I Stopped Reading

There is an essay over at Quillette about the ACT. The author has been a university professor in both biology and psychology for decades, and has worked at an ACT prep center as a tutor, usually with individual students, often nonstandard.  He has taken the ACT himself numerous times.  It sounds ideal. Yet what it shows most clearly is how thoroughly assumptions and preconceptions affect the evidence before out eyes. 

Students who take the ACT are asked to racially self-identify (not all do). These are the average composite scores for the five largest racial categories, followed (in parentheses) by the composite scores for those students who took four or more years of English and three or more years each of math, social studies, and natural sciences: Black = 16.3 (17.9), Hispanic/Latino = 18.3 (20.3), White = 21.7 (23.3), Asian = 24.9 (26.7), Two or More Races = 20.6 (22.5), and No Response = 19.2 (23.7). Clearly, taking a more rigorous high school curriculum helps everyone. (Italics mine. I stopped reading after that.)

No, you fool, how often do we have to go over this?  The people who took the more rigorous high school curriculum were already smarter.  They were already going to do better on the ACT. How much better?  We don't know from this data.  This data tells us precisely nothing about it. We do know from other sources how much prep classes help (Answer, it depends on what you are measuring, but it is mixed.  Basically, if you are getting your first shot at a kid who has not figured out until recently that these tests are important, you can get some increase, teaching them the things that the competitive [whether against other children or against the test] children figured out years ago, usually gradually. Everyone else, they will show a natural improvement by being a year older.)

If that seems odd, remember that actual abstract reasoning does not start until around age 13, even in the brightest students.  Children can follow logical reasoning and give some of it back before then, but don't start doing it on their own until then, and often unevenly.  The brightest students may actually have the dumbest ideas, as they spread their wings earlier. So taking standardised tests at 16, 17, 18 is more different than one might think, Memorised vocabulary and what math or science has been taken can be force-fed, but doing analogies or figuring out what type of math is going to bring you to a solution involves real thinking. SAT/ACT prep courses make their basic living on the natural increase in scores for students that have three years of abstract thinking versus two under their belt.  The classes take credit for that and convince the parents that the children did better mostly because of the expensive course they signed up for.

And as I said the good student who treated testing as a sideline her whole career who now sees that her PSAT projections aren't going to get her into the schools she wants is suddenly motivated to understand what is this test and how do I get more points.  They can crash course and grab a goodly gain.

Once.

Which is also great word-of-mouth for the prep course.  If they do good work with learning-disabled or decently intelligent but basically clueless students, I am glad to hear it. But be careful before shelling out big money for these.  They work great in limited circumstances.

Yet here we are, with a clear expert making assertions that fail the basic logic tests that actually are part of some of the standard testing questions.  And BTW, how is this person not getting perfects scores on these tests at this point?  Are you kidding me? Only the occasional slip-up should be keeping them off the top scores now. 

This person knows much more about the tests than I do at this point, much, much more. Yet he does not know some deeply important overall information about the tests.  I think this is an example for a dozen other varieties of expert.  The Russia team of the CIA in the 1980s knew incomparably more than I did about the USSR. If I had challenged one at a gathering (my parents did know one well who had retired to Wolfeboro, but no, I did not challenge him) I would have been quickly humiliated.  Yet they had it badly wrong, not because they were stupid, or didn't work hard, or had bad training or even that they didn't think hard about the deep puzzles.  They were wrong because of their assumptions, a hundred unquestioned assumptions they mostly shared. 

I'm not sure it works that much better when experts disagree.  I got to see mental health up close, and there was some tendency for the various schools of thought to double and triple down on pet ideas. I'm not sure experts changed their minds much. "Well, I was always taught that the first thing you ask a borderline is..." which carried the loaded implication that this is elementary, basic knowledge you fool, you fool. For years I said that the people who had experience and those who had education made equal, but different errors, and did not listen to each other well.  But I just made that up from sitting at tables of people jockeying for position and watching what decisions got made. I guess it is still a good first approximation, but I like that summary less than I did in 1992.

The difficulty is that unlearning is much more difficult than learning. I don't know how we would teach children unlearning in any way that was not merely comical and artificial, having no bearing on future understanding.

Sprinters

 US Sprinters doing well this year.

Hot Beverages

Stuart Ritchie reminds us that hot beverages don't actually cool us down.  The short version is there was one study in Canada of semi-nude participants sweating more during exercise because of the higher internal temperature.  Just a little bit. In highly limited circumstances.

