SNL

 The algorithm often feeds you not what they have discerned you like, but what lots of people have liked.  "SNL destroys Trump in Cold Open over Midterms."

SNL is the original OnlyFans.  For those of you watching at home... 

One Link Per Site

I have essay sites I try to keep up with, sometimes reading a post closely, sometimes skimming a few posts. I recommend all of these in general, but decided to pick one from each to make things a little simpler.  I have so many these days, and I'm sure you do too. And I do not even need to be smart anymore, or at least not informed.

I will scrape the October and November links from Astral Codex Ten separately. 

Unsupervised Learning, with Razib Khan.  To Have and Have Not: Genetic Determinants of Social Status. This is Gregory Clark being his usual controversial self. It is only part of the podcast, and you have to be a subscriber to read a copy, but it is about a half-hour, rather than the usual 12-min preview that Razib does. Clark runs the numbers for centuries of England, but the work has replicated in Denmark and Poland.

Anthropologist John Hawks. Among the bonobos, it is the females who hunt, not the males. This was very unexpected.

Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Across 6 million subjects in 118 countries, women experience more pain of all kinds than men. So there.

Exhibit Asterisk Your Lying Eyes.  What magicians teach us about persuasion.

Rob Henderson. Women have become more likely to marry men with less education than them.  In fact, it started happening slowly two decades ago.

David Foster. What, Precisely, Is the Issue With "Elites?'

Steve Sailer  Sailer takes issue with Richard Hanania (who I find more tiresome every day myself) about Indians vs. Israelis. Only the first part is free, but it's got some interesting thoughts in it.

The Age of Arthur by Bernard Mees Who Was Sir Mordred?

Data Republican. Power Argues With Power Just Wow. She has reportedly been identified.  Does she live in New England? She would be welcome here.

Cremieux Recueil He seems to gravitate to mythbusting and counterintuitive knowledge.  Well, Bully for him, then.  Obesity and Poverty Part II Everything you thought you knew is not supported by the data.

Aporia  A challenge to the genetic origin of racial differences in IQ, based on the HSV-1 Hypothesis.  Way over my head, but what I can understand looks like it has something to it.  I will try to be alert to what people smarter than me say about this.

Dead Language Society. What is the AI Accent, and why do we hate it?

In the To Be Continued category.  David Reich has put forward a speculative (for him) preprint about the erosion of the Out-of-Africa hypothesis.  I had thought it was solid. Apparently not. The idea is we have many more Eurasian ancestors, but the out-of-Africa population from 50K y/a brought improvements to enough important genes that it out-competed the Eurasians within the process of interbreeding, not by eliminating them.  It is similar to the idea of explaining "What happened to the Neanderthals/Denisovans?" by claiming that We are the Neanderthals/Denisovans! The O-O-A population interbred with us, bringing better stuff. We remained, but their genes gradually increased in us, so that thousands of years later it looks like they lived and we died. No, we just captured their best genes and kept on living throughout Eurasia.  Not at all what I expected. 

I could probably afford more subscriptions, but I just don't have the time.  When would I daydream? When would I obsess over my terrible fantasy football teams? When would I get irritated waiting for the dog to poop? Not to mention shopping and cooking, going down the rabbit holes of maps, going to doctor's appointments, doing PT exercises and learning my anthems? 

 

Bad Data is Good Data

Bethany's old statistics site was "Bad Data, Bad!" a wonderful title. No one wants misbehaving data. The claim is that one can lie with statistics, but I have always felt that if you grab them by the collar, shove them against the wall, and make them tell you who their friends are, you can get the truth out of them.

But even bad data can be informative. If the same bad data keeps being brought forward in an argument, it tells you that they have nothing better. The joke in Russia during WW2 and the invasion by Germany was that "We are winning glorious victory after glorious victory - a little closer to Moscow every day." Gun control is full of these sorts of arguments. If you purchase a gun for your house, the most likely person to be killed by it is a family member. Well, yes. This is like the Burns and Allen routine where Gracie is reading the paper and says to George "It says here that most accidents occur within five miles of home." He pauses and says, "That sounds about right." Gracie pauses even longer and then says "Gee, do you think we should move?"

The majority of school shootings involve guns. Hmm, yes. The majority of school stabbings involve knives, bombings involve bombs, arson involves fire, etc.  There are fewer shootings in Europe, because guns are outlawed. They do still have people driving vans into crowds in Christmas markets, however. Lots of fires these days. Plus, they do have some shootings anyway. They didn't used to so much, but the numbers went down long before the laws changed. As with New England, they would commit various crimes, but homicide didn't tend to be one of them.  This is changing, both there and here.  I wonder why?

