Orkney

 Leaving now.  Back on the 14th. I have preposted some things to keep you entertained, as usual.

Maybe You Can Use It

Cremieux writes about what he calls Cargo Cults in science: things that attempt to work without knowing the principle behind it. He chooses experiments on semagutide extending lifespans in mice as a pertinent recent example. 

The new semaglutide paper does not meet this standard: the researchers behind it failed to set up an experiment that could inform us about semaglutide’s effects on extension of healthy, normal lifespan...

The semaglutide study attempted to anticipate this objection, but did so in a self-defeating way. They referenced six studies on B6 mouse lifespans to note that the control group had a lifespan that was close to typical. But the numbers in the citations don’t support their case. For example, the Ogiso et al. paper found mean lifespans of 798 ± 161 days for B6J females and 763 ± 163 days for B6N females, which includes early deaths—meaning it’s almost-certainly mechanically brought down relative to the numbers in the semaglutide study. 

I get the principle. I am seldom interested enough in medical research these days to put in the effort.  But for those who still try and follow these things, it's a good caution to be aware of with all the new miracles being offered at the candy store. Researchers are still chasing cool and sexy results and can fool themselves, as they always have.

Scandinavian Folk Song

 ...sung in the UK.  Very appropriate for going to Orkney, ja? 

"I Trust My Gut"

I recall reading descriptions on what percentage of people form their opinions by trusting authority versus subjective impression versus social aspiration and a few others. I don't remember whether I have ever been convinced by the measurements of any such reports, as they were likely questionnaires. But I get the general idea, and there is something to it. We observe others who readily accept what important people tell them, while others rely heavily on their impressions of people and situations, and third/fourth/fifth groups gravitate to what ideas the Best People have, or trying to see behind motives. We all think we are being logical, sure, and some of us are. Yet we all have tendencies.

The greater density of connections between the two sides of the brain in women has been offered as an explanation of women's intuition. Men are tracking a more limited number of paths, but they can identify them and explain them.  Women are drawing on more data but have trouble identifying exactly where the reasoning comes from. It's a tidy explanation, and may even have some truth to it.  I know men who are certain that their wives can see through others better than they do and rely on their opinions of whether to trust people or not.

I have trust in the long-term experience of others, and early in my career was fascinated by clinicians who would say out loud "I've learned to trust my gut on these things. I think he's lying." It was a conflict for me because it didn't sound like reasoning to a clinical decision, but I did respect that these clinicians had much more training and experience, and others in the room would nod supportively when they said this. I supposed it could be true, an alternate way of evaluating that I just didn't understand all that well. I paid attention. I noticed there were others who didn't use those words but seemed to be arriving at opinions in similar ways. I still think there might be something to it.

But I came to reject and even fear it over time when it dropped from the lips of a person who had power over a patient, because I saw it go wrong.  An early case I still regret not seeing more clearly. A young man had been brought in through an unusual backchannel, mostly on the testimony of his wife, who was divorcing him. She reported he had abused her and the children and had made strange sexual statements about them. He now had a no-contact order and could not see her or them. He was pleasant but quiet, denying everything, only occasionally seeming to get irritated when describing the situation. He was too calm. He pointed out he had a responsible job, volunteered with the Boy Scouts, and had a church he went to that his wife had decided she didn't like.  

The team leaders, middle-aged social worker and best friend charge nurse both spoke with him quite a bit over the next week.  I did not, and the case was only mine part-time anyway. We were coming up to a decision point whether we should release him. He had not said or done anything dangerous at the hospital. His wife had called various people at the hospital to tell us how dangerous he was and to please not release him. He had not authorised us to give her information, but the team leaders decided they could listen and ask questions. That second part is now expressly forbidden, but was only frowned upon then. It is easy to see how one could give lots of information away with the questions one chose to ask. 

"We" decided to try and hold him and filled out the petition, but the hospital attorney sent it back, saying there was nothing to bring to court. Our clinicians shook their heads. "I really think he's dangerous.  I trust my gut on things like this.  There's something about him that's just not right." 

I had known him slightly in childhood, and mentioned that he had always been quiet. He was seen as odd, overly focused on small details of things. Well, that sealed it.  They were now sure that he was dangerous and had always been dangerous. They talked about Tarasoff Duty to Warn and who should call the wife. I was surprised.  I thought my statement might make him seem less dangerous.

I have run into him a few times over the years. His wife remarried very soon after and always bad-mouthed him to the children after he was allowed contact again. He remarried five years later and eventually all the children came to live with him, as his ex-wife's new husband was rejecting of her children, favoring his own greatly. She became involved in a criminal matter years later. My patient still volunteered for scouts, his second wife ran an antiques store. He still seemed quiet and a bit odd, forty years later, but Google revealed nothing untoward. 

That's the best of the gut-trusting stories, but I have many others over the years. There were not many clinicians fully like that, but there were always a few, and others that showed soft signs of it. They came to resent me, as I was the one preparing the petitions to send over to legal, and would have to repeatedly tell them that we needed hard evidence. Very occasionally they would become quite upset, even losing their temper, blaming me that I just didn't know how to present these cases correctly and our legal team was incompetent. They would cite their years of training and many similar cases. They railed that the courts would not accept their professional opinion as sufficient for commitment. I noticed that the patients they worried about, mostly male or a female schizoid/schizotypal, just seemed odd and quiet to me. Over time, they left our system, as their clinical gut because less and less respected.

These clinicians were all women, though there were men among the nod-alongs. These women would deal with more overtly dangerous men all the time, even establishing some rapport with them.  But the spooky ones upset them at some deeper level. 

I have wondered if it is related to the phenomenon of abused and addicted women not being attracted to men that are a little weird, even though they know intellectually that they will be safer, provided for, and treated well by them. The weirdness is just too much for them, while the abuse is not. I suspect an evolutionary substrate to this, but don't trust the just-so stories I am making up about it. These days I wonder if this is bound up with the gut instincts of True Crime fans as well. 

Clearly, at least some people's gut instincts are not reliable, no matter how much they insist they are.

Links From 2015

 What Question is God Asking You?

I Got It Wrong  about Bernie Sanders supporters

Men and Women Offended/Not Offended in a work context.  Lots of Comments 

The Uses of Fiction  the friend who offended me died not long after.  I was glad I had said nothing about this.

