Greatest R&B Song of All Time?

 I might give it my vote.

 

Exhibit Asterisk

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

Thoughts During Sunday School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Theory Before Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Non-Update

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

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

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

Recent Links

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

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

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

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

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

Homegrown Winter Olympics

 

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

Fertility Crisis: What Does (Not) Work

 Rob Henderson pulls a quote from Nicholas Wade.  

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

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

Mansplaining

 Competence-Questioning Communication and Gender 

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

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

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

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

Wikipedia Editing

 Gurwinder used to be an editor, but stopped 

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

Groundhog Day

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

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

Words Women Know, Words Men Know

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

 

Victorian City Planning

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

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

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

1. It made me more pro-planning

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

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

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

The Lily of the West

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

 

Special Pig

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

 

Super Bowl Halftime

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

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

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

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

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

Klosterman

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

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

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

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

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

Archbishop Wolf's Sermon to the English

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

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

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

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

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

Posts from 2013

Manifest Destiny

Politicians and Values

Whiskey and Orange Peel

Math Should Be Taught Like Literature and Art

Language Myths

Discussions and Opinions (at work)

Purgatory

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

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

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

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

Recent Links

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

Top 12 Camille Paglia Quotes, from NNN

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

Why Clinical Trials are Inefficient. 

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

 

Hobo's Lullaby

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

 

Education as Signalling

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

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

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

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

He summarises his argument:

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

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

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

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

Brilliant But Unreliable

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

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

CANOE

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

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

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

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

The Nones Project: Not Who You Might Think

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

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

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

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

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

Ring, Ring

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

 

First and Second Amendment Conflict?

Consistently libertarian Eugene Volokh, who Glenn Reynolds used to suggest should be a Supreme Court nominee, weighs in on the right to bear arms at protests, by excerpting recent decisions.  In the first case he quotes both the ruling and the dissent.

Links From 2013

 Just about done with that year, as you can see. 2014 was the year I blogged least, and the following three weren't much denser.  I don't know why. Maybe when I get there I'll remember.

Life Together  With an uncomfortably prescient comment from Texan99

Rants On Disc  And here I am a bit prescient myself.

Live Simply  What I mean by that, or what it has meant to me, has changed over the course of my life more than once.  You may find the same.

Marty on the Mountain  Only older NH residents, mostly in the North Country, remember Marty. A legend in his time, though.

To Anacreon In Heaven 

Minstrel Show 

 

Love In The Ruins

One of my book groups is reading Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins.  I had not known there was a subtitle (Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World) until I started this post, and think it would have helped me understand what the heck is going on - a problem I often have with non-genre fiction. I also learned from Amazon that it is an uproarious comedy. I have yet to roar myself, finding the oddity more disturbing that funny.  Perhaps that will help going forward as well.  What I have concluded is that one main theme is "What is wrong with mankind at the root, and what can be done about it?"  There, now you have three hints to go on if you want to pick it up. It's pretty easy to turn the pages on this one even when it is confusing, and I write this as one who doesn't enjoy the amount of description he engages in.*

I thought he was dancing around the problem of evil, but then dropped "The mystery of evil is the mystery of limited goodness" on me and that put an interesting twist on a concept I have been long familiar with, that Evil is not self-existent, it can only be spoiled goodness.  I discussed it here early on in Sauron is but an Emissary, which I still enjoy on rereading. So, limited goodness instead of spoiled goodness.  It fits the novel, and is in some ways an idea more accessible to the modern mind.  I don't think it is ultimately a better understanding of evil, but it has advantages.

*I suspect when people talk about fine writing they mean description, which is why I stay away from those books. 

Personality and Book Genre Preferences

 Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels.  (The graphic expands for much greater clarity)

 

  

The colors are from the Big Five personality traits 

C (yellow) - Conscientiousness

O (red) - Openness

N (dark blue) Neuroticism

A (light blue) Agreeableness

E (green) Extraversion

This was fun, not only seeing what are common personality features for the genres you love and those that don't interest you, but for the similarity of some genres. Journeys is close to balanced, and Classics, Racial, and Kids only a bit less so.  Young Adult, Girls Fiction, and Fantasy have similar shape.  One might expect that Philosophy, Religion, and Paranormal to have similar shapes, but they are in fact quite different. Does the graph show that girls become more conscientious as they become women, or that the type of person (likely female) who reads Girls' fiction as an adult is less conscientious than the type that reads Women's? Why are Drama and Plays so different? As these are user-generated tags, does it only mean that different personality types describe the same works in different words?

 

Intelligence and Prejudice

It is about 18 months old now, and we have been going over this material for all 20 years of this blog, but I think it is worth pointing out again.  I don't think it is morally reprehensible that one group is just as prejudiced as another. The problem is when they don't consider it even possible that they are in the same ballpark, and spend so much energy berating the other group for being bigots. Jesus was harder on the accusers than on the sinners. 

Intelligence and Prejudice 

 

Too Many New Ideas

I spend increasing time dopamine-scrolling through substack summaries, linksites, and blog commentary sites - like you SOB's - looking for promising ideas that will explain to me what is happening in the world. I sample them, sometimes reading all the way through, sometimes just extracting something tasty before moving back to my idea-flooded Internet River to look for more. Am I going upstream to find tributaries and sources, or downstream to find out where it is all going? I have no idea.  I only know that after a few hours a day I realise that there are too many promising explanations in the world and I have to walk away from things which might be the Key To Life. How can I turn my back on them?

