Screens and Screen Time

There is a lot of deploring of the amount of time the Youth of America is spending in front of screens, and how that has taken over older people's attention as well. Reading from a book is considered better, more ennobling, and certainly better for learning. Silence is considered superior to listening to a speaker, even if one is learning from a course on tape or a podcast. 

Are we sure? The research I have seen largely assumes what it sets out to prove. The worst aspects of the new are contrasted to the best aspects of the old. I spend a lot of time on screens, and I did while I was working as well.  Am I damaged?  Am I not what I should be? Have I let go of the rope and ceased to be a Real Intellectual? Whatever shall we do? The Apocalypse is upon us.  Again.

Simulation

When I was in college and reading Lord of the Rings, I thought invisibility would be the best superpower to have. I also thought that Time Stop would be useful in sports. I eventually settled on Time Travel, but I have been waiting for this and nothing has happened. 

I think getting into asimulation that picks up at a particular point of my life might be just as good.  I do worry about having to listen to and participating in the boring parts again, but if I make some changes, who knows what I might get out of. A couple of you won't make the friend list next time around, but I intend to be minimalist in my interventions.  Who knows what might be upended.

The objection would be that it would be less valuable because it "wasn't real," to which I say "Compared to what?" 

I Wonder Why

 

Italian boys from near Belmont Avenue in the Bronx.  Ahead of their time.

Duelling Motte-and Baileys

There is a FB argument between two Christians who I find rather tiring. One is saying "Tolerance is not a Christian virtue."  The other is insisting that it is, while acknowledging that the word itself does not appear in the Scriptures, and his wife jumps in to state even more emphatically that of course it is, quoting Bible verses in a proof-text fashion.

It looks like a clear problem of definition to me. By some definitions of tolerance, such as tolerating sin within the congregation, or tolerating the teaching or sin, the first man is of course correct. In terms of putting up with differences and difficulties from others, especially within the Church, the second man is correct. A mediated or refereed discussion between Christians who desired to live together in harmony could find points of agreement rather quickly, but neither seems interested.  One is a State Rep and the other is a college history professor, so they both feel they have territory to claim and protect for the sake of others who might be led astray. 

You see why I find this tiring. When disputatnts cannot acknowledge that they are at least in part arguing definitions and relent at least to the point that the other has a point according to his own definition, I find that one or both is trying to smuggle in other ideas with their definition. In current America, this is usually trying to add in some favorite political or cultural idea in disguise. At its worst it can insist that patriotism is the same as Christianity, or that socialism is the same as Christianity if one will only squint hard enough and count a second cousin as a sibling.

Duelling Motte-and-Bailey arguments, both attempting to claim territory they cannot fully defend on the basis of narrower claims that they can. 

 

Misinterpretations in the History of Heredity

 Two Misinterpreted Insights in the History of Heredity. Why did it take humans so long to discover what we now consider obvious, that things "run in families?" We knew there was similarity between parents and children, but somehow couldn't stretch that to families as a whole.  It seemed interesting enough, but when I ran across the sentence 

In 1644, the English philosopher, astrologer and pirate Sir Kenelm Digby published an exploration of the nature of matter, including problems associated with generation. (Italics mine)

I was all in.  OK, now you're talking! Philosopher, astrologer, and pirate. No one has had that on their resume for perhaps 300 years now, and it couldn't have been common in any era. Even two out of those three in a single individual would be rare after 1600. 

 

 

Monkeys Predict Elections

I missed this 18 months ago.  Monkeys accurately predict the outcomes of elections 54% of the time just by how long the look at the photos of both candidates. One of the commenters suggested that this implies humans could predict the outcome of monkey elections, which does seem equally likely.

PDQ Bach

We had a PDQ Bach concert when I was in college, but I skipped it.  I didn't know any better, and didn't tend to take advice then.

 

Founding Mother

David Foster talks about Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was a founding mother of libertarianism. 

 In modern Europe, some years of every young man’s life are consumed in training for war. But a far greater loss of productive energy is in the attempt to control productive energy. All their lives, all workers pour an enormous amount of energy into producing food, clothes, shelter, light, heat, transportation, all the necessities and comforts, and mountains of paper, pens, ink, stamps, filing cases, and acres of beautiful buildings, all to be used by men in Government who produce nothing whatever.

Great White Sharks

 Nellie Bowles reports that Bernie Sanders held a discussion with Chinese, Canadian, and US professors about the existential threat of AI. 

 → Well, I’m sure China is doing this altruistically: Bernie Sanders hosted an event on The Existential Threat of AI. It featured the dean of the Beijing Institute of Al Safety and Governance and a professor from Tsinghua University. Wow, all the Chinese professors think America should stop pursuing artificial intelligence research, maybe we should listen to our foreign friends! They also keep saying that we should disband our military. Seems thoughtful and reasonable. This just in: Great white sharks think seals should stop jumping out of the water and actually just stay in and float around a while.

China and Russia have also contributed heavily to American environmental causes over the years.  Which is odd, because they don't spend much on their own environmental causes. It's a puzzle. AI might in fact be an existential threat and we may need to have serious discussions with lots of people.  I'm just not sure we should start with the Chinese...

Do you think there are Chinese preppers? That might be an international conference worth having.

Medieval Manuscripts

 25 medieval manuscripts you can look at online right now.

The Beatus of Saint Sever  Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8878 (France, ca. 1028-1072 AD)

 

"A good medieval illuminated Apocalypse should still be a bit disturbing to look through, even today. If you ask me, this Romanesque edition with its flat, expressive, colourful compositions fits the bill nicely."

Short Links

 Dogs Help, Cats Watch 

The Vampirist to Catholic pipeline  

 James reports on some AI behavior

Medieval-themed gifts  from the Weird Medieval Guys site

The Smelly Baby Problem

 The history of disposable diapers is more interesting than I thought. By Virginia Postrel at Works in Progress. 

Motivated by the less pleasant aspects of spending time with his new grandchild, the company’s director of exploratory development, Victor Mills, suggested disposable diapers. After analyzing existing products and conducting consumer research, P&G created a dedicated diaper research group.

The research this group conducted, like that of its successors and competitors, wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t advance basic science. It wasn’t even an obvious route to profit. (One percent of the market!) It was a high-stakes gamble that required solving difficult engineering problems. How that happened represents the kind of hidden progress that leads to everyday abundance.

Juggler

I was just thinking, "y'know, I've never posted a juggler before, and it's about time I got around to it." 

No I wasn't really.  I was looking for something else and saw this.

Recent Links

Institute for Christian Machine Learning.  I don't know what to make of this.

March Madness set to expand to 76 teams.  William and Mary men's team has never made the tournament.  In their best years they make it to the bubble.  This is our opportunity!

One of my book clubs is reading Uncle Fred In The Springtime  and I began it today. The opening sentence is "The door of the Drones Club swung open..." A sense of calm came over me.  I am in good hands.