Ferret-Legging 

Believed or Performed?

Fifteen years ago I wrote a series May We Believe Our Thoughts which covered some of the popular edges of the science, philosophy, and reflection on how reliable even our best thinking is.  We already know that our automatic thinking is often very shortcut and unreliable, but how about when we really try? 

I have written half a dozen times on politics being performative in general, and whether the cynical paranoia that everything is a scam and we are too wise to be taken in ("The Dwarves are for the Dwarves") is really believed or adoped as a world-weary pose.

I am now turning that flashlight onto True Crime, wondering if people really believe that the Canton police could really be planting evidence, or that Patrick Clancy masterminded not only a non-impulsive triple murder of his children but cleverly and undetectably framed his wife for the deed, including an attempted suicide? Or is it all much vaguer than that: I stand with women and corrupt men get away with too much.

This is not new, at least not brand new. They are similar to the Andrea Yates case. Jonbenet Ramsey's parents were accused of murdering her, mostly on the basis that people thought it was creepy to have little girls in beauty pageants, so...you know...people like that...they might do anything, right? The Pamela Smart case was right near here.  We would drive by the prison she was in every day before she was transferred.  There were protests in the parking lot, "JUSTICE FOR PAME" because women felt she was being railroaded. I worked with a few women who went to a protest or two back in the 1990's. Interestingly both seemed to respond to my suggestion that there were a thousand better causes in the world, and if they wanted to help women in general there were better ways. This is part of why I wonder how deeply into the belief these Lindsey Clancy supporters are.

I don't want to get into defining what "belief" means, or making deep distinctions between Belief A and Belief B. No doubt these are important and a wonderful intellectual exercise. I don't care. I want the simple version these days. Intellectual laziness has taken over. CS Lewis found that when he gave talks to servicemen during the war that many of them believed it was all propaganda anyway.  He wondered why they would continue to fight at all, then, and decided that the drive to "stick to your mates," and be loyal to a town, a flag, or a regiment was more powerful than country or abstract notions of justice in the end. Women being loyal to Lindsey may be more like that.  Do they really believe it? Well, they certainly really disbelieve the opposite. They certainly don't believe that the police are trustworthy or supposedly good husbands aren't just clever sociopaths. Patrick divorced her and got remarried (the bastard). They don't leave their own husbands because they believe they are wiser now.  They were fooled by men before, but now they know how to see through things. This husband is fine.

I admit I can't sort it out. I can't tell you what the pivot point is that sends some women to the disbelief category and others to the belief side of the ledger. Is it a narrow thing that a single good friend on the other side could switch them, or is it almost inevitable if we only could add up their clues? Does it change over time?

Dolly

I have been so impressed that the woman who wrote 3000 songs, recorded 300 of them, and saucily embraced the cartoonish character snobby elites tried to impale her on has had the collective obituary of people writing about her character. Don't we all just wish.

This song was first recorded 100 years ago, and as it is Roud 410, the guess is that it is at least 50 years older than that. Probably not deeply old, or it would have surfaced somewhere in Appalachia. Dolly was from Pigeon Forge, Sevier County, TN, and if you were to pick an archetypal Appalachian place to set a novel you could hardly do better. It's 2-3 hours* from KY, WV, VA, NC,  SC, GA, and AL, an obscure settlement in an obscure county, on an obscure river that is not along one valley, but four. It's not so obscure anymore, because of all the Dolly Parton things that are there now.

This was fifty years ago. I always thought she was over-the-top and annoying - until she sang, at which point I would just stop whatever I was doing and listen for a bit. "But whoever clings to her life will lose it, and she who gives her life away will save it." (Luke 17:33) She gave herself away.

*When she was born it was more like 4-5 hours, except worse in snow or mud season, but still... 

Singing Dog

 "I had a dog once who could sing 'Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine,' but I had to get rid of him. (This is the first time I have ever told anyone about it.) He flatted badly on the 'up she goes!' and that sort of thing gets on one's nerves after a while."  Robert Benchley "Dogs" 1936

Motte-Moat

I have made many references to Motte-and-Bailey arguments over the last couple of years. It is a new phrase in the last decade or two, but related concepts have long been known in logic.  There is the idea from advertising of bait-and-switch, which is also used shadily in discussion, and Earl Wajenberg just introduced me to the word paltering, which also sounds rather Shakespearean. 

Discussing this last night at Pub Night and trying to explain the origin to an older academic who had not encountered it (but picked it up quickly, especially when I related it to the elastic term "gnosticism"), I realised I was still uncertain about the derivation. Motte was clearly related to "moat," which I took as the exterior ditch with water, sometimes even a diverted river, surrounding a castle. This looked more like the Bailey part of the story, but the motte refers to the central well-fortified area, not the expansion.  I had eventually adjusted due to context, but it still nagged at me that the motte seemed to be quite distinct from the moat, rather than identical to it. 

The power of just looking things up, which we can do so easily now...

Rabbit-hole alert: Motte is from Old French meaning "mound," clearly related to Germanic and Celtic words for the same, with extended meanings of mud/dirt/peat and perhaps even originally Proto-Uralic, as it shows up in Finnish and Saami "mud" as well. The mounds to be defended were often artificial, with a circle dug around them and the soil thrown into the center. The low-lying areas would collect water, which would be an especial barrier for horses. 

This is similar to the etymologies of ditch and dike. Dich once referred to the type of barrier in which a long trench of dirt* was dug and piled along the side. It was a single item originally, but turned into a doublet, with dike referring to the upper part and ditch the lower in different regions. See also Proto-Germanic skurtij meaning apron, tunic, which became both shirt and skirt. 

*Unrelated etymology, even though it looks similar. 

Pinball Wizard

There are some creative endeavors where I think "I wish I had thought of that," because I admire it and it is the sort of thing I might have created at my best.

I would never have thought of this idea in a thousand years. 

 

LOL

 LOL no longer means "laughing out loud," it just means funny, which is milder. You have to say "Literally laughed out loud at that" now. ROTFL never quite meant rolling on the floor, just "really funny." It's the diminution of language we have seen throughout our lives with words. Awesome need not include an awe at this point. We use language to exaggerate, reaching for a word that is too strong for dramatic or humorous effect. I suspect that will go even more quickly with initials, whose literal meaning is already obscured.

