Are People Innately Lazy?

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

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

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

Mythbusting by Megan McArdle

How do people even come up with these things?

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

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

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

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

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

Recent Substack Links

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

It looks like Fukuyama was prophetic about this in 1991.  

Bernini.  Imagine being able to make stone look soft. 

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

The purpose of Milan Cathedral 

First and Second Palestine.   Seems to be new

Reminder

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

So there's this.

 

School Is Worse

 School is Way Worse for Kids Than Social Media.  Eli-Stark-Elster

One of my favorite tests: "Compared to What?" We read about the terrible things that social media and video games do to children's development.  I do not say such things are untrue.  In my day it was comic books and TV that rotted the brain, and I imagine it did.  Either my junior or senior year of high school, I watched "Gilligan's Island" three times every night - two of them the same episode. I know see it as a good form of zoning out. When you have anxiety sufficient to require at least 60 minutes - often 120 - to fall asleep every night, the brain seeks something mindless enough to relax, interesting enough to keep you in the chair.

School was great because I got to see my friends before, after, and between classes. But many of my classes I would go in prepared to start slowly counting until the end of the class as soon as paying attention became intolerable, but having to look attentive. Even being challenged wore off rather quickly. I loved the first two weeks of advanced summer studies, 4 hours a day, six days a week of the same subject, plus homework that was new ground we were supposed to capture by morning.  Weeks three and four were okay.  Week five I was starting to wane.  Week six I was checked out again.

I suppose it was dime novels that started us on the road to ruin, eh?  

 For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?

If that was all true for social media— and again, none of it is — you and I both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.

Great. So let’s get rid of school.

Yes, there’s the obvious twist — all the data I just listed is true for the effects of school. The modern education system is probably the single biggest threat to the mental health of children. 

 

I don't know what I would design instead. I am pretty sure I would order the complete set of Junior Classics comic books. How else would I ever read Silas Marner? 

The Increase in Cancer is a Good Thing

Why it's good news that more people are dying of cancer. 

Since 1980, the share of the global population that dies of cancer per year has risen by almost 20 percent. But this isn’t because cancer has become more dangerous – it’s because of rising life expectancy. Cancer is much more common in old age, and more people now survive to that point. Age-adjusted cancer death rates have actually fallen by more than 20 percent
Stefan Schubert

This is also a good thing to keep in mind with health statistics in general. Better hospitals get more difficult cases. Longevity in general is not a great measure of a society's health (though it's a pretty good measure of yours). The percentage of people dying of a particular cause has a lot to do with the causes that have dropped off the list altogether. 

World Happiness Report

 The World Happiness Report is a Sham by Yascha Mounk. What I have been saying for years, but better researched and more thorough. Scandinavians see through the questions and want to make their society look good. 

But perhaps the biggest problem with the World Happiness Report is that metrics of self-reported life satisfaction don’t seem to correlate particularly well with other kinds of things we clearly care about when we talk about happiness. At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.  

When You Don't Understand A Novel

Book club did Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins this month, and I was puzzled for a good deal of it.  Not that I couldn't pick anything up, but events unfolded that had little connection to each other, and even well into the book, when the various subplots were building and connecting internally, how they fit with each other remained obscure.  I figured out a some interesting things I noticed and found a tag line I thought would hold up: What is wrong with mankind, and what can be done about it?  

It was good to listen to smart people who loved the book. Pieces came together. But as they came together, I realised that I had dropped basic information that I had been given.  Had I recollected those I would have done better, as I could have asked myself good questions after 100 pages.  First is the title, Love in the Ruins. Always keep the title in mind, right?  It's important. The protagonist is in love with three women but the relationships are fragmented and he believes the world is about to either end or change drastically. So when puzzled, asking yourself "Why is this book called Love in the Ruins?"  Whenever I remembered the title, I diverted into thinking "Wasn't that a movie with Katherine Hepburn?  Was that connected with the poem by Browning? Is this book going to tie into one of those somehow?" None were helpful thoughts in understanding this book.  Keep it simple.

One of the participants read from the first page of the novel. Every paragraph not only introduced the themes and subplots, but pointed to exactly what was central about them.  So go back and read the first page again. Pay attention to names.  The protagonist was named Thomas More and was one of his descendants. I just took it as a generic historic religious figure, telegraphing that there were going to be religious topics and themes.  No. It was important that it was Thomas More.  The town in Louisiana was named Paradise.  I thought that was merely ironic. There was lots more where this came from.

