Kornet Contest

Celtics backup center Luke Kornet has a strange strategy on blocking 3-pointers. Instead of going out to try and block the shot, leaving the rim open and unprotected, he gets up in the air and blocks the view of the rim instead. It decreases the shooter's percentage enough to be about five team points total for the year thus far. He was willing to look ridiculous and it seems to be paying off just a bit. Plus whatever it is worth to be in better position for the rebound. It is often the bench players and guys just hanging on who become coaches and create new stuff.

God With Us

 

Mementos

We did not travel much early in our marriage.  We did not have money for it, small children are something of a project to shuffle about on planes and into hotels or entertain in cars or RVs, and we do not have the intense love for travel that many others do, which makes the inconvenience and expense worth it for them. We went camping, which was James Dobson Approved as a family bonding experience, or visited our parents. Very local, all NH and MA. Tracy, as a suburban private-school girl, went to Europe in highschool and college, and both of us had gone on the classic 60s car trips to historical sites, memorialised with slides (not photos much in those days) of sullen children. And this was the year that David/Jonathan/Glenn didn't want to be with the rest of us, I can hear my mother narrating through clenched teeth. 

Our sons, at Christian schools that stressed foreign missions trips, became more blase about travel, enough so that I was resentful of their attitude about going to England and Scotland in 1997, which we had spent a considerable chunk of change on. It got better, slowly. The last twenty years we have been able to travel largely on our own, with the children watching after themselves if they were on the same trip.  We had tried to make scrapbooks and purchase significant mementos, believing we would review these happy memories later, perhaps sitting by the fire, or even with grandchildren on our knee. I admit when we have such things from an ancestor they are great treasures, and yes, we will someday be ancestors ourselves.

But this largely doesn't happen.

We did hit upon the idea of buying something from a local artist, and we have eventually devoted a wall of our house to such. It works because we do actually see it everyday. But Tracy discovered something that she likes better: dishtowels.  She doesn't keep them for display purposes, but for use, so that she can be reminded frequently of each place - Williamsburg, the Finger Lakes, Scituate, Spring, TX. They wear out and are more temporary, yes. It does seem a shame at first to use what others view as a sentimental object for such base practice as sopping up a bit of olive oil from the hands while preparing a meal. Yet it has proved more satisfying in the end than the other souvenirs, and we recommend the practice. Even I notice what is draped over the oven door handle at this point and give a bit of my brain to the reminiscence.

Butch and Sundance

We prefer the myth, especially when William Goldman writes the script ("Who are those guys?" in the tracking scene), but our adventure heroes often turn out to be people who like mere adventure, without regard to the effect on others. Sensation-seeking is a Big Five trait, in itself neutral, and reckless courage is sometimes absolutely necessary or the tribe does not survive. But it is only a virtue in itself if you are trying to make a movie about it. 

Sometimes the adventure goes bad.

Asterisk

Behold, a new online magazine, Asterisk. They seem to have enough interesting topics going that I will consider putting them on my sidebar if they keep it up. In addition to Stuart Ritchie on what we do after the replication crisis is over, and the (technical) future of factory farming, there is an article on why China has trouble building semiconductors and why that is a very big deal.

For China, depending on its main competitors for critical components is unacceptable. The Chinese Communist Party knows a thing or two about economic leverage, having itself used its dominant position in the processing of rare earth metals to threaten or punish other countries since 2010. ² As tensions have risen in recent years, the United States has increasingly moved to restrict China’s access to semiconductor technologies, challenging the CCP’s dreams of technological empire. Beijing’s “no-limits” partner to the north, Russia, has tasted firsthand what it feels like to have semiconductor imports decimated by American sanctions. Allegedly, Russian military equipment contains chips salvaged from dishwashers and refrigerators, while Yale researchers describe the outlook for Russia as “economic oblivion.” China’s dependence on the semiconductor supply chain likely moderates the country’s willingness to escalate international conflicts with the United States and its partners.

Plus Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten discussing whether Wine is fake. 

Your classiest friend invites you to dinner. They take out a bottle of Chardonnay that costs more than your last vacation and pour each of you a drink. They sip from their glass. “Ah,” they say. “1973. An excellent vintage. Notes of avocado, gingko and strontium.” You’re not sure what to do. You mumble something about how you can really taste the strontium. But internally, you wonder: Is wine fake?

The short version is that a very small number of people, perhaps less than 1%, can tell the subtle differences well enough to accurately identify regions, years, and vineyards. I have a brother-in-law born outside of Paris who was a chemical engineer and whose father was a perfumer for Chanel whose word I trust that he actually knows what he is saying. Yet even that raises the question "If these differences are not even detectable by 99% of us, why would we spend more that a few bucks for a bottle?" 

Dave Barry did a similar sendup to Alexanders years ago and used the phrase "nuances of toast."