Before blogging, when I commented at Ship of Fools I tried to jump start some initials about spraying coffee on your keyboard, but nothing caught on. The world is poorer for this.

Update:  Thomas Doubting suggests LLOL.  I like it. 

Using the Truth to Lie

Bethany has a new piece this morning about conspiracy theories using some true facts but leaving out others. Down The Rabbit Hole, One True Fact at a Time. A favorite psychiatrist of mine used to refer to "the truths people use to lie with," and it is a useful concept. We have better evolved to detect lies - which are there, right in front of us - than to detect truths that have been omitted.  Makes sense. 

 In this case, the user was aware the bot might just be agreeing with them, but the bot was constrained to factual information only. It appears that constraining the bot to factual information basically negated the effect of warning people that the bot might just be agreeing with you. The paper’s authors suggest that this is because the “traces of sycophancy are harder to detect among selectively-presented factual data than fully hallucinated data.” You don’t say.  In other words: you can absolutely cause catastrophic delusional spiraling by always telling the truth, as long as the truth you’re telling is carefully selected. 

Contrary to my science friends telling me this is all due to poor science training in the schools, I don't find that even advanced degrees are a sure defense against such theories. It is worth noting that even non-paranoid reasoners respond in the same way. Look at this terrible thing that Trump did. And that one. Well, not necessarily untrue...but compared to Biden, Harris, Obama...? No, all that started under Bush and Cheney...Whoa, Clinton was there first.  As Wally in Dilbert once said "We ate that banana years ago." Which of us would bring up the facts that are against us in an argument? We stay stuck in our wrong beliefs not because of lies, but because of clinging to some truths and hiding others in the closet where we don't have to look at them.

For reference, my children largely went to those same schools and are also up on the conspiracy theories that circulated in the evangelical community in the 90s and beyond. The two Romanians arrived still wondering if we were going to sell their body parts. Kyle, a Child of the Sixties even though he was born in 1996, went down the rabbit hole of Paul McCartney being replaced by an imposter years ago. Fortunately, none of them married into families that have conspiracy theorists.

Oh wait...

It is interesting in online comment sections if you challenge someone that their idea is paranoid they will often respond by saying "Show me one thing on this list that isn't true." That seems like informal support for Bethany's theory here. 

Update: In reading an article today cautioning (but not opposing) the use of Welbutrin, Thomas Cook writes "In fact if you really want to mislead people, there's no better way than with obscure science." 

Deep Ancestry

I started a deep ancestry post over a month ago, trying to summarise the radically new stuff we have learned over the last 10-15 years.  It was based on a David Reich interview, and couple of people Razib interviewed, plus a long argument an Indian nationalist was having on Substack that I tried to research, because it seemed so counter to what else I was reading.

I gave up.  It was 1000 words written, plus a dozen two-sentence clusters that I wanted to expand on, and I had no confidence I was getting it right. 

John Hawks, who is an actual expert, addresses the issue in a recent post of his own. Modern humans evolved from an 80-20 mixture of two deep streams. This is not so much Neanderthals and Denisovans, but their precursors, and the admixtures that went into them. Here's what I think you need going in: the 80 is obviously most of who we are, the 20 contains more of what makes us different from Homo erectus and the others. Secondly, over this length of time in the hundreds of thousands of years, 80% of our current genetics does not mean that was 80% of our ancestors in those years.  Variations of us that had significant advantages of cognitive fitness might be only 2% of the quantity (of gggggrandparents) of a widespread population, but eventually have an outsize influence. But they would still be highly vulnerable, and the superior disease immunity of a more primitive population would still be hugely important. 80-20 is only a starting point for discussion.

Next, being able to copy tool and technology use is easier than inventing it. The super-bright may have sprung up and died off many times because of disease, while the more primitive hung on because they could at least copy better their technology before they passed into the night. Wiping out a tribe doesn't mean you can't notice they have fishing weirs.

Our ancestors eliminated the people who built Stonehenge, which set civilisation back a thousand years, but that's how ancestry works.  Neanderthals had a greater variety of the same tools, suggesting that they were more creative/intelligent than us, but also that they had to reinvent things from scratch more often. Homo sapiens copied the Neanderthals, shared information more efficiently, interbred with them enough to get their best immunity genes, and left them literally in the dust.

Anyway, John Hawks.  Great summary, much better than what I could have given you. 

 

 

Famine in Gaza

 Turns out there is none after all. And this is from UNICEF, who were the ones who declared the famine last year. 

“The whole system is built on nobody checking anything,” he said, adding that it sometimes felt like he was the only one reading the IPC’s reports. 

Daycare Barely Matters

There are wild claims left and right about daycare helping the whole country and economy versus damaging children to the point of trauma. What have we learned to expect around here about the effects of childhood interventions? Yes, you there in the back? Correct. They seldom matter in the long run. 

Does Daycare Damage Children's Brains? 

Pitch Clock

It is unlikely I will ever be a worship leader again. It is one of those things I do just well enough to hold the fort until an actual talented person shows up.  Such versatility is necessary in a small congregation but in a larger one there is always a better choice than the jack-of-all-trades.

See?  I have already gotten distracted and gone down a side street and I am barely started. So if I were ever a worship leader again, yes, I would need a pitch clock. 

 

The Escape Artist

ACX gives a prize for best book review every year, publishing the top entries on the site.  I chose one that looked good, The Escape Artist, about Walter Rosenberg, one of the very few Jews to escape from Auschwitz. Escapes are usually gripping, but this one is set apart because it is not as morally clear and neat as nearly all others. The last part of the book is demoralising, as Walter has escaped with detailed eyewitness testimony about the death camp, but he cannot get much of anyone to believe him or do anything about it. The reviewer speculates who the actual villain is in this tale and concludes that for Walter, human nature is the ultimate villain and problem. It's an odd conclusion but it is rather compelling how he gets there. 

Pluto

 You'll have to rip Pluto as a planet from my cold, dead fingers.* I think the reasoning of these people makes sense. Ben pointed out years ago when we visited the Boston Museum of Science (which had a planetarium program my brother designed) that you could look at the floor markings in the Astronomy exhibit and tell where they had removed Pluto. 

Pluto is the 8th planet for a lot of its circuit, because of its elliptical orbit. 

