Empathy Shorthand

I have been looking for a shortcut definition of empathy for use in popular discussion. I have settled on Empathy = identifying with someone.  In the first place, it gets people off the idea that it equals compassion, or sympathy, or kindness, or just being a decent chap.  Secondly, it includes the idea that is an impression or feeling, not a kind action. Identifying is often partial, and we don't always pick the good bits of who we are identifying with. And it also highlights that it might not always be a positive. 

Do I repeat myself? Very well, I repeat myself. I don't always remember that half of 

disagreements boils down to agreeing about the definition of terms. This is where my 

contention that I may not know as much as recognized experts about a subject and not 

be fit to comment on who is wrong and who's right, but I can be pretty good at who is  

 fighting fair and who isn't . Redefining terms is something that cults do.

Liar, Liar - A Public Service Announcement

 

Don't do this. 

Sojourner and Motte-and Bailey

There is first the problem with the certainty that the Bible says what you want it to. Before we even get to discussion of any serious topic, we have the danger of forging God's signature under our ideas. Reflections on the Second Commandment. We notice how God hates hypocrisy, taking revenge, oppressing the poor, and being arrogant, but what really seems to set Him off is false prophecy. People get killed for it in the Old Testament and it seems central to the Second Coming at the end of times. We are called to teach, but teachers are under double scrutiny. We must move with all caution when telling others that God wants them to do X. It is too easy to expand our interpretations into God's commands without noticing it.

This is behind my recent post Stuart the Just.  "I only asked what time dinner was and she goes into a tempter." No you weren't only asking and she knew it.  "She's just asking how her daughter's boyfriend likes his job." No, there's a world you hope to uncover by just asking. And now "It's just what the Bible says." No it's not just what's in the Bible and we know it. You quote the verse and then bend the terms.

I have been listening to this for a long time.

From the 60s and 70s. God cares about the city. Yes, he cares about the people in the city. Does that mean he doesn't care about the rural areas? (This was before there was this big move of New Yorkers to Vermont.) Do you think he doesn't care about the suburbs? No, but churches are abandoning the cities to got to the rich, soulless suburbs.  

No, you care about the city.  The further conclusions you draw from God's love of people in general are indirect, and suspect.

From the 70s and 80s. God cares what Christians do politically.  So those monks, communes, and people too busy with ministry have got it wrong? No, you care about what Christians do politically. Jesus mentions it little.  Jesus cares about the downstream effects of all our actions, yes. Don't push it.  And especially, don't tell me what God's Politics are. 2nd Commandment. How do you even dare?

God cares about the family. Well, sure. Nurture and admonition of the Lord.  Mary and John at the foot of the cross.  Sure. But didn't God say something about remaining single if you could? So what do you mean by "cares?"  About the institution?

God cares about America. Albania not so much? No, you care about America and are bringing God into it without checking.

My denomination had a 5th grade series on the Ten Commandments.  The one about not stealing stressed the need for a minimum wage.  

God cares about sexual sin.  Yes.  Your point? 

God loves the Outcast, the Rejected, and the Scorned.  Today we would use the word marginalised. Well, yes. Everyone else hates them, but Jesus made a point of welcoming them.  Does that mean he likes them better? 

It is not only annoying to me personally.  Heck, a lot of things are annoying to me personally, including the belief that Shadeur Sanders is ready to be an NFL starting quarterback. 

******* 

Welcome the stranger. The Old Testament and the New both record it so it must mean something. There was a fair-dealing, welcoming sort of thing that people weren't doing; both Moses and Jesus thought it was important enough to mention. So most likely, we aren't doing it either and need to change our ways. Next up: Who does this mean and what is our welcome?  There are two Hebrew words, one meaning temporary visitor and another with shades of meaning between sojourner, foreigner, stranger. Missing are the direct meanings of migrant, refugee, or settlers. This is not to say that these groups were excluded, because Joseph and his sons came to trade in desperation and stayed.  What category is that? What about conquered people who stayed, or frequent traders who stayed? 