America has a high crime rate and a high incarceration rate. This is supposed to show that we are locking people up to much and making them criminals. Yet what happens when the incarceration rate goes up? Does crime go up?  No, it goes down. Fancy that. Maybe it's about something other than our incarceration rate driving crime, then.  Maybe the incarceration rate is fine. There are lots of nominations what else it might be, but first, first, we send incarceration to the back of the line for the moment.

I keep seeing the same genetics vs environment arguments. The same heresies keep coming up in the church every century, with different branding. Everyone whoever went to school is an expert on education, all bringing up the same bad ideas over and over. (And don't think teachers are exempt from believing theories without evidence.  They may in fact be worse than anyone. Except administrators, right, I forgot. And Ed School professors may be worst of all, worse even than overinvolved parents.) 

I would like to give everyone something encouraging about what to do about this life of playing whack-a-mole. I don't have anything. I am not quite like Cassandra, because I am not always right, but I completely get how maddening her life must have been. I don't know how to defeat this. Reasoning doesn't work.  Bullying doesn't work. Bribery doesn't work. The promise of being one of the very few In The Know sort of works for a while, but it's impossible to keep up with. I see, and I understand, but all my actions make things worse. I remind myself that people pay money to play whack-a-mole, and I must just have that gene - or more likely, collection of genes that each create some 1% tendency toward whacking moles, even though I rather like moles in the wild. I don't fancy bullying or bribery.  I pretend I am reasoning.

Too Many

 I have been so inundated with posts that I decided to do a links post of my own, with one piece for each of them - Exhibit Asterisk, Razib Khan, and the rest.  It is close to finished. Often it was hard to choose. But over at Grim's it was impossible. The first three out of just the usual fare all insisted on being in the collection.  I stopped there.  You need to make him a habit.

Tolkien's own tune for the Dwarves' song at the beginning of The Hobbit about smashing the plates. Marvelous!  I didn't know it even existed!

And in true Tolkien fashion, Grim looks out at recent changes in the possible struggles we have before us and concludes that what is needed is courage. To Make Peace, To Make War. 

Thomas Doubting comments thoughtfully on Grim's essays on Epitectus, asking whether it is true that our body is not our own, and what the consequences of that are. 

Parental Behaviors and Childhood Aggression

What I have been saying, from Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche. We have long assumed that how we parent has a large effect on children. Meh. Remember that parents contribute genes long before, and genes hang around in the child much longer, not to mention 24/7/365. 

Inconsistent parental discipline is linked to greater aggression in children. But does the former cause the latter? It seems not. A new behavior-genetics paper finds that much of the link is due to genetic confounding: The same gene variants associated with inconsistent parental discipline are also linked to childhood aggression. Moreover, to the extent that the link is environmental, it seems that children’s aggression leads to inconsistent discipline, rather than the other way around. 

(Link) 

Duet

 

Gas Prices

How much of "We are hurting, we are struggling, the president (any president) is ruining our lives" boils down to gas prices, which people see every day on big signs? There is the claim that it's housing costs, but those were a little higher a couple of years ago. People point to groceries, but there was a lot of wailing and general brouhaha about eggs not so long ago and eggs are back down, as predicted. Milk is the same. Hamburg is still up, maybe that is the impression-leader. We have an expensive war, but not in terms of American lives, and the same could be said of Ukraine, Venezuela, etc. It's not really driving prices higher, except for the very noticeable gas prices, which will be temporary.

I am not at all claiming that this is uniquely unfair to Republicans.  It has been true all my life, though perhaps more true now. It makes no sense, as the price is volatile in response to many circumstances that are ignored. But otherwise sensible people seem to be easily convinced that "Gas prices are up = the economy is bad" regardless of what else is happening. I think it is visibility, both in terms of signage and in terms of how often we purchase it. Memories are short, also.  I remember a FB post from about 2015 extolling President Obama for bringing gas prices down. But he still holds the record for inflation-adjusted at $5.08 in 2012. The prices we see are mostly about inflation.  The ultra-cheap prices of $0.36/gal in 1970?  $2.96 now. 

It makes me crazy. 

Voting For Nice People

I am very suspicious of nice people in positions of power.  This shows up often in local elections, where you know that Samantha is a jerk and Charles is a stuffed shirt and their opponents are nice women who volunteer at the schools (and so supposedly know what's going on there) and have sons who made Eagle Scout this year or whatever. I am slightly inclined to vote against such people. They choose their positions on the basis of niceness, because it is important to them. They like other nice people and programs which sound like they should do good things for people who deserve good things being done for them, with no supporting data whatsoever.

They are the most easily swayed by other Nice People.

This is not a suggestion that you should actively seek out jerks. It might be a suggestion that you give a second look (but never a third) to the weird people. 