Fiction takes too long to get to the point; daydreaming is much faster. But both carry the related dangers of repetitiveness and sleepiness. My brain is full.  I shall go and play Octordle. Do not send me any new ideas, I have no more storage space, and I am weary of building more shelves.

Guantanamo Bay

Now that there is electronic, portable, and personal music available, I don't know how much servicemen have shared songs anymore.  Schools, fraternities and sororities, miners, regions, ethnic groups - all had more shared songs not so long ago. 

 I had this album, but for this one, I don't remember the liner notes or the lyrics.

The Influence of Extreme Outliers at Volume

 Inside the Funhouse Mirror Factory, a research review in Current Opinion in Psychology. So maybe we shouldn't believe our eyes. We have to have our perceptions warped by this to some extent. "When people stare into the mirror they do not see a true version of reality, but instead one that has been distorted by a small but vocal minority of extreme outliers whose opinions create illusory norms."

Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3 % of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33 % of all content Furthermore, 74 % of all online conflicts are started in just 1 % of communities, and 0.1 % of users shared 80 % of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online. This can lead to false polarization and pluralistic ignorance, which are linked to a number of problems including drug and alcohol use, intergroup hostility, and support for authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, exposure to extreme content can normalize unhealthy and dangerous behavior. For example, teens exposed to extreme content related to alcohol consumption thought dangerous alcohol consumption was normative. 

Via Nathan Witkin at Arachne magazine in The Leviathan, the Hand, and the Maelstrom , a reply to Dan Williams, who we just saw in Contra Critical Theory. (The reply was to a different article by Dan.) It's long and I gave up, but he includes a TL;DR at the top.

 

Contra Critical Theory

The intellectual underpinning of critical theory is much discussed by its adherents and not fully known by its opponents. The social and emotional underpinnings of Theory are intuited and even articulated by its critics but are often opaque to its adherents. This is a common issue in all social competition - we want to see our better reasons and evade looking at our worse ones. I liked Dan Williams's Contra Critical Theory explanation of the interplay in Critical Theory over at Conspicuous Cognition, which I have linked to previously. 

Of course, this raises the question of why the humanities are a left-wing monoculture. The reasons are likely complex, contingent, and path-dependent, although I suspect one big reason is intra-elite status competition. Scholars are a prestigious segment of society in competition for status with other high-status groups like businesspeople, the wealthy, and politicians. Narratives that are highly critical of Western society can be partly understood in this context: they demonise status rivals, discredit the economic and political system in which they have achieved success, and implicitly depict the scholars spreading such narratives as uniquely enlightened and noble. 

Those who have been here a long time may remember that I made my own divisions of American (and probably Western) society into Tribes: Arts & Humanities, Science and Technology, Government and Unions, God and Country, Diversity, Military, Business, Criminal Underclass.  I mostly discussed this in terms of A&H, which I grew up in and have an uneasy relationship with now, versus all the others. There are clearly multiple loyalties and overlapping of these categories. I stole ideas from many places, including CP Snow's Two Cultures (now three).  This is one brief summary post among dozens from the early years of the blog.  At the time this was not a common idea, and I was an early adopter.  If you want a deeper dive into our discussions 15-20 years ago, you can regard this longer series as a refresher or an introduction. I think it is a somewhat common framework now. 

Conservative sites have put a lot of energy into dismantling the Arts & Humanities elites, and that has been largely my focus.  However it is worth noting that all of the tribes are not merely putting their own ideas forward but trying to undermine the others. Anti-elitism is often only advocating for the preeminence of a different elite. Tavistock Weekends used to bring in groups and divide them randomly into 2-4 tribes, both to study their behavior and teach the participants how much of their own behavior was just Rooting For Laundry. By the end of the weekend, some groups would hate each other and say the most terrible things.

That's us.  I should be noble and focus on that.  But at the moment I am much taken with the idea that That's them, those bastards. 

Protect the Dolls

From Jo Bartosch on Substack Protect the Dolls: the porn to trans pipeline. 

"Ascribing trans identities to children is itself a sexual fetish." 

Some of this is graphic, and sad. 

See also autogynephilia 

The Seven Deadly Sins

 The Seven Deadly Sins of the Digital World 

 

The Pete Rose/Barry Bonds Effect

Related to the Streisand Effect

If Bill Belichick had been a first-ballot Hall of Fame entry, the sporting world would have clapped politely, basically yawning. A great coach, some even say the greatest ever. (I say we let claims like that mellow a bit. It could be true, but there's no need to be hasty.) Nothing to see here, move along.

The favored explanation is that some voters thought he should serve a little time because of Spygate and Deflategate. Another opinion is that people are still upset that he ran up the score on people in 2007. I have some mild approval of that approach, but only for infractions that were unpunished. Belichick and the patriots were punished, and it's petty to say "Well, it wasn't enough."