Sunset in Nome

The days will shorten even more in the next week, but this is about the minimum length of day for them. The sun rises around noon and sets around 4pm. This photo of Granddaughter #4, Quinn, was taken around 3:30. She is half Romanian and half Filipina, and my son makes fun of her by calling her a gypsy.  She does look rather Roma, and fortunately there is no one within hundreds of miles of her who actually is Roma to be annoyed. I think she's pretty adorable, actually.

Opening A Door Properly

Glad that's settled.

Can't Be Contained

 The Salvation Army ringers apparently have to say "Happy Holidays" now if they are in front of a state liquor store or a supermarket worried about offending people.  But the nice young women I chatted with in front of Walmart, though they followed the directions, could not refrain from saying "God Bless You" to me as I left. I'll bet that wasn't in the script, but I doubt anyone is going to turn them in.

Not Actually a Cookie

Really Very Crunchy goes to a crunchy cookie party. 

We used to have a similar situation forty years ago when the boys started going to Montessori School. At parent conferences, cookies would be served.  Except these cookies had no sugar, nor even honey or maple syrup. "Maybe a little fruit juice for sweetening," they said. 

They weren't cookies, they were biscuits.  Now I like biscuits and perhaps could have enjoyed these in another context, if I had been told right off that they were biscuits, and perhaps I could put some butter or jam on them. Alas, no butter or jam. Just ersatz cookies.

 

Effect Size and Correlation

Small point, but one I think is overlooked even among people who think statistically and proababalistically. A correlation can be high but the effect size small.  When we see a correlation of 0.8 we rather automatically think "Oh, that's a big 'un! That's a major determinant, then." But it could be about something that doesn't matter much. Just to make up an example, when looking both ways to cross a street, men may look toward their dominant hand first and women their nondominant hand, and this might be near universal, cross-cultural, the whole bit.  You might get a nice 0.8 on a thing like that. But it doesn't seem that it would matter much, unless we can show that men and women have different safety outcomes and this could be shown to be part of it.

We see it in environment versus inheritance discussions a lot.

A Link To Comments

Astral Codex Ten continues to have a comments section that is as good a discussion as you will find anywhere. Scott Alexander reviewed David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise twenty years later, (Book Review:  First Sixth of Bobos In Paradise) finding it overdone and not fully convincing, but containing some valuable ideas.  His commenters are less kind, ripping Brooks a new one and providing some very interesting observations about America's elite class. For example, there is someone named Phil Getz. 

This has been done by keeping wealth out of the hands of people who didn't go to the right colleges, and reshaping the Democratic party in a way that made it both rich and controllable. That was done by re-creating the Democratic party as the anti-white-male party. This has no effect on white males who attend an Ivy or equivalent; they're still guaranteed a high-paying, high-prestige job. So the reforming of Ivy admissions policy, in cooperation with re-orienting the Democratic party using identity politics, has created a situation which lets the ruling wealthy elites shut out middle-class white and Asian males (including Jews) from wealth and power, and all but guarantee that those non-whites and females admitted to the Ivies will follow the party line. And it does all this in a way which focuses attention on racial and sexual discrimination, both shielding itself from charges of racial or sexual discrimination, and distracting attention from the actual, class-based discrimination.

There is more, much more.  It is strange for me to link to comments, yes, but Alexander sets this up by running these "Highlights from the Comments on..." regularly. Paul Fussell, who has been mentioned here at the prompting of Earl Wajenberg years ago, figures in a few of the discussions. Also fun was a 2004 expose of Brooks (Booboos in Paradise) that his telling anecdotes are not, in fact, true, and are sometimes the opposite of the truth.  He just makes stuff up and attaches a clever, memorable detail.

More Gift Subscriptions

Razib has sent me more - he must find that this type of promotion works for him on full subscriptions - so if you are interested (Alpha Omega in particular) get me your email. By using either of the two you can find for me on this site. ("About" and upper right.)

Correction.  Thank you Douglas2.  There is no easily accessible "About" section anymore.  That is probably long outdated.  And the email you will see in the upper right will be your own if you are signed on to Blogger, which I checked by going over to I Don't Know, But...

I will risk the spam increase.  My two emails are wymanhome at comcast dot net and asstvillageidiot at gmail dot com.

Youthful Idealism

 Listening to Steve Hsu interview Rob Henderson (both on my sidebar), they began discussing moral idealism and high moral dudgeon of the young. Both mentioned the quote attributed to Winston Churchill about being on the left when young and on the right when older and did have interesting things to say about cohort effects (the world is changed and the young do not grow up with the values, especially the church values that those of my generation and those before did) versus developmental effects versus the physical effects of better personal behavior because of less energy. 