Some others picked up that this was about the lack of integration between parts of the personality, as well as between parts of society, and parts of the Church.  As the kaleidoscope keeps turning, it finally comes to some stable picture at the very end.  Strange, but recognisable and looking healthy rather than pathological. If you know that going in, and remember the title and pay attention to the names, the book may reward a reading.

The Assistant Village Idiot is supposed to make his contribution by paying attention to the obvious things that everyone else has overlooked.  I got that backwards, failing about as spectacularly as possible. 

Tuckerman

 I've never skied Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington myself. Never seriously considered it.  I have friends who have, one in particular who grew up in Gorham and skied it often. He still skis at 72, just finishing a vacation at Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks where he skied 15 straight days, opening to closing. This is where they just had the gondola breakdown two weeks ago, which he just missed.  His was the last gondola that could be exited before it ground to a halt, stranding over 5 dozen skiers aloft. 

So he is still having adventures.  He skied for the US Army in Germany in the 70s and works for some unexplainable Minotaur AI defense intelligence company in Virginia now. His eye is on retirement to get back to the Adirondacks. I don't quite know how I got distracted into this.  I was talking about Tuckerman's.

I can see why you would want to ski it in the summer, when it is the only place in the East with snow year-round. I don't get choosing a workout like this in February, when you could get in more skiing anywhere with a lift. Wildcat is right across the highway. I'm grateful there are GoPro cameras that can give me a vague idea of the experience.

 

Links from 2014

 Generic Novel Tim Sample with a classic old Mainer's joke

Metaphor for Memory - Computer analogy or video?  Application to Borderline Personality Disorder. 

California Dreamin' with the Hullabaloo Dancers.  Fairly disquieting 

Fraidy Cats  I am still hearing that it is conservatives who are afraid of change.  I am even more convinced now that this is backwards.

Pete Seeger had just died.  James's link in the comments to a First Things essay at the time still works

 

Fish on Fridays

We are having fish tonight, which always reminds me of this joke when it happens on a Friday. 

Maureen O'Rourke went to the priest to complain about her family and ask what she should do with them.  "I make fish every Friday like my mother and grandmother before me, as a good Catholic woman should, and they whine about it the whole dinner."

"Don't they like fish?" Father asked

"They love fish.  They just don't like being old fashioned, so now that the rules have softened they want to be all Vatican II about it."

"Do they complain about it when you serve fish on other nights?"

Mother O'Rourke paused, eyes darting from side to side. Then one side of her mouth turned up in a grin. "Thank you for your help, Father.  They're going to get fish every blessed Wednesday for the rest of their lives." 

Land Line

 I haven't gotten rid of my land line yet.  I need it to find my cell phone.

Winning 20 the Hard Way

Mickey Lolich of the Detroit Tigers died several days ago at 85. He was known as a solid high-innings, high-strikeout pitcher with a bit of an attitude. Mickey was not a 20-game winner until his 30s but had some spectacular seasons late in his career.

He was overshadowed during the 1968 regular season by Denny McLain's 31 victories, an extreme statistical outlier even at the time. Lolich was even sent to the bullpen for a couple of weeks for ineffectiveness.  But he managed to win 17 games anyway, earning 3 starts in the World Series. This time it was McLain who disappointed, losing games 1 and 4. Lolich won twenty games the hard way, with three complete-game victories, including Game Seven on two-days rest. Key to that win was picking off Lou Brock* and Curt Flood in one inning. 

 

McLain's career disappeared, embroiled in bookmaking scandals. Mickey went on to have his best seasons. 

*The replay shows that Brock was actually safe, but players argued with umpires less about that then. 

Burns and Allen

First episode before a live audience

 

Recent Links

 Weaknesses in the Nurture Hypotheses. Nurture says that stereotypes have a large effect on children's attitudes toward themselves, which is why they are so damaging. Do they?  Did the expectations of the older ladies in "The Music Man" affect the little girls of the 60s? (Multiply by a thousand other examples - still not much effect.) 

