Holding The Center

The Evangelical Covenant Church strives to have unity in essentials and freedom in debatable matters.  Easier said than done, obviously as there is debate even about what matters are essential. Currently, the American Church and the American churches ae increasingly split along political lines. Paul Stewart writes in the denominational newsletter about the need to remain in discussion with each other even in disagreement in Holding the Center. I would go further. Remaining in discussion - how we get to an answer with other Christians - is likely more important than the answer itself. One can push that too far, abandoning standards for the sake of pretend niceness, but divisions that look clear in one generation become more mixed in the next. The central questions of the Covenant founding were "Where is it written?" and "How goes your walk?" I think those remain solid.

 From our beginnings, the Covenant has resisted making every secondary conviction into a boundary marker of belonging. That instinct came from the pietist belief that the Christian life is deeper than intellectual alignment and that unity in Christ can survive real disagreement. These are not incidental features of Covenant life. They reveal the shape of a people who have often chosen the harder, slower, more human work of staying together over the easier satisfactions of ideological clarity.

Ryan Burge's Graphs About Religion, which we have discussed here including recently, mentions more often than the denominations themselves do that the clergy, especially at seminary and headquarters level, are more politically liberal than the laity. This is true in the ECC as well, and it does have effect.  When there are books for discussion that circulate in denominational programs, they are much more likely to be from a liberal POV as a default, even if the discussions are real. 

I have heard angry and unfair things from both liberals and conservatives in my congregation, and this is ongoing. But we hold the center at the moment, and you can see bumperstickers of many types in the parking lot, both on Sundays and during weekly programs. 

To Improve The World

We are reading Kaplan's Revenge of Geography, which quotes Hans J Morgenthau's 1948 Politics Among Nations with reference to Thucydides 2,400 year-old The Peloponnesian War.  

The world "is the result of forces inherent in human nature." And human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos). and honor (doxa). "To improve the world," writes Morgenthau, "one must work with these forces, not against them." Thus, realism accepts the human material at hand, however imperfect that material may be. "It appeals to historical precedent rather than abstract principle and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good."

I don't want to pretend to be wiser than Morgenthau - actually I do want to pretend that but have an immediate caution that this is likely ridiculous - but I don't think that is quite what is happening. We do take those forces into account, but each of us allows any one of them to blind us to the other two.  We focus on the bent sense of honor in Moslem countries, or their fear or self-interest, but never it seems, on all three at once. As we likely need a three-legged stool of motives to convince ourselves to do something, leaving out one of the motives above opens up a slot for us to zip in one of those absolutes and pretend it is not a cat in a dog family among the others. Honor has elements of desire for not only praise, but justice. Self-interest is nearly always loyalty to a larger group, and thus includes selflessness. Fear includes caution, planning, counting the cost. Thucydides' motives are the abstracts, applied at a discount among fallen mankind.

The abstracts reflect the sun too well, not too poorly, and we cannot bear to look at them directly.  Certainly not three at once, without tarnishing them back into something manageable. Yet the New Testament does instruct us to look at them directly, using the language of searing brightness at every turn. 

Paul Erlich

I had a girlfriend in 1971 who was assigned The Population Bomb in some (HS) sophomore social studies class and was very excited to tell me about it.  She became seriously ZPG and did in fact never have any children. Neither did her two brothers, so her two brilliant parents from Nebraska ended up having no grandchildren.  (Note to Jonathan and Ben - this was the girl who I competed with for a month over who could memorise the most decimal places of pi.) Erlich was on everyone's lips in those days, including enough career-first people, male and female, to have a significant influence on the fertility crisis which was already invisibly underway.

To be fair, he might have only provided a convenient rationalisation. 

He joined the Prometheus Society  in the late 1980s*, when it still had over a hundred members worldwide. He was fawned over, as was Marilyn Mach Vos Savant, another person with name recognition.  He is perhaps the best example I have run across of what IQ is and is not. I don't know which of the several entrance requirements he met, but reading his interactions (he wrote no articles for the journal), he was clearly quite intelligent.  Plenty of candlepower. But he was unable to deal with the slightest criticism and dug in immediately when challenged, often using condescension and credentialism as weapons. Some of his main assertions in the book had already proved overstated and perhaps simply wrong by 1989, but he gave not an inch. I did not have any direct arguments with him, as I felt my role as president required as even handed an approach as I could manage. He had not yet lost his famous - okay, nerd-famous - bet with Julian Simon, but his critics in the society were already pointing out that the was just about to lose not only lose the overall bet on the combined prices of five commodities, but on all five commodities individually. 

I used the analogy of being physically powerful enough to forcefully twist in a screw that is cross-threaded to his ability to make an inaccurate theory look plausible by sheer intellectual force. I still like that metaphor and am annoyed that it never caught on.

*It not only still clings to existence with about forty members, but gratifyingly still lists me as a previous officer.  Best figurehead honor I ever had. Amazingly, I am one of the longest-serving presidents, which is less prestigious as the last few have resigned or died in office with no visible diminution of cultural presence for the group. It will look great in my obituary as long as no one looks beyond the most superficial level of what, precisely, was entailed in this international power.  Rather like being Winter Carnival King in 1970 or voted Most Self-Actualised in the year I barely eluded arrest. I think I have collected other worthless honors over the years.  Dare I look any closer? 

Best Ever?

 I saw in a Free Press subheader that Whitney Houston's National Anthem was the best ever, so I had to have a listen.

 Super Bowl 1991,  ten days after the start of the war in the Persian Gulf, for context.

 

 

Bureaucracy Preventing Cures

Ruxandra Teslo reports cases of people willing to fund and develop experimental treatments themselves being unable to get permissions, even with active cancers.

 Around the same time, writer Jake Seliger faced a similar situation while battling advanced throat cancer. Like Sid Sijbrandij, he was willing to try anything that might help. The difference was that Seliger was not a billionaire. He could not hire a team to navigate the system on his behalf, and he struggled even to enroll in the clinical trials that might have offered him a chance.

A system originally conceived to safeguard patients has gradually produced a strange and troubling outcome: the mere chance of survival is effectively reserved for the very few who possess the means to assemble an army of experts capable of navigating its labyrinthine procedures.

One of these treatments was a personalised mRNA vaccine on a dog. Veterinary medicine has nearly as much bureaucracy as that for humans.

Two from Aporia

 Earliest Firemaking. It is difficult to detect the difference between using natural fire and anthropogenic fire from archaeology, but the difference for humans is great.  Being able to cook food on demand, especially meat, is a big step forward in reliably improving digestibility and energy availability. This find pushes the evidence back to 400,000 years ago.

Indirect Measures of Racism and Discriminatory Outcomes.  Direct reporting of what people say their attitudes are explains almost all of the variance. Unconscious bias is present but accounts for very little of the variance.

Marriage Counseling

 Some things in counseling are indeed predictable. The trick is not in discerning what is happening, but in getting the patient to see it.

Forty Fingers

Flamenco & classical guitarists who now do remarkable things with other genres as well. Recommended by my brother over lunch while we were in Chelmsford today for a funeral.

