Raining Tonight

 

Semantic Shift

 I noticed today in an older book, The Memoirs of Count Witte, that he uses the word "practically" to mean in every practical sense: "I was practically the head of the Odessa Railroad." We would interpret that now to mean "I was almost the head of the Odessa Railroad." It's one of the fun things about reading older works, sensing the changes.

Trans Advocates

 No One Expects the Tranish Inquisition - Helen Joyce  

A Requiem For Nutrition

 Two years ago from Cremieux Recueil Food Probably isn't Making People Smarter or Dumber 

It is thorough. You can almost hear him thinking "Someone is going to bring up this objection right away.  Let me nip that in the bud." I understand that, and my overlong essays of ten and fifteen years ago illustrate it. He casts far afield to head critics off at the pass (metaphor alert: where he can nip them in the bud) with a long discussion on the Flynn Effect, the observation that IQ's have been rising across multiple populations for over a century*. The first guess that people have on this is nutrition, because that has been shown to be true in terms of height, and nutrition has varied within cultures and among cultures because of war and famine, creating rather dramatic natural experiments. It was not a crackpot theory. However, when looked at more closely it hasn't held up.

 We have noted that 20-point Dutch gain on a Raven’s-type test registered by military samples tested in 1952, 1962, 1972, and 1982. Did the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1982 really have a better diet than the 18-year-olds of 1972? The former outscored the latter by fully 8 IQ points. It is interesting that the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1962 did have a known nutritional handicap. They were either in the womb or born during the great Dutch famine of 1944—when German troops monopolized food and brought sections of the population to near starvation. Yet, they do not show up even as a blip in the pattern of Dutch IQ gains. It is as if the famine had never occurred.

 

 Iodine improves IQ in fetuses; adults as well? A meta-analysis of relevant studies says no.

Micronutrient supplements in Nepal and Indonesia; exposure to lead; even Ramadan 

 Among the White British students, the month of pregnancy Ramadan took place in wasn’t related to test scores, and among Caribbeans, the same thing was true. But, for Muslims, scores were lower if their mother was pregnant during Ramadan, and maybe lowest at two to three months in. (But even that is only one point difference.) 

*And has now stopped, puzzlingly. 

Come From Away

We went to see Come From Away at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse in Meredith.  That theater has some uncomfortable seats, but the production was good enough that the cast quickly overcame that and I no longer noticed. The script is about the 38 planes diverted on 9-11 to Newfoundland, Canada and stuck there for 3+ days, with the locals unexpectedly on the hook for taking care of them. If a production comes by, you will enjoy it.

 

The Letter

 Joe Cocker's movements are described as energetic and idiosyncratic. They always looked like some sort of neurological damage to me. It's a real contrast to Leon Russell, who looks as if it's not actually very interesting to be playing at a rock festival.  But I loved Cocker's voice. 

 There was a time in late highschool, 1970 or '71 when girls wore those blue boots with big stars, called "Joe Cocker's"

Are "Free Speech" Advocates Really Just Closet Racists?

No.

Oh, like you wanted some evidence or something?  If you must.  In fact, they show slightly more racial tolerance.

So-Called "Intersex" Individuals

 This particular post on Substack by Dr. T is good enough that I reprint it in full. In my comment there I noted that when I worked with Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome patients in the 90's, the former were always clear that they are female and the latter that they are male.  They are a large percentage of the folks that trans advocates like to call intersex and imply that they are ambiguously gendered, but they do not in fact undermine the binary.  Dr. T assured me that this is still the case.

 Having accused my argument of being reductionist, simplistic and outdated, the SubStacker I quoted in my previous note went on to accuse my argument of an even worse transgression.

“[Your argument] also willfully ignores the existence of intersex individuals, whose biological reality defies your rigid binary, as well as the progress made in countries like India, where legal recognition of identity is increasingly based on lived reality rather than just chromosomes…”

I did not “wilfully” ignore “the existence of intersex individuals”.  My note did not mention disorders of sex development (abbreviated as DSDs) because the existence of congenital biological conditions (present at birth) in which the development of chromosomal, gonadal and/or anatomical sex is atypical do not challenge the binary (female/male) and immutable (unchangeable from birth until death) nature of biological sex in the human species.

