Antifragile: Limitations

I reiterate my admiration for Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. The general concepts are strong, and engagingly put.  The GreenLumber Fallacy, along with a similar example about a trader in Swiss Francs, is memorable. He names names in his closing criticisms of insiders taking advantage of more fragile others:  The Alan Blinder Problem, the Joseph Stiglitz Problem, the Robert Rubin Problem.  I loved his advocacy of relying on observation rather than narratives to make decisions – one of those things I’ve learned over the years. He writes often about taking small risks while exposing oneself to large or even unlimited gains – which sounds obvious, but human beings tend to do the opposite.  In investments and many personal decisions, we ignore risks while seeking small but predictable gains.

Note to Grim:  You have written about honor and honor societies; throughout the book, but especially at the end, Taleb writes approvingly about the sense of honor in what he calls traditional societies, and how it is sometimes superior to ethics that are based on more abstract ideas. He quotes a lot of ancient Mediterranean philosophers on many topics, which I know will also be to your liking.

Note to Retriever:  Though Taleb is a trader and investor himself, you will much like what he says about investors and advisors as a class. He believes they hide personal risk at the expense of others, and their advice neglects real understanding of risk, both of which unfairly burdens the taxpayer and the little guys who cannot manipulate the regulations (and the regulators).

Yet I don’t want to come across as thinking his approaches unassailable.  I think he oversells some points. Here’s one. The American legal system has a bias toward putting the burden of proof on those who would forbid something as harmful. He thinks this should be reversed in our personal decisions, and advocates it in law as well – though I don’t know how far he wants to push that.  There is sense in that, that things should prove they are safe before being admitted to a society, rather than getting a free ride until someone proves they are dangerous. He believes a pollutant should prove its safety, not be permitted until it proves dangerous.  We have moved to that in FDA approval, for example. Taleb drinks no beverage that has not been around a thousand years – water, wine, coffee. (Beer and tea would presumably qualify as well.) He eschews not only sugary carbonated drinks, but fruit juice as well, because the form is recent and the fruits themselves overbred for sweetness fairly recently.

Well sure, but the Columbian Exchange is regarded as high-benefit as well as high-side-effect I believe. Eyeglasses have been uncommon until recently and hearing aids even more so.  Should we hold those out until we are quite sure there is no unintentional effect? Coal and oil have had very bad aftereffects, but does he regard them as a net loss for humanity?  I am not being difficult and mildly humorous here, as he raises exactly this issue with warming the planet. The general principle of applying some inexpensive fixes in order to guard against a catastrophe, even an unlikely catastrophe, seems sound.  Anyone who has low-cost, low-risk strategies out there should be attended to.  Taleb seems to think there is something we should be doing, but he doesn’t say what it is.  He also dismisses entirely the comments of those who benefit from petroleum sales.  I can certainly sign on to immediate suspicion of anyone who stands to personally benefit from a decision going one way or another.  Yet I can’t see the sense of automatically rejecting such comments. Everyone involved in political decisions – in fact, any decisions – usually stands to benefit in some way.  As the claims of the academics (a class Taleb generally mistrusts) are founded on narratives and self-interest as much as the corporations, who is left to listen to? Their grants, livelihoods, and career advancement depend on fitting into their own culture and enhancing its power. They also advocate that we should take their word on interventions that stand to be expensive at least and possibly harmful as well.  Taleb’s principle is sound, perhaps even more so in personal decisions not to add in medicines or new devices or new influences.  I’m not sure how far we can take that, however.

I recall similar arguments being made about gay marriage. Its advocates insist there is no proof of damage to society.  Taleb’s stated approach would put the burden of proof on the advocates instead – prove to us that in this new thing you are introducing there will be no damage.  (He does not say whether he applies this Precautionary Principle to gay marriage, recreational marijuana, or other public social decisions.  It is I raising those examples.) Should immigrants have to prove they are a benefit in order to get in or should current citizens have to prove they would cause harm in order to keep them out?