 

Recent Links

 Restacked by David Foster: The UK does away with jury trials after 800 years.

3 Links from Rob Henderson: 

 Who Engages in More Science Denial, Left or Right? Steve Stewart-Williams at N3 teases this at the perfect spot for his audience.  I think his sympathies would ordinarily be with the left, but his own areas of research have been vilified by the institutional left, drawing the attention of what is called the Dark Enlightenment, the right-wing intellectuals who have been similarly driven to dark corners. 

Do I feel sorry for those moderate Democratic voters, who are almost 50% of the party but controlled by the younger 10% who are communists and democratic socialists? Not at all.  As a psychiatrist friend of mine used to say "You ordered it.  You eat it."

Fallacies Don't Exist.  (They are made-up textbook examples that don't occur very often in real life.)  I don't think I agree. They may be much rarer than advertised, but I encounter people all the time who don't settle for the weak versions, such as "it's to their advantage to believe this," or "that site isn't always reliable" but go all the way to the strong versions: "They are only trying to sell you pills," or "You can't believe anything they say."

From  The History of English podcast (transcript available) Old England and New England How the East Anglian accent and vocabulary in the 1630s influenced the New England accent, some of which is still detectable.

 

Popular Science Books

 The wonderful Eric Hoel is at it again: Why do most popular science books suck? 

A bookshelf is laid out before you. It’s stuffed with photorealistic covers showing off black holes, the curvature of Earth seen from space, glossy pictures of double helixes, along with faded images of the Vitruvian Man. Everything is impossibly exciting. Did scientists just uncover the God Particle? Who killed Pluto? Wait, I killed Pluto? Here’s what’s definitely going to happen at the end of the universe. Here’s why 90% of the universe is a mystery and we have no idea what’s going to happen. Here’s a theory of consciousness that solves the problem by ignoring it. Here’s an idea others have said a million times, but wait, this time it’s in an original jargon. What if you are your brain? Ever think about that? And did you know everyone is the outcome of a complex interplay between environment and genes? Also, heredity is 100% deterministic for everything. By the way, a technology that doesn’t exist yet is going to change the world. Cephalopods are smarter than your dog!

I think I need to plead guilty for encouraging some of this. 

The Five Deaths of the Faith

My most infrequent book group just finished GK Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. The others had not been familiar with it, though many of you have read it.  I draw your attention to Part II Chapter VI, The Five Deaths of the Faith. 

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.  

That would be a classic Chestertonian inversion.  We have said for centuries that because the Church remains, that Christianity has never really died. GKC looks over the landscape and says "actually, it has, many times. But it has been resurrected after each death." John 12:24 unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. (KJV) This is not something that happened once, but repeatedly, just as the physical seeds do.

The Faith is not a survival. It is not as if the Druids had managed somehow to survive somewhere for two thousand years. That is what might have happened in Asia or ancient Europe, in that indifference or tolerance in which mythologies and philosophies could live for ever side by side. It has not survived; it has returned again and again in this western world of rapid change and institutions perpetually perishing. Europe, in the tradition of Rome, was always trying revolution and reconstruction; rebuilding a universal republic. And it always began by rejecting this old stone and ended by making it the head of the corner; by bringing it back from the rubbish-heap to make it the crown of the capitol. Some stones of Stonehenge are standing and some are fallen; and as the stone falleth so shall it lie. There has not been a Druidic renaissance every{291} century or two, with the young Druids crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge has not been rebuilt in every style of architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo of the Baroque. The sacred place of the Druids is safe from the vandalism of restoration.

But the Church in the West was not in a world where things were too old to die; but in one in which they were always young enough to get killed. The consequence was that superficially and externally it often did get killed; nay, it sometimes wore out even without getting killed. And there follows a fact I find it somewhat difficult to describe, yet which I believe to be very real and rather important. As a ghost is the shadow of a man, and in that sense the shadow of life, so at intervals there passed across this endless life a sort of shadow of death. It came at the moment when it would have perished had it been perishable. It withered away everything that was perishable. If such animal parallels were worthy of the occasion, we might say that the snake shuddered and shed a skin and went on, or even that the cat went into convulsions as it lost only one of its nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine lives. It is truer to say, in a more dignified image, that a clock struck and nothing happened; or that a bell tolled for an execution that was everlastingly postponed.

Yet when you read his illustrations of this, those who know history keep coming up against interpretations that aren't...quite true.  There are things that looked like possible re-interpretations a century ago, but now are partly - never fully - impossible to assert. Chesterton is still a man of his time. He gets pieces of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation wrong. We know more plain facts about the Dark Ages now, and Gilbert's read on them is skewy. Reading through the chapter, I feel his premise being undermined at several turns, and wonder if I will have to abandon it entirely. But strangely, when I redraw the lines to map out the changes as I now think they occurred, I find the the principle has held up even as the old evidence vanishes.  The new evidence is just as good, perhaps better.  It is a re-enactment of the very theory he is advocating.

So read the chapter and be not dismayed by any spot where it looks as if it is teetering on the edge of the cliff and about to fall. A new path opens up to the side and skirts the danger. 

Links from 2014

 Voted Best Ever Religious Joke 

Tobacco's But an Indian Weed 15 years now since I quit.

The Copernican Theory  James explained how part of it is theoretically easy (but practically difficult) to prove.

Like Grandma Used to Make 

Flawed Leadership Bethany, there are parallels to the Karen Read case here.

AI "Alignment"

 The Most Important Question No one is Asking about AI, a podcast by Dwarkesh Patel. It is based on the standoff between Anthropic and the US Military and Pete Hegseth, and military need versus the right of private companies to refuse to engage in such dicey areas as mass surveillance in every specificity the government insists on. Grim has been talking about this especially in The Anthropic Dustup.  Dwarkesh very rightly points out that conservatives would not have liked AI companies signing off on this under Joe Biden. He does see Hegseth's point as well, however, and has suggestions about what he should have done instead (and still could do). 

AI future and alignment is a Patel specialty, and he sees new problems that will be popping up in 2027 give the projected reduction in cost of mass surveillance year over year. That is, the costs will reduce by 90% each year, so that smaller and smaller actors can manage them. It's pretty alarming.

Mondo Duplantis Again

When you are this good, you can game the system.  He gets paid every time he breaks the world record.  He just set it again at 6.31 meters.  Before that he set it at 6.30 m...6.29m...6.28m...15 straight times in 0.01m increments. It's early in the season.  Expect 6.32m to come soon.

 

Salty Dog

 

The Right To Giant Congress

 David Speiser guest-posting at ACX is persuasive about twenty-seven more states passing the Congressional Apportionment Act. It is the only one of the original twelve of the Bill of Rights which never did pass. (The eleventh passed in 1992, becoming the 27th Amendment to the Constitution.) It would increase the number of representatives in the House from 435 to 6641.  I usually hate gimmicky ideas like this, but stick with him.  He has put a lot of thought into the ups and downs of this. 

Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction. Our various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. This fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them. 

Third parties would finally get a reasonable chance to gain a seat.  Both the initial and the ongoing publicity for that one would be a foundation for others. 

Won’t Congress Become Unmanageable?

At first, probably yes! 

But some immediate self-correction would have to take place.  It's an intriguing read.

Recent Quotes

 Only in one direction. 

The enemy of my enemy is statistically not my friend, but my enemy. For those of us who are math-raised, who apply +/- directionality to grammar, culture, and conventional wisdom, this is unexpected.  In fact, I would like to see more data on this.

"In today’s attention economy, one way to increase audience engagement and news virality is to single out victims most likely to trigger moral outrage." 80% of homicide victims are male, but the most famous true crime victims are not even close to mostly male, more like the reverse. The "preferred victims" that drive attention are women and children. From an academic paper quoted by Bethany at Exhibit Asterisk  I commented there.

Why we don't notice good things as much. 

And from the same source, learn to live with uncertainty.   Related: people with Borderline Personality Disorder are especially unable to tolerate uncertainty.

 

 

The Battle of Mount Badon

King Arthur's opponent at Mount Badon and its location are not known with any certainty, but Bernard Mees makes the case that it could have been Cerdic at Badbury Hill, between Oxford and Swindon. There is a hill fort there from a thousand years before the Saxon invasion, and bractates from the 6th C have been discovered by metal detectorists. One was recently purchased from a car boot sale in the area. 

Tax The Billionaires

 The Moral Crisis Behind the Billionaire Wealth Tax* by Ruxandra Teslo.  We hear a great deal about how such wealth taxes will cause rish people to leave their states, or move their money overseas. We also see statistics about how little this would provide in revenue, that in fact taking all their money wouldn't fund the government. But the moral case is less often made.

 In recent years I have come to think increasingly in the language of virtue ethics: that certain things must be done because they are right, and that in the long run what is right tends also to be what is also “useful”. Institutions, like individuals, cannot long survive when they betray the virtues that justify their existence. Intellectual life, in particular, rests on a fragile moral foundation — honesty, seriousness, and a devotion to truth that must remain independent of immediate political or strategic goals.

*Which reminds me of Eat The Rich, by PJ O'Rourke 

Public Disorder

America and Public Disorder by Chris Arnade, author of Dignity a few years ago. He contrasts the public areas of American cities with the rest of the world. 

That is not the case for the rest of the world, including where I am now, Seoul. My train from the airport was spotless, and so is the ten-mile river park I walk each day here, which given that large parts of it are beneath roadways is especially impressive. In the U.S. it would have impromptu homes of tents, cardboard, and tarps, smell of urine, and the exercise spots that dot its length probably couldn’t exist because of a fear of being vandalized.

You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder1.

He walked all over America, and is now walking all over the world. The article is not remarkable for its originality, but for the opposite.  We all see it, everyone has a pet solution or three, and the comments sections are always the same, with everyone either patiently pointing out to us what we already know, as if we are stupid middle-schoolers who just can't understand, or throwing up their hands in frustration at the intractability of it all.

 

 

Just a Closer Walk With Thee

 We haven't had any Dixieland in a long time.

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

 … What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. 

Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. 

If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory. The Gulag Archipelago

Science Clearinghouse

I get links from Science Alert, an Australian site, from time to time.  I've decided I'm not that fond of it.  It is too much like the old Discover or Omni magazines, promising more in its headlines than it delivers. What do others use for a general science news site?

Recent Links

Science Fictions has a podcast on antidepressants.  Paywalled, but in the few minutes I heard them report a study from Cambodia that showed depression decreasing if you gave someone a cow.  They doubted this would scale and work in London.  

However, More Cows, More Wives - It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.

Two Is Already Too Many  A Works in Progress essay on declining fertility, with special reference to South Korea. I have previously linked to an article that showed that subsidising having children had no effect there, but this argues the near-opposite. The subsidies partly work, but South Korea's problems are so extreme that they don't begin to solve them. I think convincing.

Earl Wajenberg put up a link about The Bible and Slavery 

A book group member sent a bunch of links from robotics companies, with video of what they can do. 

skildai.com

fieldai.com/ 

 DYNA Robotics - Commercial-Grade Robots for Real-World Automation

1X | Home Robots

Foundation - Home

 Feather Robotics

 T-Robotics  

RFK and Bullying

Michelle Obama at least followed standard practice by only bullying children about food. RFK is trying to escape from the Dunkin Donuts fiasco by reassuring people that he's not coming for their Dunkin, but goes on to say, 

@SecKennedy
No one is taking away your Dunkin'. But isn't it reasonable to ask whether a drink loaded with 180 grams of sugar is safe?

 Remember the libertarian brag that they wanted to take over the country and just leave people alone? This is the opposite.  It looks like Kennedy just wants to be a bully.  He thought, reasonably enough, that the Democratic Party was his best bet for that. But he switches parties and Shazaam! finds out that he has a better chance of that with Trump.

Massachusetts governor Maura Healey put out a meme of a DD coffee with the words "Come and Take It" underneath. 

Town Elections

I have not voted for a Democrat in decades, based on a promise I made to myself in 1998, which even then I chuckled at because I had not voted for one for a few years anyway. (I supported nothing but Democrats from 1966-1979, then slowly migrated 1980-1991. The town elections are not listed by party in March, but we know who's who from the November elections. I will be voting mostly for Democrats this time, a very quick switch.  The Republicans are crazy, and are making Trump loyalty an either-or for town offices where that is irrelevant. Trump is being used as a proxy for All Good Things, and a word of criticism against him, even from other conservatives, is a proxy for All Bad Things.  Enough.

The 1998 promise was when the Democrats in the US Senate refused to even cross the street to look at the Juannita Broderick and Paula Jones testimony and evidence. I vowed I would not vote for any who had any connection to that unless they apologised. Though I liked Joe Lieberman, he was among them. 

Neil Sedaka

 

I doubt that this was the inspiration

 

Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism

The name "Extreme Male Brain Theory" is based on a true story, but it's been an albatross.  What female wants to be told that she not only has a tendency to maleness, but to extreme maleness? Heck, even the boys are likely to look askance and the title and wonder "What do you mean by that?  Bullying? High-risk hobbies? Peeing off the porch?" Those who research brain differences between males and females have found a few things, most of them pretty small effects. Systematizing versus Empathizing is one of the few medium-size ones.  It's the only medium sized one I can think of at the moment, actually. Male brains lean toward systematising. Most librarians are female but Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal were both created by males. It is men who think to themselves "Well Babe Ruth is obvious in right field. Do I want Mays or Mantle in center? I might even take Griffey..." There are females who say, "First I set up a spreadsheet..." but I think that was after lots of males had become obsessive about it. Women often let men run the experiment a few times to see if it works before committing resources themselves.

So when autistic children stack cans out of the bottom cabinet, then stack them back into the cabinet just so, then stack them outside again for hours at a time, becoming very upset at being interrupted, it clicked in many people's head that this is something boys do more than girls already. This is a male brain thing. For review, I will put up the standard distribution graph with two overlapping peaks, this one about height. 