*During the 250th, I saw a FB post that read "You will have to take the July 4th fireworks from my cold, dead fingers. Which are lying right over there across the street." 

Tonics

I remember the place, but it was on the other side of town and we only passed it on the way to my great aunt's in Bedford. It was at what is now Second Street Plaza, near KC's Rib Shack. The photo is from the collection of John Patrick Jordan, who has a FB page of Manchester history. "Relishes and other condiments are provided by Heinz."

I post this to draw your attention to the sign on the left.  It says "Tonics," a very common word for sodas in 1941, left over from the early years of soft drinks in New England when they were marketed as health tonics.  I think it was my mother's preferred term when I was young but not later, so I can't be sure. The last person I knew who still said it died this year at 89.  There must still be a few. 

And yes, we said "bubbler" for a water fountain, which was only in New England and a small area of Wisconsin where the factory for the Bubbler brand name was.  

Fantasy Football Advice

Pick a basic ranking that you like.  Then when listening to other podcasts or reading other articles, raise the ones they are rating as hot ten spots - about one round higher. After about a month, you will have raised everyone ten spots. Hilbert's Paradox as applied to fantasy football.

I jest, but it actually makes some sense. Evaluators are looking at what will most likely happen if everything goes right. But everything goes right for only a limited number of people, in football and in life. If the quarterback who loves tight ends takes over after the third game, and if your TE's ACL heals properly, and if the new playcaller does what he did in Tampa Bay, then the TE12 will very likely become the TE4.

Men try very hard not to let their children think this way about life decisions, but every August demonstrate that they secretly hope the opposite. It's fair, really.  It's called fantasy for a reason. In this world your guy never gets injured but the other team loses key players. I once checked the win totals for NBA projections of the final standings and thought it was a mistake that the number of wins for the teams exceeded the number of losses by over 10%. But Upon Further Review, I saw this was sensible. We already know that our team is screwed if a star player goes out for the season.  That's not informative. We want to know how good the team could be if things go at least reasonably well.

Yes it's a terrible business strategy or military strategy. But it is the only worthwhile initial strategy for love. Reality can (and should) intrude later.

 

Move Everyone Up Ten Slots

Okay, maybe five slots.  But the middle distances are amazing worldwide this year, and there is more than one American in the hunt. 

 

Treating Drug Addiction

 I have been at many positions on this topic, There’s an Effective Way to Treat Drug Addiction—but You May Not Like It , but I will say that I have liked Sally Satel's reasoning in general, and I agree that reward systems tend to be effective.

There are at least two questions here, what is good for the individual and what works. I am mostly interested in the latter when it comes to public policy. This spiritual condition of an individual is the most important consideration, but that doesn't mean that the government should have anything to do with it. There is a difference between a government allowing virtue to flourish and trying to make it happen.

I have no need to punish or avoid punishing the offender. I think advocates in both directions overestimate how much effect it has. Punishing does not do half the good nor half the harm people think it does. This is why we have coaches, teachers, and leaders, because some people need to be treated gently and others need to be kicked in the butt - general rules have too many exceptions.

The answer may come from a proven nonmedical remedy. A Stanford team’s examination of 157 clinical trials of treatments for cocaine, including both psychotherapy and medications, found little clinical benefit with one notable exception: contingency management, a program that leverages motivational incentives, or “carrots,” to help shift an addict’s behavior. According to the Stanford analysis, these methods more than doubled the odds of someone testing negative for cocaine.

Methamphetamine — despite its reputation as being more addictive than cocaine and certainly more damaging to the brain — was shown to be similarly responsive to contingency management.

 Nothing works all the time, some things work more often than others.

Finding New Heresies

This one took me a minute.  I followed the wrong cue, that it was an attractive sports car, and jumped to a wrong conclusion.  It took me a while to start over and see it correctly.

But it is something many of us have said for years, including people who comment here. Chiliastic fellows arise, but lose their grip and slide over into Montanism; Bahai turns out to be Manichaeist dualism when you pick it apart.  

Contra and Contra-Contra

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its many subcategories are the dominant therapies now.  Whether you go to a "counselor," a "therapist," or any of the trendier titles for professional-who-helps-you-fix-stuff, you will most likely receive some version of CBT. There are exceptions. There are still a few people who go to some descendant of psychoanalysis or psychodynamic therapy, and trauma therapies in particular may have more physical interventions like EMDR or mindfulness meditation. (You can find lists of literally hundreds of types of therapy, but these fifteen are a good quick summary: Different Types of Individual Therapy and Their Evidence-Based Results. More than enough, really.)

Despite its ubiquity and longevity, CBT remains controversial. I have never been a therapist, though anyone in mental health is sometimes put in a position of intervening in a way that sure looks like some kind of therapy, even if you can't call it that. It is unlikely I would ever be good add it, no matter how much training and experience I had.  I am much too interventionist rather than letting people come to their own conclusions in their own time.

Here is a pretty good debate between people of good will who simply disagree strongly about whether CBT deserves its reputation or not.  Contra CBT by Josh Zlatkus over at Living Fossils.  The most scientific psychotherapy doesn’t understand science.   Josh believes evolutionary psychology should be more of a foundation of current therapies.  That is where I ran across him.

False Advertising #1: CBT is the therapy of reason. (Final paragraph: This is the recurring problem: CBT sees the inaccurate output but often misses the functional process. It pronounces defects before understanding design. For a therapy whose central promise is to improve how clients think, that is no small problem. In answer to one of the client’s most basic questions—“Why do I think this way?”—CBT’s answer all too often seems to be: “Don’t worry about that. Just think this other way instead.”) 

There are three parts to this.  It will take you a while, but it is very readable.

In answer there is Contra Contra CBT  by Unorthodox Psychotherapist, which will be in 3 parts though only two are completed.

If therapy would deactivate fear responses, there would be many more accidents. As I like to say: “People with too much fear end up in therapy; people with too little end up in the emergency room.” Emotions are adaptive, and fear is of vital importance. However, being adaptive in origin or average for the species does not make a response accurate or harmless for the individual. Evolution does not care about happiness for its own sake. Fear belongs to a regulatory system, and like fever, cough, and vomiting, regulatory systems can become disordered. When that happens, the system designed to protect a person from real danger can escalate and confine them to their home, as is the case with agoraphobia. 