Leviticus 19 just says to treat them like your own people. This verse gets quoted a lot by people who oppose the current policy of deporting illegals. (To be fair, they quote Jesus as well.  We'll get to that.) My own denomination put up a FB post that uses this verse in a commanding way - and expands it to the meaning migrants.  

See? See? That's what the Bible says. It doesn't differentiate between legal and illegal. Yes, Leviticus 19, that also tells us not to get tattoos or cut our hair, and to rise in the presence of older people. Oh now wait.  You have to understand those verses in context... 

Oh now you want context.  Yes by all means, I'm in favor of context. A couple of years ago it was taking more refugees. Are you saying the the Jews were supposed to welcome the Philistines? The Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans?  Biblical borders  

Those were invaders. That's different.  Are you sure?  You were pretty certain it was all-encompassing just a couple of minutes ago. Well but the people today are more like people just coming here to live. True, true. We could call them settlers, then.  Were the Natives supposed to welcome the Europeans?

Jesus and the NT emphasise the spiritual rather than physical stranger, noting that we ourselves are strangers in this world and encouraging the welcome of Gentiles and Samaritans into the new covenant people.  We already know the command in Matthew 25 (sheep and goats) means something, and likely means something uncomfortable and expensive for us. But yet again, we have context. Israel was occupied territory.  No group was moving in without Roman permission. The movement of of free individuals was quite free, but they were only a minority of the populace. There was an imperial backstop if 10% of the Syrians suddenly thought that living in Israel was the thing to do.

For this exercise I am not taking a position on deportations, illegals, refugees, or overall migration. I have telegraphed that my current position is to welcome legal immigrants but discourage illegals. We have resettled refugees. We still support a Sudanese church.  I volunteer at a food charity that serves lots of immigrants and doesn't ask if they are legal or illegal. As discouraging illegals is difficult I don't know how many resources I want the country to devote that discouragement.  I see that as moveable.  I will note that my immigrant sons take about the same view. The one who then  immigrated to Norway is really annoyed at the gypsies coming in on buses not wanting to work and harassing the women as soon as they get off. Illegals suck up the jobs of the disadvantaged citizens.  Bernie Sanders used to rail about how too much immigration hurt black people. 

It is a violation of the Second Commandment for people to take verses and expand their meaning to insist that God is opposed to our current deportation policy.  If some group were insisting that the Bible commands that we take in no further immigrants I would say the same thing. Don't forge God's signature.

I know, I know.  You were only saying... No you weren't You were saying much more.

Saturday Links

You will notice that a lot of my links are from Rob Henderson, ACX, and Substack notes.  Expect this to continue. 

 Ask Not, from Lexicon Valley.  Two liberals who admire Kennedy's Inaugural learn some uncomfortable truths about the context. They are almost honest about it.  John McWhorter is no longer doing Lexicon Valley and I may delete it from the sidebar.  We'll see.

Losing My Religion  Children lose their religion over a few generations rather than just one. This is the opposite of the anecdotes we tend to hear, and I can think of some dramatic examples in my lifelong acquaintances, but I will bet this is true.  

A detective's guide to English place-names, from Dead Language Society 

Place names are like this: what seems strange for an outsider is simply part of the scenery for a local, despite the fact that many place names are, indeed, very strange or mysterious. And nowhere is this truer than in England, where a commuter might pass by seven mysteries, four references to wars of conquest, and one well-disguised obscenity on their way into the office.1

 The Sex Binary is not "High-School Biology."

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Ann Althouse headlines what the NYT buries in paragraph 8 and doesn't mention again. There is a fair point here.  Maybe there have been too many emergencies recently that could have been handled differently. But there were lots of emergencies under Obama's "one," and changing Senate rules for the ACA or ordering air strikes in seven countries would seem to qualify. 

Jupiter

 We passed a small house with many lawn ornaments in Concord on the way to the Escape Room tonight. It had a whiteboard sign such as you might see outside a restaurant.  