The 30-Year Success Story the FDA ignored  Ruxandra likes the Australian model

The Gospel of Shut Up  David Foster sends along this tale of criticising Hamas and paying for it at Guelph University

Are Girls Smarter Than Boys?  According to Cremieux, the new study just means "I can win this argument if you let me redefine all the words"

Government jobs are among the least merit-based in America, prone to nepotism, affirmative action, political appointment, longevity and tenure, Old Boy (and now Old Girl) networks, and outright bribery. Yet imagine if it were the one area where merit was most sacrosanct. There would be a prestige that attracted talent. It would require a massive reform effort; likely no one would attempt it.  But Singapore does it, and Lipton Matthews compares the result to the UK and Jamaica 

How Far Back In Time Can You Understand English?

Oh, this was fun. Colin Gurrie at Dead Language Society composed a story based around London that goes back progressively in style and vocabulary to the year 1000. How far back in time can you understand English? 

1500

I went forthe among the people, and as I paſſed throughe the market and the ſtretes of the towne, euer lokyng aboute me with grete care, leſt I ſholde agayn encountre ſome peryl, thee appeared, from oute of the prees that ſame man whom I ſo dredde. And he was passyng foule was of vyſage, as it ſemed to me, more foule than ony man I had ſene in al my lyf.

He turned hym towarde me and ſayd, “Straunger, wherefore art thou come hydder?”

And I anſwerd hym nott, for I knewe nott what I ſholde ſaye, ne what answere myght ſerue me beſt in ſuche a caas.

He then goes back over the territory, explaining the changes in each era. I commented there about prose being easier to follow than the poetry we are usually given for each era.

Gurrie is the author of Osweald Bera, which teaches Old English in the form of a story about a talking bear. I haven't read it, but it looks like fun and relatively painless. 

Experiencing The Environment

 Things Have Changed (sidebar) has the blogger's career experiences with environmental degradation in non-capitalist places, in response to the frequent accusation that it is capitalism that has caused pollution. Experiencing the Environment. 

 That same year, a colleague went on a due diligence trip to Volgograd (the former Stalingrad) to look at a factory our company was thinking of acquiring.  Upon his return, he reported that the toxic waste from the plant, and every other factory in the area, was transported by a pipeline some miles to a local lake where it was dumped without any treatment.

What, are you doubting his lived experience? 

Recent Links

 Transwomen are not Women Mary Dyer. An online and irl space I know little about, other than the statements about them by others. A statement that recognises that autogynephilia is a real thing.

...“transwomen” are not, in fact, women, but are males who feel sexually entitled to women and will use male tactics like colonization, dominance, and usurpation to get what they want.  If they can’t invade our bodies they invade our spaces.  They take our words.  They redefine us out of existence. 

"The Dwarves are for the dwarves!" 

 Zimbabwe vs Botswana  Magatte Wade is a happy warrior

Pooh's Vocabulary  "This morning, my 4-year-old told me that the clementine he was having with his morning tea was “Very pleasant to eat.” About 85% of this child’s vocabulary comes from Winnie the Pooh and I am not mad about it."

Nothing to See Here, Move Along I thought I'd give another source because this one is mostly behind the paywall, but there is a Bright Future Fund related to Down's Syndrome scholarships, a Bright Futures Catholic school charity, a Florida general scholarship charity, and that's not even getting into the Brighter Futures Fund.  But this one has the usually-reputable Fidelity Investments in it. Click on the tax return to see the mission statement...

 

Greatest R&B Song of All Time?

 I might give it my vote.

 

Exhibit Asterisk

Bethany has a new experimental substack up, Exhibit Asterisk, trying to make sense from a statistician's perspective of why believe what they do about news stories. Wander on over.

Thoughts During Sunday School

We were reading the Letter of James, Ch 1, vs-2-4 

² Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you are involved in various trials, ³ because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. ⁴ But you must let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.

I mentioned there that I have often avoided James when going through trials, because James might slap me around and I don't want that. But when the Hound of Heaven is after me he usually brings me to bay, and I find that verses 2-4 are actually a comfort. Oh right. This is actually good news when I am under siege. 

I was thinking of something by CS Lewis in relation to this - something about the world as a hotel vs. a prison vs. a school - and tracked it down today.