In the context of control variables, Cremieux quickly dispatches the argument that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is dangerous. "What do the critics have? They have their confusion." Similarly, he shows how "attribution studies" that claim for example that 68,000 people a year die because they don't have health insurance are riddled with logical and statistical holes.

Gurwinder discusses how resentment and victimhood mentality leads to injustice, and Nikki Stolz relates this to  self-pity in literature.

I think I have caught up, and will resume my usual posting speed. 

Chihuahuas

 Chihuahuas don't really kill more people than pit bulls.  You will be amused why people thought so.

Auvelity

 If you are prescribed the new antidepressant Auvelity but it is unaffordable, with little research you can bring the cost down from $1000 to $5 by buying both parts of the mixture separately and following the formula.

Cole Allen

One daughter-in-law, a hearty Trump disliker, sent along a link that Cole Allen was not the sort of person the White House is saying he is.  I thought you might be interested in my reply to the dear woman from my immediate mental health perspective. 

That is fascinating. It does seem likely that painting him as anti-Christian is at minimum, highly superficial and recent, and more likely, imposing a predetermined view on him.

He has sounded somewhat psychotic to me, of a point of view that has grown gradually more paranoid. In a very usual fashion, he has drawn his paranoia from what is in the air at the time. Parts of his reasoning are indeed extremely solid, but finding the antichrist in anyone who is prominent in one’s own moment is always deeply suspicious, and attributing a special level of sinfulness to behavior that is always with us seems like a sort of "spiritual impression cherry picking."

It feels to me like an intensity of thinking about subjects that at one time was quite nuanced and able to look at contradictions and try to resolve them, but because of growing paranoia has settled on its answer and can no longer look at two sides of an issue . 

Because this is an enormous ambiguity about who he is, and what has motivated him, everyone will have plenty of evidence for their own side, and plenty of reasons why their opponents are just stupid and refusing to look at "the evidence."  I think we will see no shared resolution. 

She was around a lot of PhD candidates and PhD's at Rice in her 20's (she is early 40's now) and wondered if there is an increase in instability among such folks.  I had thoughts about that as well.

I have thought about this a lot in my career. My belief is that in a clear and protected environment like academia, you can go longer before your instability becomes a dealbreaker. It also happens in fields where you can work alone and submit your work with minimal interaction . So people “choose“ those fields because they get selected out in other fields earlier. They like those fields better for survival and social reasons.  If you learn how to avoid whatever the real forbidden behaviors are in a group, you can break lots of other rules for a long time and still get paid. Academia is just one of them.

The Fully Politicized Society

 Life in the Fully Politicized Society, on David Foster's substack.  He has written earlier versions of this at Chicago Boyz.  He links to some of that in this essay.

He darts back-and-forth between modern events - a speech by Michelle Obama, residence training at the University of Delaware - and events in Germany between the wars and in the Soviet Union.  It's not the same, as conservatives are wont to claim.  But it's the same thing. One of my great surprises when first working in mental health was that the bleeding heart liberals, who at the time I expected to be the good guys and care more about the downtrodden than those evil conservatives, were the ones who most wanted to make people do things that were Good For Them.  Oh sure, that's not what the law says, but it would be really good for Jerry to have a good long stay in the hospital so that he could "stabilisise," and then be required to go to day program five days a week when he gets out for the whole year.  Jerry was 24, and would point out that day program was groups of older women complaining about their first husbands, meditation groups, and healthy eating. 

 Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed….You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will have to be engaged. (bolding by Mr. Foster)

WWII Song

 

The Manosphere Isn't The Problem

From GenX Anecdotes: The Manosphere isn't the Problem, Feminism is.  I did wonder what would happen to a man who wrote this, but then I figured I knew the answer.  In most circles, that man would be hated and off-limits forever.  But these days, there are corners of the internet where he could get together with other guys and exchange stories in gleeful anger. He would incredibly reduce the number of places he could safely hold a job or go to school, but he could have a social consolation prize anyway.  What happens to a woman who writes this I don't know. Most would be pseudonymous for self-protective social reasons. Their comments sections might include a lot of other women agreeing with them and men thanking them, but I'm sure they would attract a lot of hate as well. There will be people who want the world to know that this woman is 100% wrong and dangerous, no quarter given*. 

In the video, the three women discuss the findings of a poll they carried out on Gen Z and their attitudes towards the opposite sex. The results of the poll certainly aren’t a surprise to me and won’t be to anyone who has been actually paying attention. But the women seem to be taken aback and surprised by the findings.

It turns out, drum roll…… young men don’t hate young women anywhere near as much as young women hate men. What a shock!

For me, the results are depressingly predictable. What was fascinating to me was listening to their response to it. Lot’s of “what could be going on here?” and “I don’t really understand why”…..

Well she's not wrong, though she may oversell it.  Schools have tended this way for a long time and it may be worse now.  When I go to vote at the highschool the signs and posters are like this, but much milder. There is also the usual "Our school is great!" and helpful nagging not to do certain things like take drugs or be a bully.  But for those messages which are gendered they are definitely all in one direction. The is also the subtler messaging of "Our school teaches kids to have particular virtues, especially ones preferred by women."  This woman has a daughter, BTW.

 

She tells me what’s going on in her lessons and I see her homework assignments.

English? Let’s focus on women and women’s struggles and how bad it is for women and write an essay about it. History? Women. Art? Women. Science? Women. Even in maths I went to an open evening and her female maths teacher kept going on about the fact that my daughter is a “girl” and that it’s great that she’s good at maths, because we MUST encourage more girls in maths. Do we? Why?

There are posters in the school corridors celebrating female writers, scientists, artists. School assemblies? Let’s talk about women.

Women Women Women…. It’s everywhere.

If they do talk about boys and men, it’s to treat them like broken, dysfunctional girls, bombard them with “education” about “toxic masculinity”, “the patriarchy” and give them the impression that the only way they can be “good boys” is to act like “girls”. 

*Technically, no quarter asked either.  Online, such things are demanded, not requested. See also billionaires, Gaza, 62 million visits, and Epstein files.

Quotes

 Megan McArdle: The existence of a problem does not imply the existence of a solution.

Ann Althouse: The war is over.  We won.  Iran just won't admit it, and we're not going to give them anything for holding out on admitting what is true.

Magatte Wade. Energy poverty kills more people than climate change ever will

Steve Stewart-Williams: IQ remains the strongest predictor of educational success, yet many teachers misunderstand it, underestimate the role of genetics, and embrace widely debunked ideas like Gardner’s multiple intelligences. 

AVI: When your opponents are 50% insane by your estimate, you will never switch to them, even if your allies are 90% insane. At that "balance" you might go neutral, but you will not switch sides.  Because...you see quite clearly that the other side is 50% nucking futs. You cannot leave your position until you have a place to land. Therefore, pointing out to people that their side is 90% insane will likely have no effect.,  They won't see it.  All they will see is that some people on your side are upwards of 50% nuts.  It's not very Bayesian, but it's how we think.

Sanity with McArdle

I link to interesting things, but sometimes underestimate how important simple sanity is in national affairs.  Razib interviews Megan McArdle. The Follies of Populism part is more his than hers, though she doesn't disagree.  Her strength is economic issues. 

