Don't Call Them Pirates

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

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

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

*Not that that would be a bad thing. 

Civic Knowledge

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

Just a thought. 

High Trust and Xenophobia

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

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

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

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

Wednesday Links

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

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

Voter's views on the economy 

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

Unexpected

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

 

Medical Update

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

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

A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother

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

 

Foxhole Friends

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

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

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

Bad Apologies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flogging a Motionless Nag Again

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

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

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

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

Up Periscope

 I remember that these were fun for about fifteen minutes.

Pouring Out

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

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

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

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

 

 

Boxing and Wrestling

Virginia Postrel on how live sports saved television. 

Sports were so perfect for television that many feared the new medium would devastate ticket sales. ‘It’s inevitable that sports attendance will crash to a national calamity’, declared a columnist, reporting that boxing authorities in the nation’s capital were lobbying for legislation requiring broadcasters to cover match expenses. Football coach Rip Engle, then at Brown University and soon to move to Penn State, foresaw a shakeout. ‘I won’t be surprised if there are only ten college football teams left in a few years’, he said in 1949. ‘That’s what’s going to happen if games involving the big schools are widely televised’. Others predicted the death of minor league baseball. Why turn out for the local farm team when the big leagues were on TV?

But the tiny screens worked best for visually contained sports such as boxing, bowling, wrestling, and even roller derby or horse racing.  As for the big-field sports, it is important to remember that people were already listening to baseball and college football on the radio. Even a ghosty picture was a big addition.  Basketball was just a little too large for those screens, and soccer wasn't even under consideration.  Only as the camera work greatly improved did those become popular on TV. 

Monday Links

Buying three airplane seats that can be folded into a bed, for one, two, or three people. 

Work is essential to happiness I didn't learn the dignity of work itself from high theory.  I learned it from having a low-status job.  I recall a retreat speaker once mentioning ways one could discern whether a call was from God or not. "It is usually a call downward in the eyes of the world." In my case that was necessary.

Chilean Sea Bass - It was an inspired renaming to make a fish more popular. But don't be fooled into thinking it's all PR. It does actually have to be worth eating or people will only have it once.

Immigrant assimilation proceeded more quickly in the  Deep South and West  We think first of the urban immigrants in the melting pot, but they didn't melt as quickly. They could maintain networks, neighborhoods, institutions, and languages. When there are fewer Germans around, you are less likely to marry another German.

The Coming Recession

 Niall Ferguson believes we are headed for a recession.  I'm surprised it isn't already here. 

Stunned by the economic consequences and their likely political costs, Nixon instructed Kissinger to get the embargo lifted. The secretary of state made his first trip to Riyadh on November 8. For all Kissinger’s skill as a negotiator, and for all the shuttle diplomacy he undertook, it took more than four months to get the embargo lifted, on March 18, 1974. By that time, the energy supply shock had been enough to push the U.S. economy—and much of the rest of the industrial world—into recession. Is something similar happening right now as a result of Trump’s war? 

Campaign Fund Corruption

Nellie Bowles at The Free Press, following up on Kristi Noem and the expensive border commercial.  I love her writing.

 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent nearly $19,000 of campaign funds on a psychiatrist who specializes in ketamine therapy. Caveat: We don’t know who was being treated, and we cannot say it was with ketamine. But let’s imagine for a moment. First of all, aren’t we glad that women are in public office now? Men spend campaign funds on one thing and one thing only: paying off prostitutes. Sometimes it’s paying off people who paid off prostitutes, and probably buying prostitutes. But women with a bucket of campaign funds? Women get creative. Women give us variety. A man never spent 20 grand on horses, or 20 grand on therapists who will give you an IV of horse tranquilizer so you can finally forgive your dad. You know this is just the tip of the iceberg. Botox, special appliances, ecstatic dance lessons. You know it got crazy.

A Christmas Carol

 Not the best version, but the one I grew up on. 

 

Tradeoffs Vs Failures

Scott Alexander, who is a psychiatrist, discusses the tradeoffs versus failures of schizophrenia as a jumping off point to discuss the phenomenon of tradeoffs versus flat-out failures in genes and interventions. (The title must need editing - doesn't make any sense.) He makes the good distinction that sometimes it is not the expression of a gene that is ambiguous in its fitness, but the risk of it. 

But cancer risk can also be elevated by tradeoffs: for example, with many asterisks and caveats, the higher a person’s risk of cancer, the lower their risk of certain degenerative diseases like Alzheimers, probably because cells can be set to either easy division (maximizing healing and growth) or limited division (minimizing cancer risk).

Walkin' The Dog

I have been thinking of this, because...I've been walking the dog and I can't get it out of my head.*

 *Having written that, I have suddenly switched to "Goin' out of my head." We'll see which one wins.

The Men of the Future

David Foster has a new substack post "Destroying the Passwords," about the erasure of history from a culture, starting with the example of the the Bank of England's banknotes and discussing the larger implications for societies as a whole.  It will no longer be using historical figures - neither traditional nor woke ones - but will feature scenes of wildlife and landscapes.

Because what we are witnessing today is not a debate about the design of banknotes. It’s part of something much deeper and more insidious: a slow but relentless erosion of our national culture, identity, and sense of collective memory. As I wrote nearly two years ago, across the West we are now living through what Professor Frank Furedi has called the ‘War Against the Past’.

Increasingly, a loose alliance of bureaucrats in thrall to the ‘Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality’ agenda, radical left activists, and compliant public institutions are pursuing a cultural project that seeks to delegitimise our history and heritage, and strip away the symbols that once anchored our sense of collective identity and memory. The pattern is now familiar. Statues are toppled. Historical figures are reframed as morally suspect or “divisive”. Public institutions rename their buildings, spaces, even London Tube lines. 

I thought immediately of CS Lewis in The Abolition of Man and his discussion of the Last Men.

And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes — the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct — the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future...

...but even within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. 

As well as George Orwell's words in the mouth of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four 

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past… The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. 

It is frankly unnerving that the atheist and Christian writing at the same time agree on so much that is worrisome about the future of mankind - and that is looks prescient still. 

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."