TODAY'S SONG 

The Planets

Gustav Holst

That seemed good to me.

 

Stuart the Just

 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, she wasn't only dropping by to chat. No, you weren't merely looking on her 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 suspect 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 xpansion 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 tought 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.

Bluegrass/Country from 1953

 I think I have the history right. A lot of people have covered this song, but I took this earlier one.

Absolute Versus Comparative Wealth

About a week ago I had a link to a graph about Estimates of Each Other.  It is surprising what things we get wrong. (Though a friend pointed out it is equally surprising what we got right.) Yet maybe it explains a lot of why the younger generation feels they have gotten a bad deal financially. If you think that 20% of the population make a million bucks a year, you might well feel left out, or despairing of ever "succeeding" and feel that the most important thing to do is Change Then System so that the bastards don't keep ripping us off. It also explains why the strategy of taxing the billionaires is so appealing.  If you think there are a lot of them out there, who could foot the bill for Everything Nice if we just stopped giving them tax breaks, it makes sense.  Only when you realise if we took all of the income from the 1% it would fund the government for about 100 days; if we took all of their wealth - their stocks, their mansions, their businesses and cashed them in - it would fund the federal government for about 9 months. Not to mention that we would destroy the major employers of the rest of us overnight and have a society where no one had any incentive to do anything beyond buying tents and ramen noodles. The number of people who make $1M/year is near 0%. If you raised their income taxes from 35% to 45% it would have no effect on you, except on your feelings. Well, in a dynamic system it would cause more of the to go live in a tax haven, so it would in fact affect you. Badly.

But they are visible, and they feed our primitive urges to break them, because we are sure they must be cheating and stealing or they wouldn't be rich.  This upsets us so much because in hunter-gatherer societies having more than twice as much as the average is indeed suspicious. Jobs and roles are similar and interchangeable.  If they have nice things, check your pockets. In America if they have nice things so what?  

This is also why every generation thinks the previous one had it easy but they have it hard. They are not much moved by reports of cheaper communication, in that a poor person in San Diego can talk for thirty minutes to her mother in Atlanta. That fruits and vegetables are available yer round. That a cancer diagnosis at forty no longer means death even if you are homeless. These mean nothing, because everyone has them. Odd that socialists, who claim to be committed to everyone doing better, stop counting things as wealth once everyone has them. One would think that was the point, and count as a victory. 

We have better communication, and think that half the country has more than us even when we are in the top quintile. 

We have not stopped homelessness, largely because we have not figured out how to get landlords (or shelters) to operate once the tenants are destroying the place, or keeping the neighbors from sleeping, or molesting the children. The low-hanging fruit has largely been picked in housing.  We are looking at fentanyl, dangerous smoking, violence, and sex offenders now.  Those aren't easy to solve. 

Links From 2012

It is with great surprise and joy that I find that a post in 2012 linking to another blog turns up a site that is still operating.  Even more amazing, his post for 9/3/25 draws heavily on mine from 9/1/25. 

Things Have Changed.  It's going up on the Sidebar immediately, so I don't forget. He has a good deal more artwork than I do, and more discussion of popular music. I was entertained by everything I saw, which means I agreed with it at least 75% as well, because I am not good at appreciating the structure or beauty of something that is just plain wrong.

I told a Lie in 2012. Sometimes such things haunt me, but not this one, probably because I was mock-apologising at the time anyway. 

Reconsideration.  It's about looking back at being Lutheran in 1981. So you get to look back at me looking back. Worse, I was writing the history of the congregation at the time, so today you get to see 2025 looking back at 2012 looking back at 1981 looking back at 1950-1980. 

Lyrics We were more sophisticated in the old days.

Parenting Priorities Reminder 

Painting 

 

Friday Links

The International Association of Genocide Scholars, recently quoted by the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, and ABC News Australia, is a fraud.  It is a pro-Palestinian mock-up of an organisation.