Nine “semi-nude” men cycled non-strenuously on a stationary bike for 75 minutes in a warm-ish room (24°C), and had their temperatures measured in their oesophagus (via a probe in their nose) and rectally. They were linked up to a calorimeter, which calculated their heat production from the amount of oxygen they were using and the carbon dioxide they were breathing out. They were also weighed with a very sensitive scale to measure sweat loss.

Just before, and then a few times during, the exercise they were given a controlled amount of water, adding up to just under a litre across the whole experiment, at various temperatures: 1.5°C, 10°C, 37°C, and 50°C. Each participant did four sessions, one at each of the water temperatures.

To note a few things already: n = 9; only males; doing exercise for quite a long time; in a not-particularly-hot room; rapidly drinking water, not sipping a cup of tea. They also had a big fan pointed at them to help their sweat to evaporate away. These are just a few of the differences between this experiment and perhaps the average person’s situation in a heatwave - and I haven’t even mentioned the fact they were doing all this while they had a thermometer “inserted to a minimum of 12 cm past [their] anal sphincter”.

That's it.  It was in Smithsonian, so it got wide play, but that's the extent of the research.

Lost, Not Stolen

I am no expert on election law, but I trust Volokh Conspiracy over at Reason, who put out the report on the election "Lost, Not Stolen," written by a qualified and a believable cast of characters. I would add that identifying a vulnerability, though clearly a cause for great concern and rapid remedy, is not the same as identifying fraudulent votes.

There'll Always Be an England

We went to see the "The Mousetrap" tonight, and in the lead-up they played British from that era.  I had done the same thing myself on the way up, irritating the oldest granddaughter with "We'll Meet Again." Which they also played while we were waiting for the curtain to go up, which I pointed out triumphantly.

I had never heard this song, only only heard of it.  Once they played it I knew I had to share it with all of you.

James linked to Mark Steyn writing about it, including Julie Andrews singing it.  That might have been more fun.

Opioids Part Four

 Tim sends along some final thoughts - though I will bet you could keep him engaged if you wanted to.

Longer thoughts on scalability and political feasibility. Probably more than you bargained for but these were thoughts I had on my list of things to start writing out anyways. I know this will be too long for comments but let me know if I should break it up and add them. 

On political feasibility. In New Hampshire, it was a libertarian-leaning Republican member of the House who was also a physician that led the charge on legalizing syringe exchange programs. Governor Sununu has been a proponent of harm reduction and Manchester-based Democrats the biggest opposition while declaring that they support it in theory. So, I think your political read is spot on. The idea of a brave Republican president doing something on principle might be our best shot. The other possibility would be a convicted Democrat serving their last term. But, I'm not holding my breath on that option. 

The one thing that might make it easier is if it didn't need to happen legislatively. Doing anything with heroin is a huge task BUT, expanding what is considered a legitimate medical reason to prescribe substances like morphine and hydromorphone might be possible. Hydromorphone is closest in user experience to heroin and far easier to dose than fentanyl. The FDA and the DEA could allow for a change in prescribing standards and create a pathway to regulated access.  This doesn't answer all the questions of administration but, as Jonathan pointed out, it would allow different states to create models to test the effectiveness of different models and create systems of control. 

In Canada, they are piloting a system that sounds terrible at first but makes sense on further examination... hydromorphone vending machines. At an overdose prevention center, a registered user can receive a pre-selected dose available only through a biometric scan. By removing the human element of administration, you decrease the potential for conflict and increase controls. But the "drug vending machine" attack ads write themselves. 

Unfortunately, I don't see the political winds shifting quickly enough to implement these kinds of solutions before the overdose crisis begins to decline on its own through losing another 700,000 lives over the next 5 to 7 years. But, it's also something I am hoping to dedicate the next few decades of my life to working on. And, my hope is that the changing nature of the illicit drug market brings more costs and benefits into stark relief.

It was easier to pretend like our "supply" side strategies were working in the past. In part, because they worked sometimes. Heroin production and distribution are complex tasks that require significant financial and human capital. Break up the distribution network in a small town in NH and the supply might dry up. Work your way up to some big fish, seize assets and lock up the big bosses and you might be able to disrupt large regional distribution systems. 

And, it did "work" in Australia. An internationally coordinated effort led to a simultaneous dismantling of the three major criminal organizations bringing heroin into Australia. The price of heroin skyrocketed and the percentage of the population using heroin dropped. BUT, for the next few years overdoses, violent crime and property theft all went up. And, meth usage skyrocketed. In terms of decreased crime and overdoses, it was about 10 years of dramatically reduced heroin supply before it was determined there was a net benefit. 