Taleb makes a powerful antiwar argument, and mentions Iraq in particular in several places. As war is likely the best example of introducing chaos into the world, with all the unexpected downstream events, usually negative, I don’t have a cold answer. Nor does he make the claim that it should always be forbidden and avoided.  As with medical intervention, Taleb believes that sometimes the likely downside is so great that much risk must be endured. But he is right to note that advocates for war seriously overestimate the predictability of what will result.  Wars usually turn out to be more deadly than expected; they always turn out to be much more expensive; they especially turn out to have unintended aftereffects, sometimes catastrophic ones. I will have a longer go at this discussion, but only wanted to note here that one of his primary ethical arguments intersects with the practical ones: that we are unleashing the unexpected on many people, and that itself is a bad thing.

A Walk In The Woods

No, not the book or the movie.

When I talk about “my woods” I mean this Bog Rd, Wilson HillRd, Rte 13 triangle.(hope that works)

There are trails on the other side of Bog Rd which I use as well, but those are less dear to me.  It’s a little less than a square mile, all of it wooded, so that you can’t see more twenty yards in any direction, sometimes less than five.  There are a few elevated places where you can look out in one direction, and patches that have been logged in the last few years where you can see fifty yards or so, but the brush comes up quickly.  You can pack a lot of trails into a place like that, and sometimes I can sense that I must be running parallel to another path 50-100 yards away, unseen.  I have learned, however, that my sensing is pretty inaccurate when the leave are on the trees.  The sunlight coming through seems to help my sense of direction.

There were ATV tracks in the spring, but I can’t detect any of them now.  Someone has covered a lot of this on a fat-tire bike in the last month, but only once.  No footprints since the leaves fell, and possibly none for quite some time before that, though they wouldn’t show most places.  I do see the place where 2 bowhunters came through, coming off Rte 13.  The slopes are gentle; I don’t think there’s more than a 400’ rise from the lowest to highest points.  As is usual with USGS, the part you want to see straddles two maps, but you can see it at the bottom of Concord and the top of Milford maps.

 

Some trails are nearly invisible, and I can still find an old one I hadn’t noticed even now.  One trail along the center of this gets a lot of use and some misuse by ATV’s.  Snow machines go through as well. They keep me from getting lost in winter.  There are still small orange diamonds directing them around the place, but the words washed off a couple of years ago, so now there are only arrows pointing out the obvious: this is a trail, and so is that path to the right.  They both go somewhere.  The center one was called Tall Pine Trail, ending in Tall Pine Loop, but its pines aren’t any taller. A half-dozen fire circles dot the place, but only one gets any use, in winter. Someone put up flat bridges for snow machines over the dips – mere platforms or pallets, really, 3-6 feet long – I know who but I’m not saying, because the Forest Society doesn’t like it, and they own a good chunk of the middle.  I admit those create a way for the forbidden ATV’s as well, but I’m just as glad they come through and clear the trails a little.  If there were more of them some year I might upend a bridge or two and hide them off to the side. New sign:  Bridge out. Only fair to give them warning when you change expectations.

I can tell you about the trees if you like, but I only care once in a while.  Same with the wildlife.  I like guessing at the tracks in winter. I’ll see or hear something and notice that. I recognize some birdsong. I want to be fascinated by natural history, but my brain doesn’t hold that knowledge like some others seem to hold it.  I’ll tell you about the bear and the coywolves if you like. 

I have no idea why I wrote this.

Sources Of News and Opinion

I will have comments about where I disagreed with Antifragile, but today is not that day.

I wish I had a neutral source of news, or especially of news commentary. 

 

I don’t have TV.  I hear some Boston radio, and even though that is largely sports radio, there is news at the top of the hour, and some political commentary, with even one conservative on the morning drive.  I listen to Howie Carr  very occasionally, but he is a corrective, not a general source.