Antique Bottle and Glass Collector,  Sponge-Headed Scienceman, known IRL as Dennis Sasseville, has an article about the intertwining of the history of bottling and history of a mill city, Manchester, NH. Sponge has been mentioned before as a Moxie and NH beverage author and expert.

Weed Is Different Or at least its users think so. I have seen people desperate for opioids, benzos, and other drugs, saying that they need them. But I think this is correct.  Cannabis users usually try to convince you that it's actually wonderful.  Good for you. Good for them, anyway.

Literally   I like when they use the word "literally," because you can relax knowing that it means "not at all." Once you have broken the seal on a word's agreed-upon meaning, it can wander of anywhere.  And usually does.  It reminded me of relatives guaranteeing the suicide of my patient. That in turn has my theory about hitting squirrels when driving. 

Jane and John Psmith review The Ancient City by Numas Denis Fustel de Coulanges. The book is a fascinating discussion of the culture and institutions of Ancient Greece and Rome and the changes wrought by the philosophers and Christianity.  I am going tio reread the review again today.  Haven't read the book, though. 

Reading this book really makes it clear how nearly every aspect of Christianity was like a laser-guided bomb aimed at one or more of the pillars holding up the social order of ancient Mediterranean civilization.

 

The Seven Signs

Our group leader made passing reference to the Seven Signs of the Gospel of John in class week before last. I recalled having heard of this years ago and perhaps even hearing a teaching or sermon on it, but not ever having studied it. As is my usual habit, I went googling around to see if I could find something on this that I liked better than the others. There is no guarantee that it is the best, or even in the top 10%. Other articles on this site seem reasonable. 

Theological Significance of Signs in the Gospel of John  

 The Gospel of John meticulously weaves together a narrative where each sign serves as a theological beacon, illuminating the divine nature of Jesus and his mission. These signs are not mere miracles; they are deliberate acts that reveal deeper truths about the relationship between the divine and humanity. By focusing on these signs, John invites readers to look beyond the surface and engage with the spiritual implications of Jesus’ actions.

Substitute Links

Maggie's Farm has been down for a week and I thought I would try again to supply some links.  Not the same as what they would do, but some overlap. Lots of substacks send me links so I will start there.

Deepnewz, my favorite news site, has not updated for a week.  It is a startup, so I am concerned. 

Certain words show up more in AI. At the top: delves, delved, underscore, underscores.

The rebranded architecture of fast food, from the slanty, colorful 20th C to the minimalist and boxy 21st C.  

Ruxandra Teslo, who calls herself an "anti-cynic," on the growing nihilism of the Online Right, reflexively opposing everything without offering anything. Very Nietzschean, she says slyly. Your newborn is not Hepatits B vaccinated because of wokeness. 

When Civilization Control-alt-Deletes: Prehistoric Europe's false dawn and long reboot. 

Liberté, égalité, radioactivité  France built 40 nuclear reactors.

Run-Punt Option

I drafted Jeanty in one dynasty league on Monday, and probably will tonight in a league where I get to keep fewer players.  He is fun to watch.  But the point of the video is the new(ish) twist that one college team is trying on punts, to run first and punt only if the run looks blocked off.  It is risky, because it is easier to block and any disruption might cause a fumble.  But it also injects the element of surprise into the play, a chaos that one team expects and the other does not. A defense can't be everywhere at once.

It is not strictly new.  A player can drop-kick from anywhere on the field for a field goal, though that hasn't happened in decades, and Doug Flutie of the Patriots used that a few years ago for an extra point.  He and punter Rich Camarillo used to work on a last-second alternative to a Hail Mary when their team was out of field goal range, but three points would win or tie. They tried it both ways, Camarillo passing 20-30 yards down the field to Flutie while the receivers headed to the goal line, bringing the defensive backs and linebackers with them, and Flutie to Camarillo. The passcatcher would then spin and drop kick the ball through the goal posts. They pleaded with Bill Belichick to let them try it in a game, but it never happened.