The dueling summaries are about as good an introduction as you could get. I doubt that an entire Introduction to Psychotherapy full-semester course would be better. 

Unforgettable

 

Banned For 100 Years

I was surprised that a new comment was not accepted at "Matriarchal Blessing" on Substack even though I had liked the original post and said so. The reply rules told me not to be insulting.  I didn't think I was. 

The update is that at least some of my comments remain up and I have lots of people liking them. Go figure 

From "The Long Game"

 A Race With No Finish Line Some nuance to the discussion of selection, of a principle that was discovered fifty years ago and resisted at first. Parasites and hosts co-evolve in a dynamic and asymetric situation.

 Imagine you have a rare MHC variant. Circulating parasites have not yet adapted to evade this particular variant, so you are going to benefit from that relative rarity. This fitness advantage enables the variant to become more common - those with the variant will have more offspring - so then the parasites adapt to avoid this variant. The variant is now less useful and the advantage moves to whatever variants are rare. No variant remains useful for long, and the set of effective variants keeps changing. This is called frequency dependent selection.

Data Centers

The linked post is about both the effect of data centers and the limits of persuasion. Can the Truth Convince People to Like Data Centers? by Cremieux Recueil

 The unique thing in this poll was that the pollsters sought to see if they could change people’s views. They wanted to test if they could unravel people’s misinformed views about data center harms by telling them the truth. Unfortunately, people don’t tend to believe the truth, even when you present it to them directly: they don’t think data centers generate tax revenues, that they make AI more widely available, that they create high-paying jobs, power modern business applications, or—critically—that they actually don’t use very much water.

Medical Breakthroughs in 2025

From regular columnist Saloni Dattani at Works in Progress.  Some rare conditions, some common ones, plus a little historical review of what medicine was in 1950.

Deifying the Suicidal

 Eve Barlow, from "Blacklisted" on Substack 

Before I go on, I want to make something clear, because I am a journalist – a real one. Deifying someone who just committed suicide is incredibly dangerous. The Samaritans guidelines themselves instruct journalists and content creators to strictly avoid sensationalizing, glorifying, or romanticizing suicide. That specifically includes blaming anyone’s suicide on a simplified cause such as “the media”. Samaritans media guidelines are free. Anyone is able to look them up online. But I guess it speaks to online commentary these days that none of the thought police thought to do so. 

Imagine Squirrels

This was the background music to my son Ben's sixth-grade science project in 1996, where he had filmed squirrels encountering various types of bird-feeder barriers, trying to discover which was best. So imagine squirrels falling off bird feeders into the snow and running away, only to come back and try again.

Female Risk Aversion

(Note: I also published this to Substack.  I worry it will take over my life.) 

"When the big ones are gone, the big ones remain." My friend Gerry used to say this a lot, speaking not only of work problems, but family and political problems. The meaning is that when one problem is solved, another rises to take its place, seeming just as large. It is like those old cafeteria stacks of plates in a cylinder with springs. When you took off the top plate, the next one rose to its exact level. There was an illusion of endless plates, though at the very end there was a different look and feel that the last one was coming. 

A lot of women, especially young women are angry at everyone right now, and everyone is angry right back.  The women feel uniquely put-upon and disadvantaged, while the rest of us look on in astonishment. Sexual assault diminishes every year.  Discrimination against women now exists mostly in subtle ways, while their societal advantages are quite public. If the attitudes of men in the dating market and into the realm of marriage are bad, were they not much worse thirty years ago, sixty years ago, ninety years ago? Have you never talked to your grandmother about her life, and her own mother's life? Have you never read a biography of a woman before Oprah?

Tangent:  I mean a real biography, not one of those Facebook blurbs about Felicia Elderflower, who wanted to go to medical school after saving thousands of soldiers in the Civil War, but her father forbade her, threatening to kill her cat. But she and Mr Whiskers set out for the West and worked a silver mine, where she developed new techniques that were stolen and she was never given credit for. She made her fortune and founded the Nevada Medical College for Women, which has produced four Nobel Laureates. Her brothers eventually had to kiss her feet when she went back East.

Yes, yes, I am being snide and unfair. I am one of the astonished ones. 

But because of that, I thought it better to look at all this mechanistically.  Let's say that women have a pre-installed level of suspicion about men and the world in general. This fear was developed in worlds in which however dangerous your own village-boys and even husbands were to you, the men from the next tribe over would abduct you, kill your children and sell you. That was not an irrational fear, and a patriarchy run by brothers was at least a step away from servitude or death. Even as things improved throughout the Middle Ages, when women slowly acquired the right to inherit property, or inherit guild status when widowed, or veto marriages for themselves and their daughters, privileges that look meager now were hard-won and deeply treasured then. By current standards it may all have been embarrassingly bad, but in Asia, Oceania, the New World, and Africa it was far worse.  And still is. There are still slave markets in Libya. 

The big ones are gone, so now there are new Big Ones. A hundred years ago, women depended on men for a lot more than just status and social expectations. In an agricultural and industrial world, they were much more reliable sources of long-term resources, especially with an eye to your parents dying before you. Death and disability came more frequently, but playing the percentages, a girl could look around town and see that the future was bleak as a single woman alone. It was better in the cities, where there were teaching and millworking and secretarial jobs, but the cities also carried a much higher risk of sexual assault, especially by the men from other groups. Survival was in question, and two together had a better chance than one alone. Humorously, Garrison Keillor reversed this when talking about hard times among the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers in Lake Wobegon: "Some of those guys are even considering getting married. Marriage: the last refuge for a guy who can't make it on his own." This is also true.

All that is much better. Women have better jobs, public order protects them more, domestic abuse is no longer a forbidden subject. But the level of fear remains, so it moved down to the next plate in the stack, and then the next one. Men still have the desire to protect, but that is less necessary. There are still some groups of men that are dangerous, but women are no longer afraid to go out most places. However, because of 24/7 news covering wider areas, rare dangerous events look more common, feeding the need to keep danger alertness at the same level. The existence of some safe places highlights that some places are not. And...they are not safe because of men.