Yet a piece was missing that was better-known in such discussions in the 1970s.  I have mentioned it here myself, but not often and not for some time.  So in the age of wokeness, which is PC culture squared, which was itself 60s flower child culture squared, I think it still applies and is less noticed.

There is much less judgement among the young about pleasure issues - sexual behavior, drug use, and public display issues such as noise and clothing (sex, drugs and rock 'n roll in the 60s and 70s). Because those were the things we wanted to do and not be called to account for.  Even before I returned to the church I had become aware of how often my agemates claimed to have left for intellectual reasons, but conversation revealed threadbare excuses about not being a bad person just because they weren't a virgin anymore, or wanting to sleep with their girlfriend without criticism from anyone, even implied. 

They were morally outraged about issues of money - because they didn't have any cash but were quite materialistic without noticing - or of politics, like war or racism or brotherhood. 

It was clear to many that the one was a replacement for the other.  Trying to get out from under the sting of criticism about their personal morality, they changed the subject and reversed the accusations on less personal, more collective topics, insisting that these were the greater morality.  It's not untrue, of course.  there is a lot to be said (and the Bible does indeed say it) about group morality and societal actions being of great importance.

What we see now is the same thing all over again. People who see no need to be faithful to a romantic partner, be polite or even kind to others, or listen to a contrary view are those most accusing of the societal sins.  It's the same replacement. It's not fully idealistic or wanting to change society.  It is resisting anyone accusing them.

Again, a balanced morality has both, and I don't claim otherwise.

There Is No Rose

An old carol. This is not the oldest version, but I very much like it.

Reunion After Death

In A Grief Observed, CS Lewis described a brief encounter of a presence of "H" (Helen Joy) shortly after her death. The second paragraph in particular caught my eye.

Not at all like a rapturous reunion of lovers.  Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about some practical arrangement. Not that there was any "message" - just intelligence and attention. No sense of joy or sorrow. No love even, in our ordinary sense. No un-love. I had never in any mood  imagined the dead as being so, well so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy. An intimacy that had not passed through the senses or the emotions at all.

If this was a throw-up from my unconscious, then my unconscious must be a far more interesting region than the depth psychologists have led me to expect.  For one thing, it is apparently much less primitive than my consciousness.

Gaudete Sunday

 Gaudete, "celebrate," as in gaudy.

"Doesn't Do Well With Men"

An old lesson from the psychiatric biz that I remind you of here. When the nurses would say about someone "He doesn't do well taking orders from women," I came to immediately look for the proof, usually showing up in the next day or so, that he didn't do all that well taking orders from men either. I have seen something similar in racial prejudices as well. "She is very insulting to the nice Korean lady who comes in to do music." Let me put down money that she doesn't do well with black people, young people, old people, and white people either by the end of the week. 

If such things show up in Rate My Professor surveys - "Hates men," I just have an automatic suspicion that there is only a fairly narrow band of women she approves of either. Once you are that noticeable in rejecting a category of people, other collections will follow. Once the seal is broken, lots of things leak in.

People From The Past

If it seems I have been spending an inordinate amount of time on reflections on reflections on the last 60 years of my life and the characters who inhabited them, it is nothing compared to the amount of mental time I have spent on them. It has been forcefully driven home to me this last year how very different I am from others in this, not only in the detail which I remember, but my familiarity walking with them in the present as if they were just here at dinner a few weeks ago, rather like the singer of the second verse of "The Ash Grove." They are amazed that anyone remembers that world and struggle to resurrect what I refer to with accuracy.  I am in turn amazed that this is not their normal neighborhood. I do have a few friends who experience something like it. But five years ago is only slightly more present to me than twenty-five or forty-five years ago.

In this way I see things both more clearly and less clearly than others. More, because I can easily draw a direct line from your actions in 1972 to 2022 and see parallels you are not likely to be happy to acknowledge.  Less, because I also project back what we know from 1995 or 2015 back onto 1975 with some sense that "we should have seen this then," and worse, that I did see it (I most likely did not - at all) but you did not, and why are you so surprised about this now? 

Forgiveness requires memory, because otherwise the narrative will be changed conveniently.  I have been quite uncomfortable about how many people get things wrong, not just in the sense of "That was 1979, not 1978, but in what the effect of an event was on others concerned. "She always resented me for moving us back to New Hampshire, but she was part of that decision too."  Well, yes, that and the affair you had about a year after getting back here. There's that.

Many people are long past being defensive about their choices and settled into disapproval or even contempt for those who made other choices. They tend not to see it, that they who focused on career want to talk only about the careers of others, for example. I will bet there are those who chose family who do the same - that is the common complaint about them from their single friends when young, which must be based on something - but I haven't seen it in anyone myself. And most of who I see move comfortably among topics, of medical issues complicating things, talking about houses, regions, and moving, referring to children or siblings in one breath and careers in the next.  I do have a hard time getting people to engage in more abstract topics, such as those I cover here, but that is hardly surprising. I sometimes ask point blank "So what have you been thinking about lately?" The offhand dismissal of whole categories of people not so far removed from them years ago does take my breath away at times. One expects the puffery and defensiveness at early reunions, when people are still jockeying and uncertain.  One expects more tolerance and curiosity later.

