News With the Sound Off

I watched ABC news with the sound off for a few minutes at someone else's house tonight. I could tell from the images alone what the slant was about the airport lines. There is widespread dissatisfaction with Trump over his handling of this, and he is under increasing pressure to make a deal soon. People are angry and im[patient.  We interviewed a few, plus some Democratic senators. ABC wants that to be true and do what it can to convince you its true.  They still have an audience predisposed to that view, which they will happily reinforce.

Your God is Too Small

We have discussed JB Phillips's book Your God Is Too Small here before, quite a few times in twenty years. But two of the posts, Sentimental Jesus (lots o' comments) and Your God Is Too Small, that includes a list of many small gods we put up as substitutes - including Meek-and-Mild and Heavenly Bosom - I put up here. The limited god we believed in before we encountered the Real McCoy is probably our greatest danger forever, and the one we should work hardest to purge.  If we saw him as healer, we are in danger of seeing that as his central role, and ultimately his only one.  If we shrunk him down to greatest teacher to fit in our backpack, we will have to focus our attention on the mysticism or transcendence - anything but the narrow schoolmaster.

I have one new one to add that is not on JBP's list: Community Organiser. That is a favorite Jesus these days, who talked back to the authorities, disrupted society, and encouraged programs to make the world a better place. Those who arrive with any truncated god may have to forswear that one forever. That grain of wheat must die.

There is a quick excuse that people leap to on any of these small gods: "Oh sure, sure.  Jesus is much more than that of course. I was only saying that it's important to include..." No, it won't do. That one will always be where the demons hide for you, the small god you retreat to when you begin drifting away. 

Magical Mystery Tour

I  never saw the movie, only a few stills. But I could play a record until the grooves wore through to the other side, and of course I read all the liner notes of this one. 

It is probably their least played, least remembered album at this point.

Terence Tao

The Dwarkesh Patel interview with Terence Tao. I am always surprised at how young Patel is: 25. He started this podcast when he was 19.  Tao is my nomination for smartest person in the world, though I admit that is related to name recognition and my bias toward mathematicians. He achieved a 760 on his SAT math when he was 8. I still think of even him as a youngster, but he is 50 now.

Every minute or three during the interview I thought  Huh. I didn't know that. They come in a flood. So I could flood them for you, but I think that would just be a list without context.  I'll try something else. 

Peer review came in an era when there were lots of theories, and we had to sort out signal from noise.* Lots of small experiments looking for signal, with detecting false signal being one of the constant reminders for experimenters and reviewers.  Criticising a study is often an exercise in "that's a false signal." Improved communication, especially the internet reduced the cause the cost of communication to zero. Even just word processing allowed an incredible increase in the number of papers that could be generated, and increased the length of them.  Peer review was overwhelmed by cheap quick communication alone. In the same way, the cost of isolating signal from noise has basically gone to zero from AI.  Perhaps that is not the problem that we think it is. We still need to verify theories against #DATA. But the way that we do that, peer review, may no longer be necessary because it is simply overwhelmed.  AI makes everyone so productive even with its semi-thinking that checking it is impossible. Tao mentioned that  AI excels at  breadth, human intelligence excels at depth, and then they are complementary. He calls this Amazing and Disappointing, and compares it to the search engine, which was a stunning leap forward that became taken for granted just a few years later.

 He considers it something of an accident that AI was developed around thousandfold increases in data such as LLM's, versus first principles reasoning. It's not immediately apparent that that's a good way to go, but it was the one we could do and got in first. He compared it to astronomy, when Kepler could not move forward on his theories without data, and Tycho Brahe had the data. We can't know whether that is going to be more fruitful because we don't know the future.  It still might be worthwhile to focus on teaching AI to reason from first principles instead. It made be think of Yogi Berra "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future."

Bethany, 30 minutes in he discusses how the social aspect of science has a larger effect than we think.  Newton wrote in Latin and did not write engagingly. Everyone was jealous for their discoveries and would not even commit ideas to paper for fear others would steal them. Newton was not well understood and explained in his day because of this. Darwin, OTOH, wrote clearly and in English when there was an existing network of sharing information.  Persuasiveness, having a narrative that could be grasped, even though he admitted there were all kinds of gaps in it, turned out to be key. Ideas bubble up but recede and disappear if they don't get picked up. Tao thought that AI might prove helpful in discovering things already discovered because it does literature review so quickly.  But what occurred to me was the persuasiveness of a True Crime narrative, because it fits preexisting beliefs (see previous confirmation bias post) can quickly overwhelm the data. In your discussion of base rates and known versus suspected data, the effect of AI will change the territory. I don't predict it will fix things, because the situation is dynamic.  But it has to change it.