But whoever didn't vote for him, it has already backfired, as all the big names are now fighting over their chance to say this is ridiculous.  Next year his nomination will get outsized attention and it will get brought up again, even after he's in. Oft evil will shall evil mar.

Update: The video is disallowed.  It was one of the repeated "We're on to Cincinnati" answers when interviewed after being badly beaten by the Chiefs early in the season.  I won't bother to replace it.

 

Gentle Annie

It's a pity this isn't a particularly good recording, because it's the best version.

My sister-in-law went to school with his daughters in Dover and used to be over at his house as a girl. 

 

Alex Pretti Shooting

I don't know this source, and I don't know if this is right, but I did detect some serious effort to resist an extreme perspective from a person who apparently has some expertise in the area.

Why the Alex Pretti Shooting Leans Toward Justified Force - Barely.

 It’s an ugly, messy shooting. Anyone pretending that this is a clean, clear-cut, and obviously justified shooting – including the Trump administration – is being extremely disingenuous, if not outright spinning you. The people on the other side, who claim this is a clear-cut execution, implying ill intent, are also being very disingenuous, if not outright spinning you. This one falls somewhere in the middle, and the answer likely lies within the fog of war and inside a scrum that we can’t all completely see.

I also stipulate that we don’t know everything the system does; we don’t even know what the officer’s statement says. I reserve the right to change my opinion based on new information.

Let’s start with the law.  

Seems like a good place to start. If you are looking for early clues to bias she does say that the Trump administration is being extremely disingenuous, while the other extreme is being only very disingenuous. 

I jest. I doubt that was more than simple variety of adjectives.

Christa McAuliffe

Concord High School is right across from where I used to work. I had gone over to buy gas at the Cumberland Farms between us, which has the school gym looming over it. As I started pumping, there was lots of student noise, coming from the gym.  Happy noise. I remembered that this was the day of their teacher Christa McAuliffe's launch and rightly concluded they had everyone in the gym to watch it together. The noise crescendoed while I was out there, then suddenly went silent. A creepy silence.  

I went inside to pay and the clerk and a few other people were looking at a small television screen. "It looks like the rocket just blew up, we're not sure." "We think she's dead." We all stared at the screen, the announcers speaking hesitantly, irregularly. "...trying to find out...no word yet from..."

It was one of those dissociative moments where you wonder if you have stepped into some alternate, unreal world.  But there's nothing to do but just head back to work. My son was in first grade, and they had all the children watching the launch. I remembered that myself from school.  All 9 grades at Straw School were brought out to watch the launches of astronaut Alan Shepherd, who was from just a few miles away in Derry. It was considered amazing to be able to watch history as it was happening, and I suppose it was. No one thought of the possible downside then.

Storm

I have never done a stormwatch blog; it just seems too temporary and local.  Y'all have your own problems.  But this is the lightest snow I have ever dealt with. Freezing rain or sleet on snow, or slushy snow don't have the inches or low temperatures to brag about but are much worse. So far no problem.

We supposedly have four more inches to go, when once the prediction was twelve more. Still very light because of the low temperature. I had predicted 16 inches, then jumped it to 18 at the last minute. Some models were saying 24.  My first guess is looking good at this point - light snow projected all day.

Wind chill above zero anyway. 

Final report: It won't go above freezing for two weeks - winds but no high winds. Little snow.  

 

Minneapolis as an Example

The takeover of the Minneapolis-St Paul Airport by protestors is also something we have only partial knowledge of, though we have a bit more than we do about the shooting at present.  One group that made itself prominent in the crowd were clergy. By their own statement they "prayed together, sang songs and hymns, and shared stories of those who have been abducted by ICE while at work or commuting to and from the airport." Notable by its absence is "Asking the Lord what He would have us do."

I would be very surprised to learn that ICE included "Lord, what would you have us do?" in their daily briefing, nor that Trump asks himself that question very often.  But when your job is pastoral in the spiritual sense, I expect it to be prominent in your thinking.  Perhaps it is, I don't know. I am irritated by its absence in the organisers' press releases, but were I there, I might be greatly comforted by how they start each morning. Yet I suspect this is deeply tied to the problems Lewis noted in The Dangers of National Repentance. Confessing other people's sins to show how sensitive you are... It is also in the category of forging God's signature under your politics. It is among the most major of sins.

Both conservatives and liberals will make strong declarations about what they understand God to be teaching and requiring. But if you cannot show the respect to other Christians to even consider their understanding, you cannot convince me you have heard the Holy Spirit. Your prayers are not prayers, but performances. Your songs are not worship but a variety show. I do not see the fear and trembling in you that at least some earlier Christians displayed. 

Clay Tablets

When I read about "400 clay tablets" I had a mental picture of something like 12"x18" objects with hundreds of character each, rather like the Dead Sea Scrolls - a massive amount of information. In actuality, they looked like this, and though sped up, you can see how long it took to make one. Firing it, which allows us to find them and read them now, was not instituted for long term record-keeping as much as to guard against anyone doctoring them after completion

 

Knowledge

We still know very little about the shooting in Minneapolis, yet there is jumping to conclusions.  Admirably, Grim is not.  I'm a bit of a broken record - I recall saying this about Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as well. But that's rather the point, because those are two incidents where the public still believes untrue versions which they picked up in the first few minutes of hearing about it. 