We have no reason to believe something like that could be accomplished and sustained in the United States today. A 22-year-old can set up their own drug trafficking ring and start making big money with a little knowledge of the dark web and a few thousand in starting capital. And, it isn't just illicit fentanyl. If you were motivated, in about 30 minutes of internet searches and a credit card, you can find "research chemicals" that are close cousins to any major illicit substance online. When one substance gets scheduled, a few modifications and a new version is back on the market. And, this new one we know even less about. 

Big drug trafficking groups used to need to train people on how to process these drugs and pass along that knowledge from person to person. Now, you can legally order all the chemicals you need to make meth and learn how to do it in the microwave over the course of an afternoon. The difference between a home chemist and a cartel-trained one is that the cartel guy is less likely to poison you with their product or blow themselves up. 

There also used to be more of a divide between urban and suburban and rural. Creating regulated access to opioids might have benefits in an urban area where you are unlikely to get supply under control and population density makes profitability easy. But, in the past, there would have been downsides in areas where access was more difficult and supply reduction more feasible. For urban areas the switch would be from easily accessible dangerous drugs to accessible safer drugs. For rural areas it might be very limited access to dangerous drugs to expanded access to less dangerous drugs. The positive benefit is clear for urban areas but not clear at all for a rural area. 

Now, that distinction doesn't exist in the same way. So, my hope is that in the coming years, we will have more previously competing interests find some alignment and a clearer sense of the futility of our current system. 

The final shift (that I hope to be a part of) is articulating these ideas in a way that resonates with a broader swath of the public. In continuing with the theme of Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, arguments concerning "freedom" will fail to beat arguments that appeal to "purity." A counter-culture or libertarian style ethic just won't pass the smell test for most people. 

On to scalability. Again, we don't know the best model but various versions have been tried in the UK, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands. But, the American context is still unique and we are just dealing with a whole lot more people. But a helpful thought experiment is to think through what it would look like for this model to go "wrong" and determine whether or not that is likely to be better or worse than our current reality. 

We know, for example, that drugs would get diverted out of this system and end up being used by people we would otherwise hope to protect. But, we know when that happens likelihood of overdose will be less likely. And, do we have reason to believe there more of these drugs will be available in a diverted "gray market" than in the current black market?

A few areas of concern for me and how I would respond...

Teens: We want to limit access to alcohol and other drugs for teens in general. Behavioral risks are high and long-term issues for developing a substance use disorder are a concern as well. It is possible that this system would increase the availability of diverted opioids to this population. And, if they believe the substances are "safe" they are more likely to use them as kids are more likely to pop an oxy pill than just straight to IV drug use. So, even if we decrease teen overdoses in the short term by making sure the diverted supply is safer, are we creating a larger population who will have severe problems by the time they are 22? 

I couldn't say with confidence that this won't increase diverted drugs to teens. But, we have seen lessons with cannabis that teen use has dropped even as states have legalized it. The worst I have read is a study that argues that legalization has slowed the rate of declining cannabis use among teens. Overall, I think this shows that legality may be a factor but is not THE driving force for trends in teen drug use. The most successful anti-teen smoking campaign was the one that framed smoking as the thing the "establishment" wanted you to do. Then vaping became a fad and has already dropped down again dramatically.

I imagine two different kinds of teens at risk. The first is the risk taking teen highly motivated to purchase and use drugs. They are likely to live in unstable situations, probably around parents, guardians or siblings who are already using. They are the kind of teens that might know an actual drug dealer, buy from them, and sell at school or through social events. The second is the casual teen who goes to some parties and experiments with drinking and drug use.

It's possible that this system grows the pool of the second kind of teen as access to a regulated supply decreases risk to a level that more teens would be interested in trying. But, probably wouldn't have much of an effect on the first kind of teen as it doesn't take much motivation or know how to source under the current system. 

But, the potential benefit is removing the user/dealer population. Who is the kind of person that sells drugs knowingly to teenagers? Someone slightly older who really needs the money and is in a situation where they feel they have nothing to lose. Put that person into a system where they have regulated access to their own supply of opioids and suddenly they do have something to lose for diverting a portion of their supply. Or, the employees administering the program have the possibility of losing a good job, license or career. 

I think it is highly likely a regulated system reduces the population willing to sell to teenagers. 

Cultural Capital: Another risk is widespread cultural shifts in the role of a particular drug in building cultural capital. I'm thinking about smoking cigarettes in the 50's and 60's, cocaine in the 70's, heroin in the 90's or alcohol at pretty much anytime in the past 100 years. If using opioids had the same cultural cache as using alcohol, I think we'd have a huge issue. 