Vivid Images

I just finished weekly group discussions on CS Lewis's Miracles. It is more a philosophical book than a theological one, though it keeps its theism and then Christianity in focus throughout. It is tough sledding in places for that reason, requiring close attention. Yet one of the ways that Lewis makes this a bit easier along the journey is by using vivid images, slipped in even unnoticed, to make the point. In the following two sections, one from Chap XI "Christianity and Religion" and one from Chap XIV "The Grand Miracle" I have italicised a short but vivid section in each that helps the reader along. First, they do illustrate the point accurately. Lewis is refuting a good deal of possible counterargument with his comment about the shoe.  He is heading off possible complaints that you did not even know you had. And in his description of Jesus sharing our earthly lot with the image of almost-defeated soldiers captures much of what is indeed wearying in this life. He doesn't strictly need to include such homely examples to make his point, but we are glad he does.

Plus he is also giving us a short rest in our intense race forward in thinking. Just a quick breather, but it grounds us back in our own world, reassuring us that we are not going to be let out on an impossibly long kite string.

Now this imagined history of religion (Ed. note: the gradual improvement from primitive anthropomorphic "spirits" to the pure abstraction of mind-as-such, which is pantheism) is not true. Pantheism certainly is (as its advocates would say) congenial to the modem mind ; but the fact that a shoe slips on easily does not prove that it is a new shoe — much less that it will keep your feet dry. Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are. It may even be the most primitive of all religions, and the oienda of a savage tribe has been interpreted by some to be an ‘all pervasive spirit’. It is immemorial in India. The Greeks rose above it only at their peak, in the thought of Plato and Aristotle ; their successors relapsed into the great Pantheistic system of the Stoics. Modem Europe escaped it only while she remained predominantly Christian; with Giordano Bruno and Spinoza it returned. 

Humanity must embrace death freely, submit to it with total humility, drink it to the dregs, and so convert it into that mystical death which is the secret of life. But only a Man who did not need to have been a Man at all unless He had chosen, only one who served in our sad regiment as a volunteer, yet also only one who was perfectly a Man, could perform this perfect dying; and thus (which way you put it is unimportant) either defeat Death or redeem it. 

Lewis mentions with great approval that Plato does the same, and so is much more readable than most books about him.  There is the Allegory of the Cave and the Allegory of the Sun, and also the charioteer driving two horses in tandem, the rational and the irrational. 

I try to do this when I remember and sometimes it works. But more often I have to fall back on the literarily cheaper hack of getting some illustrations or video clips inserted, or breaking up the page with an unrelated video, like an entr'acte in the theater.  Which I am now going to find before my third and last fantasy football draft.  

Update: Or like illuminated manuscripts, which is also way cooler than what I do. 

Star Trek

What is the stereotype of adult Star Trek fans? Is it different for male and female fans, different for those from the originals, my generation, versus younger fans?

I never took to it when it came out, but loved Star Wars instantly. It looks like there is some different appeal here.  Star Wars came in for a lot of criticism from fundamentalist Christians, but I don't recall that happening for Star Trek. I have theory why the earlier space series might be religiously worse, but I think my prejudices and personal taste might interfere too much. I would like to hear what all of you have to say.

Also Doctor Who fans.  Do they overlap with either group? Both? I know even less about that. 

Cash Transfers

 Giving People Money Helped Less Than I Thought It Would. from The Argument, via Rob Henderson. 

 I cannot stress how shocking I find this and I want to be clear that this is not “we got some weak counterevidence.” These are careful, well-conducted studies. They are large enough to rule out even small positive effects and they are all very similar. This is an amount of evidence that in almost any other context we’d consider definitive. And yet, you'd be hard-pressed to hear about it in the media:

“Overall, the larger and more credible studies in this space have tended to find worse effects, and yet the press seems to prefer to cover the small pilots that show positive impacts,” Eva Vivalt, a co-author of one recent OpenResearch study on guaranteed income in the U.S., told me.

Maybe poor people are mostly poor people. 

IQ and Crime

 Smarter People Commit Less Crime over at the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter. 