It seems to all of us that social media has made these leaps more likely, yet I wonder if that is actually true.  Human nature abhors an explanatory vacuum, and that is likely true throughout history and prehistory. I doubt that we lived less by rumors and lies a century or a millennium ago. 

Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God

People remember Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God because it's a cool title, not like anything that we would preach today. I'm guessing that less than half the people who recognise it know that it was Jonathan Edwards, and less than half of those would pin it to some Great Awakening, without knowing there were three of four. A fair number might guess it was Puritan, New England, and 16-1700, because that's the stereotype for that group (not without reason). 

Yet it is a touch odd that that's the one remembered.  It wouldn't be what he was known for in his own day.  It would be as if a century from now, all that anyone remembered that some group, maybe the Rolling Stones but probably the Beatles, sang Sympathy For The Devil at Woodstock, and decided that was the most informative example of rock music. Well, no; you missed the story.  

Edwards was known as a vivid preacher, not a particularly condemnatory nor emotional one. He kept up with natural science and was knowledgeable about philosophy, he studied for hours daily. He preached quietly, but was known for fresh analogies and descriptions. Perhaps that is what made him powerful, for the territory of most of the sermon was fairly typical for the time. For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Basic Calvinism, heard not only Sundays but at weekday dinner tables and taverns. In this sermon, as with many of his others, Edwards stressed that this pull of this weight, dragging the sinner to Hell, was inexorable. You were going there unavoidably unless something were done about it. This is close to the reverse of what most Americans, including many Christians believe today.  It is a foundational, almost unquestioned belief that while we may not be completely innocent, we are mostly so, only needing a bit of instruction and encouragement. 

In his own day, Jonathan Edwards was known for his emphasis on grace, on the amazing love that God had shown - that for no reason other than his lovingkindness, God interfered with the inevitable torment we were sliding toward. In the imaging of a later writer, that we are not Jacob Marley, doomed to drag weights around in misery for eternity, but Ebeneezer Scrooge, miraculously given "time for amendment of life." Today we have a tendency to go back one step earlier and shift the blame off ourselves.  How/why did God get us in this mess to begin with?

Fertility Crisis

 I have found the cause.

 

Storm Prep

"Why are we buying bread and milk? 

Get wine. And chocolate cake. Maybe some Oreos. Do this winter storm right."

 

Our snowfall numbers keep going up.  Monitoring whether the inches are trending upward or downward is my general rule for whether we are going to get hit hard or it will blow over. It's not a great time to have blown out a rotator cuff.

We'll see. At least I'll have all the time I want to clear it away.

Cea Weaver's Comments

Rob Henderson recommended Oliver Traldi's essay at City Journal Cea Weaver's Comments Were Shocking.  They Used to be Normal.  He detects a change from even a few years ago what is not allowed to be said about white people.  I guess that is true, but I wouldn't trust it. He notes some ironies, that even anti-wokeness attacks whites now, especially if they are liberal women. Left antisemitism is associated with anti-whiteness; right antisemitism is associated with anti South Asians and East Asians.

He advocates that we should feel pity for this sorry lot instead.  I think my mother used to say this when I was a boy, that I should feel sorry for people who were mean to me. I think that is an obstacle to actual forgiveness, because it makes excuses for them, and breeds condescension in us. The poor dears just can't help it. Not like us.

Christian Alphabet

Many Bible teachers of all stripes will tell you "It's as easy as A,B,C"  while hitting a few texts hard to prove a point.  I am not entirely unsympathetic. Some things about the Bible actually are simple, but people try to evade them with complications. You may run with a crowd like that, as Lewis did.

But generally, people who try to shut you down with A, B, C don't like it when you bring up D, E, and F, never mind the rest of the alphabet. There are puzzling things like Ecclesiastes and Job, which are sort of the Q and X of the biblical alphabet.

Come to think of it, A, B, and C are not simple letters themselves.  A comes in long and short forms, sounds different before R, is silent in some words, and is frequently a schwa. B looks simple at first but is deeply related to P, Bh, and even V. Let's not get too deep in the weeds with C. It can be sounded as "s," "k," "ch," or "sh," and the history of the letter teaches you lots of other history.  A highschooler could wow an English teacher with a paper on the letter C. "As easy as A,B,C" indeed. We would do better to say that the Bible is as complicated as A, B, C. The road goes ever on.

Fangorn is Tolkien's representative for Owen Barfield's theory of the preservation of historical meaning, found in Poetic Diction. "My name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language."

Links from 2013

 Word as Sacrament  I had said versions of this before, but my readers thought I may have gotten out over my skis on this one. Good comments

Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong   The second internal link does not work, so I include a different one for What Is It Like to be a Bat?

Tallis Canon

One of the Higher Spiritual Gifts  

And so...

Reminder 

More Guitars 

Analogy

Don Lemon's excuse for the disruption of worship services in Minneapolis is that Jesus flipped over tables in the Temple - the anti-ICE protestors are just following Jesus.