There are a few women who are taller than most men.  There are a few men who are shorter than most women.  But on average, men are taller than women. Similarly, there are women who love systematising more than most men.  Can't get enough of it. Tendency doesn't mean "women are incapable of systematising."  Don't say that, or bsking will systematically dismantle you, and she's not the only one here.  They might tag-team it.

Aspergery people/mildly autistic people/ HFAs/ and geeks who don't quite qualify for an ASD diagnosis can be particularly good systematisers because they also give some thought for usefulness to others, when enough is enough, and activities of daily living. ("Children.  I have children. Three of them. They should eat pretty soon.  I'd better make something.") Engineers are the archetype for good reason. They are Useful. They don't think they are aspies, for two reasons: everyone they work with is like this, so it must be typical; and they have friends and especially relatives who are more autistic than they are. We make fun of them, but they have created just about everything that makes your life easier, since time immemorial. Fire.  Bridges. Washing machines. Tampons.  (A woman bought the patent and popularised it.)
 

The female brain is more empathic. Fortunately, no one has been stupid enough to officially call bleeding heart syndrome or reflexive knee-jerk overidentification Extreme Female Brain, though there are lots of mutterings by laypersons to that effect. We have discussed the misdirections and limitations of empathy here a dozen times at least. Autists especially have less empathy, but there is a catch. At least once I have tried to draw the distinction that it doesn't mean they aren't nice and don't care about others, but they don't always think about others or do it as well. Once they have thought "how will the people I supervise feel about this change?" they can do well at it, but it doesn't come naturally.  It is called Theory of Mind (internal link below) and is a big part of how we navigate in the world, projecting likely responses of others. I had not known that observant researchers had also noticed this, defined it much more clearly, and divided empathy into two distinct parts. Autists are about as good as anyone else at the second part, it's the first part that is impaired. They do very well with rules-based empathy, like sending everyone a thank-you note or following the agenda item of remembering to seek out everyone's opinion during the discussion phase. It may sound less warm, but when Empathy A is driven by the obsessive nature of Asperger's they become much nicer than the rest of us, with occasional slips. *

As with engineers and systems, overempathisers do not see themselves as pathological.  They see themselves as Nice People, and the reasons are similar. They work in fields where everyone is like that, and they have friends and family who really are pathological in their overidentification. I suggest that this comes from reversing the arrow of Empathy A and Empathy B. People think that kindness results from identifying and understanding, and kindness is the goal. Therefore, if they feel kindly toward some one or some group, it is because they have accurately understood them. You can see this in the complete intellectual disconnect of leftists supporting Palestinian causes rather than just feeling sorry for the people.  The correctly surmise that it must feel real bad to be losing a war, especially for the women and children who have less control over the situation. So the empaths feel bad about them. Except... they misread the Palestinians. Leftists project how they would feel if they were in a war zone and their side was losing. They miss the part that there are other feelings at play among the Palestinians: cruelty, anger, revenge. These go unnoticed. Empathy is always projection and must be tempered by follow-up questions, usefulness, and boundaries.

How would Empathising and Systematising be opposite ends of a spectrum?  I don't think they are.  I think two separate things are being measured that both sexes have in different proportions. To take the hormonal stereotype, I don't think that testosterone and estrogen are "opposite" chemicals.  I think they are different chemicals. I don't think the data shows that one extra bit of empathy means a complementary drop in systematising.  If they are related, I would take a wild guess that when autists put things in categories, they resist changing the system and this makes them less flexibly empathic.  You can't possibly feel the way you do because you are wrong.  It's not teal, it's green, and they see you as just being obstinate about it.  Anyone who has gotten into one of these arguments knows how dug in aspies can get about a rule they have made for everyone else, even if you can definitively show it's not a good rule and they are the worst breaker of it.  It's a rule, and you are breaking the rule.  But I am probably reaching here.  They are more likely unrelated.

The primary opposition to Extreme Male Brain Theory I don't think I can do justice to, because...well, my explanation might be insulting. One aspect is that the original theory (Simon Baron-Cohen) thought that autism was caused or at least mediated by exposure to testosterone, especially in utero. That part isn't holding up. Secondly, there is a belief in the ASD community that they empathise just fine with each other, so it is a different Empathy A, an Empathy A1 that's just as good. That isn't bearing out in the data.  It is more likely that this results from cueing autists past step A, telling them they have to look at something from another's POV. (Trust me, autists are not the only people who need this cueing.  It is all of us at times.) Thirdly, there is a strong pushback from women both in and out of the autism community that this does not match their internal experience and sounds derogatory to women anyway. 

You can do an AI request or a quick search yourself to get expanded versions of the POVs, but this short article is pretty good. -and no, it doesn't mean autistic people lack empathy or are more 'male.' If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can ask Claude about the criticisms as well.

*Did I get that right, darling? 

Lou Holtz at William and Mary

The recently-deceased Lou Holtz was head football coach at William and Mary the first year I was there in 1971. No, really. Go Tribe. To show you how different the mentality is of super-successful football coaches versus merely obsessive and driven coaches, you should know that Holtz arrived at W&M in 1969 and started talking about his goal to contend for the national championship in five years. (Spoiler alert: We did not win the national championship.) This, at a school where student athletes were expected to pass their classes like everyone else.

Utterly insane. He left after three years for NC State, then the New York Jets, where he was reunited with WR David Knight, who he had recruited to W&M out of Mount Vernon HS in Alexandria.

Bobsleigh History

 

"And Yet It Moves"

I have twice promised to keep you up-to-date with a couple of genetic controversies but have not done so. This is largely because the issues have gotten out into mathematical and biological specialties that are entirely beyond me, and I am less and less able to extract information from all the brilliant people on my sidebar and put it into take-home paragraphs.  I have scraps, occasionally connected by rubber bands that I actually understand. 

As far as I can tell, one of the controversies is rather amiable, with everyone agreeing that Population Y, a substrate of some tribes in the upper Amazon, greatly predates the bulk of New World settlement, and is quite different from any of the three known waves into the Americas, all of which came in via Beringia. It seems more closely related to Southeast Asia and Oceania, to Papuans and Andamanese than to the ANE (Ancestral North Eurasians) and NEA (Northeast Asians) identified as the populations which mixed west of Beringia before tha long migration to the New World.  However, everyone also agrees that there are problems with the data that are present. Contamination has not been entirely ruled out in the samples, though the results look robust enough to withstand some discovered contamination from more recent sources (either in the ground or in the labs). The dating of samples is disputed. Not all Amazonian populations show the substrate, which is surely unusual after 20,000+ years of tribes living near each other and exchanging (or stealing) wives. Most importantly, all the explanations of how that genetic material could have gotten there have difficulties. Across both the Pacific and Andes? Then why no trace in the Andes? Coastal Beringia and western North America? Then why are there no traces of them until South America?  And far inland. So when and and how the DNA got here can get people worked up, and everyone agrees it's not even proven.  But there it is, until a better explanation comes along.

