Juggler

I was just thinking, "y'know, I've never posted a juggler before, and it's about time I got around to it." 

No I wasn't really.  I was looking for something else and saw this.

Recent Links

Institute for Christian Machine Learning.  I don't know what to make of this.

March Madness set to expand to 76 teams.  William and Mary men's team has never made the tournament.  In their best years they make it to the bubble.  This is our opportunity!

One of my book clubs is reading Uncle Fred In The Springtime  and I began it today. The opening sentence is "The door of the Drones Club swung open..." A sense of calm came over me.  I am in good hands.

In the context of control variables, Cremieux quickly dispatches the argument that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is dangerous. "What do the critics have? They have their confusion." Similarly, he shows how "attribution studies" that claim for example that 68,000 people a year die because they don't have health insurance are riddled with logical and statistical holes.

Gurwinder discusses how resentment and victimhood mentality leads to injustice, and Nikki Stolz relates this to  self-pity in literature.

I think I have caught up, and will resume my usual posting speed. 

Chihuahuas

 Chihuahuas don't really kill more people than pit bulls.  You will be amused why people thought so.

Auvelity

 If you are prescribed the new antidepressant Auvelity but it is unaffordable, with little research you can bring the cost down from $1000 to $5 by buying both parts of the mixture separately and following the formula.

Cole Allen

One daughter-in-law, a hearty Trump disliker, sent along a link that Cole Allen was not the sort of person the White House is saying he is.  I thought you might be interested in my reply to the dear woman from my immediate mental health perspective. 

That is fascinating. It does seem likely that painting him as anti-Christian is at minimum, highly superficial and recent, and more likely, imposing a predetermined view on him.

He has sounded somewhat psychotic to me, of a point of view that has grown gradually more paranoid. In a very usual fashion, he has drawn his paranoia from what is in the air at the time. Parts of his reasoning are indeed extremely solid, but finding the antichrist in anyone who is prominent in one’s own moment is always deeply suspicious, and attributing a special level of sinfulness to behavior that is always with us seems like a sort of "spiritual impression cherry picking."

It feels to me like an intensity of thinking about subjects that at one time was quite nuanced and able to look at contradictions and try to resolve them, but because of growing paranoia has settled on its answer and can no longer look at two sides of an issue . 

Because this is an enormous ambiguity about who he is, and what has motivated him, everyone will have plenty of evidence for their own side, and plenty of reasons why their opponents are just stupid and refusing to look at "the evidence."  I think we will see no shared resolution. 

She was around a lot of PhD candidates and PhD's at Rice in her 20's (she is early 40's now) and wondered if there is an increase in instability among such folks.  I had thoughts about that as well.

I have thought about this a lot in my career. My belief is that in a clear and protected environment like academia, you can go longer before your instability becomes a dealbreaker. It also happens in fields where you can work alone and submit your work with minimal interaction . So people “choose“ those fields because they get selected out in other fields earlier. They like those fields better for survival and social reasons.  If you learn how to avoid whatever the real forbidden behaviors are in a group, you can break lots of other rules for a long time and still get paid. Academia is just one of them.

The Fully Politicized Society

 Life in the Fully Politicized Society, on David Foster's substack.  He has written earlier versions of this at Chicago Boyz.  He links to some of that in this essay.

He darts back-and-forth between modern events - a speech by Michelle Obama, residence training at the University of Delaware - and events in Germany between the wars and in the Soviet Union.  It's not the same, as conservatives are wont to claim.  But it's the same thing. One of my great surprises when first working in mental health was that the bleeding heart liberals, who at the time I expected to be the good guys and care more about the downtrodden than those evil conservatives, were the ones who most wanted to make people do things that were Good For Them.  Oh sure, that's not what the law says, but it would be really good for Jerry to have a good long stay in the hospital so that he could "stabilisise," and then be required to go to day program five days a week when he gets out for the whole year.  Jerry was 24, and would point out that day program was groups of older women complaining about their first husbands, meditation groups, and healthy eating. 

 Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed….You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will have to be engaged. (bolding by Mr. Foster)

WWII Song

 

The Manosphere Isn't The Problem

From GenX Anecdotes: The Manosphere isn't the Problem, Feminism is.  I did wonder what would happen to a man who wrote this, but then I figured I knew the answer.  In most circles, that man would be hated and off-limits forever.  But these days, there are corners of the internet where he could get together with other guys and exchange stories in gleeful anger. He would incredibly reduce the number of places he could safely hold a job or go to school, but he could have a social consolation prize anyway.  What happens to a woman who writes this I don't know. Most would be pseudonymous for self-protective social reasons. Their comments sections might include a lot of other women agreeing with them and men thanking them, but I'm sure they would attract a lot of hate as well. There will be people who want the world to know that this woman is 100% wrong and dangerous, no quarter given*. 

In the video, the three women discuss the findings of a poll they carried out on Gen Z and their attitudes towards the opposite sex. The results of the poll certainly aren’t a surprise to me and won’t be to anyone who has been actually paying attention. But the women seem to be taken aback and surprised by the findings.

It turns out, drum roll…… young men don’t hate young women anywhere near as much as young women hate men. What a shock!

For me, the results are depressingly predictable. What was fascinating to me was listening to their response to it. Lot’s of “what could be going on here?” and “I don’t really understand why”…..

Well she's not wrong, though she may oversell it.  Schools have tended this way for a long time and it may be worse now.  When I go to vote at the highschool the signs and posters are like this, but much milder. There is also the usual "Our school is great!" and helpful nagging not to do certain things like take drugs or be a bully.  But for those messages which are gendered they are definitely all in one direction. The is also the subtler messaging of "Our school teaches kids to have particular virtues, especially ones preferred by women."  This woman has a daughter, BTW.

 

She tells me what’s going on in her lessons and I see her homework assignments.

English? Let’s focus on women and women’s struggles and how bad it is for women and write an essay about it. History? Women. Art? Women. Science? Women. Even in maths I went to an open evening and her female maths teacher kept going on about the fact that my daughter is a “girl” and that it’s great that she’s good at maths, because we MUST encourage more girls in maths. Do we? Why?

There are posters in the school corridors celebrating female writers, scientists, artists. School assemblies? Let’s talk about women.

Women Women Women…. It’s everywhere.

If they do talk about boys and men, it’s to treat them like broken, dysfunctional girls, bombard them with “education” about “toxic masculinity”, “the patriarchy” and give them the impression that the only way they can be “good boys” is to act like “girls”. 

*Technically, no quarter asked either.  Online, such things are demanded, not requested. See also billionaires, Gaza, 62 million visits, and Epstein files.

Quotes

 Megan McArdle: The existence of a problem does not imply the existence of a solution.

Ann Althouse: The war is over.  We won.  Iran just won't admit it, and we're not going to give them anything for holding out on admitting what is true.

Magatte Wade. Energy poverty kills more people than climate change ever will

Steve Stewart-Williams: IQ remains the strongest predictor of educational success, yet many teachers misunderstand it, underestimate the role of genetics, and embrace widely debunked ideas like Gardner’s multiple intelligences. 

AVI: When your opponents are 50% insane by your estimate, you will never switch to them, even if your allies are 90% insane. At that "balance" you might go neutral, but you will not switch sides.  Because...you see quite clearly that the other side is 50% nucking futs. You cannot leave your position until you have a place to land. Therefore, pointing out to people that their side is 90% insane will likely have no effect.,  They won't see it.  All they will see is that some people on your side are upwards of 50% nuts.  It's not very Bayesian, but it's how we think.

Sanity with McArdle

I link to interesting things, but sometimes underestimate how important simple sanity is in national affairs.  Razib interviews Megan McArdle. The Follies of Populism part is more his than hers, though she doesn't disagree.  Her strength is economic issues. 