*Especially in the social sciences, that drove a lot of the replication crisis. It was widely considered respectable to engage in purely exploratory thinking and devise experiments to illustrate that rather than prove it.  Wouldn't it be cool if people did even terrible things because an authority told them to? It would allow us to train humans to be what we want. So give us the power to do that. Or in another area I think matriarchal societies would be less violent. So lets find some and prove that they are, so we can make that part of Western education systems and bring peace on earth. The triumph of preferred narrative over data. Even in hard sciences you get things like String Theory, amyloid hypothesis, or universal grammar infected by preferences that win out for a time because they deny resources to less-preferred theories.

Dark Shadows

I don't usually post literary essays, even when they impact directly on politics or culture, but Rob Henderson's discussion of Dostoevsky's The Possessed (also known as Demons or The Devils was intriguing enough to go forward. 

When these children of affluent liberals come of age, they do not follow their parents into comfortable moderation. Instead, their kids, now in their twenties and early thirties, become enamored with socialism, atheism, and nihilism.

What had been building beneath the surface of Devils erupts in Part 3. Over the course of a few days, everything falls apart. Fires spread across the town. People are beaten, robbed, and executed. Others are coerced into false confessions. The tone shifts from satire to something closer to horror.

At the center of it all is Pyotr, the organizer of the local radical cell who has been pulling the strings from the beginning. As the chaos peaks, he flees the consequences, leaving behind a broken group and a town in ruins.

Decades ago, a very liberal psychologist said to me "We have a generation that proclaims nihilism" - he meant Boomers - "but were mostly raised in churches, even said the lord's Prayer every day in school. This new generation was raised with nihilism. They really mean it."  Neither generalisation was quite true, but it's a good first pass.

The One Bias Underlying the Others

Steve Stewart-Williams at N3 called it "One Bias to Rule them All" and links to Toward Parsimony in Bias Research. 

...the current article seeks to bring a set of biases together by suggesting that they might actually share the same “recipe.” Specifically, we suggest that they are based on prior beliefs plus belief-consistent information processing. Put differently, we raise the question of whether a finite number of different biases—at the process level—represent variants of “confirmation bias,” or peoples’ tendency to process information in a way that is consistent with their prior beliefs.  

It sounds plausible. We give up our ideas slowly, likely for good reason. James once mildly pointed out to me that we can't do a complete examen on all our beliefs every day. We would have no time left over for dinner.

Followup to the Post on Aging

 I tried this strategy on the missus. 

 She's just rescued a dog I don't much like.  I can't explain it.

Ventilator Patients Died?

 Do we know this to be true? Heartbreaking.

2014 Links

Halfway through 2014 already. With the internal links also being interesting, perhaps I should have divided this into two parts.

 

Revisiting the Bicameral Mind and the followup months later about  Circular Time.  Pastor Dave Denis suggested that Helical Time was a better description than Circular Time, and I think that is astute. Seasonal time is also a good descriptor. Linear Vs Circular Time is one of my most-visited posts of all time, if you like following that concept.

Social Justice.  Upon further review, I think my original call on this, and the internal links, are peak AVI. If I rewrote it now I would likely ruin it.

Changes In Prejudice. 

Needles Thoughts about anti-vaxx sentiment, long before Covid.

The Way NH Used to Be.  I so wish I could remember what those latter images were.

A Dog Called Kitty 

Removing the Means of Suicide  I later learned that the numbers were way too high, but the phenomenon still solid.

 

Right in the Mouth

It was thirty years ago that I first caught an glimpse of my grandfather in the mirror, and have seen each of them from different angles a fair bit over the last decade. Neither was unsightly, but also, neither were particularly attractive men. My aging seems to be accelerating the last 3-4 years. I have always thought age had a certain respectability that is nice, and I believe I am less bothered by the reality of aging than the average man.

But the next guy who tells me you're only as young as you feel is getting it right across the mouth. 

