exercise in criticising one's opponents. It is a performance for one's friends, showing that you can execute a triple salchow and land it.
Taylor Swift has become the girl she used to resent. My granddaughters adore her. I don't mind her, really. As for the rattcheting up of sexiness, it happens to most of them. That can't be Katy Perry. That can't be Miley Cyrus. That can't be Taylor Tomlinson. It was that way when I was young, too. That can't be Hayley Mills. That can't be Julie Andrews. It's a world with different pressures.
I've had my day talking about modern dating, when I was fascinated by the topics of intrasexual competition, dating apps, and burgeoning polygamies back in 2022. I still have some interest, especially with Kyle still searching. But I don't think I have much to add to the conversation. Works in Progress interviewed social scientist Alice Evans (transcript available), who substack talks about these issues a lot, in a way that doesn't make me crazy, at least when I graze a bit.
How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Crazy. Freeing the Menendez brothers. Fits also with my post about Kind People Loving to Hate. Or maybe the one about pets. I don't know. It all looks familiar somehow.
Why Romania Excels in the International Olympiads. Jordan Lasker over at The Palladium thinks it is extreme stratification. The few at the expense of the many. I am going to reread this and perhaps come back to it, as two of my sons Transylvanian Elementary and Middle schools.
Sex Differences Don't Go Away Just Because You Want Them To
This is not a topic I know a great deal about. Because of working in mental health I have had more contact with refugees than most people, but I'm not sure that generalises. I have immigrants in the family and know plenty of legal ones. I did just hear today that 98% of asylum requests are bogus. Even if that is an exaggeration, it does change the picture for me. I had always pictured that some large minority of asylum requests were real and an equivalent group was marginal but not entirely ineligible, while another 25%? 33%? 50%? were gaming the system. I had never imagined numbers as high as 98%. But it was Razhib, who likely knows more than I do. As a Bayesian calculation, my current estimate for fraud moved higher, but not that high.
The quantitative change in illegal immigration became so large that it has created a qualitative change. Birthright citizenship and "anchor babies" was something you used to hear people mutter about, but nothing ever got done and no one was taking to the streets for it. Not all countries have birthright citizenship. It tends to be mostly in the West. But as over 7 million came in under Biden, that's a lot of possible anchor babies.
As it is not possible to have hearings for 15 million people here without permission, the current strategies are designed to discourage people from coming here or not risk staying any longer. If they don't stay away or go home on their own there isn't going to be much we can do. I suspect that is behind the drama of ICE raids and choosing people who would have thought themselves beyond being worried about anymore. They want self-deportation.
Small businesses, especially in service trades like restaurants or hotels, complain that they can't stay in business without hiring illegals. They can't compete. If we emphasise that second sentence instead of the first one it makes sense. Of course those industries could continue if they didn't have illegal immigrants. They just can't compete with each other. E-verification is apparently not that difficult, but it is opposed by small businesses - often Republican - as too difficult.
The legislature has largely abdicated its responsibility to be a co-equal branch of government and work on difficult problems. It has receded to working out the details and marginal cases that the other two branches of government decide. This may account for the growth of legislatively-induced civil service, as it focuses on smaller and smaller details and need to feel important. Mission creep is unrelenting. It certainly doesn't help.
The other two branches step in to fill the void and compete with each other. Whichever party isn't getting its way in a particular branch complains that the Executive/Judiciary is too powerful. They stop saying that in the next election. The executive needs to rein in the judiciary! The judiciary needs to rein in the executive! No one seems to talk much about reining in the congress anymore. It has confined itself to trench warfare on the front lines, with predictable costs of all sorts and lack of movement.
Just a thought. In the discussions about tech and innovation competition with China, it is often mentioned that their population is three times that of the US, and now that they are ramping up, more and more of them are going to be educated as well or even better than we are. But is this 3x really true in terms of talent, or even potential talent? China is getting some researchers in select fields from outside their country, including some Europeans and even Americans. But in general they don't import talent. The Anglosphere has a shared talent base with the US getting first pick in most cases, and Continental Europe, India, and even Japan are more likely to come here than go to China. That may change, and according to Razhib Khan already is changing, but isn't the 3x a little misleading?
As recently as a year ago when I wrote about the movie The Quiet Man dowries puzzled me. If a husband (and husband's family) is getting this free labor, shouldn't they be paying money to her family? Bride-price is exactly that, and is the custom in many cultures.
Isn't dowry just a woman getting her inheritance before her parents die then, as she moves off to be part of another family?
Americans have less and less sex. What a relief. I thought it was just me.
Deepnewz appears to be gone.
State and County Level Data Can Be Plausibility Checks For Your Pet Hypothesis. I'm sure that under Bethany's gentle guidance, people will now stop just saying whatever dumb idea occurs to them on the internet. Bsking keeps talking about posting on some intriguing subject, but choosing another intriguing subject instead.
Explosions, Shootings, and Stabbings did not used to be so common in Sweden. Primarily in the cities. Still less than here. You are not supposed to mention that these events are concentrated among immigrants. Names are seldom included for that reason.
We have found this GF site useful. Find Me Gluten Free.
Did I mention that my granddaughter attended the same summer studies program at St. Paul's School that I did 55 years ago and adapted a Go Baby Go! car in her engineering program? These projects are usually given to colleges, but ASP does it after 11th grade.