A common complaint from the angriest women on reels is that men haven't fixed other men. The idea that good men have always been needed to protect you from bad men is no longer accounted or credited. Men are now seen as contributors to dangers even if they are protectors. Yet in a pre-installed level of evolutionary fear sense, this isn't crazy. It's just moving on to solve the next level of problem. 

Consider the true crime narratives, the Karen Reads and Lyndsey Clancys, that obviously guilty pretty white women can't be the guilty ones.  Something about it just doesn't feel right to other women. They feel sure that something must be wrong in this situation.  It must be the husband or the ex-boyfriend, somehow. Incredibly unlikely scenarios are believed, with rumors of suppressed information. Handsome single men get the same treatment. I give you Luigi Mangione, or the Tsarnaev Boston Marathon bombing brothers. Well sure they are guilty, but...they just haven't beeen understood properly. Black women don't get these fan clubs, they get the bog-standard, who-cares wheels of justice with appointed lawyers in small courtrooms. 

The dating/marriage narratives and true crime narratives are tied together by evolutionary inheritance. We are still in danger.  But who does the danger come from?  Who is next in line?  There is also heightened suspicion of what we would call male-coded spaces. When the danger was the males on the other side of town, the arrival of the police was a cause for relief.  But now they are the ones who are suppressing the evidence against the guilty men, and if that man has some police connection, that just proves it. 

I have mostly left out men's genetic programming and how it plays out in changing society.  Society is always changing and the male and female programs are built to be somewhat adaptable. There is a different set of discussions about where all this leaves men, especially young men. I don't think I've covered that much in the last couple of years. I should have another go at it in light of this new information. But part of it is in the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche research of Why Men Take More Risks.  

 

 

Throwback

A throwback from the deep past, even before my wedding fifty years ago: there was 3/4's of a cigarette in the parking lot, and I reflexively considered it a terrible waste. I thought I should pick it up and save it for later. I quit smoking over fifteen years ago, and haven't pick up used butts since early college, when they were 39 cents a pack but I didn't always have 39 cents. Padding my supply with a minor treasure like that would make the day easier.

Well of course it's revolting, you don't have to explain that to me.  The surprise of that long-buried response is the reason I'm telling you the story. 

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

I just saw a bee chasing a hummingbird away from a flower - and the little SOB was sticking with it, not letting the bird sneak back from another side. It makes entire sense, but I had never seen it before.

Jason Arday

 ...found dead. It's sad. 

50th Wedding Anniversary

Tracy and I were married 50 years ago today at St. Mary's of the Nativity in Scituate, MA.  This was the Recessional

From the Sidebar

 What Part of Britain did King Arthur Come From? Competing claims. You also get to learn where Lloyd Alexander's Gurgi comes from.

Americans: Rich and Short-lived? Our shorter lifespans are often mentioned, but obesity is not the largest factor.

Beyond a Reasonable Coincidence  More True Crime Meets Statistics from Bethany. When all answers are unlikely, unlikeliness is no longer a strong argument. 

Unlikely Medical Hypotheses  Because of the accents, it sounds like Monty Python Discusses Mad Medical Ideas.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

 

Cultural Vs Physical Anthropology

Physical Anthropologist Robert Lynch over at The Laughing Ape" highlights some of the extreme deterioration of evidence-based scholarship in his field. We have heard stories like this, but it is interesting to see how some sectors are much worse than others. How Anthropology Lost Interest in the People it was Founded to Understand. 

 I was already used to the massive differences between the two wings of anthropology, and all the jargon (e.g. embodied subjectivity, intersectionality, structural violence, hegemonic knowledge production), but was still surprised when the cultural anthropology students went up one after the other and explained what they were going to find. Not what they were hoping to understand, or learn, or test, or discover, but what they were going to find. Here is an excerpt from a typical defense that was read1 to us called “Portside Synaesthetics: Sensing the Politics of Place”:

“Architectural models and projections in Marseille are experienced as uncanny, rather than as communicative… Based on the ethnographic evidence, I argue that there is progressive potential in taking seriously the impacts material ‘objects’ have on human ‘subjects.’”

 There were no questions. No hypotheses. No data to be collected, let alone analyzed. There were claims about arguments being “based on the ethnographic evidence,” but no evidence was ever cited. Conclusions were drawn from a series of assertions. It sounded like they were all already done and weren’t seeking to learn anything at all. I remember asking one why they were even bothering to go into the field at all.

This is not a political essay.  Most physical anthropologists are liberal as well.  The registration is 42:1 of Democrats to Republicans among anthropologists in general. 

Nicotine Works

Sebastian Jensen shows how a little nicotine really does boost IQ 3-8 points for a short period of time.

I believe it. The movie stereotype of the journalist who sits down at the typewriter and lights up was exactly my experience.  If I wanted to concentrate and think hard I pulled out an Old Gold. When I quit, the moments that I noticed the lack most were sitting at a computer and starting something difficult. My thinking just felt a little gummy and slow. Doctors and others would ask "Why do you smoke?" and I would point out that I loved smoking.  Smoking is a great drug delivery system, getting chemicals to the forebrain almost immediately. 

Of course, I also had sixteen other cigarettes every day even when I didn't need to think all that hard, and those were bad for my lungs. Detail, details.  It is very hard for schizophrenics to quit smoking because they already feel mentally slowed and/or disorganised. Being in hospital provokes a lot of extra anxiety, and feeling even more zombified than usual is tough to endure...especially if you think there's nothing wrong with you to begin with.

The Beauty of Settled Science

 Eliezer Yudkowsky made the case almost two decades ago. It was passed on to us by Scott Alexander at ACX. 

…and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.

The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention...

Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty...

A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.

I stand convicted. 

Links From 2015

I have discussed taking the Lord's Name in vain since 2007. In 2015 someone asked where I had gotten the idea and I couldn't remember.  Readers, especially Earl and Texan99 discovered that I had gotten it from CS Lewis, which makes entire sense. Everything I know about the faith I got from Lewis. Please Exercise Caution. 

I sent two books to Ben, both humorous. I tell people about How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read often. 

In Polls We Trust 

On Being Rich It's difficult for the rich to make their children work hard.

Henri reveals his ennui. 

Recent Links

 Were Successful Insertions in the SARS-CoV-2 Genome common enough... Way beyond my full understanding, but if you fight through by context you can see what he's driving at.

Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes 

David Foster on Germany: What Happened?