 We're gonna have a fiscal crisis, what that means is up for debate. We're gonna have a fiscal crisis in the sense that at some point we are gonna get into a bad situation where the interest rates on our debt are rising enough - Okay, let me qualify this. If we reach super intelligence, I don't know the universe gets wierd, economics is riding around in the sky, we're all like living on clouds.  at that point I don't know. But assuming that we do not get super intelligence that rips through the economy and raises the GDP growth to 35% and/or super intelligence just looks around at all the carbon based life forms, and is like, why? This is very untidy. We should get rid of that. It's those uses could be those, those resources could be put to better use for silicone production. But assuming that neither of those things happens, we're just kind of past the point of no return to getting a good outcome. I've been screaming about this literally for my entire writing career. And when I started, I would say this is coming in the 2030s and people would it was as if I might have, I might as well have said, this is coming in the year 40,000 ad. It's just didn't register. No one was interested. It was so far off that no one paid attention. And that was the point at which we could have had very good outcomes. There were lots of ways to make small tweaks to Social Security, to bring it into balance, to make small tweaks to Medicare. We did not do that. You know, to lightly raise taxes, to lightly change the rules for getting benefits. We did none of that. Instead, we spent more on Medicare, and we did not reform Social Security. And at this point we're less than a decade off, yeah, the solutions are much harder.

Recent Links

Links as threatened. 

 Venn Diagrams get messy quickly. The purpose is to visually represent the relationships clearly. After four it doesn't look very clear and doesn't help much, however accurate it might be.  Of course, there may be those who still find them useful at higher numbers, and good on 'em.

Low Elite Fertility contributed to Roman instability You can't have a hereditary monarchy if the monarchs don't have children

 The Outliers by Joseph Heath.  Progress comes from both our sociability and our unsociability in tension. 

 Kant went on to claim, somewhat provocatively, that the tension between these two aspects of our nature is responsible for the progress that can be observed in human society. Without the “unsociable” aspect of our nature, we would sink too easily into complacency and stasis, but without the “sociable” aspect we would be unable to realize any of the benefits that come from the occasional disruptive insight.

 Ex-climate-activist Lucy Biggers goes back and watches "An Inconvenient Truth."

Fouling when up three.  This is an example of people not understanding that successive reasonable probabilities quickly become unreasonable.  A 7-in-10 chance is good, but if it is combined with a second 7-in-10 chance it drops to 50-50 (0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49), and a third one brings you down to about a 1-in-3 chance. (0.343) Tiago Splitter gets it.

 

 

Marathon in 2 hours

When I was a young man, I thought this would never happen in my lifetime. Even twenty years ago, I wondered. The last few years have seen the time come down regularly.

Sawe breaks the 2 hour mark in the marathon, in London.  I hadn't even heard of the second place finisher Kejelcha for good reason.  It was his first marathon.

 

ACX Links

Astral Star Codex puts out links every month. I will link to a few specifically, but you might like the whole batch.

Go in Peace, Be Warmed and Filled

A small version of this Biblical principle (James 2:16) from Steve Stewart-Williams Life Hack: A Small Gift...

Links From 2014

 The Real Casey, The Real Servant Humor about persistent frauds

The Visit; 1984 & Animal Farm; The Lesson and Rhinoceros As Paul Simon said "Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."  An excellent link from James in the comments.

Circular Time, Julian Jaynes, and Greg Cochran A commenter refined the idea to Helical Time for me, and I no longer think the last part of this is quite accurate.  Still, the concept (also at the internal link) was a big one for a decade or so for me and I still think it has some explanatory power for both history and prehistory

Tessie bsking was there at Fenway that night. 

California Rocket Fuel The old all-or-nothing antidepressant combo discussion revisited.  I was going to delete half the comments, including my own, but Granite Dad saved us in the end.

Bungle in the Jungle

You don't hear it much these days, but this one was played on the floor below me my last semester in college nonstop.  Or so I imagined at the time. 

 

Reminder Before Checking Out

My father's second wife died a couple of months ago, and we helped my younger brother and his family move stuff out today.  they've been at it for a month now.  She wasn't a hoarder, but she had lived in that house since 1946 and kept the better and sentimental things along the way. She had been the one who told us when we were first married that you spend the first half of your life acquiring things and the second half getting rid of it.

Lots of dark wooden furniture, now stacked up in the garage.  Some of it is quite nice, but I understand no one wants it anymore. In the garage rafters is an 8-ft sled with runners that looks about 100 years old.  Even the steering rope looks that old. It's probably worth something and even looks like the sort of thing that gets restored and put in an Historical Society display. There are more than a few things like that in the piles of stuff, but neither Ruth nor my brother had a guy in that knew about antiques to pint out what should be saved and sold or bequeathed.  They both kept saying they were going to, and my sister-in-law says she certainly reminded them about it repeatedly over the last five years. 

Next weekend one pile is going into a U-Haul for donations and the other pile is going into the portable dumpster in the driveway. There's still time to save some of it, but no one will.  My wife took a creamer and sugar bowl as a memento of the very dear woman.

So find the guy you heard about that checks out antiques and put stickies on the ones you want to sell or bequeath. You will have less energy next year, not more. Or you might get injured, as I am, and be much less able to to carry stuff. 

Recent Links

 I have an overflow of articles again, which leads to grouping them like this. There will bve more of these for a while, because I have so many.

Women's sex drive is more socially constructed than men's, which is more biologically driven.  This in the context that both are both.  From the Existential Contrarian

Higher Graduation Rates Are Not a Good Thing from City Journal. It seems to just mean they're promoting weaker students anyway. I'm lookin' at you Tim Walz and Gretchen Whtmer

Predictors of Conspiratorial Thinking. 

Empty Buzzwords Lead to Poor Judgement.  Research confirms Dilbert

Do Young People Suck?  One would think this was a short rant by a grouchy old person because damn kids can't even shoe a horse these days, but it's Lyman Stone doing a deep dive, with graphs and statistics.

Southern Poverty Law Center

Grim points out that paying informants is not illegal, and may not even be objectionable.  I agree.  What is at issue is if they significantly funded the events, and if the violence would even have occurred without them.  I don't know, but I am certainly suspicious.

 

Update: Polimath reports what I should have looked for myself - that the indictment is not for paying sources but for wire fraud and making false statements. Which makes the cartoon less a propos, but I still like it.

Does Your Mother Know?

 An ABBA song I had never heard before.

 

Glom

I wondered for years where my mother had gotten that word. "You look like a glom," she would say, especially if I was unkempt, underdressed, and self-pitying.  I'm not criticising her, it probably helped. I was never able to get a handle on what it meant, but the sound of it alone seems to convey it, doesn't it?