Online, I see whatever the news boxes are at the bottom of the Bing site.  Those tend to have a liberal slant, but not extreme.  Similar to mainstream news, I think.  FB, we have established,  has a slant in it’s trending now, but a lot of that isn’t news, but personalities. I get lots of HuffPo, TPM, Truthout, and Occupy Democrat links there, though I seldom read more than the headline of those.  Sometimes, if the person posting it is generally reasonable, I will give those a whirl, and nearly always have Suspicions Confirmed almost immediately.  The question they are not asking, the mirror they are not looking at, the determined effort to hear nothing contrary – these are quickly apparent.  I voluntarily go over to Volokh Conspiracy, which gives me a sidebar of Washington Post articles, clearly quite liberal, and I seldom go beyond those headlines either. I go to my sidebar sites, which tend strongly to conservative and libertarian POV’s. (My obsessive nature tells me that should be P's OV.)  When I have time, and the political fit is on me, I will also hit Instapundit. My son follows NRO and sends me links or tweets them out.  I haven’t had any problems with stories turning out to be untrue, but I know that the basic design of those sites is to highlight stories that they think are underplayed in the mainstream media, and to comment from perspectives that are less-often heard.  They are trying to complete the picture, not be a complete picture themselves.

Unz.com is the completer of the completers for POV’s – a lot of people who have been kicked out of other venues. Most are some version of conservative (never neocon), such as Pat Buchanan, John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, but they had Alexander Cockburn, they’ve got some strongly anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic writers, at least two that I would say are alt-left rather than alt-right, they have some unclassifiables. I don’t ever go there for news, really, but I get there every month to stretch my own thinking, making sure I try the half-gainer with full-twist versions of the current discussion.  There’s an awful lot of interest there, even if one rejects the general conclusions of half the articles read.

Anytime I go to those sites which accord with my POV, my first thought is “Why are all these stories not bigger news? They would be news if the shoe were on the other foot. I didn’t see or hear anything about this on Bing/WP/radio/FB.” However, I can get the same impression going the other way when I have embedded in my usual sites too long.  I get to a CBS page and see stories that my sites have not carried. Not just general-interest or nonpolitical stories, but protests, assaults, foreign events, and controversial statements that the conservative/libertarian sites would certainly cover if that shoe were on the other foot.

Supermoon

The supermoon is very bright. I cannot read a paperback Antifragile, but I can read "Biblical Archaeology Review." I'll try again tomorrow, but expect the same.
Every time I hear that word, I keep putting it into the song.

Good Ratio

2.5 hour walk over natural terrain and have five topics to write about.  Maybe six.  That's a better ratio than sitting at the computer reading people who have gotten the election wrong.

I know better.  Got to stay in the good spot here.

Older Material Only

On the advice of both Nicholas Nassim Taleb and CS Lewis, I am not going to read anything current for a while.  I will use the internet for checking this sidebar, my FF team, some emails - especially the cross-generational beer night at the church - and the weather.  Nah, screw the weather.  I'll take what comes.

I'm behind in New Testament reading, so there's that. Some Chesterton and some Lewis that have been sitting there next to my chair.

In the meantime, I will say again that city-states are probably a more stable arrangement than nation-states, and we should gradually move in that direction if we can.  The Lindy Effect would say that because America has been around 240 years it will probably last another 240.  I think that's true, but I also think it will change as much in the next 240 as it did in the first 240.  Thirteen colonies, remember.  Not many laws about anything and not much federal power.  I still think the city-state model is possible within something that is called "America" and carries some of its democratic

intention.  Something like the Nine Nations of North America, perhaps, each with its own capital.  (I'm thinking Denver may not be the capital of the Empty Quarter anymore, as it is something of a California colony now.  Though maybe that's a feature, not a bug.)

England was something of a surrounding supportive territory of the city-state of London for quite some time.  The powerful all maintained some connection to the city and many lived there part of each year. This, even though England was among the most clearly-defined nation-states. 

However much we talk about reducing government, especially in Washington, it's just not going to happen, not under any president or congress, ever.  DC provides nothing but consolidation.  It will only be undermined by the growth of other consolidations of power:  New York, Atlanta, Houston, Kansas City, San Francisco.

