The Land of Milk and Cookies

I had a pastor who years ago used that phrase in a sermon, along the lines of "and then we will all go to live in the land of milk and cookies."  I thought it was charming, capturing the spirit of joy, calm, and abundance that the biblical phrase milk and honey intended, but in a modern context.  I mentioned it to a co-worker who was one of Those Christians who launched into a correction that this was not actually something that should have been in a sermon, because the honey part of the phrase represents something-or-other about Messianic prophecy which shouldn't be left out because then you are missing the whole point...

Well, no. Keep it simple.  Honey refers to foraging.  Milk refers to agriculture, possibly settled but more commonly nomadic. The Israelites moved between these economies, and at varying times God was quite clear where they should be.  No, Cain, do not bring me an offering of broccoli. Yes, Nehemiah, it is time to rebuild a city. The Land of Milk and Honey covers the territory.  Everything is here.  The foraging is good, the cows are contented, be at peace.

Noticing

Steve Sailer's book Noticing is built around his decades-long observation that there are things you are not supposed to notice, and simply noticing them out loud gets you in trouble.  There is a reason no one was noticing and it wasn't an accident.

So I have long noticed but only occasionally mentioned how often people - meaning especially my age, especially women, and ones I know/knew - show how kind and good they are by how often they mention that they hate Trump. The oftenness provides ample evidence that they don't actually criticise both sides, and leads to wondering why they have to say essentially the same thing so often.

The other side spreads it around to a somewhat larger circle of "stupid things liberals do," with a variety of targets.  

Yogi Berra supposedly said "You can see a lot just by looking." 

Links from 2015

From October and November.  It now looks as if all 11,702 posts of mine have been visited 150-200 times this October, including some to dead links. 

 Boomer Youth Culture a simple theory on how it developed that I still like.

Community Versus Communism  I was refining the idea at this point.  As I read, I sometimes thought "That's how I still say that now," while at other times I thought "I hit upon a better way to say that." Good comment from T99.

Bamfield's John Vanden Music from The Bills with great harmonies. Bamfield is a tiny community on Vancouver Island, facing the Pacific.

Star Wars Villains  The Assistant Village Idiot explains to you why it's morally inconsistent and confusing.

Two extended posts about College Protests that are still green

One Thought  Starting with an analogy I still like.

Life Is Hard  Good responses, closing with a highly complimentary spam comment I left up.

Porcupine

A woman was running back up the road from her truck, looking concerned at the small animal that was wandering and looking disoriented in the road. It was a young porcupine.

A warm-hearted woman. What could possibly go wrong. 

Traffic

My overall traffic has suddenly gone up 100x, with this last week up 3x, all of my posts from May 2025 visited two hundred times each two days ago, and a similar weirdness for Oct 4-9 targeting other months in the last ten years.

They come from phones in South America and Southern Asia, but except for one American Osteopathy site, the majority come from the vast category of "other."  

Whatever it is, something automated is looking for something here, and I doubt that's good. 

Controlling The Weather

Conclusive Evidence Found of Jew Controlling the Weather - Babylon Bee

Winchester Cathedral

 

New Education Model! Using AI!

 So you know it must work, right? Except Boy, Was I Wrong About Alpha School by Wess Trabelsi at AI ∩ K12.  This is someone who wants the tech revolution in education to work.  He is sympathetic.  

But he has also seen other promising results blow up before, and calls 'em as he sees 'em.

I have long since learned not to be surprised when new educational marvels look like they work, because the news that there is selection bias and results that don't scale is just around the corner. Deception.  Some of it may be salvageable, but it doesn't look likely.

Debates

Scott Alexander at ACX has a new post, challenging Steven Pinker to a debate about AI. Alexander thinks the AI dangers are real - and I don't mean the water and the electricity - while Pinker thinks they are oversold. Alexander points out that Pinker has consistently underestimated how intelligent AI is going to be, so he should just admit he is wrong, wrong, wrong about all of it. There is something about the tone which makes me uncomfortable.  His reasoning is all in a row, though it is his usual obsessive self. (Note, Alexander always faults himself for the length of such posts, as if that were the extent of the problem. To me that is a clue of how he is missing the point.)