It's an inaccurate analogy. Jesus flipping the tables of the moneychangers would be more like ripping out the card scanners for a private valet service in the church parking lot. It is part of a larger poor analogy that Jesus was disruptive/protested the culture/opposed the authorities, therefore whenever we do those things we are being like Jesus. Jesus's example in these things is no more than a declaration that such protest techniques are permissible, not that they confer blanket permission.  This is obvious enough that I have to suspect people of bad faith and deceptiveness.  However, we all have such remarkable abilities to deceive ourselves, and they may not be attempting deceit. 

I used to have paranoid patients who claimed to be prophets or the Second Coming who would point out that Jesus was persecuted and disbelieved, they are persecuted and disbelieved, therefore their message is validated*. 

There are competing sets of subtle manipulations in the discussions about whether people are being called Minnesotans** or Americans, whether they are being called Moms/Dads vs Parents, and a host of tricks of video perspective and what is left out of stories.  I'm not happy with much of anyone on this and am not entering that discussion at present. There are manipulations that bother me more than others, but I have not done an Examen on that and better not get ahead of myself.

*Their "message" was nearly always the same, that they were a prophet.  If pressed, the manics would say that "people should love each other," schizophrenics would say that "judgement is coming." That would be about it. 

**Walz, Frey, Smith, Omar, Ellison, Good - none are Minnesotans, BTW. 

Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev

Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire had a profound effect on me, the only non-Christian book I can think of that I would say that about. Even after learning that Night is fiction, and known to be so when it was first published, I was still fascinated by what Wiesel had to say about the Hasidic masters. I have given the book as a gift several times, but I don't think it has affected any I gave it to very much.

One episode in particular has reoccurred to me many times, the year that Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev went silent. He had been sociable, humorous, and a great advocate on behalf of the Jewish people to God Himself. He argued on behalf of both individuals and Jews as a whole without rest, imploring God to forgive, because they also had many fair accusations against Him!

The rabbi returned to his previous personality overnight, and the incident is not mentioned anywhere else I can find. Wiesel states in his text it is barely mentioned since, as if no one could bear to think that R. Levi-Yitzchak could be downcast, even for a moment. Today we would simply call it endogenous Depression that remitted on its own and not look too hard for deeper explanations if none presented themselves. The Hasidim are not like that. Still, there are no stories.  Did Wiesel make this up as well? I would be on the far end of the continuum that says that such things should not be done. When we are speaking of the encounters between God and Man even small details might be critical and should not be played with. Yet with the stories of the Hasidic masters there are already porous boundaries between this world and any others. Time, distance, causality, motive - all of these are flexible.

I have always taken comfort in that unexplained year of the rabbi's. Silence strikes, but it ends.  It may have twenty explanations or no explanation. Day follows night. 

Be at peace whatever your lot. This too has been noticed. 

Will Ye No Come Back Again?

It is not only romantic loves that are unrequited

 

Fewer Bus Stops & Walkability

 Why America Needs Fewer Bus Stops at Works in Progress.

Bus stop balancing involves strategically increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet (roughly 210–240 meters; there are 3.2 feet in a meter), common in older American cities or in London, to 1,300 feet, closer to the typical spacing in Western Europe, such as in Hanover, Germany. Unlike many transit improvements, stop balancing can be implemented quickly, cheaply, and independently by transit agencies. By removing signs and updating schedules, transit agencies can deliver faster service, better reliability, and more service with the same resources.

In Northeastern cities especially, most people can get to a bus stop within a hundred meters, because different routes can take you to similar destinations. Four blocks feels like a mile to a tourist, but to a resident it's a comfortable distance that does not involve going up and down flights of stair and escalators for a subway.

Relatedly, the desire for walkability in neighborhoods is up against more friction that it used to be.  Houses and properties are larger but have fewer people in them, reducing the density that a retail store might need to stay operative. "Corner stores," similar to what we would call convenience stores now were ubiquitous in small cities when I was young, as were barber shops, churches, schools, music teachers, tenement apartments, and postal dropboxes. It was all walkable not only because we expected to walk more, but because the density allowed it. This remained true even in suburbs built around small-town centers, as many up here were. Not many in the neighborhood I lived in until 2020 walked the mile into town for milk or to have a beer, but I did. Online ordering means fewer customers on foot as well. We want contradictory things in our lives.

Social Justice in Medicine

I read Sally Satel's PC/MD over 20 years ago, during the height of political controversies affecting me professionally, and found her to be a breath of fresh air. She has a new piece at the American Enterprise Institute's publication Medicine in  the Age of Social Justice.

 One effort to dismantle racism was undertaken in late 2020 by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). As you remember, at first, we had to ration the vaccine. It was clear that people over 65 were undeniably the highest-risk group for getting COVID morbidity and mortality. Almost every country gave them high priority. Yet ACIP told the CDC that it should not prioritize age. Why? Because, the 65-and-over cohort in America was whiter than the general population...

ACIP’s decision was anomalous. Racial politics is not an accepted method of rationing scarce treatment resources. Public health has used various other options, such as basing distribution on who has the best prognosis—that’s classic battlefield triage—or who is the sickest, or on a first-come, first-served basis. (That’s how kidneys are allocated when you need a transplant.)

Remarkably, ACIP did its own calculation and found that overall, more Americans would die, between 0.5 percent and 6.5 percent, if the equity approach were implemented. Older Black people would be among them.