For random reasons I decided to try again, with similar lack of success. But DuckDuckGo gave me a link to Althouse in 2010, where she quoted the word "glomming" for males looking on while one man spoke with a woman. One of the commenters had apparently said 

 "Glom" was used by my mother to describe a sullen, unsocialised male: "you look like a glom in that shirt." Everyone else used it to describe attaching oneself or sticking on to something - glomming on to. Given my heritage, I concluded that the meanings were related to the Swedish word for oatmeal. I have been unable to find any authority who thinks this even remotely possible. However, a similar word roughly equivalent to "gloomy" was reported to me by a Norwegian.

If I had to push my guess beyond provable limits, I would relate it to PIE *ghel, melancholy, rather than Proto-Germ. *klamm, stuck together (clamp, clam).

I was thrilled to see this. It validated so much of my childhood experience. Except when I clicked through I found it it was written by me, in 2010.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

 Colin Gorrie at the Dead Language Society does a nice introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Conspicuously French words tend to cluster in certain scenes within the poem. When Gawain is at the castle, being tested by the lady, their speech is dense with French. They talk of plesaunce ‘pleasure,’ prys ‘excellence,’ drury ‘love,’ and walour ‘valour.’

For example, in the following line, spoken by the lady, every content word is of French origin. English has supplied only the grammatical glue:

to þe plesaunce of your prys, hit were a pure ioye (1245–1247)

‘[I would gladly aspire] to the pleasure of your excellence; it would be a pure joy’.

When the Green Knight speaks, however, French is almost nowhere to be heard. And when, as we saw above, Gawain rides through the frozen landscape, the poet largely turns to native English vocabulary, albeit a Norse-inflected version: felle ‘mountain’ (from Old Norse fjall), dryʒe ‘strong; patient’ (from Old Norse drjúgr), dreped ‘killed’ (from Old Norse drepa ‘to kill’).

The poem sets court and culture against nature, and its representative, the Green Knight. The indoor world is adorned with French vocabulary; the outdoors is distinctly Germanic.

 His paid subscribers are doing four readings across six weeks of the entire work, with discussion, if you are interested.  

The Hali Gali

 

Every version of the Hully Gully seems to be a little different.  This is closer to what I remember from my first dance at Liberty Hall in South Chelmsford in 1965.  My father knew how to do this and I didn't.  Cooler than me.

Some Things That Work

 ...and some that don't in criminal justice. Book review at Washington Monthly of Jennifer Doleac's The Science of Second Chances. He differentiates between Activists and Factivists in what works after arrest inb the criminal justice system, and places Doleac squarely among the latter.

...collecting the DNA of people charged with felonies reduced their future rate of criminal conviction by 42 percent. This is one of many studies that allows Doleac to underscore a critical point: The most powerful deterrent is not the severity of the punishment but the certainty of being punished. Once criminals know that it will be hard to get away with crimes because their DNA is on file, many desist. And importantly, as Doleac notes, crime deterrence isn’t just good for future victims; it also increases the likelihood that the one-time criminal will do more productive things, such as obtaining a job or receiving an education.  

Fair monitoring of substance-use disorders has a good rate of return in lowering recidivism. The author suggests that doing this and little or even nothing else might be the best strategy for probation and parole.  For reasons that favored my agency but not the patient, I was part of resisting this at the psych hospital for many years.  Our position was that we were a mental health agency, not a substance treatment facility, and we would be overwhelmed with returning patients who did not have current psychiatric symptoms. We gradually shifted this because the long-term practicality proved itself out, but we were slow about it.

Something to surprise everyone in the topic. 

 

The War on Cancer

 Progress in thew War on Cancer By Steve Stewart Williams.  A good example of what to look for when someone is using statistics in a misleading way.

The Jalens

The best unofficial team in the NBA right now might be the Jalens. Named after Jalen Rose of the Michigan Fab Five (the First Jalen) and then 16 years in the NBA, the current crop was born in the years of his greatest popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s. This year's all-NBA team should have three: Jalen Brunson and Jaylen Brown, both 29, and Jalen Williams, 24. Jalen Duren and Jalen Johnson might qualify for awards this year as well, and there are about ten more after that.  OKC has two Jalen/Jaylin Williams.

Poor Orphan Boy

 Eve, on X: my dad's dad died recently and my mom just told me that now if they're (for example) deciding what kind of pizza to get he'll be like "well we have to get pepperoni..........because I'm an orphan.........."

It reminded me of this. 

 

How Funerals Keep Africa Poor

 David Oks writes from a statistical viewpoint on a lot of job automation and poor country topics. 

How Funerals Keep Africa Poor.  

And, finally, after all this, the big day comes. Your body is retrieved from the mortuary; hundreds of people show up, many of whom never knew you in life; and a great deal of money is spent feeding them, entertaining them, and sending you off in the style that an Akan elder deserves.

This all sounds, you’ll notice, very expensive. And it is.

A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year.

Test Optional Admission Policies

 Test-Optional policies are a disadvantage to qualified applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. National Bureau of Economic Research

We find that test score optional policies harm the likelihood of elite college admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. We show that at one elite college campus, SAT (and ACT) scores predict first year college GPA equally well across income and other demographic groups; high school GPA and class rank offer little additional predictive power. Under test score optional policies, less advantaged applicants who are high achieving submit test scores at too low a rate, significantly reducing their admissions chances; such applicants increase their admissions probability by a factor of 3.6x (from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent) when they report their scores. High achieving first-generation applicants raise admissions chances by 2.4x by reporting scores. Much more than commonly understood, elite institutions interpret test scores in the context of background, and availability of test scores on an application can promote rather than hinder social mobility. (Italics mine.)

Testing was my ticket into college. 

 

The Final Battle - Pahlevi Will Return

This is the current Revolution song in Iran.  Note that it refers to the Islamic Republic as a foreign occupier.

 

Who Counts as a Victim?

 Steve Stewart-Williams's post at Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche links to a paper by Jake Womick and colleagues about different definitions of victimhood between liberals and conservatives. 

 In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed. 

Womick thinks this division makes more sense than Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations and fits the experimental data better.  That is encouraging to me, as I very much liked Haidt's research at first despite some flaws I noted, and was disappointed when its predictive value was not holding up as well as expected. 

Point of Comparison

 

Speaking of Mexican and Tex-Mex

I wanted to choose one and just kept watching them.  I finally decided enough was enough and took the next one that isn't too long.

Part of Our Culture

I didn't know who Sabrina Carpenter is, but the recent incident brings up something just a touch puzzling. She heard something she didn't recognise as an Arabic call of celebration and thought it was yodeling.  She said she didn't like it.  The person was offended, saying "But it's part of my culture," and a lot of her fans were offended as well, and chastised her the next day. 

I don't think "It's part of my culture" is quite the blanket excuse that pop fans think, but I do think it is on balance better to be polite. It's better to be polite in the opposite direction, too, however. If I were to go to an Arabic musician's performance and kept interjecting "Hallelujah! ...Glory, glory!...Amen, sister!" throughout the concert I would not be surprised if people found it intrusive and took it amiss. I wouldn't expect the artist and the rest of the audience to understand. I don't applaud during Romanian Orthodox prayers. If I am doing something that I should know will makes others uncomfortable, I should at least have a better reason than "It's part of my culture."  There's an arrogance to that. 

