Experiencing The Environment

 Things Have Changed (sidebar) has the blogger's career experiences with environmental degradation in non-capitalist places, in response to the frequent accusation that it is capitalism that has caused pollution. Experiencing the Environment. 

 That same year, a colleague went on a due diligence trip to Volgograd (the former Stalingrad) to look at a factory our company was thinking of acquiring.  Upon his return, he reported that the toxic waste from the plant, and every other factory in the area, was transported by a pipeline some miles to a local lake where it was dumped without any treatment.

What, are you doubting his lived experience? 

Recent Links

 Transwomen are not Women Mary Dyer. An online and irl space I know little about, other than the statements about them by others. A statement that recognises that autogynephilia is a real thing.

...“transwomen” are not, in fact, women, but are males who feel sexually entitled to women and will use male tactics like colonization, dominance, and usurpation to get what they want.  If they can’t invade our bodies they invade our spaces.  They take our words.  They redefine us out of existence. 

"The Dwarves are for the dwarves!" 

 Zimbabwe vs Botswana  Magatte Wade is a happy warrior

Pooh's Vocabulary  "This morning, my 4-year-old told me that the clementine he was having with his morning tea was “Very pleasant to eat.” About 85% of this child’s vocabulary comes from Winnie the Pooh and I am not mad about it."

Nothing to See Here, Move Along I thought I'd give another source because this one is mostly behind the paywall, but there is a Bright Future Fund related to Down's Syndrome scholarships, a Bright Futures Catholic school charity, a Florida general scholarship charity, and that's not even getting into the Brighter Futures Fund.  But this one has the usually-reputable Fidelity Investments in it. Click on the tax return to see the mission statement...

 

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.