Something to think about, as it's not happening anytime soon but may be in the cards, especially if there is some sort of serious economic collapse from debt.

Hillary

Not much original to say, but I like to step back and take the longer view of things.

Hillary is rather obviously a bad candidate.  She started with every advantage in 2008: a network of donors and people who owed favors; a front-row-seat knowledge of who actually pulls the strings in the Democratic Party; an actual occupant of the White House.  Yet she lost to a complete outsider with a thin resume, whose only talents seemed to be a blank-screen quality that allowed people to see what they wished in him (as BHO himself said), plus an ability to look dignified and thoughtful while saying mean things.  That he had some advantage in that the country was actively seeking for a black president was certainly offset by her similar advantage of a country that had been seeking a female president for even longer.

She lost to him, amazingly, and took a coupla top-level jobs in government to keep her hopes alive.  Senator, Secretary of State. Some say she was a disaster, some say she did very well in difficult circumstances, but no one claims she was brilliant at either. Good enough, unspectacular, Grrl Power competence seems to have been the highest claim.

She runs for president in 2016 against a person who is not even a member of the Democratic Party, yet if the party apparatus had not cheated in her favor - starting from the Superdelegate arrangement that favors all party-chosen delegates - she might well have lost the nomination.  She then runs against the anti-Obama, the candidate who made it easy for people to project whatever negative thoughts they had on him. (I said often enough he was plenty bad without anyone having to make stuff up or make it look worse.  It is telling that people needed to project worseness onto him anyway.) Trump may actually have been the easiest negative in the long lamentable catalog of bad American presidential candidates.

She does not have obvious virtues, beyond a remarkable ability to punish those who crossed her.  How, then, did she get so far?  She did not succeed, but she came very close.  It is easy to dismiss those who finished second in competitive endeavors, but none of us were ever remotely in a position to finish second, or twenty-second, or two hundred and twenty-second in presidential voting.  She must have some strengths that people don't give her credit for. Some give her credit for personal charm in small groups, though others deny it; she has some credentials for intelligence, but these never seemed to blossom into anything; her public speaking is very good, though a lot of people dislike her voice; she hitched her wagon to a star and would never have gotten near any elected office without him, yet in the end he was a liability.  All her strengths have an asterisk.

I suppose her weaknesses all have asterisks as well.  She is ambitious, determined, to a degree unusual even among politicians; she may appeal only to a minority, but she inspires an amazing loyalty in those.

It occurred to me on my walk today that if the heat gets turned up too high on her now that she cannot wield a scorpion sting, Trump may consider pardoning her in the interest of national unity.  It would be something one of the Bushes might do, for example.  One could see the point of that, if there were a realistic hope that such a generous gesture were perceived that way. I am cynical enough to think that it would be seen by her supporters as an admission that there isn't any real evidence against her, seen as a betrayal by Trump's supporters, and taken as evidence that it's all rigged and they're all corrupt by a good percentage of whoever's left.

Fools and Wise Men

Antifragile remains slow-going, as every few pages I encounter some interesting bit and begin staring off into the distance, wondering Don't I do something like this already?  or How would life have been different had I lived this way? I am in his section on via negativa, of addition by subtraction, which is related to apophatic theology but he applies to more mundane events.  He quotes an ancient Arab philosopher that one achieves the same gain in wisdom in life from removing a fool as from adding a wise man. Alert readers will notice how a similar theme shows up often in Proverbs.

It can sound little better than fortune-cookie advice, a bromide that cannot be contradicted but is meaningless and insubstantial. Yet I could see a great deal of how my life has been shaped by this.  I have stumbled upon this truth, but not very clearly or fully.  I could have done better.  It includes authors and artists as well as friends, certainly. I have a great many pleasant acquaintances who are fools - we can hardly go otherwise in the world - but I have mostly been able to keep them farther out in the realm of the purely social.  My friends are largely wiser.  There are a few people I would have done better to invite in closer.  Yet had I developed this as a clear rule in my head at a young age, there are many authors I would not have read a second book of, having been more alert at my first try, and many co-workers I would have chatted with less in favor of others.