 

 The second controversy is more rancorous, as nature-nurture usually is.  While 'nurture' controls the cultural narrative, 'nature' has racked up victories for years. Those who strongly favor the environmental, keep insisting that nature can't be the main driver - the geneticists must not have looked under the seat cushions or something. But recently there has been a sharp check in the heritability juggernaut. That a large factor of randomness, or 'unshared environment' is in the mix we already knew.  However, while genetics has been doing a good job in predicting phenotypes (with that limitation), when we take the pieces apart they don't add up to the expected percentage.  It is called missing heritability, and people are quite nasty about it.  I wonder if the the nastiness is driving people to make stronger claims than are warranted. 

When it became clear that polygenic traits were the norm,  there was blithe confidence that we would find the additive combinations pretty quickly.  If we could predict IQ within 0.5SD with 80% accuracy, finding 20% seemed like a great start.  More brute force calculations, drawing more lines in the network, would soon solve the problem. It hasn't. Researchers who are taking a hardline approach to proof are saying it's only 30%, rather like the preacher in black churches who sends back the collection plate saying "It's not enough!"  Suddenly it is the strong nurture group that is complaining about the change under the seat cushions.  Don't tell me it's not there.  It has to be there. It fits the predictions.  It fits real life.  Not so fast. Yes they have allowed that there might be cross-influences at deeper and deeper levels, of SNPs speeding up or slowing down expressing, turning the lights on and off in response to other SNPs acting on them. But "Said the Pieman to Simple Simon, first show me your money."  

Yes, environment might creep back in after all, particularly WRT chemical exposures affecting not only final-product expression, but light-switches in every room along the tunnel. Novel chemicals might bind to receptors developed over hundred of generations of evolution for unrelated reasons. Some receptors will show out to profligately bind to lots of unexpected substances, others will be more choosy.

YA Novels

From a comment section on boys reading: young adult fiction can be divided into three categories: having problems with one's friends, having problems with one's boyfriend, or the problem is that one's boyfriend is a vampire.

AI Style

Colin Gurrie mentions how the style of AI, called "AI Slop" is readily recognisable in his new essay Leave the em-dash Alone.  I notice AI occasionally because it seems padded, too redundant, but I've never noticed the supposedly tell-tale "It's not X, it's Y," or the use of words like delve. I don't notice style much in real-life authors either.  Whatever spell they are weaving must either just affect me without me noticing, or affect me not at all. I think some of both.  I never noticed that Tolkien will begin paragraphs with short sentences when he is describing action, and break up longer sentences with colons and semicolons.* (The last few pages of "The Siege of Gondor" in The Return of the King, for example.) But it must work on me, because I hold my breath even now while reading it.  I can't say that happens to me with lesser authors, though. 

I am not a stylist when I write.  I have habits I was taught about not running sentences too long, and using synonyms for variety. I am strictly Point A to Point B, and so notice AI Slop mostly when it is dragging its feet.  I try my hand and finer writing at times, but it does not come naturally, because I do not revel in the beauty of writing even when it is good. So AI will fool me more often than thee.

*Earl, this was probably where I got the idea about varying the pace. But it's not a good example of what I told you then.  Sigh. 

Do Eclipses Cause Rebellions

Rob Kurzban at Living Fossils Do Eclipses Cause Rebellions? would say they do not cause rebellions, nor do they cause the necessary cooperation for a rebellion, but they do have a strong influence on coordinating the time of a rebellion. 

 A recent paper (by Miao et al.) reports an analysis having to do with how often areas rebelled over the course of centuries of Chinese history. Do provinces in which people see total eclipses more rebel more often?

It turns out that they do.

And it’s not a tiny effect. The researchers pin down how much more likely this is, writing that “counties in the totality zone of a solar eclipse are about 18 percent more likely to experience a rebellion in the eclipse year relative to counties that are outside of the totality zone.”

His (shared) theory of how that happens is fascinating. He relates it to the experiment of two people tasked with meeting at the same time and place in a city without any communication succeed much more often than chance would dictate. In NYC, many people choose to go to Grand Central Station at noon.  If I told you that you and Francine both need to show up at the same place in England within a calendar year, you - knowing nothing about Francine - would evaluate in terms of "What is a place and time that many people would know about?" You might go to Stonehenge at sunrise on the Summer Solstice. 

If there is joy and prosperity, an eclipse is less likely to portend doom.  But if there is already unrest, the blotting out of the sun will seem a portent, and many folks will think "Now must be the time." 

Something Missing

Great photography, stirring music, but something is missing.  What could it be?

Ah yes.  It didn't happen that way. It is a dead thing that Jackson is trying animate with a defibrillator. 

 

How To Handle Anxiety

 Just one study from over 15 years ago, but I think it captures some important things. How to Handle Anxiety - Reappraisal, Acceptance, and Suppression

Abstract

It has been suggested that reappraisal strategies are more effective than suppression strategies for regulating emotions. Recently, proponents of the acceptance-based behavior therapy movement have further emphasized the importance of acceptance-based emotion regulation techniques. In order to directly compare these different emotion regulation strategies, 202 volunteers were asked to give an impromptu speech in front of a video camera. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The Reappraisal group was instructed to regulate their anxious arousal by reappraising the situation; the Suppression group was asked to suppress their anxious behaviors; and the Acceptance group was instructed to accept their anxiety. As expected, the Suppression group showed a greater increase in heart rate from baseline than the Reappraisal and Acceptance groups. Moreover, the Suppression group reported more anxiety than the Reappraisal group. However, the Acceptance and Suppression groups did not differ in their subjective anxiety response. These results suggest that both reappraising and accepting anxiety is more effective for moderating the physiological arousal than suppressing anxiety. However, reappraising is more effective for moderating the subjective feeling of anxiety than attempts to suppress or accept it. 

Reappraisal and Acceptance both reduced your heart rate. Suppression did not.  Also, neither Acceptance nor Suppression reduce the subjective feeling of anxiety. Only Reappraisal did both.  For reference, all of us use all three strategies at different times. We usually start with Suppression, then move to an incomplete Reappraisal. Both work a bit, and that is often enough. After that it is highly variable, and may be more habit than conscious decision.  But if you can remember to get there, conscious reappraisal is likely your best bet. Your reappraisal might cause you to realise it's not your problem, that you are beating your head against a wall, that there is a piece of the situation you can bite off and chew while you plan the rest, etc. 

Troubling Thought

 From Nicholas Decker:

Yet the development of AI is not riskless. The problem is not AI alignment, but human alignment. AI will greatly increase the power of any one person to do bad things. 

We worry about AI going rogue, and fantacise how terrible that will be.  Yet we already know that human beings can and have gone rogue. CS Lewis pointed out that a cow that goes bad can only do so much damage. Even an incompetent man can do more.  Worse still is a king or a mad scientist, who has the power to do greater damage.  Worst of all is an angel who goes bad and becomes a devil. Such a being going rogue can and has done damage that is unimaginable, even as we look upon it.  AI, like any power, is a multiplier.  It is not evil - that hand that wields it is evil. 