 We're gonna have a fiscal crisis, what that means is up for debate. We're gonna have a fiscal crisis in the sense that at some point we are gonna get into a bad situation where the interest rates on our debt are rising enough - Okay, let me qualify this. If we reach super intelligence, I don't know the universe gets wierd, economics is riding around in the sky, we're all like living on clouds.  at that point I don't know. But assuming that we do not get super intelligence that rips through the economy and raises the GDP growth to 35% and/or super intelligence just looks around at all the carbon based life forms, and is like, why? This is very untidy. We should get rid of that. It's those uses could be those, those resources could be put to better use for silicone production. But assuming that neither of those things happens, we're just kind of past the point of no return to getting a good outcome. I've been screaming about this literally for my entire writing career. And when I started, I would say this is coming in the 2030s and people would it was as if I might have, I might as well have said, this is coming in the year 40,000 ad. It's just didn't register. No one was interested. It was so far off that no one paid attention. And that was the point at which we could have had very good outcomes. There were lots of ways to make small tweaks to Social Security, to bring it into balance, to make small tweaks to Medicare. We did not do that. You know, to lightly raise taxes, to lightly change the rules for getting benefits. We did none of that. Instead, we spent more on Medicare, and we did not reform Social Security. And at this point we're less than a decade off, yeah, the solutions are much harder.

Recent Links

Links as threatened. 

 Venn Diagrams get messy quickly. The purpose is to visually represent the relationships clearly. After four it doesn't look very clear and doesn't help much, however accurate it might be.  Of course, there may be those who still find them useful at higher numbers, and good on 'em.

Low Elite Fertility contributed to Roman instability You can't have a hereditary monarchy if the monarchs don't have children

 The Outliers by Joseph Heath.  Progress comes from both our sociability and our unsociability in tension. 

 Kant went on to claim, somewhat provocatively, that the tension between these two aspects of our nature is responsible for the progress that can be observed in human society. Without the “unsociable” aspect of our nature, we would sink too easily into complacency and stasis, but without the “sociable” aspect we would be unable to realize any of the benefits that come from the occasional disruptive insight.

 Ex-climate-activist Lucy Biggers goes back and watches "An Inconvenient Truth."

Fouling when up three.  This is an example of people not understanding that successive reasonable probabilities quickly become unreasonable.  A 7-in-10 chance is good, but if it is combined with a second 7-in-10 chance it drops to 50-50 (0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49), and a third one brings you down to about a 1-in-3 chance. (0.343) Tiago Splitter gets it.

 

 

Marathon in 2 hours

When I was a young man, I thought this would never happen in my lifetime. Even twenty years ago, I wondered. The last few years have seen the time come down regularly.

Sawe breaks the 2 hour mark in the marathon, in London.  I hadn't even heard of the second place finisher Kejelcha for good reason.  It was his first marathon.

 

ACX Links

Astral Star Codex puts out links every month. I will link to a few specifically, but you might like the whole batch.

Go in Peace, Be Warmed and Filled

A small version of this Biblical principle (James 2:16) from Steve Stewart-Williams Life Hack: A Small Gift...

Links From 2014

 The Real Casey, The Real Servant Humor about persistent frauds

The Visit; 1984 & Animal Farm; The Lesson and Rhinoceros As Paul Simon said "Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."  An excellent link from James in the comments.

Circular Time, Julian Jaynes, and Greg Cochran A commenter refined the idea to Helical Time for me, and I no longer think the last part of this is quite accurate.  Still, the concept (also at the internal link) was a big one for a decade or so for me and I still think it has some explanatory power for both history and prehistory

Tessie bsking was there at Fenway that night. 

California Rocket Fuel The old all-or-nothing antidepressant combo discussion revisited.  I was going to delete half the comments, including my own, but Granite Dad saved us in the end.