Activities.  It's not the things I would add in for fun, but would leave out as useless.  Good to know, going forward.

This is not an intelligence judgement, though I think some minimum is required.  It's the people who think they are wiser than they are who are the problem.  You can't make a good fool out of someone who isn't smart enough to insist on their bad ideas and sound at least a little convincing.

Unlearning

Yes, let's focus on that.  What have you had to unlearn in your adult life?  My son brings it up in the Education post.

I flooded the market with so much information to my sons that there must be a significant amount of unlearning needed, simply by law of averages.  I had to unlearn many attitudes (and the supposed underlying facts) from high school and college culture.  Maybe also junior high and the first few years after graduation. The actual information has held up a little better.

From my father, nothing.  He was not part of my life age 6-18 and little until age 24.  My mother?  That will take some thought.  I think I absorbed much in my bones, and it will be hard to figure what part is hers, what was my school, my books, my church, my culture.

Have a go at it.  Sounds like fun.

Education Update

I think the link is fixed.

There was a New Yorker cartoon someone gave to me:  Mensa Does Improv. “We’ll need a suggestion of a place, an occupation, a family member, an extinct language, a Byzantine Despot, a transuranic element, and a word that contains every vowel.” Right up my alley, though I thought Bela III was Bela IV.  So sue me. I can stand back and admire the ridiculousness of that knowledge, because I know almost nothing about the difficult ones.  Just enough to make an answer.  So when Taleb was criticizing that I nodded automatically.  But going back and rereading what he wrote, in light of the (excellent) comments here, NNT is saying something a bit different.  It is not so much superficial knowledge – which can, in fact, at least give you some structure – but that the purportedly deeper knowledge generally isn’t.  The college professors and popular authors are going to be actively damaging, because they will teach you things that aren’t so.  They will sound plausible, because plausibility is their stock-in-trade.  But they won’t actually hold up under scrutiny. You will have to unleartn things in order to become wiser.

Consider: there are websites devoted to reporting cockamamie things that some academic is teaching or writing. Conservatives and curmudgeonly types love these stories and they pass them along for enjoyment.  There are new idiocies every day, always a fresh supply.  I have usually just shrugged and thought to myself “Well, that’s just one knucklehead at one college.  Let’s not get carried away thinking that they all believe that.” Yet what other industry tolerates such an enormous amount of quackery, not removing these fools?  Where is a med school that has even one professor who says that X-rays are racist? Where are the auto mechanics who insist on indigenous methods of repair, or house painters who insist Western methods are uniquely bad and always oppressive? Is there a burgeoning movement among administrative assistants to switch to other calendars and concepts of time? Lord knows all of these professions get things wrong – but not bizarrely wrong. Cf. Anthropology departments, History departments, where these threads run through many of the courses, and effloresce into the truly absurd at more than one spot.  Who else does this?

While writing this, Bird Dog linked to a related section of Taleb’s Antifragile posted at Zero Hedge.  I’ll just let Nicholas speak forhimself for a bit.

Catalog

The Signals catalog came today, and as my wife is away, helping with the new granddaughter in Nome, it fell to me to peruse it and see if we were keeping it for ordering possible Christmas gifts.  I have not looked at one in years.

There are fewer children, more pets, especially cats.  Fewer grandparent nostalgia items.  There is lots of A&H signalling - the irony of the catalog name strikes me just this moment - showing how much we love art, how much we love books, how much we love musical in-jokes. Lots of scarves, and celebrations of how great particular types of women are. The only appearance of men are as recipients of the type of man-profession T-shirts that they would not buy for themselves but women would buy for them.  Engineers, mathematicians.  Women in those professions would not be impressed by these cutesies, I don't think.

Not much music anymore - just the tchotchkes. 

The irony of the name "Signals" was prescient, wasn't it.