The graphs below show the main findings. As you can see, the IQ-crime relationship was close to linear: The higher the IQ, the lower the odds of offending. This held across every one of a range of crime categories. And it also held across all IQ subscales, suggesting that general intelligence is the main driver of the IQ-crime association.

I expected this, but I did not expect it to be this strong. The Scandinavian countries provide especially clean data for studies like this, because of the required year of military service. Nearly everyone in a cohort year is tested. They are 90% Finnish, and 90% of the rest is from immediately neighboring countries, especially Sweden, so there are no racial complications in the data. It is nearly monocultural. 

Stewart-Williams points out the intriguing breakdown of the pattern at the extremes but does not discuss it. For his purpose in a short article, I think he is right to avoid that distraction.  Yet it did get me thinking. The lowest decile would include those in the care of someone else, usually parents who are watching over more of their hours.  Yet their overall crime rate is still quite high. At the upper reaches...well, we can make up stories. Are they more resentful that their achievements are not as high as they believe they should be? Do they have more contempt for the authorities and believe they can get away with things? 

We Believe In Science.

Do you, Mr and Ms lawn sign?

 

GMO foods?  

Organic foods? 

Genetics and heritability of cognitive and personality traits?

The law of supply and demand?

The significant clean advantages of nuclear power?

Making limiting your jet travel a priority if you believe in the dangers of CO2? 

The poor evidence base for the initiation and perseverance of nearly all education interventions advocated by education schools, education researchers, and education administrators?

Belief in priming, stereotype threat, implicit bias, and sublimal advertising?

That billionaires' salaries and "tax breaks" affect you negatively?

Minimum wage increases don't affect employment rates? 

 

That's ten right there.  That's enough for now. 

No it isn't. A bonus five. 

Mindfulness meditation?

Violent media (games, movies, TV) increases violence?

Supercentenarians and Blue Zones?

Sugar rush in children?

Emotional intelligence?

 

And perhaps most important of all, even if you do acknowledge some of the above are poorly evidenced or even false, do you put out rainbow yard signs about these? The science you believe in seems to be mostly politics.

 

 

 

Shine On, Harvest Moon

Best version. Complex chords off a simple structure, male quartet in the distance, whistling...every little touch is an improvement.

 

Sibling Genetics

My wife and I were speaking at lunch with an old friend whose sister had recently died. The sister had been a significant problem for her as an adult, but she mentioned unbidden that she missed her. I mentioned that another woman of mutual acquaintance had said the same thing about her sister who had caused her a lot of distress over many years. She still missed her. 

The woman at lunch was similar to her sister in important ways.  They were close in age, had gone to the same Seven Sisters college and majored in similar subjects. They were similarly smart, similarly pretty, similar in demeanor, though this changed over the years. "I reflected on how much trouble she had been to me over the years, but I thought how I am glad I didn't get here genetics." The specific reference to genetics made it more jarring to me.  I have heard people say "I wouldn't want his life," or "I wouldn't have wanted to go through what she went through," but not heritability in specific.  I mentioned the conversation to the other friend today, who also didn't want that sister's genetics.

Yet not until yesterday did I apply the lesson to myself. What would life have been like if I had gotten my brother's genes? 

John Shelby Spong

Episcopal Bishop Spong wrote in Why Christianity Must Change or Die that Christianity must adapt to a changing world or risk becoming irrelevant. I remember when the controversy about him was live.  He ordained the first gay bishop, and thought that St. Paul was a homosexual. He believed Jesus was adopted by God, denied the virgin birth and the resurrection. If one doesn't believe and want to defend the core tenets of the faith, there is no one forcing any of us.  Yet it is dishonest to continue to take a bishop's salary, power, and status if that is the case.  To take Lewis's example, a person may decide he no longer holds to communist beliefs and have arrived at that conclusion quite sincerely.  But then taking a salary working in the headquarters of a communist organisation should be off the table.

Spong was on TV a lot.

He was heavily influenced by and friends with John A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, who wrote Honest To God, which CS Lewis criticised in God In The Dock. I only put that in for background.