Bungle in the Jungle

You don't hear it much these days, but this one was played on the floor below me my last semester in college nonstop.  Or so I imagined at the time. 

 

Reminder Before Checking Out

My father's second wife died a couple of months ago, and we helped my younger brother and his family move stuff out today.  they've been at it for a month now.  She wasn't a hoarder, but she had lived in that house since 1946 and kept the better and sentimental things along the way. She had been the one who told us when we were first married that you spend the first half of your life acquiring things and the second half getting rid of it.

Lots of dark wooden furniture, now stacked up in the garage.  Some of it is quite nice, but I understand no one wants it anymore. In the garage rafters is an 8-ft sled with runners that looks about 100 years old.  Even the steering rope looks that old. It's probably worth something and even looks like the sort of thing that gets restored and put in an Historical Society display. There are more than a few things like that in the piles of stuff, but neither Ruth nor my brother had a guy in that knew about antiques to pint out what should be saved and sold or bequeathed.  They both kept saying they were going to, and my sister-in-law says she certainly reminded them about it repeatedly over the last five years. 

Next weekend one pile is going into a U-Haul for donations and the other pile is going into the portable dumpster in the driveway. There's still time to save some of it, but no one will.  My wife took a creamer and sugar bowl as a memento of the very dear woman.

So find the guy you heard about that checks out antiques and put stickies on the ones you want to sell or bequeath. You will have less energy next year, not more. Or you might get injured, as I am, and be much less able to to carry stuff. 

Recent Links

 I have an overflow of articles again, which leads to grouping them like this. There will bve more of these for a while, because I have so many.

Women's sex drive is more socially constructed than men's, which is more biologically driven.  This in the context that both are both.  From the Existential Contrarian

Higher Graduation Rates Are Not a Good Thing from City Journal. It seems to just mean they're promoting weaker students anyway. I'm lookin' at you Tim Walz and Gretchen Whtmer

Predictors of Conspiratorial Thinking. 

Empty Buzzwords Lead to Poor Judgement.  Research confirms Dilbert

Do Young People Suck?  One would think this was a short rant by a grouchy old person because damn kids can't even shoe a horse these days, but it's Lyman Stone doing a deep dive, with graphs and statistics.

Southern Poverty Law Center

Grim points out that paying informants is not illegal, and may not even be objectionable.  I agree.  What is at issue is if they significantly funded the events, and if the violence would even have occurred without them.  I don't know, but I am certainly suspicious.

 

Update: Polimath reports what I should have looked for myself - that the indictment is not for paying sources but for wire fraud and making false statements. Which makes the cartoon less a propos, but I still like it.

Does Your Mother Know?

 An ABBA song I had never heard before.

 

Glom

I wondered for years where my mother had gotten that word. "You look like a glom," she would say, especially if I was unkempt, underdressed, and self-pitying.  I'm not criticising her, it probably helped. I was never able to get a handle on what it meant, but the sound of it alone seems to convey it, doesn't it?

For random reasons I decided to try again, with similar lack of success. But DuckDuckGo gave me a link to Althouse in 2010, where she quoted the word "glomming" for males looking on while one man spoke with a woman. One of the commenters had apparently said 

 "Glom" was used by my mother to describe a sullen, unsocialised male: "you look like a glom in that shirt." Everyone else used it to describe attaching oneself or sticking on to something - glomming on to. Given my heritage, I concluded that the meanings were related to the Swedish word for oatmeal. I have been unable to find any authority who thinks this even remotely possible. However, a similar word roughly equivalent to "gloomy" was reported to me by a Norwegian.

If I had to push my guess beyond provable limits, I would relate it to PIE *ghel, melancholy, rather than Proto-Germ. *klamm, stuck together (clamp, clam).

I was thrilled to see this. It validated so much of my childhood experience. Except when I clicked through I found it it was written by me, in 2010.