All this is according to the pattern I noted a decade ago in The Sadness of NPR Christmas.

Contrast this to The Sadness of NHH Christmas, which still devastates me.

Pumpkin Spice Overload

My son Ben has a new site.  I hadn't known.  I somehow can't make it link quite properly on my sidebar.

He determined to buy everything labeled Pumpkin Spice.  It's a three-part adventure thus far.

Education

Nicholas Nassim Taleb describes his education in Antifragile. It sounds much like CS Lewis's, as described in Surprised By Joy. He read as he wished from a young age, according to no program other than what he set for himself.  Adults did not supervise or direct his free reading, so he would sometimes be exposed to things they might have found inappropriate had they known. (Neither Taleb or Lewis notes whether this is inappropriateness is violence, sexual, or abstract concepts beyond their likely understanding.) He attended school and did as well as he needed to at each point but found it unexciting and not very valuable.  His father was a more devoted school student and won national awards in Lebanon, but did not insist that his son take the same route.

I have noted a few times that most geniuses seem to have been autodidacts.  Taleb is clearly smarter than I am and his devotion to reading exceeded mine.  I had also a devotion to socialising - perhaps that's it. Yet I understand what he is talking about.  I used to say "never let school get in the way of your education" when I was in highschool and college.  That was certainly founded in arrogance and a sort of laziness about what others thought I should be doing, but there was truth in it as well.  I knew an enormous amount about a few subjects I had never taken a class in.  In fact, there were no classes in Arthurian studies, baseball history and statistics, or history of the English language beyond an introductory.  I added things over the years, taking up a topic with fanaticism for a few months or a few years, revisiting it years later.  In between, I would pick up other stray bits without even trying.  Once you have a structure, a schema, about a subject, anything that drifts past gets put in storage pretty easily.  I call it "cuphooks."  Once you have cupboards, and have put cuphooks in them, you can add in information at will. This is why I believe that teaching higher-level thinking skills to students too early is just bosh. Until they have a supply of cupboards and cuphooks, the information just lies around on the counter or on the table, useless.

I have therefore always loved books which supply a schema, even if it has to be modified later.  Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America and David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed supplied cupboards and cuphooks. I have redesigned those cupboards since then, but they were extremely useful.

My children also have topics in which they are extremely knowledgeable. These are significantly independent of anything they learned at school.

I noticed early on that a temporary devotion to a subject in the humanities could make you an expert very quickly.  I would talk about an historical or literary topic with a person who taught it at the college level and sense immediately that they did not know what I did.  Not close, in some cases. There's a lot of literature, a lot of philosophy, a lot of history out there and no one knows more than a sampling. If you pick an obscure corner, you can get right up to the top quickly. The general tools that the professionals bring to tie things in together and give overview don't impress me.  In theory, such things should be useful. However, they seem to be largely fashions, and these days, an imposed set of sociopolitical ideas.

I have also described in more than one place that experts and talented amateurs make different sorts of errors.

Enter Taleb, widely read in literature, philosophy, and mathematics. He suggests we avoid talking to middle people - which includes most college professors and popular writers - as we can learn little from them. He recommends attending only to the most informed, least fashionable, and most original thinkers on any subject.  Beyond that, you are better off spending your time with auto mechanics, waiters, or others who do not rely on book knowledge to get by. I see the sense of this immediately, especially in the context of how he defines antifragile knowledge. I do have an immediate difficulty with the concept, however, because I am one of those middle people, and so are most of my friends. NNT notes that the middle people, middlebrow, can be very entertaining people to be with. They are conversant at a minor level with a hundred subjects.  They know who Plato was and a few facts about him, so you can reference Plato in conversation with them in order to make a point quickly.