In common with most biological scientists and health care professionals who treat people with DSDs, I do not use the obsolete term ‘intersex’ for a number of reasons.

First, the term ‘intersex’ is stigmatizing because it implies that ‘intersex’ is a person’s identity (as in, “she is intersex”).  In contrast, the term ‘DSD’ refers to an often debilitating biomedical condition that a person has from birth and throughout their life, not who a person is.  The use of DSD in place of intersex seeks to put the person first, as we do when we say that a person has a disability, rather than saying that the person is disabled.

Second, calling people who have DSDs, “intersex”, is both scientifically indefensible and an insult to the humanity of these people.  The people who used to be called “intersex freaks of nature”are not located somewhere on a sex continuum between a woman (a female person) and a man (a male person).  Nor do these people have a sex that is other than female or male.  The claim that DSDs create a variety of sexes, other than female or male, usually ranging from three to six other sexes, but even extending to a multitude of other sexes, is scientific sophistry serving the transgender political agenda.

Third, the social and biomedical challenges faced by people with DSDs have been weaponised by transgenderists in their war on the material reality of biological sex.  By including the letter ‘I for intersex’ in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, transgenderists claim that people with DSDs have ‘a queer gender identity’.  This has done a great disservice to people with DSDs and their families who are focused on ending the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs and who do not want to serve as clown fish in scientifically ludicrous attempts to disprove that sex is binary and immutable in the human species.

The main source of the ignorance, stigma and trauma associated with DSDs is the mistaken belief that all people with DSDs are sexually ambiguous, meaning that, at birth, they can not be classed as either female or male and so need to be arbitrarily assigned a sex by their birth attendants.

DSDs encompass over 60 different congenital biological conditions and are relatively common, affecting approximately 2% of live births, but the vast majority of these live births are unambiguously sexed either female or male in terms of their chromosomal, gonadal and anatomical sex, even though one or more of these determinants of sex are atypical to some extent.  Less than 0.018% of live births are affected by a rare DSD that either causes a mismatch between chromosomal (male) sex and anatomical (female) sex or results in anatomical (mainly genital) sex that is so malformed that it is not classifiable as exclusively female or male, but is never both.

The former type of DSD involves disorders of testicular development or disorders affecting the synthesis of testosterone produced by the testes.  In the absence of the masculinising effects of testosterone, a foetus will follow the female developmental pathway in utero.

Wednesday Links

Mary Parker Follett The Godmother of Management She saw the invisible authority of common purpose as more powerful than hierarchical authority

Just Plain Rivka  has been added to my Tuesday Zoom book club and now her substack Logic and Morality goes on my sidebar. I think she said she has twelve children age 2-23, and now the the youngest is out of diapers she wants to create a change in her life. Just a remarkable thing to say, eh?

Data Republican on the one paranoia to rule them all. I remarked long ago that wherever a paranoia starts, it seems to slowly work its way to the Jews. I worked with paranoid people my whole career. I have to suspect that for all the focus on Musk and Bezos, the current focus on billionaires owes something to the old trope about "Jewish Bankers." Yet even I have been amazed at the speed and intensity at which it operates now. It has come to this:  I don't dare ask my brother what he thinks. He has been sympathetic to Palestine for a long time, but not at the expense of the Jews until Obama's first presidency. 

Strange Women Lying In Ponds 

I had heard that there is linguistic evidence of isolated words making it from Indo-European into Chinese, a completely unrelated language, but all I had seen before was names of tribes from Central Asia showing up in some very early Chinese records. Those Steppe barbarians got around, after all. But this is a clear word itself, mit in Old Chinese means "honey." As in Indo-European *medhu, found in descendant Greek methy, amethyst but most recognisably in "mead."  The contact point looks like Tocharian B, a wild eastern outlier of PIE that split off early. 