Most of us would call "more people dying" a big deal in medicine.  From personal experience I will tell you that doctors know a lot of bad sociology and believe it. It does influence some decisions.

European Cognitive Abilities, Medieval and Modern

Cognitive Evolution in Western Europe, by Peter Frost at Aporia 

As average cognitive ability increased, so did the numbers of the highly intelligent. They were becoming a class of their own... Progress is driven not only by individuals but also by communities that can fully appreciate new ideas and put them to good use. Otherwise, new ideas are left to rot on the vine. For example, the printing press wasn’t really invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 — this was when it became commercially viable. 

He places the inflection point around 1350, which naturally suggests a change in culture and thus selection at the time of the Black Death. If you think you would have just killed it as a thinker before then, likely not. Unless you found one of the few niches you could exploit, your knowledge of the solar system, germ theory, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics would not help you much. The larger monasteries in strong networks would be about the only place you would find people who could follow your reasoning after a few minutes, and those would um, at least reduce your chances of passing on your superior genetics. Hanging out with Jews for knowledge of medicine and accounting might have helped, but you would have acquired extra physical risks for that.

Tangent: He quotes a now-standard estimate of 30-60% of Europe's population dying from plague at that timed.  When I was in school "as much as one-third" was the usual phrasing, which crept up gradually to 40 and 50%. The numbers stopped rising about fifteen years ago, when I would read occasional 60 or 70% estimates. I had a brief conversation then with an historical researcher while we were on vacation who lowered his voice and said in not only towns but small regions the numbers reached 80% death, according to cemetery studies. At that point the towns simply folded, no further bodies were buried there, and the survivors moved to functioning communities, disguising the population decreases there. That is getting into the range of New World death from European (and in western South America, Oriental*) diseases.

Extra controversies are dropped in along the way because well, Peter Frost . 

*Pacific silver trade, similar diseases to Atlantic seaboard 

Wally Ballou

 

No Wrong Answers

Someone said this morning WRT a particular question (not truth in general) "There are no wrong answers." It was meant as an encouragement to not be afraid to speak. I took the point, but that was not what he quite wanted to say.

Because sure there are.  I was reminded of a related line "There may not be True Truth, but there is certainly arrant nonsense." Truth may be hard for mortal man to find, and confidence that we have it quite right may forever elude us, but wrongness often leaps out at us.

Similarly, Meaning may be hard for mortal man to find and confidence that we have it quite right may forever elude us, but pettiness often moves in and takes up all the available space.  I know people who are smart and well-read, but are increasingly posting politically insulting silliness. No, silliness isn't the word I want here.  Silliness has a purpose of refreshment, of giving perspective and even joy. Stupid insults make us ever more stupid ourselves and slowly drain wisdom from those around us.

Ethical Capital Partners

Reminiscent of my general rule that organisations that brand themselves with the word truth are usually selling opinion that they'd like you to believe is truth (Truthout, Truth*, and of course the Ministry of Truth in 1984) we have Ethical Capital Partners.

*Notable for its campaign to reduce nicotine use by telling teens that their pets might all die because of secondhand smoke. 

Old Norse and Old English

 Were Old Norse and Old English the same language? Colin Gurrie at Dead Language Society. 

Naturally, these kinds of claims invite a healthy suspicion. Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper have a great video where they test it out, and reenact a hypothetical conversation between a speaker of Old Norse and Old English as a kind of “experimental linguistic archaeology.”

...But for us the important thing is what they concluded from this experiment, namely that two people trying to make themselves understood to each other across this linguistic divide would indeed have succeeded.

The video is an hour long, but the conversation in one dialect of Old Norse and one of Old English is only a few minutes at the beginning. Gurrie mostly gives them credit that mutual intelligibility is likely, as they claim, but qualifies it that this would depend on context and situation.

The Dark Tetrad in Women

This is an area of psychology I mostly know only secondhand. I have had patients both male and female who would weaponise their own children to get back at a spouse, especially around custody issues. I never stopped to tot up which there were more of. When you are working with live people, the specific case looms so large that generalising about the sex, seems inefficient. The Dark Tetrad In Women puts forth the claim that men start in the position of having to prove their safety and innocence while women enjoy an immediate advantage of the societal assumption that mothers are centered on the good of the child. Worse, during evaluations the same behaviors can be interpreted oppositely in the two sexes. 

This results in the same behaviours being described differently depending on sex. Male boundaries are “controlling”; female manipulation is “coping.” Male retaliation is “aggressive”; female retaliation is “defensive.” Male alienation is “abusive”; female alienation is “protective concern.” Her narrative is taken seriously by default, even when behaviour and outcome don’t match. The same actions acquire entirely different meanings depending on who performs them.

For me the problem is that I have heard too many accusations from people who clearly unreliable themselves. In acute psych, one learns too quickly and easily to be suspicious of or even disbelieve everyone.  It is interesting, and I think wise, that Dr. Hannah Spier advocates that we look at evaluating the behavior of women not in terms of what they feel but of what they have to gain.  We should train clinicians for it.