Turns out it's bad Karma to GoPro your rape spree   

Paper is your best play.  Unless your opponent knows that trick. 

Willkommen

 After I put up the intro from "The Producers," this one has been running through my mind ever since.

When the movie came out, I thought it unbelievable that people could be so base and depraved as to find this erotic. I have lived to see similar work come to American stages.

Sources

Christian lifestyle books are a combination of evangelical standards - take time to be with God, read Scripture, pray with discipline - and a buffet of pop psych ideas from 10 - 40 years ago.

Misandry

What are little boys made of?
Snips & snails & puppy dogs tails
And such are little boys made of.

What are little girls made of?
Sugar & spice & all things nice ^[
And such are little girls made of.

Robert Southey, early 1800s 

Third World

The term originated because the democratic world was the First World, the communist countries were the Second World, and the Third World was the poorer, nonaligned countries that had to navigate their way through this dangerous arrangement, playing one off the other as well as they could. It soon came to mean just technologically poor countries, and by the time the Iron Curtain collapsed, the original meaning collapsed for good as well. 

It might pay to recall the original framing, at least for purposes of understanding the resentment that comes our way, even from third-world nationals who have come here. We are puzzled that Islamists and leftists make common cause so easily, and this is at least part of the answer. The belief is that the First and Second Worlds fought over them and used them, leaving them nothing. They were victims of the great powers, which ruined them. Now that one of the worlds has collapsed, there is only the West left to blame. For many, victimhood and resentment are permanently installed. They don't just want a seat at the table, they don't just want to start making money, they want revenge. One can find this all over the Global South.

The first thing to notice is that it is not completely untrue. We have much to be ashamed of. We might feel the same in their shoes, and even in America there are groups that cling to the victimhood narrative. 

We read about people who came to see us differently, who had experiences which turned them around, but in general, those who grew up with this mentality keep it all their lives. Charts and graphs that show how much they benefited from contact, or illustrating it was their own leaders who took the money, or revealing how cultural attitudes prevented them from doing better often have no effect. There are cartoon images, movies, rumors, and myths that rule their minds. The Maya Angelou line is almost true: I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. The missing piece is that that won't forget how they did feel, but they will forget whether it was even 10% their own fault. They will forget everything but how they felt, and blame it on you.

It becomes an entire mindset of "if you succeeded and we didn't, you must have cheated." We believe that about sports teams, business competitors, and romantic rivals. Is it any wonder that people believe it of all billionaires, or the majority of the other sex, or political competitors, no matter how crazy that is in reality? Not to mention that it is sometimes true. 

This has resulted in one of the most bizarre inversions of my lifetime, that Israel must be oppressors because they have succeeded. Facts do not matter, only impressions, and the need to retain victimhood.  

Casting

Yuri Bezmenov. Jul 24
How To Subvert Subversion with Yuri Bezmenov

Sophie Cunningham should have been cast as Helen of Troy - the point that launched a thousand memes. 

Heil Myself

 When this came out in 1968 it was edgy.

 What is it now?  I have no idea.

Ideological Takeover

When the UU clergy isn't liberal enough for you and you have to purge its ranks, I am assuming you have something wrong with you. The Ideological Takeover of the Church I Loved, by Dr. Kate Rohde, who was booted from the UU clergy after she retired.  

Things began to change dramatically six years ago, when a latina Sunday school director complained of discrimination after a white minister was chosen for a job that she wanted. The Unitarian Universalists’ first latino president resigned in the midst of an internet storm and accusations of racism against his administration. No concrete proof was offered for any of the accusations. In a closed-door meeting, the national Board of Trustees declared that Unitarian Universalism harbored “structures and patterns that foster racism, oppression, and white supremacy.” No evidence was given for this assertion. This was a surprising self-evaluation for a group with a strong civil rights record, including the highest percentage of clergy to participate in the Selma Civil Rights March.

The essay was written in 2024, so I don't think I am going to comment there.  I am sad for the woman, and as frustrating as I find Unitarian Universalist positions on many things, I sense that I would get along with her better than her opponents. Admittedly, I am not hearing their side of the story, and additional facts might cause me to see things another way. Yet this is a familiar pattern by now, isn't it? I am increasingly convinced that for this level of extremism, the issue is never the issue: the Revolution is the only issue.  The sub-causes can be exchanged - we can go to war with Oceania instead of Eastasia without missing a beat.

For the Revolution, Hamas will be discarded, as will Islamism in general (though who will discard whom is always an issue). They could not care less about trans rights or disability rights. Heck, even billionaires as a class may be rehabilitated, as long as they are the right sort of billionaire. Racial grievance is too fertile a ground to stop harvesting, though the pattern of deciding who is black enough or Hispanic enough will only increase from here. The Jews are gone and the Asians are going from the fold unless they renounce and recant. Remember that the issue in 1984 was not whether 2+2=4 or 2+2=5.  In the end, the correct answer was "whatever you say it is."

But it is a bit fascinating that the UU's should be subject to purity reviews this soon. I read this woman's story and wondered what they had done to invite the vampires over the threshold. Near the end she reveals it unwittingly.

I have fought for justice against those who denied women equal rights, denied rights for African Americans, denied rights to gays and lesbians, against those who led death squads in El Salvador, and against those who bled the poor in Mexico. I’m old. I’m tired. I am fighting one last time for my faith, liberalism... 

She has fought for justice she says. but all her examples are of fighting against people. Fighting for something often does required fighting against something else, and that is usually a personified human agent.  But fighting the enemy is supposed to be a tactic, a necessary evil, not the point of the whole enterprise. Yet it seems this is where she invited the vampires over so many years ago. Hating became the point. When that happens there can never be victory, only a change of hatred. They finally came for her.

Old Saying

An old guy - meaning 20+ years older than me in 1970 - said something that was funny and cynically wise then. "Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play cards with a man named Doc, and never date a woman named Caprice."

No one has ever nodded and laughed at that line, so I stopped saying it. I finally figured out it is because the names are dated. This is what happens when one lives in one's own head and never considers that possibility. An updated version might be funnier, but people don't go into saloons to play cards with strangers anymore, and there are too many dangerous female names that are common words now. Destiny, maybe. 