Christ said it was difficult for “the rich” to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, referring, no doubt, to “riches” in the ordinary sense. But I think it really covers riches in every sense—good fortune, health, popularity and all the things one wants to have. All these things tend—just as money tends—to make you feel independent of God, because if you have them you are happy already and contented in this life. You don’t want to turn away to anything more, and so you try to rest in a shadowy happiness as if it could last for ever. But God wants to give you a real and eternal happiness. Consequently He may have to take all these “riches” away from you: if He doesn’t, you will go on relying on them. It sounds cruel, doesn’t it? But I am beginning to find out that what people call the cruel doctrines are really the kindest ones in the long run. I used to think it was a “cruel” doctrine to say that troubles and sorrows were “punishments.” But I find in practice that when you are in trouble, the moment you regard it as a “punishment,” it becomes easier to bear. If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.

Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison.

Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic. ("The Christian View of Suffering.")

Teaching Theory Before Data

I had no idea it was this bad.  I have been hearing that parents were puzzled at math methods being taught to their children, but I figured it was just a mild inefficiency of method that they were not familiar with. We forget things, and when Jonathan and Ben were in more advanced maths I had to stare at things a while and look at the previous chapters (which I never did in high school) to figure it out.  But they were in Christian schools which taught math in more old-fashioned ways.  I recognised what was in front of me, but had forgotten it.  I could get it back. (Though they usually got there first while we were staring at it together.)

Holly Math Nerd, who I have seen quoted before on the internet, has an essay I can only describe as chilling, Light Bulb Moments Are Not Accidents.

 The clearest example came with a real-world problem: 6,990 ÷ 260. Framed concretely, this was a question about how many more paychecks it would take to pay off my car loan if I stopped making extra payments, with each paycheck covering half a payment.

Without prompting, she immediately saw that 260 × 2 = 520 meant 2 was the first step — and did the multiplication mentally. No boxes. No number lines. No written explanation of her “strategy.” No developmentally inappropriate requirement to do meta-analysis of her strategy in real time.

Just fluency, surfacing the instant the problem was allowed to be orderly.

This is the part that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t watched it happen: the so-called “conceptual” method didn’t deepen her understanding. It buried it.

It increased cognitive load, scattered attention, and replaced a stable procedure with constant decision-making.

The standard algorithm didn’t feel old-fashioned to her. It felt like relief.

Some of you are familiar with Richard Feynman's experience on the California State Curriculum Commission in 1964 New Textbooks For the "New" Mathematics. This is the same type of error allowed to continue unchecked for 60 years.  It stems from the idea that the theory should be taught first, before there is any data to apply it to.  Children's brains don't work that way.  Heck, our brains don't work that way. Even in later years, when children have some abstract reasoning ability, you don't teach the idea of the periodic table and expect the student to figure it out, labeling it as they go.  You put the periodic table in front of them and then start pointing out the patterns and connections. Once they get the general idea, then it doesn't necessarily matter much if neodymium drops out of their memory.  But they aren't going to get the idea cold. If you want to teach maps, you start with places the child already knows, not the idea of a map.  

AI Non-Update

I do not link to or discuss many AI articles.  I think it is getting beyond this dinosaur enough that I am no longer interested. That is my lack, I suppose, rather like discovering you are beginning to top out in mathematical ability and deciding you don't want to major in it after all.*

But Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten is still going full bore. His Links for February starts off with variety, but settles into a pattern of most articles being about some aspect of AI, and today's post is an update on Bio Anchors. If you want to keep up, I recommend you make that a regular stop, both for his own thoughts and those he links to. Steve Hsu's Information Processing (or Manifold, sidebar) is another, and might be more interesting to those who also want information about Chinese technology, geopolitics, and technical military capabilities.

*Had I stayed in, I suspect I would have been in Number Theory or Transforms, though the fascination even there was waning in 1972. 

Recent Links

 The Greater Male Variability Hypothesis at NNN.  While males have greater variability on more traits, there are some on which females have more.  And some that show little difference between the sexes.

Noah Carl thinks E-verify would be a better tool for reducing the number of illegals, but Republican interests keep opposing it.  The Trouble with Trump's Deportations.  

America's Water Is Too Clean.  A great example of the law of diminishing returns in terms of health.