My point here is to draw your attention to Spong's book title again and note that no one much reads Spong anymore. 

Covid As An Example

There is a lot circulating now, especially on the conservative side, about the negative impact of school closings on student performance that is continuing into the present. According to Rob Henderson, there is almost no drop in the test scores of the better students, and even the average students were not much affected. But the worst students are no doing worse still. They got used to being absent from school, they often did not have anyone trying to make up for the lack of structure, no one trying to compensate for fewer opportunities.  

This is a pattern not only in schools but in churches, businesses, neighborhoods. Those that are doing well already tend to widen the gap from those who were doing poorly.  Lots of marginal restaurants went under, because an additional difficulty was too much.  But many who were forced to find ways to compensate developed a new line, a new way of doing business, and are now doing better.  Our church has mentioned often that as we were meeting under big tents in the summer we became used to the idea that we could build a more permanent pavilion, where we now meet every summer. Youth groups and other activities also use it.  We wouldn't have built it otherwise.

Getting rid of test scores for college acceptance was actually detrimental to minorities and poorer students.  Many of them hadn't known how smart they were (nor had their teachers). Many had little contact with people who had experience identifying which colleges they would succeed at. And test scores are one of the hardest pats of the admission process to game. Better students go up 75-100 points a years even without SAT prep. But letters of recommendation, GPA's, personal interviews, personal essays - those are more easily affected. This favors the rich kids over the talented ones. My first two sons did not have unusually difficult lives, but tell them to write an essay about what they have overcome and they could both do it far better than their three younger brothers, who actually had overcome difficult circumstances. 

Affirmative action worked out great for minority students with above average tests scores, grades, and contacts already. They got an extra boost. But the poorer students went to the wrongs schools, the wrong programs, the wrong trainings because they could now get in. Program matching matters and results in more minority doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. 

Links From 2012

I haven't done a set of these in a while.

Need and Suffering and Just Dessert  We don't usually associate this with illegal immigration issues, but as we are connecting everything to deportation now, it occurred to me that this at least partially fits.

Part of my discovering that I actually don't have good Spatial Memory. 

I include this post on Contemporay Christian Music mostly because it attracted 20 comments, largely a mostly polite argument with Anonymous. It ended well.

Alien Contact  Busting a common myth.

I lose my temper about do-gooders making things worse and still being self-righteous. 

The Opposite

 RFKJr, among many other myths that he believes*, thinks psychiatric meds are contributing to the high-profile shootings we've been seeing, and thinks we should "look into it." Well, this is only one study in Sweden, but it does have an N=247,420 with robust results. Prescribing ADHD medication resulted in lower adverse "real world outcomes" such as self harm, traffic crashes, and crime. Interestingly, the effect seems to be weakening over time as the number of prescriptions increases. 

In this longitudinal population-based study of 247 420 individuals using ADHD medication between 2006 and 2020, we consistently found ADHD medication to be associated with lower rates of self-harm, unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime across all analyzed time periods, age groups, and sexes. However, magnitude of associations between ADHD medication use and lower risk of unintentional injury, traffic crashes, and crime appear to have attenuated over time, coinciding with an increase in prescription prevalence during the same period. The weakening trends for unintentional injury and traffic crashes were not fully explained by changes in age and sex distribution of the medication users, whereas the trend for crime was no longer statistically significant. These findings suggest that the declining strength of the associations of ADHD medication and real-world outcomes could be attributed to the expansion of prescriptions to a broader group of individuals having fewer symptoms or impairments.

My guess on this reveals one of my biases, but it may turn out to be true in this case. A broad range of interventions pick off the low hanging fruit at first, whether this be in medicine, education, economics, or crime. As this success is experienced by the doctors, politicians, or teachers, they try the solution on a wider group that less-obviously fits the the category and surprise! It doesn't work as well on every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The Law of Diminishing Returns. I used to see this in mental health, where an intervention like ECT's would work spectacularly well on some people with depression, but treatment-refractory patients of many diagnoses would eventually end up at the "shock treatment" door, because patient, family, and prescribers were all frustrated and willing to try less-likely interventions.