E D Hirsch made a name for himself in the 1980's by advocating a "cultural literacy" as a shared common knowledge to enable communication.  I have thought until quite recently that this is an excellent way to go.  I now see it is restricted to the middlebrows. It has strength because the current alternative is an assemblage of correct attitudes, even more a product of politics and fashion. Yet after reading Taleb I see weaknesses. It has no depth, so that no subject need be understood well.  More importantly, it provides considerable inertia for the conventional wisdom.  It is much harder to find a spot on which to stand to say "Socrates is wrong, and so is Plato," as Taleb does. As an autodidact, he references other ancient philosophers who he believes come closer to important truths - and I have never heard of most of them. They aren't part of the cultural literacy lists, neither the old canons, nor the new politically correct ones.

He disparages the type of close-ended knowledge that tests measure, with single correct answers according to forms.  I have disparaged them myself (which is one reason I preferred Ron Hoeflin's Mega Test to other IQ tests), but not too loudly or too often, because they are the sort of thing I'm good at and I have an interest in keeping my own roads to status clear. Yet I emphatically see his point.  His examples are pretty persuasive, and pretty damning, as well.

More to say, but I think I'll leave this here for the moment.

Looks Presidential

I recall decades ago reading about voters who cooed about which candidate looked more presidential and thinking those must be the less-educated, soap-opera watching*citizens who had never heard of Nietzsche and were easily swayed by Madison Avenue into buying hundreds of dollars of useless lawn and laundry products.

The was some quasi-conservative in 2008 who was impressed with Obama's pantleg crease - was it David Brooks? There has also been an unending stream of comments about how classy Barack and Michelle look, but I always took that as little more than a calculated sneer at conservatives of "See?  Black people can look really good dressed up you racist bigots."  They look fine.  Presidents and First Ladies are supposed to have a good sense (or hire people with good sense and listen to them) of occasion, and they have done that.  But I regard all that commentary as essentially neutral.

But this year I keep hearing elite liberals - graduate degree and/or wealthy liberals - so impressed that Hillary "looks so presidential."  (I can't recall any conservative using phrases like that in my lifetime.) What? Does that matter? I grant that Trump looks a little strange in terms of World Leader, but I thought ignoring that sort of thing was where liberalism originally came in.  Not judging people for long hair or not wearing ties.  Looking beyond tattoos and piercings.

Guess not.  I guess that was just a ruse.  Mean girls. Your dress is so 1974, Linda.

* A prejudice I might have reversed a full 180 at this point.

Respectful To The Family

I frequently get young African patients at the hospital - about a dozen a year, which is a lot considering the base we are drawing from. They do not come in for anxiety disorders or personality disorders.  Some affective disorders - depression more than mania - but mostly for psychotic disorders.  I imagine there is a lot of PTSD out there, but families don't tend to bring their children to the emergency room for anything other than psychotic thinking plus some threat of violence.  Perhaps PTSD and depression do not even register on a scale of abnormality in refugee families.

Yet when I speak with the parents, an odd equivalence shows up.

Let me first note that with all families, there is a tendency for the parent to want to launch into discussions of how the child has had problems since kindergarten, or has had not thriven these past fifteen years since graduating highschool, with details about individual events that took place in 2011 that are nearly always irrelevant. (Head injuries are relevant.  Deaths of close relatives maybe.  But even sexual abuse and divorce from a decade ago are not explanations for a crisis today.  "Why now?" is a frequent question of ours.) So the tendency to try and get the hospital to become involved with some overall solution to chronic problems is not confined to African families.  Also, even though it is almost always Mom I am talking to, that is likely a selection bias of Moms remaining involved and wanting to talk about it.

With that out of the way, I notice that African parents speak about things that American parents would regard as minor or typical problems as if they were just as weighty as the suicidal statements.  "She does not speak respectfully to her father."
"He wants to braid his hair and have an earring but I tell him I will not allow that (he is 19) because he is not a girl."
"He uses bad language in front of his sister's children."
"She stays in her room and texts to her friends and does not talk to us."
American parents would certainly recognise these things as behaviors that might be controversial and even lead to grown children being asked to move out.  Yet they are not on the level of suicidal statements. To African families - my experience is at least three each over the years of Sudanese, Congolese, CAR, Gambian, Kenyan, and South African, with six? ten? other countries of one each - these behaviors apparently are equally concerning

I think back and try to remember if Vietnamese, Nepalese, or Bosnian parents (three groups I have more familiarity with) say these things.  A little, perhaps, but I am quite sure not that strong.  Hispanic parents - not at all.  I have never heard these complaints from those parents. Russians, no. Afghanis, interestingly, there is simply no comment from the parents about these things at all.  We just find out that the children were beaten later.