The Smartest Online People

Present company excepted, the smartest (somewhat distinguished from wisest) people I know online are increasingly talking about AI more than anything else.  This would be Scott Alexander, Steve Hsu, Dwarkesh Patel - plus some I listen to less - Elon Musk, Marc Andreassen, Tyler Cowan. However, the smartest people I know IRL talk about it much less, perhaps because many of us are old, and sense that this will be a late-in-life tool only, not something we will have expertise in. We won't be doing our own repairs on this Philco, we'll just be turning it on.

The result is that I am reading less of the smartest people I know, which doesn't seem wise of me.  OTOH sumus quod sumus, we are what we are, and we may learn in the judgement that the great Christian teacher of the age was only a couple of miles away most our lives, but we weren't sufficiently attentive to the Holy Spirit. 

Substack quotes

 AI Laundering - "blaming AI for layoffs you were going to do anyway - is going to be a real thing."  Alex Imas

Victor Kumar  at Open Questions "LLMs are so overconfident and they’ll just invent empirical claims when they’re convenient. What a relief to talk to a philosopher instead."

Why America's Extremes Will Both Fail, by Noah Smith at Noahpinion. "In all of these cases, what progressivism is doing is parasitizing the liberal institutions that allowed progressivism to exist in the first place. Liberals built the public libraries; progressives are destroying them by turning them into ad-hoc homeless shelters. Liberals built trains, but now people don’t want to ride the train because of crime and disorder, requiring big bailouts from the state of California. Progressive tolerance of bad behavior by the few — open drug use and sales, theft, street harassment — has turned parks, streets, and other types of urban commons into no-go zones for the bulk of the citizenry." (The whole article is excellent)

 Stefan Schubert "When we try to understand society, we often neglect how people react to changing circumstances. You see it in climate discourse that assumes we’ll sleepwalk into disaster. You see it in Hollywood battle scenes, where they never retreat, no matter how bad it’s going. And you see it in the discourse about a world without work, which tends to assume we won’t be able to create new meaning. But I’ve noticed that economists don’t make this mistake as often, since the insight that people adapt to change and respond to incentives is a cornerstone of their discipline. We should all learn to think more like economists."

Pieter Garicano at Works in Progress: "Why Europe Doesn't Have a Tesla. These rules – severance, negotiating periods, works councils, buyouts, and waiting periods – collectively impose high costs on a European company that tries to let workers go. The costs of restructuring are so high that companies will often try and bribe their workers to leave. In 2023, Amazon offered French employees a year’s salary to leave voluntarily so they didn’t have to fire them and go through a legal restructuring. In 2024, German chemical manufacturer Bayer offered long-tenured workers 52.5 months of pay, or over four years’ worth, in exchange for quitting." 

Twelve Gates To The City

 I was looking for a strong bass version, but I got captured by this.

 

Slavic Prehistory

I'm fascinated by Indo-Europeans and all their descendant peoples. But y'know, there's a limit. In Razib's interview with Peter Nimitz, imagine listening to this as a podcast on narrow rainy roads at night when you have no real chance to change to a different podcast, or even pull over and try to look at the transcript to look at the spelling of all these cultures that are mentioned to see if they look at all familiar. You have to have had 6 credits in Slavic prehistory to even tell what the names are. 

I'm not even sure I got them all. I actually know what a very few of these cultures are, and recognised a few more. I usually feel I can enter just about any conversation as a listener and ask a decent question or two, but I have no confidence I could even form an intelligent query.  

Enjoy. 

 ...the back flow from the Corded Ware people who had first conquered, like Poland and Germany and then migrated back, kind of swept over both some of the Yamnaya people, like their more northerly realm, which had kind of spread up into the Volga and the Kama River basins and what's nowadays, Central Russia, as well as some of the hunter gatherer societies like the Volosovo culture, which were further north in the kind of forest region. So we know that, like that third of the Corded Ware world, roughly from Belarus to Udmurtia to Tartarstan is where this Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic proto population was living. And the Soviet historians actually did know that the Eastern, like the very far eastern part, was where the Indo-Iranians were. That's like the Sintashta culture they come out of, like the Abashevo culture. And there was were they looked back at the metal work and the pottery that was being made by these different cultures in kind of the eastern part of European Russia, and they were able to see that, you know, these were the groups that spread in the Central Asia. They were definitely the Indo Iranians. They were not the Baltic Slavs...

 There were a lot the Fatyanovo-Balanovo groups that were kind of around, like modern Pskov area, just south of St Petersburg, east of Estonia. They do appear to be Indo-Iranian like groups that would eventually contribute to the Iranians, rather than the Balto Slavic groups...

 ...you do see these kind of post Yamnaya cultures, like the Catacomb that are still dominating a lot of the steppe region - which is a much better place to live than modern Russia, north of the forest line. So these kind of pre/proto Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian groups, they're living in fairly marginal territory for Corded Ware people.

They overrun the early European farmers, the Globular Amphora culture, the Funnel Beaker culture and stuff. There are some farmer groups in kind of interior places, like Kuyavia, which is in kind of like Northeastern Poland, thereabouts. And then you have, like the surviving Baltic Hunter Gatherers that are hanging out in the Baltic that kind of like coexist with them. So 2500 BC, there's the introduction of the Bell Beaker culture...

 ...these Abashevo culture people in the Far East...

 those people definitely have some sort of link to the slot, because those two populations that kind of descend from that mixed like Bell Beaker, you know Netherlands Indo European group that migrated to the east and forms the Trzciniec culture. The cultures they produce, the Komarov culture...

 Finnic speaking people, are pushing out of the Northern Urals and kind of like sweeping across and  eventually, like the most common Y chromosome, a lineage of modern day Lithuania Latvia, is N1c-n3a you know, whichever N3a, like the whichever nomenclature.

 as well as these Baltic Corded Ware people with these populations who are genetically known to have spoken Indo-Iranian, almost certainly…

we would expect, expect to see, like isoglosses, from Albanian, from Greek, Tocharian, which we really don't see. So that's why I lean more towards like this, Iwno culture, Rzucewo culture, this North Belarusian culture…

I think there's a lot of stuff showing that they were linked in with the Srubnaya Indo-Iranian people, who were kind of dominating the Western steppe at the time. So I think they were kind of dragged into these conflicts in the same way that they were when the Persians invaded a couple centuries later, where Herodotus talks about how you have all these tribes that are presumably Slavic or para Slavic, who are getting dragged into fighting Persians on behalf of their Scythian overlords. I think there's something like this for Sosnitsa culture Slavs, they get dragged into these kind of, like collapsing Srubnaya conflicts and the result is their population is devastated. A lot of their sites start to disappear. It was definitely not a good time to be them. So you actually see the rise of this, I think it's the Lebedovskaya culture…