What the heck are chins for?  by John Hawks.  There have been lots of theories by some very smart people, but each hypothesis has acquired strong evidence against it.  The last theory standing is that it is a spandrel, a byproduct of other changes.  In this case the shortening of the face from smaller teeth, and a gestational need to take in amniotic fluid means the lower jaw must grow faster than the upper. 

Veggie Tales Characters Aren't Christian  A fun definitional dispute.

Homegrown Winter Olympics

 

Pittsfield is way out in Western Mass, almost into New York.  Looks like a fine day for sledding.

Fertility Crisis: What Does (Not) Work

 Rob Henderson pulls a quote from Nicholas Wade.  

 South Korea...has spent more than $200 billion since 2006 on programs to reward parenthood, with cash awards for the birth of a baby, parental leave that lasts a year, and subsidized childcare. Nothing has worked.

Reading further on the page brings up an intriguing example of something that recently worked at least once. 

Mansplaining

 Competence-Questioning Communication and Gender 

 Results demonstrated that when faced with condescending explanation, voice nonrecognition, or interruption, women reacted more negatively and were more likely to see the behavior as indicative of gender bias when the communicator was a man.

This accords with my personal observations, but I do have a quibble. Women reacting more negatively to men's statements seems like a more important finding than that they find this evidence of gender bias, as all of us would be less likely to attribute disrespect to gender bias when it is our own gender. 

I have received competence-questioning communication from both men and women.  With the latter, I am likely to attribute it to the type of female communication  outlined by Deborah Tannen in You Just Don't Understand, that women offer what they think are involved, helpful suggestions that men interpret as being ordered around. After a few repetitions I might start to conclude that the woman has some sort of need to put men in their place, but even then, I am more likely to conclude that she wants to put everyone in their place. With men, I usually conclude that they are equal-opportunity jerks. 

And yet...and yet...I find that men will make assertions more often, but women will put an edge on these more when it is to men, and deny they are doing so. They define this in gender terms, that they are simply defending their right to be heard in the face of silencing, or standing up for themselves. Men are more likely to just be full of themselves. Women wound. Some are genuinely unaware that they are being condescending - others are clearly antagonistic but denying it.  My examples are from work, and therefore dated. I don't have a good sense how things are now.

Wikipedia Editing

 Gurwinder used to be an editor, but stopped 

"I gave up editing Wikipedia articles when I realized most of my fellow editors were either political activists or PR firms. The problem with a website anyone can edit is that the people most motivated to edit will naturally be those with an agenda." 

Groundhog Day

I never think about Groundhog Day, nor notice it when it goes by.  I don't think they've ever made much of a deal of it in New Hampshire, even for schoolchildren who like holidays and animals. It's never an open question here that there is going to be six more weeks of winter.  Feb 2 is halfway through the season, but that is purely a mathematical situation. You can get bright warm days at the end of March, and occasionally in mid-March.  However, you can also get snow in May.

I have to figure fourth-graders in Arizona don't care much about Punxutawney Phil either.  Irrelevant rodent.

Words Women Know, Words Men Know

 From Steve Stewart-Williams.  Unlabled, because you will get it soon enough. Expandable. I will tell my tale in the first comment.

 

Victorian City Planning

 Samuel Hughes at Works in Progress writes about urban planning in Europe and America Many Victorian Cities Grew Tenfold in a Century. 

This sluggish growth rate (Ed. today) has generated intense housing shortages. Tackling them may require learning from the city planners of the nineteenth century. The whirlwind pace of nineteenth-century expansion was underpinned by a distinctive approach to urban government, including a fundamental right to build when it was profitable to do so, tolerance and even mandating of infrastructure monopolies, and willingness to charge fees at profit-making levels to fund urban infrastructure, whether sewerage, water, buses, trams, metros, gas, or electricity.

The illustrations alone are worth going over and wading through a long article. The followup a few days later How writing about nineteenth-century cities changed my mind,  was what actually attracted me to the first essay.  The words "changed my mind" are like catnip to me.  It is so hard for all of us to change any belief that the arguments in such essays are likely to be surprising and powerful. It is the intellectual equivalent of hiking up a mountain with a fire tower, at least in New England. Those spots were chosen for wide visibility but easy access for a fire warden to live there, so you get a lot of view for moderate effort.