*The current fallback argument by his supporters are that the CDC and the medical establishment badly needs disruption and he is supplying disruption, so shut up, you liberal weenie. I find this unconvincing. Just because an institution needs to be disrupted does not mean that any particular disruptor is on the right track. Not all disruptions are equally valuable. Saruman wanted to disrupt Mordor, after all.  

Can't Let Go

The idea of Alison Krauss singing with Robert Plant offended me so deeply that I never listened to any of their album. Yesterday my son assured me that it was a great album, that Krauss had pulled Plant in her direction more than he had pulled her to his. So I tried it.  I think I'd like it better without the visuals, but this is a good song.  Let me know if there others I should be paying attention to.

Unconscious Influence

We seem to like the idea of unconscious influences that make people - mostly other people - do things. The Hidden Persuaders came out in 1957, even before the age of Mad Men, discovering the outlines of naked women in ice cubes. Significant effects have also been ascribed to subliminal advertising, which also burst on the scene in 1957.  Individual movie frames saying "Have a Coke!" beneath the level of conscious detection, were supposed to spike sales of Coke.  Or of some beverage. Or of something. They didn't. The whole concept of priming is still very big in psychology, despite the lack of evidence that it has even negligible effects. Reading the extended discussion of effects that have been discovered, there is some weak evidence that it may cause people to do something they were going to do anyway a few milliseconds quicker. There are other results that look oh-so-tantalizing to researchers, rather like alchemists who believe that the lead was briefly, under certain conditions, turned to gold. 

The whole concept of Implicit Association and bias is entirely dependent on the idea that small differences in automatic responses to photographs are evidence that people are less like to hire a black man or go along with a woman running anything bigger than a bake sale. But such evidence has proved...elusive. Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge promises to change the world with little interventions by the powerful to get the unwashed to do good things for themselves. But the things that actually work are not persuasions, but restrictions imposed on you without your consent that no one bothers to even notice anymore, like withholding your income taxes. 

I get it.  We all get it.  I was thrilled with the idea that opt-out versus opt-in organ donation had large effects, and disappointed when it came up almost empty.  

We are always half-convinced that "unconscious "inputs control our conscious behavior. This seems possible to us because we do sometimes do things and don't know why - and when we think about them, we can see some plausible reason that seems to be related to our past experiences or patterns in the way that we were brought up, or suggestions that happened to us earlier in the day. But these have all proven very hard to pin down with any real evidence, even though we've spent decades at it starting with Freud, if not before. There is just too much noise to isolate things like that, but we like explanations and stories so we pick something out of the noise and say "that's it. That's why I did it." Or that's why you did it or that's why they did it. 

Your default position for any of this should be probably not, but make your case. 

Let me now talk out of the other side of my mouth and say that we do seem to respond to buzzwords in our politics, don't we? Mamdani has said that Defund the Police is a feminist and a queer rights issue. He doesn't say that any more. Defund the Police is still a hot concept if one doesn't use the buzzwords, but it's all about playing notes on the synthesizer that elicit a particular response. I would be stunned if there is evidence that feminists would benefit from decreased enforcement of rape laws, or that trans people will have less difficulty in public if the police go away.  It is just adding on to the general "police do bad stuff to Cool and Marginalised people" sentiment with a "feminist" or "trans" murmur in their ear,s so that they think he really gets it.  He is for your people. The distinction would be that all of these hot buttons are already in place.  The suggestion is not creating them, but just carelessly brushing those nipples on the way by. 

 

Megafauna Extinction

Greg Cochran has put up one of his rare posts, King of the Beasts about megafauna extinction on various continents.  Most of it wilol not be strictly new to those who follow these things, but it is considerably more complete in a few paragraphs than longer essays. 

He includes at the end a Samuel Goldwynism I had not heard for years and those are always a delight in themselves. Look for it in the essay, then follow the link here.