There's this Stamped Ware complex that emerges out of modern day Romania. And they just go and expand everywhere, like they drive into Germany, some of them, like, drive into Greece. You know, some of them go into Bulgaria, where they come the historical Thracians. The one that's relevant for the Slavs is the Chernoles culture. The Chernoles, they're on the north side of the Carpathian Mountains. They start off on the Dniester River and they expand into the Dnieper river. But they kind of colonize both the steppe region as well as kind of the fore steppe  region. They don't really penetrate into kind of the Lebadovskaya culture core territories, and the kind of Pripet marshes and southern Belarus. So this Chernoles culture, they're pretty militarized…

 Like, finally these refugee populations contact the Chernoles, and they're being separated by these first Scythians and the Sarmatians, and eventually these Germanic migrants who kind of cut through at the beginning of the first millennium AD

So the Milogrod culture, they're fairly primitive. A lot of their survival seems to be they would just hang out in the swamps. Archeologists, they have these things called bog forts, where it looks like they were kind of temporary refugues, refugues for these Milograd culture people, if something bad happened, if they're like, kind of main farmstead on the Dnieper or the Desna, or whatever kind of overrun by the Cimmerians, they would kind of flee to these bogs …

And eventually the Cimmerians, they get swept off by the Scythians…

So he discusses the Budini and the Gelonians were the two important ones. The Budini are described as a great populous nation. They're all - they have blue and gray eyes and red hair. And the Gelonians, they have, like no resemblance to the Budinian complexion or general appearance…

 So when the Goths storm in from the West, rather than the east, they're incredibly destructive. They go and they dominate the entire steppe. The Zarubinets it's culture basically implodes. It actually fragments into like multiple cultural traditions. So whatever, like unity the Zarubinets had, and they were, I would assume, kind of like a loose Federation...

 the fringes of the Desna river,  and, of course in the Pripet marshes as well. These fragments still cause the Goths a lot of problems. Jordanes mentions that just before the arrival of the Huns, the Goths from this kingdom of Oium...

 I think there's two finds of Slavs in Iberia, in a Visigothic or Vandal context. So at least some of them did accompany, like the Eastern Germanic groups as they were migrating across Europe. I don't think it was like a full - I mean, there's no evidence to suggest, at least there was, like political movement. These were probably just like random Slavic subjects who had been recruited for the armies and decided to drive west with the rest of the people. You're completely correct, the Slavs themselves did not really play a role in this stage of the migration period. It would have to be a later period, with the arrival of the Avars...

 

 

Links from 2014

 Believing Against Extended comments from Donna B

New England's old numbered roads.  Rte 3 is now Rte 6; Rte 6 is now Rte 3.

Half Man Half Biscuit ("It's Cliched to be Cynical at Christmas") had a small but ongoing following in the UK. They split up in 1986 for "musical similarities" but reunited, and the Scouse (Liverpool) band has had years of sardonic titles, such as "Trouble over Bridgwater" "Achtung Bono," and "Back in the DHSS" (UK unemployment agency).

Us and Them The ethnonationalists won, not lost in Europe, (as of 2008) each boundary more homogenous after WWII than before. They just called it pan-Europeanism, pretending that was internationalism, which was considered holy by the elites, because they liked the internationalists in every other country. Now that immigration has increased, people are feeling the same tribalism they did before, just directed against different groups.

Chick's Got a Sword  St. Dymphna

 

 

Hesykhia

James mentioned upgrading Hesykhia to the status of Muse. I long sought her presence when young, but always murmuring, like Augustine, "but not yet." Now I have too much of her presence, perhaps, but she is very good company.

Stone Age Minds in Modern Skulls

 A debate over at Conspicuous Cognition, What Kind of Apes Are We? 

So my response to Dan might be something like, “Yea, maybe humans are kind of confused and maladapted sometimes, but it’s also really insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals.” And Dan might say something like, “Yea, it’s pretty insightful to see humans as savvy animals strategically pursuing their Darwinian goals, but it’s also really important to recognize that humans are confused and maladapted sometimes.” It’s basically a disagreement over where to put the italics.

But if it was all about italics, I wouldn’t be writing this.

I tend to agree with whoever I listened to last on these sorts of questions. 

 

Assortative Mating

I recall hearing about this paper a few years ago, and there may have been similar others in addition to this one. Assortative Mating at loci under recent natural selection in humans.  Nicholas Christakis is one of the authors, which I take as a recommendation. We tend to choose partners who are equivalent to fourth-cousins genetically. Not that they are about fourth cousins, but they have the same amount of genetic similarity. That is in some ways not very much (0.025%) but is also more than the average person you run into in a city (variable, but less than 0.001%) at the loci that are current natural selection.  That means, not the 99% of genetic similarity that we have to a banana, because we are both living and have cells, but the places where evolution is selecting most heavily because of changing environments. Gravity isn't changing.  The amount of sunlight and oxygen isn't changing - there isn't much selection underway at those points.  We've got that covered.

This makes entire sense when I look at myself, my siblings and parents, and my two oldest children. All of us come from that lake that is the North Sea, where genes were in constant exchange, so that even the different varieties are similar. But when I look at my Transylvanian son who married a woman from Manila, the pattern breaks pretty thoroughly. Those populations have not interacted for tens of thousands of years. There is likely a lower threshold beyond which it makes little difference. 

The idea of "similar but not too similar" makes intuitive sense for our default programming. The default is easily overwhelmed by circumstances, such as migration to a different culture (or even a somewhat-different culture), but exerts some influence. The genetic pool we are choosing from is something of a kaleidoscope, not an infinite branching. See also Pedigree Collapse. 

You're The One

I love that topping harmony.  I use that with worship songs at church sometimes.  It makes visitors nervous.  Maybe everyone else as well. 

 

Spammer

I have what is purportedly a young woman commenting on every post, telling me how much money I can make from home on Google-something.  My spam detector is keeping her out at present, as she isn't showing up in the comments, just my email.  I suspect it is a result of me being stupid enough to comment twice on Instapundit about a week ago. 

I am not going to put any effort into deleting "her." Sometimes the spammers say things that are unintentionally funny. 

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Mythbusting

 Why the worst idea in linguistics won't die, at Dead Language Society. I have written about both Sapir and Whorf over the years - in exactly the same posts. It is the very cool idea that the language we speak constrains our speech, so that having a different native language, or learning a new one, drives how we think. All those stories of "the German word Schadenfreude does not exist in English, and it is untranslatable." No, it's not. There is no one-to-one translation for the word, but it is easily translated if you allow phrases and multiple adjectives.  This is why your pastor can take apart a word in the NT from Greek and explain it to you, even though it is different from English - because it can be translated. At an overwhelming level, any thought that can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another.  That's going to be tough when one society has very different technology from another and it will take time, but it can be done. 

I knew the essay was going to include the very slight exceptions, such as Russian light blue and dark blue, and even though it is after the paywall jump, I am going to bet that the Amazonian language Piraha and its lack of numbers will be brought forth as a stronger exception.  But really, you aren't ever going to meet any speakers of Piraha, so there's no need to know it. Linguistic Relativism isn't true, even though we would like it to be.