1. It made me more pro-planning

Living in 2020s Britain, it is easy to become sceptical about planning. Our planning system enormously constricts housing supply, impoverishing the country. The housing and industrial buildings that do get built are often distributed around the country according to political imperatives rather than economic logic. It is natural to think that some sort of Hayekian emergent order would be preferable.

In the nineteenth century, however, we see planning performing its true function, solving the collective action problems inherent in urban life...

So for moderate effort, I actually feel I know something about the topic.  That is probably an illusion, but still, it's a nice feeling. 

The Lily of the West

I had only heard the PP&M version, which has the best lyrics. But I instantly knew it is better as a bluegrass song.  I didn't like the Irish versions much, even with Mark Knopfler and the Chieftains. I might have liked to hear a Johnny Cash version, but this group is great instrumentally.

 

Special Pig

 I had heard it, but I wanted to hear Norm tell it anyway.

 

Super Bowl Halftime

The usual NFL fan thinks every aspect about the Super Bowl is supposed to be about them, because they are the ones who cared all year, buy the merch, and watch the games. The halftime show is therefore supposed to be someone they like. The NFL views it differently. They want to be known as every year's Big Event for the country and even the world. They want to throw the best party. Next, they want to attract some new fans.

The football fan feels defensive about this.  They consider the Super Bowl to be essentially their territory, their party.  They earned it. But the NFL brass knows that the fans would be thrilled with highlights from 10 random previous Super Bowls, commented on by someone who knows football. No one else is watching that. There are no new fans there. There's no national party there, only a football party.

The halftime show has more in common with the commercials.  Lots of non-fans tune in just for the ads, though these days it is more common for those people to watch them as an entirely separate entity, only distantly related to the game. 

The NFL desperately wanted Taylor Swift this year, but there was a dispute about who was going to own the rights to it afterward.  Swift doesn't need to bend on such questions, and they need her more than she needs them - except for the precedent of owning the rights, which the NFL felt was a bridge too far.  Taylor had already brought in female fans, especially 13-40, a demographic which football is weak in. I never watch the halftime show, but even I might have looked in on it in order to chat about it with my granddaughters. Bad Bunny is not going to bring in nearly as many new fans.  But he fits the bill as big this year and a demonstration that the Super Bowl is the country's biggest party. 

The football fan wants to be acknowledged as one of the people the party is for, one of the honored guests.  Ain't gonna happen. 

Klosterman

Humorous what Chuck Klosterman says now that he's older. But I give him credit.  He is well aware that he thought differently when he was younger, and finds it amusing now.

Ethan: But this one right here, this one right here, Chuck. This is about the topic, but about a whole lot else, and something that I've thought about a lot, though not necessarily from your perspective. 

quoting Chuck, (from his new book Football): The enlightened opinion one is supposed to hold about the young is that their provocative ideas are inevitably correct, and that history unfailingly proves that the views of outspoken 20-somethings eventually become the views of everyone else.

This take is particularly common among hipster olds who believe aligning themselves with young people keeps them young. They see a college protest, or they read a novel from a precocious author, or they hear a teenager voicing radical politics, and they say, the kids know the truth. What's hilarious about this claim is that it only works in the aggregate.

Ask any 50-year-old if he or she, on a personal level, was more intelligent and more ethically sophisticated at the age of 25. They'll always, always, always say no. Somehow, it's possible to imagine that young people are smarter as an amorphous group, even when the individual experience of every midlife adult suggests the opposite. (Podcast interview with Ethan Strauss)

Archbishop Wolf's Sermon to the English

A thousand years ago, the Archbishop of York chastised the English people for their sins.  (Full text)

You can read this marveling at how different they were then, or how much the same.  Both are true. 

But what I say is true: there is need for that remedy because God’s dues have dimin­ished too long in this land in every district, and laws of the people have deteriorated entirely too greatly, since Edgar died. And sanc­tuaries are too widely violated, and God’s houses are entirely stripped of all dues and are stripped within of everything fitting. And widows are widely forced to marry in unjust ways and too many are impoverished and fully humiliated; and poor men are sorely betrayed and cruelly defrauded, and sold widely out of this land into the power of foreigners, though innocent; and infants are enslaved by means of cruel injustices, on account of petty theft everywhere in this nation.