The Wicked, the Sinners, and the Mockers

In the sermon on the Psalms the pastor made a distinction between those who do things wrong, those who do wrong things for so long that they have seared conscience and no longer recognise the wrong, and those who are so far gone that they make fun of the righteous.  If you think that first group doesn't sound so bad in comparison - which I guess is true - notice that they are called the wicked, which doesn't sound like an especially neutral term. The sinners and the mockers are the two further categories.  This tracks with what I have observed, though I'm not sure how we measure it. 

Advisors

 Women in the supermarket ask their teenage daughters their opinion and then argue with them about it.

"Should we get more tacos?"

"No, we still have one and we're not making them this week."

"But I like to have some on hand." (Daughter then blankly silent.)

I have to wonder why she even asked.  

Do they even ask their sons? Come to think of it, I think I have heard women do this to husbands as well.  It must mean something.

Guide Me

 

There is an exquisite joy for me in this harmony.

Opportunity

Imagine, if you will, two bread trucks backed up to each other so the two vertically-opening doors can be lifted so that goods can be transferred from one to the other. They do not quite meet, so that there is about a 20" gap between the two, and one truck bed is about 5" higher than the other. One bread truck belongs to a charity that cannot afford luxuries like maintenance, nor can the warehouse bread truck, which is used instead of the actual warehouse because a largish rat showed up in the bread about 9 months ago and the charity doesn't take the risk - even for the immigrants being given the bread tomorrow who are used to working around rats since childhood.

Moving bread from Truck A to Truck B is one of my three stops every Friday. Six months ago I seriously banged my head on the poorly-maintained warehouse truck's rolling vertical door, bleeding all over the wrapped bread and my own clothes. I banged it again today, because it doesn't quite go all the way up to where it should and I didn't notice. I never do.  It was much gentler this time, and my scalp didn't bleed. But I did shy away from it, lost my balance slightly, which turned into "quite a bit, actually," and somehow bumped against both trucks on my way down.  I did not fall into the 20" gap, but impossibly fell outside the two trucks onto the pavement from about 3 feet above the ground. I landed on my shoulder and elbow and lay there, mentally surveying whether I was lightheaded, which parts of me hurt, etc. (See link.) I resolved not to try and stand or even sit up until I had figured out what was up. It sucks getting old and losing your balance gradually, so that you realise even on your way down that a year ago you could have gotten a foot under yourself and stayed roughly vertical, but now are headed for a very unforgiving place. 

I just barely protected my head with my flannel shirt-sweater-winter coat sleeve! I am very proud of that.

Long story not really short, I ended up in Emergency Services, answering the same questions repeatedly. I was able to try out my wise-ass lines on different audiences as I went. I had it down to a routine by the time I got to the final Physician's Assistant, and the harried staff pretty much loved me and had a brief moment of joy.  My favorite was answering "When did you first notice symptoms?"

"Right about the time I hit the pavement, actually." (While thinking "I can't wait to tell this to someone.")

"Who is the president?" 

"Is this a trick question?" (That got a laugh both times.)

When you were Al Wyman's son, everything that happens might possibly turn into a vaudeville routine. Life is richer.  

 

Extreme

 The Alaska Wymans left Orlando at 74 degrees.  They arrived in Nome at -22 degrees. With the slight breeze, it was 30 below. 104 degree difference.  I don't even like to hear the words "30 below."  I shiver from that alone.

Oxytocin Paradox

 
Gurwinder at The Prism links to the Oxytocin Paradox research 

 Oxytocin, the “love hormone”, can also make people spiteful. Cruelty is not simply the opposite of compassion, it’s often adjacent to it. For instance, the platform most dominated by “social justice” advocates—Bluesky—is also the one with the highest support for assassinations. Beware of those quick to show empathy, for they are often just as quick to show barbarity.

Beauty Matters

 From the substack Beauty Matters: Imagine being able to make stone translucent

 

Hunting Song

 I had not heard this one before.  Looking it up, it is not a traditional piece, it is written by them. The lady with the magic horn is likely to be Morgan Le Fey. The narrative isn't quite clear to me, and seems to be a pastiche of medieval-sounding legends about false maidens.

 

927 vs 954 AD

I have heard that the debate over when ENGLAND formally began has resurfaced. It is one of those issues - like the filioque clause - that most people say "Who cares?" while the remainder insist that it is absolutely vital. 

I lean toward 954 myself. Aethelstan was the first to say he was King of all England and he did put most of the conquering or at least pacifying in place, and that was by 927.  Everyone would sort of like it to be Aethelstan. More kingly, what? Even his grandfather King Alfred, even more beloved, preferred Aethelstan to his older brother. Aethelstan is undoubtedly a great Anglo-Saxon king. But did he get the collection of territories in various states of fealty over the finish line to get to the point that we say "There! Finally! That's the England we've been looking for!" 

The other nominee is Eodred, who was sickly and uninspiring.  He did drive a stake in the ground - almost like planting a flag - on the English Benedictine Reforms, which was seen at the time as a big deal of a display about unified England in the 900s, even though it is rather a "Wait, what?" topic in the 2000s. 