The practical people are little better, if at all. They are too easily swayed by charlatans who are not nice but put up the banners of how great this would be if it were true.  The name Elizabeth Holmes may come to mind here.

If, if, and if.

There is an analog to the discussion going on over at Grim's about treason. Most of us grew up in good times in nice places and the idea of treason in out schoolbooks - even out college textbooks - was right out.  We could trust the government at least that much, that it shouldn't be overthrown. Plus, the overthrowing people were clearly lying and playing a secret hand. Well, sure. Usually you don't have to examine the core premises that closely. The good guys are 80% good and the bad guys are 80% bad, let's go to Disney World and not think about it. But when we get down to 60-40, it can become situation by situation, issue by issue, region by region. "Treason" turns out to be one of those things where we say "It depends."

So too with nice people and practical people.  First, assume that neither is neither, though they at least want to be.  Only then can you move forward. The ambiguities of local elections are not a distraction, they actually highlight the real national problem. Eschew niceness.  Eschew practicality. 

My Name Is Jack Hall

The American version has it as Sam Hall, with similar lyrics about a man going to be hung. "And my neck shall pay for all." Johnny Cash had the more humorous version, though grimly so.

 

Campaigns

So one candidate for Senate is claiming that the other worked for a lobbying firm and that lobbying firm made lots of money. In reply, the lobbyist is accusing the first candidate of voting in a way that the companies of guys he dated probably liked.

That's it.  That's what passes for corruption in NH.  

Stuart the Just

Reposted from 2025.  Substack has fewer knuckleheaded conversations than other social media sites, but it still has them.  I find I am linking to this at least once a week when someone is trying to claim "I was just asking a clarifying question, which you still haven't answered..." 

It must hit a nerve, because it has received a lot of hits in only 13 months. 

******** 

My father-in-law used to joke that his mother called him Stuart the Just, because he was always saying "But I was just...But I was just..." We have variations in English: "We were only..." "She was merely..." "All I asked was..." When people use these phrases, they are often hiding something. No, Stuart you weren't just looking in your sister's toybox to see what was there. No, Ingrid, she wasn't only dropping by to chat. No, you weren't merely looking on your wife's phone to see if her mother had called yet. 

I have been on a run for motte-and-bailey arguments lately.  I have a few more coming. This is mostly because I am currently alert to them, but I hope to perform some instructive service along the way, saturating the summer of 2025 with examples and commentary. 

I don't want to get too bogged down in the castles themselves, though this is an attractive picture that's fun to spend some time on.  Analogies break down if you stretch them too far, but this illustration allows us to extend the idea just a bit.  The motte is the most defensible place.  It was often built first on an elevated area, which provides in itself some defensive advantage. In some descriptions the motte is the mound itself, and the keep is the fortified area. 

Once the motte is in place it makes sense to live near it in case of emergencies. Outbuildings would spring up for stables, work areas, and housing.  These in turn would be fortified as time and resources allowed.  In the illustration above, there is an expanding series of baileys, and outside the moat there are plenty of fields for pasture and planting. The motte is extending its influence over an entire area. The whole enterprise expanded in stages and can be defended in stages. 

In rhetoric or argument, a set of ideas can extend their influence over wider and wider areas. If you have a constitution and laws, a group can start from something quite basic, quoting "the Constitution says this," and be on safe ground. Not long after, they are saying "the Constitution also means this," expanding the idea out a little farther.  If everyone goes along, it becomes a fortified place of its own. The expansion goes fine until someone says "Hey, this isn't the Duchy of Toulouse anymore.  You are encroaching into the Duchy of Aquitaine.  Stop that." If Aquitaine attacks with enough force, Toulouse falls back to an area it thinks it can defend. Unfenced fields are tough to keep enemies out of.

In the motte-and-bailey fallacy, what is usually the problem is the discovery that Toulouse has been encroaching into Aquitaine for a long time.  It has been claiming lots of territory that isn't theirs, and Aquitaine quickly acquires some allies who say "Dagnabbit! Toulouse has been cheating. None of this has been theirs and they must be punished." Toulouse goes all the way back to the motte if necessary, saying "THIS IS OURS. You can't accuse us of lying and cheating.  We own this."

From here we are going to the situation of "But we we're only quoting what the Bible says," because being deceitful about that "only" is a big deal.

Trepanantion

 I didn't know I was interested in this until I started reading. Why Global Trepanation? by Scott Alexander at ACX.

Was it cultural diffusion? No. Trepanation (the technical term for drilling a hole in the skull) was common across Europe and South America, with scattered cases in Africa and other continents. The Old and New Worlds had limited contact after about 10,000 BC, and most customs don’t survive for five thousand plus years with no reason.