It is similar to complaints about cultural appropriation, which I identified over a decade ago as more about snobbery than protecting another culture: I know more about Indonesian cuisine than you do. That style is more the province of liberals.  Conservatives have different "shoulds."

Donna B and Texan99 discuss Mexican vs Tex-Mex at the link, which was fun.

Beethoven

 We walked out to this at our wedding almost 50 years ago.

 

Not this version

Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism

David Foster, over at his substack Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism, which includes some early and mid-1900s political history.

Although most assume that an immoral person is one who is ready to defy law and convention to get what they want, I think the inverse is often true. Immorality is frequently motivated by a readiness to conform to law and convention in opposition to our own values. 

"Just Look At History"

This is a phrase that now puts me off entirely. It is the equivalent of "It's obvious that..." or "Only a fool would..."  When I hear it, I envision hand-waving, condescension, smirking, disdain, or that new thing on reels where guys are drinking from a mug and nodding thoughtfully.

The postmodernists are correct in noting that everyone has unexamined assumptions, especially those who claim to be the most scientific or most orthodox or most knowledgeable. Poking those balloons with a pin often reveals them as the least scientific, orthodox, or knowledgeable. I believe in science, orthodoxy, and knowledge, which is why I am extra suspicious of those who claim it without evidence. "Just look at history" is only a way of saying "I can't prove it but I want to skate by without being challenged by being intimidating."

BTW the postmodernists usually fail by exempting themselves from consideration of unchecked assumptions.  When challenged, they happily point to the unexamined assumptions that they have considered but cost them nothing.  It is similar to the chronological snobbery that irritated Barfield, or the chronocentrism which Lewis kept identifying. Yes, all ages have their biases - especially this one.

It can be used to "prove" why capitalism never works and why socialism never does; how Trump is a fascist or his opponents are; how women have it easy or women are oppressed. It is a social rather than logical or evidentiary argument, relying on cherry-picked data.  

So stop that.  Do I have to pull this car over? 

Links From 2014

 Sentimentality is a leading cause of poverty

Well-Behaved Women I got some pushback for this one.

Development    I should add that Lewis did not dislike Restoration Comedy.  He was making a different point.

Foreigners 

Inspiration...?  

The Magpie on the Gallows  Explanation of a painting by Bruegel. Quite a lot in it.

Changes in the Game

The NBA season is over, and the big controversies are teams tanking to get better draft odds, the 65-games-played rule for many awards, and the increased injuries. WRT the latter*, in the 1980s every year an average of six players who made the All-Star game played all 82 games.  These days there hasn't been one since 2019. The great increase in decelerating and side-to-side motions is blamed. Eurosteps, crossovers, step-backs, stop-and-pops, and many more put tremendous strain on ankles and calves.  Earlier basketball was more straight up and down the court. Fewer games in the season would help but is dead on arrival, because everyone wants the money. Reverting to the ref touching the ball after every made basket would slow the game down and reduce the number of possessions per game. It might help.

Victor Wembanyama has played fewer minutes per game than other top stars and has still been out with occasional injuries - and they bring him back very slowly.  He is very tall, very skinny, and is coordinated enough to make those reverses and spin moves that put stress on the legs, so he plays 30 minutes per game instead of 35. Yet he is going to get MVP votes this year, because he is simply is that good. This limiting of minutes is not going to be just an aberration for him.  My prediction is this becomes more common in the league.  The NBA put in the 65-game rule because when fans buy tickets, they want to see the stars play.  They don't want them being held out for "load management," even though they need it to just not be injured. Compare this to starting pitchers in baseball. No one pitches a complete game anymore, because the greater speed puts more stress on the arm, and whole teams try to wear pitchers out by drawing walks and making them throw more pitches.  Six innings is a good outing now.

There are a hundred proposals for modifying the draft to reduce or eliminate tanking.  Some are saying eliminate it altogether.  The best law firms and hospitals don't draft the top graduates every year.  Especially if you have a salary cap, teams can make their offers to the players they want.  If they have terrible coaches or cities that aren't fun, how is that different from some artists wanting to be in NYC while others want to live more quietly, or Elon Musk moving to Texas? There is an argument that the only shot the worst teams have at getting great players is he draft. But Washington and Sacramento have had top draft picks for years and are still terrible year-in, year-out. Other things are their real problems. No one wanted to play in Oklahoma City either, but Sam Presti is magical and gets players. Brad Stevens of the Celtics is another.

Some of the many proposals are quite odd, and I won't even get started on them.  Most of them seem to accomplish something that would improve the situation by reducing the incentive for tanking. All of them still offer some incentive for losing in some situations, and when that happens, teams will tank.Various lotteries dilute but do not eliminate the problem, and the best outcomes are usually for good teams who have their best player out for the year dropping to the bottom to get a prime draft pick.  The Indiana Pacers went to the finals last year but lost Tyrese Haliburton for this season and will have a top pick this draft.  The all-time example of this was the San Antonio Spurs already having David Robinson but getting Tim Duncan in the next draft because Robinson was out injured.  It was the beginning of their dynasty.

As for the awards, I can see points in both directions, but I lean to eliminating the 65-game rule. Some of the voters object because they want to be trusted to make a decision whether a guy playing 63 games was actually more valuable than one playing 70.  The league does not want to give up the hammer to make sure players aren't being rested "for no good reason."  As if "We want him healthy for the playoffs" isn't a good enough reason.

*Lattest? Latest?  Is that where the word latest comes from? Cool. OED has latest=last as archaic and poetic, and also mentions lattermost.  I should have use "last" in this context.

1 Corinthians 15:21

 

Wax Beans

I didn't know they are the same as butter beans. Butter beans sound wonderful, and duck.ai images look bright and appetising.  I am not fooled. These were one of the horrors of my childhood, worse even than their close relative the green bean. They were a school cafeteria staple, but I haven't seen them in years. Of course, I haven't looked for them either.  They might be in those cans I always walk past with a shudder. 

Maybe they're fine if they haven't been soaked in water and stored on a shelf for two months. Fresh vegetables are better...

But I am not going to find out.  They were called wax beans for good reason. 

P.F. Chang's

There used to be one in NH.  I always called it P K Chang's, and when I looked it up had minor trouble. It now comes frozen, and I still refer to it inaccurately, shaking my head why I can't remember it. I bought some this week for the first time, looking at the package and wondering while I cooked it. It occurred to me that I confuse it with C K Yang, the Olympic decathlete from Taiwan and UCLA. It's as good an explanation as any.

Instant Coffee

 The Creation of Instant Coffee at Works in Progress. I drink instant for the convenience and cheapness, but I admit I am intrigued by the idea of the new offerings. I may give them a try one of these days. 