And the rights of freemen are taken away and the rights of slaves are restricted and charitable obligations are curtailed. Free men may not keep their independence, nor go where they wish, nor deal with their property just as they desire; nor may slaves have that property which, on their own time, they have obtained by means of difficult labor, or that which good men, in Gods favor, have granted them, and given to them in charity for the love of God.

But every man decreases or with­holds every charitable obligation that should by rights be paid eagerly in Gods favor, for in­justice is too widely common among men and lawlessness is too widely dear to them.

Posts from 2013

Manifest Destiny

Politicians and Values

Whiskey and Orange Peel

Math Should Be Taught Like Literature and Art

Language Myths

Discussions and Opinions (at work)

Purgatory

Maggie's Farm carried a Real Clear Religion essay about "Groundhog Day" as a humorous but serious depiction of Purgatory.  The idea of Purgatory as a place you get stuck until you figure out some character-improving principle shows up a lot.  Usually it is being stuck in a waiting room until you figure out you have to be kind to the old black janitor or something else tied to simple social kindness rather than anything deeply theological. I've never run across one that was offensive, just rather milk-and-water niceness. 

I don't think much about Purgatory, but since reading CS Lewis's defense that it is possible (though not a required belief) I have been more comfortable with the doctrine than most Protestants.  "Groundhog Day," now that I look at it, is a surprisingly good basis for the pivotal part of the discussion. If we look at Purgatory as a place where we get sent unwillingly until we smarten up, then it seems an unnecessary step by God, who has elsewhere promised us that we will be changed in the twinkling of an eye. 

Yet what if it is not that we have to stay until we get it right, but we get to stay until we get it right? The identical scenario, but with a different attitude. God allows us the freedom, even after death, to participate and cooperate with the change. We have an unlimited number of lives in this video game, and can keep going until we collect all the necessary treasures to move on. The treasures, of course, would not be the accidentals of a game, where it is well more than half luck to learn that the runestone is behind the waterfall guarded by the trolls.  We learn instead that our brilliant idea for improving on God's morality, no matter how vehemently we insist and how many variations we try, is not actually the best answer. We have to unlearn many of our treasured ideas. 

No, we get to unlearn many of our treasured ideas. We not only see, but we see why. When I am nostalgic, I usually try and change something, starting with my worst sins, and I find this good to contemplate. So a purgatory like that sounds difficult and frustrating, like a video game purposely designed to keep you focused to the point of obsession until you crack the code, sounds more deeply comforting than uncomfortable. Bring it on.

Recent Links

Erica Komisar, therapist and parenting expert, explains in interview what is wrong in both specifics and general approach in the education of young boys. From the substack Celebrating Masculinity, which does not just confine itself to complaining about unfairness, but what prosocial masculine traits can and should be taught.

Top 12 Camille Paglia Quotes, from NNN

When we pray "Thy kingdom come," implicit in the petition is "My kingdom go."  Mike Woodruff, The Friday Update.  

Why Clinical Trials are Inefficient. 

Well this is depressing: Do women really select for intelligence? by Ichimoku Sanjin, an evolutionary anthropologist. As I read, I kept thinking "But wait, isn't it true that..." only to have Sanjin address it. I still am uncertain about this.  My wife didn't choose me for my looks, trust me. The assortive mating aspect, that she chose me because she is herself smart and people choose for similarity, is likely. There is a link to a study that shows that intelligent teens (IQ 130) were 3-5 times less likely to have sex than those with average intelligence.  Believe me, I suspected that.

 

Hobo's Lullaby

I sampled half a dozen versions tonight, and still like hers best. 

 

Education as Signalling

 Asian immigration and the signalling model of education, at Aporia.  It's almost a year old now - I don't know how I missed it.

"Arcotherium" is a particularly interesting writer at Aporia. He combines knowledge known to the education skeptics and heritability-focused but little-known (or disbelieved) by even the educated general public, and additional surprises not generally known to the skeptic/heritablist group either. I read along with the frequent thought That isn't what I would have thought, but it sounds quite possible. Hmm. This article is longer than most substacks, but my interest did not flag. He includes homework hours, SAT and SAT-prep, performance in both home country and in US, and IQ. There is a lot here. Key to the understanding is that parenting that is beneficial for the educational success of the individual is collectively bad for the society, as it destroys the signal that education is supposed to provide.

Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Whenever there is a signal for desirable traits, prospective signalers can focus on either (1) improving those traits or (2) optimizing for the signal itself, making it a worse signal of the underlying traits.