Tuesday Links

 Islam in America by Reiham Salam. American Muslims, especially those young, female, and US born, believe that Islamophobia is rampant. The evidence for this is not only missing, but backwards

Low-Conscientiousness Losers are Bad Senate Candidates  by Josh Barro. 

No, the failure to cover the tattoo indicates something different about Platner: Like John Fetterman, he is a fuckup. 

The death of the Summer Job You learn to deal with unreasonable people and are treated as a low-status individual. But you also learn some small competencies and in a narrow venue, people depend on you to get it right. 

Harari Vs Henrich For those of you who follow the overview of evolution. The prevailing 20th C view was that increased intelligence gave rise to language which gave rise to cooperation which produced culture. There is a developing consensus that this can't have been how it happened, and may even be reversed.  Henrich says it's Culture to Cooperation to Language to Intelligence. We have discussed this here before, most recently a year ago  

How Vermont Became Ground-Zero for the Anti-Israel Movement  This infuriates me. 

Wrong Eyeglasses

 

Sehnsucht

My college roommate was from Wayne Township and knew one of these guys. This song should have been a natural for us, but somehow it just wasn't cool enough at the time.  Too much Four Seasons in it. I didn't even like it much until about 20 years ago, but I must have listened to it because I knew all the words. I love it now and feel it was an important part of my childhood. 

Except it wasn't. There is no particular girlfriend attached to it, just all of them, and some I wanted but never had. Nostalgia lies and tells a different story.

Happy beginning of summer

A Billion Years

Instead of booksignings on tour, the new thing is to go on podcasts and get interviewed when you have a book come out. Steve Stewart-Williams of Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche just had A Billion Years of Sexual Differences come out. You can listen to him at any of these places, and most have transcripts. I have listened to a few and I also read him, so I eventually decided I don't need any more on this particular topic. at the moment.  But here you are, as much as you want. Well, actually, there are more.  This is enough.

We Can't Just Lie About This  Skeptiker

The Dissenter   

Keep Talking  

The Good Fight  Yascha Mounk, who interviews a lot of very good people.

The Overthinkers  Christian perspective

Links From 2015

 Slogging Through Woods on a Slushy Morning

(Jump Off The Page Title)  The first appearance of JM Smith, our resident geographer, in the comments

Hillary, perpetual martyr. Inserted irrelevantly into a public conversation

Ion Mihai Pacepa Evidence from the highest-ranking Soviet defector that Liberation Theology was intentionally created by the KGB, who arranged for an agent to become head of the World Council of Churches to introduce the concept into Latin America.  I had forgotten the story.

Archive of Old Radio Shows.  It's still there! 

The Afterlife In Popular Opinion.  Lots of comments. 

 

Recent Links

 The Shocking Truth About Fairness, by Lionel Page. 

 The idea that ruling ideas about fairness are an ideological veneer used to placate dominated groups is, however, unsatisfactory. If what matters are actual relations of power, why do powerful people need justifications in the domain of ideas? What role do these justifications play?

I think "unsatisfactory" is the right word. Everyone uses justifications for what they do, except in cases of extreme power imbalance. But this cannot be the whole story. Perhaps strange women lying in ponds distributing swords IS a good basis for government.

What's New In Biology from Works in Progress New drugs, vaccines, and therapies

The Commodification of Christianity  by Freya India, a newish Christian.  Interesting for us, as we have young relatives, one in particular, trying out Christianity

And as if in answer, Bench Press and Be Baptised by Josh Code. 

What's the Tax Rate of the Forbes 400?  A National Bureau of Economic Research estimate puts it at 24%, six points less than the national average of 30%.  This is for all taxes, including international, BTW.  But David Splinter has a detailed critique and finds that both numbers are wrong.  The real number should be 38% for billionaires, 25% for everyone else.  But wait, there's more! If we add in yearly charitable giving, the top 0.0002% give 59% to the citizenry, and if we add in their end-of-life bequests, it rises to 73%

Victor Borge

 Always a joy.