When I was in Beius, Romania in 1998 I went one morning to the small grocery to find some instant coffee.  Unsurprisingly, I could not find it in the store, which had a bizarre array of products arranged in no discernible pattern.  I stood in line and asked at the counter for Cafea Pudra (powder)...Cafea Repede (instant, fast). Blank looks. I tried to mime spooning it and pouring over. I was holding up the line, half of which was impatient, the other half intrigued.  Someone in the back asked "Cafea Nes?" I turned back, excited. "Da! Da! Cafea Nes! Multumesc!" Relief and jollity prevailed. But they didn't have any.  Maybe tomorrow.

They say Cafea Instanta now. 

Not For Sale

 Daniel Piper is a Serious Literary Author, after all

Today a brand contacted me and asked if I would consider writing a sponsored diary entry. I was shocked and appalled. As a Serious Literary Author, I am against the concept of advertising. I told them in no uncertain terms that my writing is not for sale. 

Afterwards I felt so sullied by the exchange that I was compelled to wash my hands with Aesop Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash, which, with its gently aromatic formulation containing oils of orange, rosemary and lavender, leaves the hands smooth, purified and refreshed without drying them out.

Brain Donation and Autism

 Brain Donation is Needed to Study Autism. I registered to be an organ donor, assuming that if anyone would have a need for it, they should go for it. But somehow this feels different. My body going into the ground without my pancreas or spleen seems fine.  But without my brain in my head?  That creeps me out.  It's irrational, I know. Still, I am considering it, because as someone who has some combo of OCD/Aspie/Anxiety symptoms with a high IQ, there might be useful things to look at. In reality, researchers would probably look at something else completely unremarkable about me and I would just look wrong under the ground.

I think you don't tell people that for the wake.  It's one thing to think "They sent his spinal column and his kidneys up to Mary Hitchcock for a study." Quite another to look at the face and go "They cut his brain out of that.  They filled it up with styrofoam or something for the viewing." 

Making a Marriage

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly… both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to his son. 

The Global IQ Debate

Tove K at Wood From Eden on Substack has a guest post from a Nigerian psychologist about African IQ scores and what they mean The Global IQ Debate: A Modest Contribution from a Resident African. She includes her own introduction. She is an interesting person herself, and I have read posts of hers before. But this guest post is a point of view I have not heard before. One would think that a Nigerian might feel defensive and dismiss the idea that the majority of sub-Saharan Africans have IQs less than 85, but he thinks that is about right. He sees a particular strength in rote memory among the population, especially those who pursue education, combined with a significant rarity of what we would call abstract reasoning or information processing.  He tries to define exactly what he means by that quite carefully. 

Fascinating stuff.

His essay is fairly long, but it was all new enough and provoking enough to be worth the effort. I would rather let it speak for itself than try and interpret at this point. A sample, halfway in:

 So, back to the point I have only so far made passing references to: if Africa has a real IQ disadvantage, I don't think it is much in the cognitive dimension. Nigerians, as you probably know, are a notoriously successful immigrant group - even after we take selection bias into account (although some data have shown that second generation diasporic Nigerians, and immigrants from third world in general, tend to regress eventually to their country of origin means). But I think when the environment is optimal and held constant, and the incentive structures are robust, I don't think there'll be significant difference in pure average academic performance between children of African and European (or of Asian) descent. I think if there's indeed a dysgenic factor, it must lie in some other property of the 'mind' (which I'm using to mean 'emergent brain function'). And one such property is what I would call 'Information processing', not of facts and factoids printed and presented in textbooks but of the raw unstructured reality. The kind of ongoing information processing that gives rise to how a people conceive of reality, what they think this reality, as conceptualized by them, demands of them in order to maximize its impartial offerings, and how they believe this reality should be interrogated and organized.

This is by far the most fundamental sense in which I think the poor countries of this world are different from the rich ones.

Patches

 My best friend in highschool loved this song.

 

Which Goods Are Overemphasised?

People overreact to gas prices, ground beef, eggs...

What else? Tolls? Fast food? Soda?  What are the things that turn people against whoever the current president is?  A bit of mutton is so dear these days. 

More importantly, what do we not notice that actually costs us more? 

Have fun. 

Reporting Housework

 Women report doing more housework when being interviewed by a woman. Men are not affected by the gender of the interviewer.

When studying time spent on housework, most evaluations rely on retrospective questionnaire responses rather than on diary-based data. There remains, however, discussion about how reliable such retrospective time-use data are. For example, Kan (2008) finds systematic differences between questionnaire and diary data on housework hours which vary by gender and other characteristics of the respondents. 

Yeah, I'll bet that's true.  Diary versus questionnaire "finds systematic differences" in just about everything. Not that the diary can't be shaded as well, but we tend to put on the shine more for questionnaires. Are women feeling guilty in front of other women, claiming more dusting than they really do? If we go back and look at previous studies, can we tell?  Wanting to measure something accurately and objectively doesn't mean you are succeeding. 

There is no standard definition for what constitutes housework. Does gardening count? When does beautifying shift over into hobby? Do driving errands count? Parent-teacher conferences? It is one of those elastic categories that easily lends itself to taking resentful positions for what is included. I imagine the items that spring to mind first do indeed fall to females more often, likely unfairly: laundry, cleaning, cooking, dishes. Gratitude, or lack thereof, figures prominently in folks' feelings about the matter.

Even If You See It Coming

 It is done very well.

 

Op-Ed By a Horse

 I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like to Try Cake

Back to Links from 2014

Frozen Revisited.  I watched "Frozen" for a second time with the granddaughters and was irritated by the lack of foreshadowing that Hans was going to turn into the villain.

Frozen Re-Explained  Six months later, I ran across an article that explained the lack of foreshadowing to me. However, support for my idea was still rather half-hearted.

Risk Assessment of Sex Offenders

Two PC Spirits  A competition between Indigenous Culture and the combined weight of Anthro professors, alt-religion, and gay people. At the time the answer was only partly in.  The conflict has now been resolved by the latter coalition insisting that the Indigenous Peoples did too have two-spirit gender- switching people which was very modern of them.  That the various tribes insist this was not so is simply ignored.  The Indians lose again.

Parody/Parody Non  

How To Get Out of a Psych Hospital 

  

Being at War

I turn 73 in a couple of weeks and grew up in an era of many Americans knowing directly what it was like to be in a war in other places. Europeans and others, however, would frequently mention that Americans had no knowledge of what it was like to live through a war and held that as a serious talking point that we had no idea of the horrors of it. European writers would bemoan warlike Americans just not understanding the danger. When we visited there we would be solemnly informed of the battles that took place, and people who had been in them or lived through bombings would be trotted out as prizes to lecture the stupid Americans.

I have a brother-in-law in his late 80s who remembers being able to distinguish which side's bombers were coming in the Paris suburb he grew up in late in the war.  My best friend in the 80s was the son of a man who had been in the Hitler Youth, was drafted at 17 and sent to the Russian Front, was immediately captured and sent to Siberia. One could still meet such people then.

It is entirely fair that they had a point in saying Americans just didn't get how bad this could be. Most of us hadn't the least clue.