Whole sections of life are poisoned for people by the bad event that accompanied or followed.  I do partly understand that. Remembering the conversation of a friend who later betrayed you is less pleasant than it would have been otherwise. Less often, a terrible event is rescued by what came after to resolve it. But for me the moment was what it was, and all good times had pains in them, and there were moments of joy in even the worst of times. I happened to be thinking just this while traveling when I came across a related quote in CS Lewis's A Grief Observed: 

"One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call 'the thing itself'. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea." Chap. 1, p. 12

There are no poisoned years for me, though one does come close. Nor are there very many poisoned people, perhaps none at all now. I can look back on their decisions and actions more kindly now, being aware of my own bad decisions and actions. I might even venture that those who have people they still hold entire grudges against are also those who seem not to admit to any faults themselves in the past. The blame always lay with others.  How did they ever hold responsible jobs, I wonder? It might be revealing to learn whether their coworkers also thought them so faultless or there was a trail of destruction behind them. 

Richard Hanania on Henrich's WEIRDest People on Marriage Practices

We have gone over the likelihood here that the discouragement of cousin marriage has had an enormous influence on Western Civilisation. Richard Hanania does a quick summary of Joseph Henrich's book (and makes a plug for Garett Jones Hive Mind, which we have just mentioned as well) about Western Educated Industrialised Rich and Democratic nations being significantly different from the rest of the world, and then comments on this himself. I liked it quite a bit, the third thing in a row i have liked by Hanania after dismissing him about a year ago. So i think I have to call myself wrong about him at this point.

Ultimately, Henrich traces the success of the West back to the sex and marriage taboos of early Christianity. The book highlights how obsessed early Christian leaders were with preventing incest, and just how rare this concern has been historically. An appendix to the book lists milestones in the process, beginning with the Synod of Elvira in 305-306 AD decreeing that a man could not take communion if he married his dead wife’s sister, to bans on marrying family members that started with close relatives like first cousins and nieces and expanded to include sixth cousins by the eleventh century in a system that covered not only blood relations, but affines (i.e., in-laws, step-children, etc.) and spiritual kin (godmothers, etc.).

And there's historical linguistics to boot. 

A fascinating line of evidence documenting the development of changing family norms can be found in the linguistic record. Earlier in their history, European languages had terms for things like “mother’s sister” or “male cousin on my dad’s side” instead of just saying “aunt” or “cousin.” Such distinctions matter in societies in which clans and extended family relations are important and descent is traced through either the male or female line alone, and so these kinds of words are still used in modern languages such as Arabic. They would disappear across Europe, first in the Romance languages like French and Italian around 700, and then German and English by around 1100.

I also discussed this, and the focus on monogamy and its importance both culturally and economically, in the series on polygamy from this fall, specifically the  post on Old World Demographics and Religious Practices. Monogamy and forbidding incest reduce the power of elders, make society more mobile and individualistic, and reduces dependence on kinship networks.

Hanania becomes quite critical of the book on what he considers some less-important points - reliance on some suspect research - and a major one - neglect of actual genetics - but in the end pronounces it valuable. There's just so much out there proving out that folks don't want to be true, isn't there?

 

More Sweden and Denmark

They have only one child, it seems, but they take that one everywhere in all weather.  I did not once see a family with a third child.Somehow none of them is ever pregnant. Though with the drapey, dark clothing it is admittedly a lot easier to disguise. The children are remarkably well-behaved, even when you see them in large day care groups walking two-by-two with their teachers.

Considering the dressing in all black, when something is that consistent in a culture I have to think it is not only expressing what they are trying to be, but what they are trying not to be as well. There seems to be a widespread horror of being flashy, of standing out. There was some splashy red at the Christmas markets, especially in Denmark as it is one of the colors in the flag, but it seemed confined to costumes and decorations. The Swedes didn't even have much blue and yellow out there unless it was clearly meant to be suggestive of the flag or on some humorous character like a troll.

Lots of English words penetrate their conversation even with each other. Sure. Absolutely. I just... mothers tell their children to stop. The singsongy Swedish Chef voice is more common among older men. In the restaurants in the cities at any rate, one sees couples much as one would here, and groups of women together. Yet I think it is more common to see groups of older men together, dressed well but not in business suits, just sitting and talking affably, with their slightly unkempt hair and glasses of light beer. I looked on it a bit enviously, as if they have found something easy in society which we find more difficult.