More on Cognitive Genetics

Robert Plomin is a big name, and I think I have seen some of those other names with his before.  He has a King's College lab in the UK. The Genetics of Specific Cognitive Abilities, from a special issue of the journal Intelligence. Some knowledge of the Cattell-Horn-Carroll Theory of Intelligence will be needed to follow the terminology, even if the concepts are already known to you.  It is a hybrid that describes cognitive skills as a hierarchy. The most commonly researched is the most abstract type of intelligence that is closely related to the g-factor. That it is heritable is well-established, though the usual arguments about how much and what the interaction with nurture is remain. The other levels of intelligence usually regarded as less heritable and more responsive to what comes from the environment. To solve a new math problem requires abstract intelligence. To remember mathematical techniques you have been taught is considered more a product of what you have been exposed to.

So this one is interesting, because it finds that the second level of intelligence and abstraction is about equally heritable. Even more surprising, the specific abilities, the least abstract, are similarly heritable.  It's one study but it's worth paying attention to. You might go down the rabbit hole with this one, but I think you can pick up a fair bit with one pass. 

"The Nature of Nurture" is a fun phrase, anyway. 

 

 

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

Adult Sunday School is reading John Mark Comer's The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry this summer. It will change the blog, I imagine. My prediction at present is that my posts will more often be links, because that is what has happened so far as I have eliminated hurry the last few years. I will try to not dispense wisdom.  If wisdom happens, it will be largely accidental.

But I admit I don't know. We'll see.  

Jonathan's Fence

 

This was an upgrading of an 80-y/o deck at my son's previous house. Much of the framing underneath this was kept, but the upper portions which had long been exposed to weather and people were 100% replaced, as you see. It was built on New England soil, so frost heaves destabilised it over the years. I had previously built a porch that included many of the features of this deck.  However, the construction was a bit different, and my son was doing the adaptation - I was mostly there just to be a worker bee. This railing you are looking at was the result of compromise upon compromise. Nothing was square, and attempts to correct that only seemed to make things worse.

The proper choice, in some sense, would have involved lots of digging, leveling, and replacing it all. But it was a deck on an old house.  The next owner, in fact, made some modifications to it that were changes, not merely corrections of what we had made. Putting twice as much effort into would have been inefficient, in retrospect. Even though a close look would reveal some adaptations that weren't quite perfect, it might fairly be said that this was the best choice. 

We don't uproot or tear down Chesterton's Fence until we know why it was put up.  Then, as you will. In this case, it was put up because it was necessary and was good enough. My son had to learn along the way what compromises would be necessary to be "good enough," and make choices. The next owner can do as she will. But she would be wise to know why the compromises were made, because they might be "good enough" for her also, and even the owner after that. 

There is a New England saying that is likely used in other places.  If it ain't broke, don't fix it.  

Value and Worth

Amy and Becky want to start a restaurant.  Amy will be the chef, Becky will be the business manager. To get started, they ask their friends Caitlin and Dierdre to lend them some money. At first, the restaurant has no value. But after a year or two, it is doing well.  Whatever we call the overall value of the restaurant, each of the four women owns a percentage of that and is "worth" that amount of money. 

Let's not even talk about the part where the state wants to raise taxes on the business in some way.  Let's pretend the tax rate is zero. But Amy is frustrated with something about the deal.  She doesn't like working with Becky, or she thinks she can make more somewhere else. Something.  She wants to take her percentage of the value - which she does own - and cash out. If she does, there is a strong possibility that the other three cannot rescue things efficiently with another chef quickly enough and the restaurant goes under. The remaining "worth" of all of them is pennies on the dollar.

Or Dierdre has a crisis in her life and needs to take her investment money out. The other three attempt a lot of juggling, restructuring, and negotiating, but it's not enough and the business goes bankrupt. Again, now instead of having 25% of something valuable, everyone has 25% of scattered restaurant equipment. Any of the four might try again with another restaurant or business and succeed. Each might still have market value, but now they have little "worth" unless they become part of building something else.

If you try to smuggle in some idea of a different kind of worth, like the worth of the labor they put in, or whether they are worth something just because they are human, or their infinite worth in God's eyes you are changing the subject and being deceitful.

I just explained billionaires to you.