Alexander was arguing with Tyler Cowen last year about USAID in much the same tone. I am at a bit of a loss, approving of his general approach in both discussions, yet finding the final product somewhat beside the point. It is fair to hold someone accountable about what they previously wrote, but this somehow has an air of the childish "But you said...but you said...but you SAID..." I quoted GK Chesterton about arguing with a madman, as Alexander has that autistic style I am so familiar with. 

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity*, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. 

But my strongest impression was how much I glimpsed my own reflection in his posts. A few specific topics I have covered in detail (ahem) and at length (ahem) sprang immediately to mind. 

* I remembered this as "charity," which is interesting.  I may like that better, and if I ever get to speak with Gilbert I will mention it. 

Undermentioned

There are people making points I would myself, but doing it better than I would have. Yet I do notice few people want to touch on the possibility that this is what happens when minority and immigrant cultures are trying to compete socially in elite white situations. Perhaps those who already feel entitled are more likely to enter those cultures, less afraid of it.  One of the accused has returned to Dubai, for example. 

"Hidden" Messages

My mother remarried in August 1966, just before I entered 8th grade. We went to the beach with his family sometime that summer, with the girl who was going to become my step-sister, who was getting ready to leave for Colby Junior College.  This song came on my transistor radio and their voices dropped.  "You know what this is really about, right?" said Beth.  My mother murmured, "it sounds like they are talking about having too much to drink last night without saying it." My sister nodded wisely.  They were clearly hoping that I didn't catch this terrible reference. 

That was my first clue that my new sister was some kind of a dingbat.  It was clearly a drug reference, not alcohol.  You could tell that from the garage-band El Cheapo psychedelic sound if nothing else. (Rock autoharp was a little surprising.) Heck, I even made sure my nine-year old brother didn't miss stuff like that.  You wouldn't want to be humiliated in fifth grade of a suburban school for missing a drug reference.  You might never recover your status. It was one more moment of thinking I was just going to be alone in the world until I had a family of my own. Eighteen months later I played "What Condition My Condition Was In" in my own garage band,* and none of the mothers overhearing us had the least bit of objection. Went right over their heads.

Of course, I married a girl who also didn't get the reference, or more exactly, never considered that there might be a naughty reference of any kind. She memorised lyrics without listening to them.  Her sorority sisters explained a few things to her so I didn't have to. But that's another story.

 *We weren't even a garage band.  None of our parents would let us use their garage. We thought we had a garage at Jimmy Labonte's house once, but when we got there his father was doing Pinewood Derby stuff with his younger brothers.

Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs

 The review convinced me that Lee, the topic, is fascinating, but the book isn't. Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs at Astral Codex Ten, part of ACX's yearly series. Lee was the determined genius who rescued Singapore, taking it from Third-World hellhole to economic powerhouse.

There’s an irony in that while Japan lost World War 2 pretty badly on the field, their actual stated goals in the war were to free Asia from western colonialism, and those goals they achieved amazingly well. They may have lost by direct force, but Lee and others like him didn’t forget how weak and disorganized and cowardly the British ruled in defeat. Western empires ruled Asia more through their aura of invincibility than through their technological advantage, and once that was lost their days were numbered and they knew it. The fall of Singapore was the single greatest military defeat the British ever had in terms of soldiers lost; it was also the battle that struck the deathblow to their Empire. 

But also

Something like half the book is Lee listing every world leader he ever talked to as PM. This is another part that mostly gets kind of dull (especially if you don’t follow the details, although this case is much easier to track than the internal politics chapters since you’ll probably recognize the characters’ names, or at least their countries). They’re all described as “tough” and “vigorous”, occasionally as “warm”, and usually with some other positive descriptors. This is probably a mix of sincere respect and diplomatic language for most of them.