The Evolution of Social Paradoxes

Human behavior is often paradoxical. We show humility to prove we’re better than other people, bravely defy social norms so that people will praise us, and donate to charity anonymously to get credit for not caring about getting credit. Here, I argue that these and other social paradoxes have a common thread: they are all attempts to signal a trait while concealing, from both the signaler and the recipient, the fact that a signal is being transmitted. 

David Pinsof in The Evolution of Social Paradoxes .  He sees them as a spin-off from the necessary Theory of Mind to perceive signals of trustworthiness.  We have to be able to know what others might think of our actions. But when we know what they probably think, we can mimic what will give them a particular impression about our actions.  We can game the system. But then we know that they also can game the system, and they know that we know that they know that we know.

Except in reality, we quickly disguise these motives from ourselves, and lots of people will likewise give us credit for being virtuous. Of course Congresswoman A isn't virtue-signalling.  She really cares about working people because she was one herself. It becomes a recursive mindreading game in which some people see one or more levels deeper than most, while others are one or more levels more superficial. The advantages either way are uncertain, because at each mindreading, there is only a percentage chance we are correct. The deeper we dig, the more speculative it all is.

I am reminded of Screwtape's advice to Wormwood about drawing his patient's attention to the fact he has become more humble in his battle against pride, as he will think "By Jove, I'm being humble!" and be proud of it. This can be repeated at the next revelation, but not endlessly, else the patient will see it is a hall of mirrors, laugh at himself, and head for bed - a very bad outcome for the demons.

Yet to a point, I think it is useful to remember that there is always a further layer of self-deception. This essay may well alert you to areas you have previously overlooked. 

"It is a spiritual gift from God for a man to perceive his sins" - Isaac the Syrian

 

1930s/60s/90s Pro Football

The running plays are more rugbyish, and there is much less strategy and technique in the line play, but it is still recognisably football, more so than basketball and soccer are from that era.

No. 3 is Bronco Nagurski 

 

By the 1960s, you can see much more precision and deception in the blocking and route-running. But it is the defense that is most different.  Instead of getting into a position and just trying to stop whatever comes to them, the defense is playing more angles and shifting around. If you grew up with this, as I did you have some tendency to see this as not all that different from the modern game.  But it is...

 

...which you can see immediately in the film in the 1990s. Much more misdirection and finding seams in the strategy, the passing depends much more on timing. 

 

Ship of Fools

I was on a Christian discussion site in the early 2000s called Ship of Fools. It is where I got the name Assistant Village Idiot rather than Village Idiot. There were some good discussions and reasonable people there, but I eventually found it repetitive and enabling to, well, fools. It suddenly occurs to me that it was far better than TikTok, FB, Twitter/X, etc. There were a variety of bulletin boards with names such as "Dead Horses," which helped keep perspective on discussion that was potentially rancorous.  It was still often rancorous, but less so than we see now.

The site has shifted to humorous and satirical content, though there still are discussion boards. As an example of the former, there is a piece about the double-entendres of hymns, Bosoms and Ebenezers 

 I've always found singing in church a joy, but some hymns make you smile for all the wrong reasons. For a start, they use words that lead very different lives in other parts of your brain. Words such as 'bare', 'bondage', 'bosom', 'bowels', 'breast', 'bush', 'desires', 'conquest', 'flesh', 'gay', 'kiss', 'loins', 'lover', 'organ', 'prostrate', 'queen', 'rude', 'seed', 'submission', 'succour', 'tossed', 'virgin', 'womb' – and not forgetting good old 'intercourse'.

For the latter, Oops- Your Trump Presidency Discussion Thread in the "Purgatory" category, which is currently discussing his bone spurs as a draft deferment. The site is more UK than USA, but plenty of both.  It definitely tends liberal and snarky. I don't think I will reinvest my time, but someone here might be curious.

 

Are People Innately Lazy?

The prevailing theory is that people find effort aversive, and people avoid aversive things. The Principle of Least Effort. Some recent evidence paints that picture a little differently. Are People Innately Lazy? 

 The new, improved alternative theory was best articulated by my colleague Guido Gendolla: people are averse to wasting effort, not to effort itself. Or as the lead author Nathalie André put it, effort is a cost, which people are sometimes willing to pay. Effort is more like money than like pain.

This makes sense to me. I will take the most efficient route, even if I have time to spare, unless there is something worth spending the effort on, such as a particular view.  Even if I am walking for exercise, I will take a diagonal to shorten a distance.  

Mythbusting by Megan McArdle

How do people even come up with these things?

Ollie Whitby (who?) on Substack: Our grandparents were on to something. Turns out slow mornings, early home-cooked dinners, getting lost in books, walking everywhere, real conversations, and minding your own peaceful business was a great way to live. 

Megan McArdle in response:  My grandfather got up at 5 am to drive down and open the gas station where he worked until 6 pm, unless he was short a worker and had to go back to man the evening shift.  There were about five adult books in their house, two bibles and three biographies. No one in his small town ever minded their own business. The home cooked dinners and the conversations, I grant you.  Otherwise you are describing college, not how our grandparents lived.

AVI: One grandfather was the egg man for two towns.  The rooster woke him at  4AM and 300 chickens needed to be fed and harvested, so that he could drive around in an unreliable car until noon, at which point he switched to the garden and repairs, six days a week. He chatted for a few moments with some customers.  He read two newspapers every evening, the Lowell Sun and one of the Boston papers.  I recall no books. Before that, he walked 26 miles each Friday to see his wife for the weekend and 26 back to Boston every Sunday for his chauffeur job.  I imagine her weeks were not filled with real conversations except for Aunt Betty half a mile away. She died at 49, I never knew her. The other grandfather didn't talk much, not even to his wife and children. Worked 60 hours/week as an accountant. His wife had friends and conversations - mostly after the children were grown. 

If you take that down to our parents' generation, it is only slightly less "relaxing." Later in life, after they had lived long and prospered, they had more quiet dinners, books, and real conversations. That would be what my children remember.

So too for us, as we are grandparents now. I used to get up before 6 to get to work for 6:45. I can draw real conversations out of just about anyone, but psychiatric patients are a challenge even for me. My wife worked with children and books, having real conversations only on the fly with co-workers. Hurried home-cooked dinners, drove everywhere all week to church, sports, lessons, relatives, talking with other moms and dads while watching kids. Lost in books, yes. 

Recent Substack Links

 Why Poor Countries Stopped Catching Up. Notable for academic researchers being honest and saying "The data now says we were wrong."

It looks like Fukuyama was prophetic about this in 1991.  

Bernini.  Imagine being able to make stone look soft. 

Steve Sailer reminds us what PJ O'Rourke wrote about Somalis. In 1993. 

The purpose of Milan Cathedral 

First and Second Palestine.   Seems to be new

Reminder

One of the possible names for this blog 20 years ago was "Do I have to pull this car over?" I rejected it because I knew I would prove as guilty as the misbehaving children in the back. 

So there's this.