European writers and even people on the street still talk that way.  I grant that there is something different about looking at the river running through your town and knowing "This was the boundary between the Nazis and the Allies during the war," with buildings and even damage still visible. But it is entirely a pose at this point. There are many more Americans than Western Europeans especially who know what war looks like up close now. One could say that this is our own damn fault, but it is still a core fact. Scandinavians, Spaniards, Austrians, and Belgians are now the ones who know nothing directly. Terrorism they sometimes know.

They don't know what it is like to be fired on and have armies of occupation patrolling the streets, whether on their side or the other guy's, so they imagine that what they do have is almost the same thing. 

It is not only the American military.  American missionaries and businessmen have also seen war around the globe. Portugal sent out both 500 years ago but nowadays, not so much.  America has a lot of immigrants who have seen war elsewhere. Fewer illusions. 

Better Moon Shot Choice

"Space Oddity" was hurriedly released in June of 1969 to be in advance of the moon shot, but it barely registered in the UK despite good reviews, and not at all in America. With re-releases it picked up steam and was a hit in 1970 and quickly became an early 70s standard.  So I missed it in my Top 100 lists for 1969, but Texan99 was on it anyway.

It's definitely a better choice because it's an astronaut, not just the moon. The moon is actually mentioned. I put this out as a better choice.

 

The Wrong Lesson

David Foster links to an excellent summary essay by Richard Fulmer about groups putting energy into economic activity rather than political activity. Politics is necessarily redistributive, creating no new wealth. The continuing misunderstanding by socialists and much of the left that the amount of wealth is somehow just present, and equity can only come from taking it from A to give to B. Economic thinking casts a wider net on getting wealth, including direct creation of something that was not there minutes before.

 Those who had to rely on markets and education were, in a grim irony, forced into the more productive path. Markets reward productivity. Politics rewards coalition-building, favor-trading, and the ability to extract value from others.

Politicians, especially on the left believe "Only we can save you. Elect us and we will get you your fair share. There is no other path." Unions will insist "We got you the weekend and the forty-hour week." That is less than half true.  They could not have done this if there were not new wealth to draw from. They were not useless, and the service they provide must be achieved somehow. But they did not create a penny of it. You can't export the practice to places that aren't producing wealth - there is nothing to share. 

Great Answer

 

We might be doing education all wrong, but this is not why. An adding machine - or children two grades ahead - have always been able to do the math better than the student. Lots of people can write better than a ninth grader.  What has that got to do with anything? 

Replication

Attempts at replication of social science papers showed that half could not be replicated with statistical significance, and re-analysis showed that 2% of the studies even came to the opposite conclusion! Some of the difficulty maybe downstream of the fact that less than 30% of the 600 papers gave enough detail that replication could even be attempted. 

Finally, SCORE checked papers’ replicability — the most onerous of the three tasks. Researchers endeavoured to repeat entire experiments, gathering and analysing the data from scratch. Of the 164 studies that they focused on, they were able to replicate only 49% with statistical significance¹. That figure is roughly in line with the results of other attempts to replicate scientific findings.

Gurwinder concludes from the 7-year long project published in Nature  it’s now wiser to assume a social science study is flawed until there’s reason to believe otherwise. Similar problems persist in biomedical studies.

The Natural Progression

My wife invited a woman from knitting group to come to one of our Easter services.  She called yesterday to see if the woman was coming and to which service, 9 or 11?  "I can't come because of Easter" of course turned out to mean that preparations for the feast after the celebration prevented going to the celebration. This has definitely happened with Christmas as well. I don't think this is simply North American, It is a natural tendency of humankind.

In Honor of the Moon Shot

I mean in 1969. There are pop songs from that year that sort of work, but none that jump off the page.  

"Bad Moon Rising" - well, I'm not sure a bad moon is what we are looking for.

In "Aquarius" the moon is in the seventh house, but that's the last we hear of it.

"Good Morning Starshine" has stars, not the moon.

I think that leaves an entirely forgettable song by Paul Revere and the Raiders,

 So maybe we try 1968, for the first moon orbiting and looking at the "dark" side of the moon.

Nothing. No moon songs in 1968. 

"Remember the Ladies"

Also from the Free Press 250th Anniversary historical discussion is the famous exchange between Abigail and John Adams, excerpted here.

Abigail (full text) ...and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

John (full text) Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory. We dare not exert our Power in its full Latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in Practice you know We are the subjects. We have only the Name of Masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight. 

I have most frequently heard this discussed as if Abigail is being half- or even fully serious about the rebellion. In that reading, John comes off as something of a prick, dismissing it so lightly. Yet while Mrs. Adams is being sincere, she is also being intentionally humorous and hyperbolic. Only in our own era, when there are women who would mean it just as it is stated, would the harsher interpretation be automatic to some. John Adams was not that stupid. If he thought this a quiet threat of what would happen in the next decade or so if the ladies were not "remembered," he would have been more diplomatic and conciliatory in his response.

These were two people who loved and enjoyed each other, and even on serious subjects put each other first. They are both correct about the underlying issue. In the realm of violence men are more likely to be dangerous and tyrannical, and women even then knew that reining that in was of grave importance to many women. But the general (though uneven) verbal superiority of women was known then as well, though scarcely acknowledged, and Mr. Adams's humor is carefully delivered. 

Don't Call Them Pirates

 From the Free Press, a story of the privateers of the American Revolution, Don't Call Them Pirates.* 

Washington had a realistic view of what motivated men. Though he himself had refused to accept a salary for his service in the Continental Army (he accepted only reimbursement for expenses), he saw the importance of marrying patriotism with appeals to the pocketbook. “I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism. I know it exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest,” he wrote. “But I will venture to assert that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone—It must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward.” 

I am a subscriber, and I don't know how much of the article is above the paywall. But with FP the first paragraphs are usually enough to get you started thinking, anyway.  And I have some 1-month free subscriptions to give if you get in touch with me at wymanhome (comcast). It is also why I included a section from further down.  Letters of marque and reprisal figure prominently, and a further reading list is there.

*Not that that would be a bad thing. 

Civic Knowledge

Instapundit links to a study (via Marc Porter Magee at X) by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation of the comparative civic knowledge of men and women.  Men greatly outperformed women on the task in all 50 states. However there may be something misleading about this.  It is my experience that women know more about local elections, candidates, and issues, while men follow national candidates and issues more.

Just a thought. 

High Trust and Xenophobia

I had a friend at work who lived for two years in Estonia when her children were preschoolers in the early 2000s. She and her husband were very white, Americans of German extraction and not alarmingly eccentric in any visible way. Neither were they socially accepted in any way, even though the husband brought very useful skills to the university and the wife was intelligent, open, and charming. Other mothers would decline play dates with the brightly-dressed American children, and at daycare the staff discriminated against them and did not insist that the other children treat them fairly. 