The Middle East. (Recalculating...recalculating...) We receive mostly rich Saudi children, whose bad behavior is tolerated endlessly at home but gets you arrested in America - beating up prostitutes, or taking lots of drugs (but no alcohol) for example; or aged psychotic aunts and uncles, who the families are attempting to farm out to us. The family relations may be important back home, but don't leak out to American social workers.

Some thoughts: In these African cultures, children are not asked to leave the house, no matter how bad their behavior, so bad behavior is more of a concern.  Is that the reason?  Or - in the high-conflict, high-violence cultures that refugees come from, is family solidarity such a hugely greater survival need that such deviations imperil everyone and must be squashed mercilessly?

Reading back over this...  You could turn me in for being horribly racist and prejudiced, couldn't you?  Please do.   I am near retirement and can say things that others cannot, and the real information must leak out somehow.  Not that mine is anything like a complete story.  I might have gotten the Bosnians and Kenyans wrong.  You will have to find one hundred other superannuated social workers to get a fair picture.  Die Gedanken Sind Frei.




Disclaimer: This might be some horrible neo-Nazi group who I would disagree with 99.9% of the time. I just like the feeling of it, not for the whole post, but for my final paragraph.

Lord of the Rings 2016

In a discussion of the candidates and our responses to them, I realised that my view of Hillary had changed over the last year or two.  I had seen her as Boromir or Denethor, retaining some good characteristics, but over time mostly overthrown by ambition, until all morality was clouded or bent.  Dangerous, but understandable.  In the last year I think that has changed.  I now see her as Smeagol, utterly overthrown by temptation (his, for small-scale dominance; hers, ambition) and dangerousness just barely fathomable.

Pitiable, yes. Were she not poised to wreak great havoc on all of us we could perhaps stand back and see her thus, a poor, wretched creature, a Gollum. Grima*, perhaps, not Shelob.  We think of that only because of the gender connection, I think, which is unfair to her. She did not want absolute domination over a small place - her aim was higher. I don't rate her as Saruman - she never rose that high to fall equivalently low. The feminists who defended her as a victim of a horrible sex-offending husband may be picking up some of this pitiable quality - not acknowledging that Smeagol had choices for many centuries (and one huge choice for evil early on) until he finally had no choices at all.

Tolkien - and Lewis, Alexander, plus all the Arthurian legends, contrast how the power to destroy is common; the power to create much rarer and more difficult.

*Though I can think of a dozen Grimas around her, so that can't be it.

Nobody Knows You're A Dog

It was common to read two decades ago "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."  It promised a leveling of prejudice, that black and Hispanic people, or maybe women, teenagers, old people - anyone could be judged on their merit, ushering in a new age of colorblindness and acceptance.

It doesn't seem to have worked that way, as people use social media to emphasize rather than disguise their real-life tribes, with people embracing rather than downplaying stereotypes. Or so it seems.  I have no numbers, only impressions, and those are too easily influenced by a few loud voices.  Perhaps we are actually moving to a "content of their character" world because of the internet, just accompanied by a lot of noise and childishness on the way.

But bsking mentioned something in reference to my Underground DSM that I have thought of often but somehow keep forgetting rapidly after: personality disorders may have an outsized audience and sense of support because of the ruckus they can get started on the internet.  Are they disproportionately represented in twitter mobbing? Do they create more unfair and angry memes? Do they swoop in on the helpless more often? I'm guessing yes.

Predators always get the jump, but humans adapt.  How will we stay ahead of these? How will we learn the equivalent of crossing the street before the Troubled Youths arrive?