Here are the weaknesses: Aethelstan had some controversy about whether he was a legitimate heir of Edward. His mother may have been a wife, may have been a concubine, and such distinctions often hinged on whether the king or the woman in question had technically been married before, or whether they had technically married before the birth of the child. If you think those are just matters of record-keeping and technicalities from an era completely unlike our own you might consider the early political career of Kamala Harris, of whom some would say "C'mon, no big deal," while others would say "Very big deal."  Yet he survived that and was almost universally accepted.  The bigger weakness is that the control of Northumbria slipped away right after he died and was not restored until later, under - you guessed it - King Eodred. 

Eodred nudged it over the line.  He gets the bouquet. 

BTW, this is delaying a post on King Canute. 

Dogma

The following Chesterton quote came up for discussion at pub night while I was in Florida. I won't know until Thursday how it turned out, but no parties were hospitalised, for which we may all be thankful. There was puzzlement about what exactly GKC was driving at. 

 “Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.”

I have an advantage here because I have read CS Lewis's discussion of the matter, which is greatly clarifying. Chesterton fans will tell you that everything of Lewis is in Chesterton first. While that may be true, the Chesterton version is often less clear, at least to me. 

One aspect (only one) of the above quote comes in those discussions of "the real meaning of Christmas (or Easter, Passover.)" Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen sang one little child, quite appropriately. Only when this is challenged does dogma start to be defined. "Well, Johnny, the chocolate eggs aren't strictly necessary and might even be a distraction. It's the Jesus risen part that's important." Once the distinction has been made we see that we could have Easter without chocolate eggs, but we couldn't have it without Jesus risen. We might not have apprehended that before. As things are taken away we see the core more clearly. The challenge has defined the doctrine. I wrote at greater length and I hope more poetically fifteen years ago in Festival Worship. Food and music are mentioned prominently.

We see that while we have gained something in terms of clarity in our religion, we have lost a great deal of fun and involvement when we separate out the (usually pagan) bits. The secular members of a post-religious society may want to keep the foods, the music, and the decorations and thus create new "real meanings" of Christmas or Passover.  It's about family. It's about heritage. It's about Peace - meaning either pretty quietness or a political version of the term, not a biblical one. It's about giving. It's about poverty and refugees. These dogmas define a new and different religion because the tree ornaments can't do that. They define nothing, only celebrate it.

I don't say the new religions are entirely unrelated to the old one. They are usually clearly descended from it, taking one of the many doctrinal bits and making it central. That is where the clarity of dogma comes in.  We wouldn't see - indeed we largely haven't seen - that a new religion has emerged if we focused only on the cookies and Santa songs. Memorial Day was about those who had died in battle, now it is about all who have died. Fourth of July and Veterans Day now join it in Generic Patriotic Day with Military Emphasis I-III. The celebrations alone cannot hold the holiday together, dogma is necessary or it erodes. 

Yet put simply, dogma isn't as much fun, at least at first. We can't just enjoy the holiday anymore, we have to believe in it now that unbelief has become a possibility. Failing that, we have to find a new belief, a new dogma to attach to the celebration. 

 

  

An Interesting Time

My brother sent some Wyman family history from the Revolutionary War.  Menotomy is now called Arlington, and on the battle day of Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775, more people were killed in Menotomy than in the more celebrated towns. This was later in the day as the British were attempting to get back to Boston along the Battle Road, now Massachusetts Avenue. Militiamen from many towns positioned themselves along the road to harass the British. The video is a detailed description of the deaths on Jason Russell's property and in his house. It is also notable for the magnificent Coastal New England accent of the presenter. You should click through to hear a couple of minutes of her, anyway.

 

No Wymans are mentioned in that video because the Wyman who was killed in Menotomy, Jabez, met his end in Cooper's Tavern nearby, drinking with Mrs. Russell's cousin and sure that they had time to finish their "flip" before the British arrived. (They didn't.) All the Menotomy deaths were incredibly bloody. Other Wymans acquited themselves more admirably, that day and throughout the Revolution, mostly in the vicinity of Woburn, where the two Wyman brothers had originally settled in 1635. One Hezekiah Wyman was one of those legendary gray-haired men on a white horse that show up in old war stories, nicknamed "Death on a Pale Horse." I recognised as soon as I saw the names that they were not direct ancestors of mine and wondered how close they were. As it was 3-4 generations after the immigrant ancestor they could have been as far as fourth cousins to my line, which seems distant now.

Yet it probably didn't seem so then. If you ran into someone with the same surname they would almost certainly be a relative at that point, as the Great Migration was essentially 1625-45 and then stopped. It would usually take only a minute or so to ask about towns and grandparents to have a good idea where they fit in relation to you. Americans were exposed to many fewer people in their lifetimes then, which would make the connections even tighter. My ancestor Ephraim Wyman and family headed for Nova Scotia shortly before this, where the same process would be replicated. 140 years later around 1915, if you ran into a Wyman in Yarmouth County NS you would be certain it was a relative and likely able to nail it down pretty quickly. I don't think that process replicated nearly as well after that. 140 years ago would be 1886, and if your immigrant ancestors showed up then, they had a lot more America to move around in and could easily end up more that three towns away. If you ran into your somewhat-common surname you might be sure it was some kind of relative, but until quite recently your ability to track that down would be hampered.