Sistine Chapel Exhibition

Tracy and I went to the exhibition in Cambridge of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes. Definitely recommended if it comes near you. Close-ups, many life-sized, all in context and described. Portrayals and techniques used for the first time are highlighted. There was a lengthy video to go with the text and audio about The Last Judgement, pointing out features one would not have immediately noticed.

 I included this view to give size context. 

March Madness

 ...has come a long way.

 

Sumer Is Icumen In

The descriptions in this song sounds more like Spring than Summer, and in fact they are. People thought more in terms of two seasons, summer and winter in the 1200s. They would make the distinction for Spring and Autumn if the occasion called for it, but not reliably.  Those of you who do genealogy or otherwise work with colonial American documents can see that persisting into the 1700s. A new year began on the first day of Spring, even in official records in many places. You will see your ancestress Elizabeth born in 1718-19 and wonder "Didn't they know?  Didn't anyone keep track?" If the month was June it was in 1718.  If it was February, it was in 1719. Old habits die hard. 

This is a nice version I had not heard before. I like that it contains the translation - and the correct one, not the bowdlerized version.

 

The Mystery That Makes Us

 AJ Swoboda, The Low-Level Theologian, starts his essay about Scripture and mystery, paradox, and seeming contradiction with an anecdote about GK Chesterton, appropriately enough. The Mystery That Makes Us,  reminds us that we are not to come to the scriptures in any arrogance, demanding immediate clarity, but in humility, trusting that God has spoken to us in the best way possible, and it is up to us to adapt if we do not understand.

To genuinely engage with the story of the Bible, it is critical that we learn to work backwards from what seems reasonable. Too often, we are prone to believe that the biblical text is credible only if we have come to understand or agree with it. What we have to learn to do is come at it differently. We must come assuming it is true. We must first accept it as it is—as truth and reality—and then work backwards from there. Reading Scripture correctly requires us to reverse-engineer our understanding of reality to what is revealed in Scripture. We don’t start by assuming our experience of reality is true and that the Bible must fit into that; rather, we begin with the assumption that everything in Scripture is true and trustworthy, and we learn to adjust our view of the world around it. 

There are twinned errors which complicate this.  One is to remain literalist and insist the earth must be square because the Bible says it has four corners.  The other is to make everything Bible so metaphorical, believing that to be spiritual, that it no longer has any definite meaning. The Swedenborgs and many New Age Christians are sometimes lovely people, but a faith that relies entirely on mysticism can quickly go awry. 

Such As... 

Holding The Center

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

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

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

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

To Improve The World

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

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

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

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

Paul Erlich

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

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

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

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

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

Best Ever?

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

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

 

 

Bureaucracy Preventing Cures

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

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

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

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

Two from Aporia

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

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

Marriage Counseling

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

Forty Fingers

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

 

Recent Links

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

3 Links from Rob Henderson: 

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

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

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

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

 

Popular Science Books

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

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

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

The Five Deaths of the Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links from 2014

 Voted Best Ever Religious Joke 

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

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

Like Grandma Used to Make 

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

AI "Alignment"

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

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

Mondo Duplantis Again

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

 

Salty Dog

 

The Right To Giant Congress

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

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

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

Won’t Congress Become Unmanageable?

At first, probably yes! 

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

Recent Quotes

 Only in one direction. 

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

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

Why we don't notice good things as much. 

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

 

 

The Battle of Mount Badon

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

Tax The Billionaires

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

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

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

Public Disorder

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

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

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

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

 

 

Just a Closer Walk With Thee

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

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

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

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

Science Clearinghouse

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

Recent Links

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

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

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

Earl Wajenberg put up a link about The Bible and Slavery 

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

skildai.com

fieldai.com/ 

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

1X | Home Robots

Foundation - Home

 Feather Robotics

 T-Robotics  

RFK and Bullying

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

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

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

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

Town Elections

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

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

Neil Sedaka

 

I doubt that this was the inspiration

 

Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Did I get that right, darling? 

Lou Holtz at William and Mary

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

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

Bobsleigh History

 

"And Yet It Moves"

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

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

 

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

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

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

YA Novels

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

AI Style

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

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

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

Do Eclipses Cause Rebellions

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

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

It turns out that they do.

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

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

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

Something Missing

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

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

 

How To Handle Anxiety

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

Abstract

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

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

Troubling Thought

 From Nicholas Decker:

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

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

The Smartest Online People

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

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

Substack quotes

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

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

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

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

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