The quote that begins Are High-Trust Societies More Xenophobic? , “I found a region and a culture that finishes high in societal ‘trust’ rankings globally, yet has little trust in outsiders,” rang true for me about rural Scandinavia, but not urban.  In contrast, Romania both welcomed and rejected Americans while I was there at about that time, and I was given to understand that this extended to Western Europeans as well. But Romania was not a high-trust society under communism, even as intense nationalism simmered underneath the surface the whole time.  Yes, they hated gypsies, Hungarians, and Russians, not to mention Jews and Germans while they still had them, but they were not correspondingly high-trust with each other either. There was a Casa Noastra in the cities, quite equivalent to the Italians of similar name. Trust only for the narrowest of categories.

I would read the Aporia article with the world outside North America uppermind first, only extending it to ourselves when you finish. The relationship between ingroup and outgroup thinking is much more complicated that we would think at first, and the usual explanations shift between obvious correctness and wild misunderstanding. Peter Frost has given a gift here, of information vaguely known and understood leading to unexpected conclusions that don't fit our pictures of other nations. But...but...aren't these the same people who... Yes. Yes they are.  Their contradictions are different from ours. You will find yourself tentatively thinking "I see that, but I had not thought of it that way."

All of this changed with industrial capitalism and the rise of labor markets in the 1800s. Industrialists found that they could more easily expand and contract their workforce by hiring and firing non-family members. Meanwhile, compulsory education made young people less available as a source of labor. Children became a net cost, and their numbers shrank. Thus ended the West’s population boom, first during the 1920s and 1930s and then for good in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to experience substantial population growth due to Western advances in medicine, sanitation and agriculture. (Italics mine.)

Wednesday Links

Reading comprehension is not a skill. An excellent "we've put the cart before the horse in education" essay. Critical thinking skills are not even an issue if the child doesn't know the vocabulary. Another instance in which "drill and kill" is actually life-giving. 

Crystal Widjaja. "You need to be unemployed to keep up with AI, so that you don't fall behind and become unemployed."

Voter's views on the economy 

Kids are safer than ever.  We complain that the overemphasis on safety has made children tentative and vulnerable.  Bethany checks out what we have gained for this. 

Unexpected

NH has had vanity plates for a long time, and still has a high percentage of them. I always thought it was a very sensible libertarian way for the DMV to make a little extra money for the taxpayers. Fee for service. 

 

Medical Update

I fell off a bread truck onto my elbow over 10 weeks ago driving my humerus into my rotator cuff.  Three of the four tendons are completely torn.  Surgery will be in early June, with a 50-50 chance of doing any good at all, only a 25% chance of complete restoration of function. Then 6-12 weeks in a sling, 6-12 months of physical therapy.  The PT will maximise whatever I've got, so my functioning will be at least improved regardless. 

Not very encouraging, but I have already started adapting, anticipating what I can lift and what I can't, where I can reach. One gets creative. I am not especially discouraged.  Life goes on.  

A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother

My DIL is weeding books from the town library, and discovered a songbook from 1992 which has never once been taken out. It has "Sippin' Cider," which I knew from scout camp in 1965, but none of the others were familiar.  Some of the titles were phrases I had heard before, not knowing they came from a song.

 

Foxhole Friends

Anyone can support you when you are right, moral, and making sense.  The fanatic's test is whether you can support them when they are wrong, evil, and making no sense at all.  Those are their most important supporters. 

At the Free Press I Went Undercover in France's Anti-Israel Movement. 

 I participated in conversations in which activists—who proclaimed themselves deeply committed to believing all sexual violence victims—expressed doubt about the veracity of rapes committed by Hamas against Israeli women on October 7. Worse still, some female activists claimed that “Hamas responded in accordance with its culture.” Even those who believed the victims fiercely denied the antisemitic nature of the rapes: “This is not an antisemitic rape; it is patriarchal, because it is inherent to men to rape women,” explained one activist during a feminist demonstration.

Bad Apologies

If someone says "I'm sorry IF..." that could mean they don't think they did anything wrong, it's just you being oversensitive.

If someone says "I'm sorry BUT..." that could mean they only did something that looks wrong because you did something worse that caused it.

If someone says they are sorry and feel ashamed they did something, they still might only mean they are embarrassed they got caught, not that they feel at all bad about having injured you.

Each of these might be used for a decent apology.  I don't want to fuss about someone sincerely being sorry but not getting the words quite right.  Yet these are often evasions. 

Inexcusable and unforgivable are not the same things. An evasive apology does not only not excuse wrong behavior, it is an additional injury in and of itself.  Not all behavior is excusable. Yet all call be forgiven and we are in fact commanded to. One of the main ways we go wrong is in wasting energy trying to find excuses and convincing ourselves they apply to "those who trespass against us."

Scripture tells us that the quickest and most reliable way to get to forgiveness is to recall what we have been forgiven for ourselves.  

Flogging a Motionless Nag Again

Why Would You Study That?  People who study sexual and ethnic differences in humans are often challenged for doing it at all.  Aporia plays the Basic Curiosity card. I think it would be unimportant if we didn't build so much of our legislation and government funding off false information. But once we are going to shell out large amounts for it, craft our education around it, while punishing good things and rewarding bad ones, I get interested.

We are bombarded by claims that the South Koreans educate better because they are so strict, and the Finns do so much better because the are are so laid back. Yet the PISA scores track the national IQ very nicely, including at more granular levels like Brahmins, Saami and immigrants from different countries. 

We don't want to condemn a generation of Caucasians into believing that they can't ever be an Olympic sprint or jumping medalist no matter how hard they try.  Why would you crush their dreams like that? Isn't it better that we feel relieved that the myth is true rather than letting them learn that being a coach, or a sportswriter (or Youtuber), or a manager/trainer/photographer/physical therapist/merch creator is more accessible?  Why would you limit a child's dreams in that way.

Not recognising heritability is ultimately cruel. You just didn't try hard enough. You don't have the character for that. The Man is keeping you down.  How is that better for a kid?

Up Periscope

 I remember that these were fun for about fifteen minutes.

Pouring Out

We want the people in the way of our loved ones' salvation to be cleared out.  No mercy for them. It isn't just evangelicals.  A Catholic priest told our group a story of a woman who worried about her brother, who had long ago left the Church and was now dying, who kept telling him he should call for the priest and receive Extreme Unction (which most of us call the last rites). Lord, please grant this small thing.  I am sure it will be enough. And there are Gospel accounts of Jesus operating at a distance, or indirectly simply by being touched. 

It reminds me of the many mothers talking about their child who "got in with a bad crowd."  In one sense that is true, for we are social creatures, and the accident of who was in our neighborhood or class does have an effect.  However, sometimes we are the bad crowd for someone else. Sometimes it is not the lack of a single friend or the prayer of a single sentence. Sometimes the need is thoroughgoing and huge.

I was at a funeral mass for a middle-aged man who committed suicide and was impressed how the language of the liturgy was quite different. The grace and mercy of God are poured out. It might be good for us to remember that to be the dog beneath the table waiting for scraps is enough and begging for those, but for the sake of Jesus Christ, the Father's love is poured out.

Poured out. Take your time. Maybe come back to this on Good Friday.