Except Jimmy Carter. Lee spends an entire chapter making fun of Jimmy Carter for being shallow, undermined, weak-willed and inauthentic. And then takes an aside in the next chapter, when he’s complimenting Reagan, to mention how smart it was of the American people to replace Jimmy Carter with this guy. If you ever want to see someone who’s not a giant swimming rabbit attacking Jimmy Carter, this is the book for you 

Nolan Sisters

British.  Never heard of them before. This was their first TV appearance, but they were big in Europe in the 70s.  A friend described them as "terminally cute," which is true. As they got older, they got just a little more frisky, more like Marie Osmond than ABBA or Olivia Newton-John, but in that range.

The algorithm just sends you things, and there are lots of YouTube videos about their later tragic lives (three died of cancer; their agents ripped them off) and how beloved they were in Europe, especially England and Ireland. Perhaps it is the green dresses, but that's a very Irish-looking group of sisters.

Public Perception

Bethany again looks for the research, finds there is very little research, and so does some research.

Do People Ever Change Their Minds About Controversial Cases? 

This is why polling can be valuable: people’s perception of what others think does not necessarily match what others actually do think, and it definitely doesn’t always catch when people change what they think. 

Data Republican is a national treasure, and it looks like she does this full time.  Bethany, OTOH, has a day job, a husband and child, and lots of medical appointments or she would be DataCatholic/~Feminist/~Libertarian*, which doesn't really roll off the tongue and sell subscriptions. 

We think we know what the general public thinks, but it is often only what "my people" think, or "those stupid other mass culture people" think, or what I overheard today, saw a poll on today, or was assured by reliable opinionards is true. There is almost nothing that we have more than a slender portion of the data, but even with that low bar, gauging public opinion might be near the bottom of the list. This leads to the puzzle of whose opinion we do actually know pretty well. Perhaps I should write about that general question.

Public perception does change, but is tough to suss out, because there are so many temporary and interactive factors that influence point-in-time opinion guesses discernment. 

*I don't know who has what symbols and semiotics in place, but "~" means approximately. 

Kids These Days

 Kids These Days Part II by Paul Bloom.  Part I is linked there. He goes directly after the smartphones-are-the-problem issue, but expands to trying to explain anything about development.

 Turkheimer’s skepticism is about explaining individual differences, but population trends also emerge from many interacting causes. When trying to understand an increase in depression among a certain population at a certain time, we should take seriously a similar skepticism about theories that say it’s caused by this—and even about more subtle theories that say it’s caused by this and that and this other thing. When it comes to the claim that smartphones are to blame, this skepticism should be reinforced by the failure to find robust evidence in its favor.

Kids these days can't even shoe a damn horse. 

Johnny Most

Everyone around the league hated him. I grew up with him.  I thought that's the way basketball announcers were supposed to sound. 

Pound the Table

 There is an old lawyer's joke that works well for just about any dispute:

If the facts are with you, pound the facts into the table.

If the authorities (professors, officials, regulations) are with you, pound the authorities into the table.

If neither the facts nor the authorities are with you, pound the table.

This comes up in hereditarian disputes all the time. The hereditarians pound the facts, the environmentalists pound the authorities...

Who pounds the table? That should tell you something. 

Ever Green

 

Chart-topper in 1909

I don't think they called it barbershop quartet singing until much later, but this kind of four-part harmony was big for many years. The soloist was more prominent at this point, while a full blend became the standard later. I have a dimly remembered fact I will confirm before going forward...

Yes, the barbershop sound was all-male at first. But women sing as well as men if not better and there was resentment that they could not join, so they formed their own groups, called the Sweet Adelines. Great name, BTW.  They tended to be more choral than quartet. Eventually there was enough pressure that the SPEBSQSA (checks notes, yes, that's it) admit women that they did so, but an all-male movement started up almost immediately after.  The claim was that the all-male sound was distinctive and worth preserving.