Quote of the Day

"It might look like I'm sitting on my ass doing nothing but I'm actively checking my privilege." Tired Moderate

Men in Packs

Prehistoric hominids traveling in packs suggested the Yamnaya to me, though those were much later - just last week by this time scale.  Men might travel in packs for lots of reasons, trade and hunting being two. But advance scouts out to attack others and take their women was a major one we don't talk about much.  The tribe didn't do that for you until late in human history.  The Genesis accounts seem horribly barbaric to us, of neighboring groups exchanging children - or more likely, just the brides - as a sign of cooperation. But that's actually pretty advanced in terms of human behavior.  Sending the young men out to get their own mates before they could be considered adults was common for millennia.

Lots of them died in the process, sure.  But they were usually the hot-blooded extra crazed young ones anyway, and it was good to send them out to do the bloody work. A couple of women each calmed the survivors down a bit, and you could send out the next age cohort. The men were trained and bonded together, which worked out great for the other pack activities, trade and hunting.

I think of this when I see the reels by young women complaining about patriarchy these days. A few thousand years ago, half the young women were captured and half the young men were killed. And that's not even including disease, injury, and famine. Kids, the wives and husbands available now are a pretty good deal, comparatively.

Save The Children

 From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine

 

The Obstacle is the Point

Megan McArdle and others have explained why we learn more from failing (oversimplified, yes). It is a good message to teach, that failures are just a setback and resilience is better than talent. Sometimes we learn to try harder, or earlier, or smarter. Sometimes we learn that we have to find a partner with complementary skills. Sometimes we learn that we aren't a pro athlete, but we can make a career as a coach, a YouTuber, a trainer, a writer. I wonder if there could be an educational model that teaches children to pick a goal they are most likely going to fail at - a science project that they can try again next year, a history project that they have to look at differently next year.  It is sort of like the St. John's Great Books curriculum model, but aimed at younger students. The important thing is to not fear throwing things out.  This only partly worked.  Back on the horse.  

This does still carry a covert message of the important thing is to be king in the end, however, if we let it. When my sons were at a small Christian high school, there were a few years where there was great success in sports...followed by a few years of very few wins in any sport. At one of the parent meetings, there was discussion of how difficult this was to go through, but they were glad that their children had learned these lessons young. One parent was having none of it. He worked in a positive-attitude sales field and fired back "Why are we talking about the lessons learned from failure?  Why not teach them the lessons we can learn from victory? Our God is a god of victory!"* There was a Victory Christian School in the area, but we did not consider that for our children. I I think we learn from both Solomon and Job, myself. Many biblical characters had both sets of lessons. 

I don't think the lessons of failure leading to success is the Christian point. The obstacle is the point. God could accomplish these things we strive for almost accidentally with a word. This world is a school, not a factory. The learning does not lead to doing, the learning is the doing. 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is our friend.  It is an implacable teacher. It may be why we live in this universe and not another. 

*My children and bsking's family might guess who this was. 

Stick Library

 Via "Pineapple Street" on Substack

Recent Links

 The Isle of the Dead It has an evocative sound, doesn't it, like The Well at the World's End and The Young King of the Black Isles? Lewis declared it impossible to write a story that lived up to the title.

 Nehalennia has long remained a controversial figure, with all sorts of theories arising over the years regarding her origin and how she is depicted. Yet the latest research indicates that Nehalennia was a Germanic goddess who had a particular connection with Britain.

The illustration is attributed to Andreas Bonn, but it looks far too modern and nothing like Bonn ever did. That this is a watercolor by Peter Spier fairly leaps out at me.

David Foster reviews Red Plenty

How might this actually be accomplished? Stalin mocked the idea that planning an economy required much in the way of intellectual depth or effort. Get the chain of command right, Stalin seemed to be saying, build it on the right ideological principles, and all that was left was a few technical details, a little bit of drudgery to be carried out by the comrades at Gosplan with the adding machines. But it turned out to be a little more complicated than that. 

The DSA Sweet Spot  Nate Silver looks at who are the voters of the Democratic Socialists, and notes that the strongest group are people with high education and low income.  This has been said before, and discussed.  The finding is consistent across groups in America, which makes it more likely that it is measuring something real, but there's a catch.  The effect is not that large. Education itself is stronger. Note: There is a reference to Omnicause voting.  I interpret that as more social aspiration than ideological.

Colin Gorrie of Dead Language Society is writing a book about English before it was English, that is, from Proto-Indo-European through Germanic through all the subsequent splits to the beginning of Anglo-Saxon, first written down in the 600s.

Bernard-Henri Levy does not agree with Niall Ferguson that historians have lost the war against antisemitism. This is just another chapter in the long war against truth. 

Post-truth was not invented in Silicon Valley but in the Agora of Athens.

It did not come after truth; it was born alongside it, as its shadow.

It is that force which, with the death of Socrates, seemed for a time to triumph and plunged the Fergusons of that age into despair.

And yet.

In the end, it is the spirit of Socrates that prevails, while his opponent Gorgias sinks into oblivion. 

 

Up and Coming

Gout Gout is an 18-year old Australian runner whose parents are from South Sudan. He has stunning speed, but is inconsistent, likely because he is so young. He is on track to pass Usain Bolt and has already broken his junior records, but so many flash out after a promising start.  This is a sport where no one can hand it to you.  I feature him because you might be hearing about him everywhere in a year. The name does rather stick in the mind. 

 

I have mentioned over the last few years that there are too many up-and-coming runners to keep track of. We had Quincy Wilson in the 2024 Olympics, and 2028 is likely to be better.

How to Talk to Someone Who Is Still Inside The Spell.

 Mary Jane Murphy, on Substack, writing about talking to trans activists and friends still "inside the spell." It is good advice for any difficult discussion, but she makes it specific.

1. Refuse the vocabulary without attacking the person

Language is where the spell lives. Every loaded term you adopt is a conclusion you have silently conceded. “Assigned at birth” presupposes that sex is assigned rather than observed. “Cis” presupposes that everyone has a gender identity. “Trans women” presupposes the category exists as described.

You do not need to fight about every word. You need one calm, repeatable move. Mine is this: “That’s contested vocabulary, it embeds a conclusion I haven’t agreed to.” 

2. Ask questions you do not answer...

3. Pace before you lead... 

 4. Plant seeds and walk away...

5. Wait for the wobble...