Asian success in education is partly (1) but more of (2).  

He summarises his argument:

1. Education is mostly signaling, so increasing competition among students and investment in education is collectively wasteful, while individually rational.

2. Asian immigrants, through a combination of grinding and cheating, Goodhart this signal for cultural reasons, thereby attaining more education than expected from their abilities.

3. Given (1) and (2), Asian immigration to the US makes life for aspiring upper-middle class children and their parents significantly worse—by worsening the college admissions grind that has come to dominate childhood.

Note:  I did not read the comments there.  They often have some good ones, so I intend to get back to that. I am still overwhelmed from too much input last week, so not today.

Brilliant But Unreliable

I thought I remembered it was James who had heard the phrase "brilliant but unreliable colleague" to describe AI, but I couldn't find it at his site, not on any of your other sites. It eventually occurred to me that it might be on my own site, and it was. Steve Hsu thinks of AI as a "brilliant but unreliable genius colleague." So I had the physicist part right.  

I mentioned this at book group to David Foster and Texan99, and the latter noted immediately that this described many of the humans she had worked with as well. It's a fair point. When I worked the neuropsych unit 1998-2003, I had many brilliant but unreliable genius colleagues. I hate it when I forget my own rules.  In this case, "Compared to What?" 

CANOE

The acronym CANOE is an etymological joke, referring to the Committee to Attribute a Nautical Origin to Everything. Many English words do come from nautical terms, because English spread around the world first on ships, headed for Bermuda, Canada, India, Australia, or Pitcairn Island. But people got completely carried away with this, with "Port Outward, Starboard Home," or "Shipped High In Transit," neither of which is the real origin of those terms*. Acronyms did not come into being until such things as RADAR and SCUBA** in the 1940s. Also, there is no such Committee.

There are romantic notions that seem to be culturally installed, so that phrases are often falsely attributed to "Shakespeare's time," or "gambling slang," or "originally Irish." Those are red flags (which is a nautical term) that the purported explanation may be invented. As for the Irish in particular, I wrote about that almost twenty years ago There's a Sach Ur Born Every Minute.

*Posh is an old term for a dandy, based on a thieves cant word for coins. Shit occurs in other Germanic languages, likely derived from a a verb meaning "to snip." Which makes sense if you are spending a lot of time around sheep, dogs, or other mammals.

**SCUBA means Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. TUBA is also an acronym, meaning Terrible Underwater Breathing Apparatus. 

The Nones Project: Not Who You Might Think

Playwrights, screenwriters, journalists, and novelists have long sold the idea that strict evangelical homes have produced a lot of atheists. Those children were disillusioned, have seen through the hypocrisy and charade, and they know the real score. I have run across this in conversation about Catholics as well, but have not seen it in media as much, so my personal experience may be influenced by growing up in a disproportionately Catholic community, a northern mill city. Social media is overrun with people who will tell you why you shouldn't believe, many of them angry and disdainful, but they do not represent the majority of the non-religious. 

Ryan Burge of Graphs About Religion has written extensively over the last few years about the non-religious in America, and after surveying the Nones, a hefty 12,000 of them, divided them into four categories: Nones in Name Only, Spiritual but not Religious, Dones, and Zealous Atheists. He looked specifically at their religious upbringings and found patterns. Different types of upbringings produced different types of non-religious people. 

Because I often look for heritability explanations, I will note that he does not include anything like personality types as possible confounders.  Parents provide both genes and environment after all, an a certain personality type of parent might not only environmentally influence the religion of their children, but pass along a disposition toward a certain style or approach.  But Burge isn't touching that, at least not at present. He's already generating an 8x8 matrix for his surveys, broken down into a number of 4x4 questions, and one has to draw the line somewhere. 

The Nones Project  is three related surveys, beginning with religious upbringing and continuing with beliefs and what their level of well-being is.  Graphs and more graphs! Bright labeled colors! 

Bsking gave me a months free subscription, so lots of this might be behind that paywall.  Let me know and and I'll see what I can piece together for you. 

Ring, Ring

An ABBA song I have not yet posted. I'm not that fond of it, but I'm thinking I have to eventually expose you to the entire collection. You can hear "Dancing Queen" anytime at Home Depot after all.