They were right. It's not the same. For choirs, Soprano-Alto-Tenor-Bass or Soprano-Alto-Baritone is standard, and it is just different from all-male or all-female.  It is not accidental that the most precise arrangers mixed both sexes for voices voices.  There is something more universal about that.  But for homier, more intimate harmonies in performance, those community groups tend to be all-female or all-male. Three or four sisters dressed alike, four neighborhood guys on the corner trying to make it big, all the Oak Ridge/Byrds/Temptations with qualitatively different sounds than the Supremes or Vandellas.  When the voices were mixed, it was a female lead with Pips behind her, or a famous male with interchangeable female backups. Call it whatever you like and complain about it if you have nothing better to do, but the sound is different. I like them all, but don't consider them interchangeable. 

I had a friend who went to Mount Holyoke who claimed that there was nothing more breathtaking than spending all week hearing nothing but female voices and then having a male chorus come in to perform on the weekend. Similarly, USO performances always brought in females.

Effective Altruism

Data Republican believes EA should be banned from AI safety, policy-making, and governance.  That's a pretty extreme position, but she makes a solid case for both the mild and extreme versions.

Fundamentally, EA is a maximizing philosophy: it always tries to price future value. And extinction is the “negative infinity” number in the ledger. Once you are determining outcome by probabilities, just having even a tiny chance of extinction dominates every other calculation.

One such scenario that many conservatives might find sympathetic is: do you do gain-of-function research for a 70% chance that you will prevent the next swine flu, or is the 1% risk that the virus escapes containment in Wuhan and kills 10 million people acceptable? Many of us, having lived through COVID-19, would put our foot down on allowing any kind of gain-of-function research again within our lifetimes. That’s one scenario where conservatives can potentially reason their way to the same answer as EAs.

EAs run that same logic in every calculation. What this means, inside their heads: an extinction level event scenario is the greatest threat vector. 

Scott Alexander, like others, is obsessed with AI, alignment, and its effects. He is very much a supporter of Effective Altruism in general, though not slavishly so. Still, I imagine he would object to such a blanket disallowing of EA from the discussion (or at least, from the decision-making). There are so many discussions and counter discussions over at Astral Codex Ten that I won't even attempt to choose for you. As his commenters are also quite brilliant - I consider it one of the few sites to compete with this one for average IQ - you can either dabble or go hard against them, trying to steelman your own arguments. This would be the major leagues. And yet...

I have felt uncomfortable with Effective Altruism since I first heard of it, though it took me a while to articulate why. Frankly, it probably took reading others who had thought about it more rigorously to be able to articulate it.  One of the consequences of becoming lazier, and thus less intelligent, is not being able to provide some of the service I was designed for. I have excuses. Not good excuses, but at least some things I can say out loud with some earnestness. 

The best arguments against EA are in Data Republican's essay. Pricing future value is a great example. It makes entire sense, but somehow leads to insane conclusions. If a future life is worth the same as a life now, then the sheer volume of future humans and their needs with forever dwarf what is good for us. More interestingly, perhaps, is how that completely devalues our ancestors. There is the (bogus in reality but worth valuing as a myth) Native American belief in Seven Generations, that we owe something to the three generations before us and the three after us. GK Chesterton wrote similarly that tradition is the only way of giving a vote to the dead. CS Lewis, describing the Tao in The Abolition of Man shows that the wise in every tradition teach that we owe something to both our heritage and our posterity. But EA very quickly reveals that it owes nothing to heritage and everything to posterity.  The dead have made their contribution and their suffering is now a sunk cost. 

There is also comparative suffering among species, leading to calculations that the horrible suffering of three chickens or thirty-two shrimp are equivalent to the suffering of one human. The actual numbers are immaterial.  Thirty or three-hundred chickens would be the same. The principle of comparing it to any human suffering is something new in the world. It may be a logically consistent and defensible philosophical and moral position.

But it is not a human position, despite being favored by "humanists." It gives away the game, recognising that humanists are in fact subhumanists, valuing some bare minimum of the species as fungible with any other human.  Dismiss it as a mere prejudice on my part if you will, but the idea of perpetuating humans who are only biologically and not culturally related to me is not just disquieting, it's silly.  

Humanists are actually Subhumanists.  I should probably think about that and post on it.  Yet now that I have said that, I recall that CS Lewis already covered that in the last debate section of Out of the Silent Planet.