But, I don't see a lot of evidence that this is happening with opioids or stimulants. Feel free to correct me if you see evidence otherwise. The one area that I think could be problematic in the coming years is teenage experimentation with psychedelics. These are substances that are gaining cultural cache. While I'm personally very positive on potential therapeutic use of psychedelics, there are lots of ways that can go wrong for teens and adults. 

I think this will be trickier to address. Teen participants in the old DARE program were shown to be more likely to use drugs than their counterparts and use of psychedelics drove those shifts. This is a potential downside and trickier to address. But, ultimately, I don't think legality is what will really make an effect on this trend. There are currently multiple kinds of powerful psychedelics that are widely available like the San Pedro cactus, salvia divinorum, morning glory seeds and... nutmeg. Nutmeg, believe it or not, was big in the Jazz scene in the 40's and 50s. 

Recovery: Another concern would be people in some kind of recovery. Would people who had a long fight to find their own sobriety be more likely to begin using again if there was a means of regulated legal access to opioids? 

I don't think so. Right now one of the big issues are people coming out of rehab and immediately getting text messages from their old friends/dealers. They face incredible social pressures from existing peer networks so much so that I hear a lot of stories of people moving across country to remove those temptations. In a system of regulated access, people would need to jump through some hoops to get in. And, it would be possible to voluntarily place yourself on a restricted list that won't allow you to do that. 

Low-income neighborhoods: One possible concern is that services like overdose prevention centers tend to get located in service heavy and resource poor neighborhoods. This can attract the populations dependent on those resources and increase crime and add fuel to the fire of a cycle of poverty. 

This is another very real concern and one that I could see going wrong. This certainly happens in Manchester and is a big reason why Manchester Dems have been so resistant to harm reduction. Folks from across the state get sent to a recovery program in Manchester and end up on the streets afterwards. As someone who owns a home in downtown Manchester about 75 yards from the primary homeless shelter, I have "skin in the game" on this one. In all likelihood, a program like this would be located within half a mile of where I live, if not a few hundred yards. 

But, I know from experience, I stopped having to pick up syringes as regularly after the local syringe exchange program went it. But, I still see people injecting drugs directly around my house multiple times per week. And, the behavioral and mental health issues from bad methamphetamines keep getting worse. In my neighborhood, at least, I'd see it as a net benefit to set up regulated access and an overdose prevention center. 

There are other neighborhoods where people might legitimately feel differently than I do. Overall, it will be crucial for these solutions to be implemented with state or region wide plans in order to mitigate these sorts of concerns.

Are there any other major areas of concern you'd list?

Mild Confirming Evidence

A man at Bible-Study last night made the observation that he had been briefly involved in the prophecy understandings of Scripture years ago, and even had some belief in the conspiracy theories of Illuminati or other groups controlling a great deal behind the scenes.  As he is an engineer (like most of my friends in retirement, it seems) I half-expected him to offer some numbers-based or probability-based reason why he thought these explanations unlikely now.  I should know better.

His actual reason was "Even if these things are true, God is still in control." I have only a slight problem with that. When someone says that to mean the large spiritual overview, that It Is Well With My Soul, or "this world is not my home" they are quite correct, and no matter how bad things get here we can trust God for the ultimate outcome.  I think another idea does creep in a bit, with many Christians, including my friend. Terrible things happen in many places, and we cannot count on it all coming right in the end in this world just because it will do so in the next.  When presented with that distinction I think most Christians excepting the committed Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn sorts would get the theologically solid answer.  Yet I think some of the Christian Victory teaching does color the emotional approach of many believers.  And they get it from the pulpit, more often than not. If we do live into the last days it is likely to be very unpleasant.

But what really struck me was that his personality would not sustain the paranoid interpretation. He considered these ideas, he had cultural support for believing them, they provided an explanation for some of the evil in the world, but in less than a year he no longer believed them.  It fits my frequent reminder here that paranoia (or depression, or anxiety) precedes our explanations and rationalisations of them.

Compost Into Fuel

 Something over at "I Don't Know But..." reminded me of this video, so I thought I'd put it up.

Woke Ain't Woke

Listening to Stanley McChrystal talking about the multiple definitions of woke, and the difference between being an extremist who is reflexively accusing, versus being a person who is alert to the racial, sexual, and ethnic aspects of issues, it occurred to me that the woke have become insensitive to these nuances.  I should say some of the woke, and perhaps the noisiest of them. If you have made up your mind what you are going to find regardless of the data, you cannot be said to be sensitive, alert, or awake to those issues. You have in fact gone to sleep. The usual irony.

The idea immediately resonated with me, because we see this in so many other places. Schools move gradually to noneducation and even anti-education (see JMSmith at The Orthosphere for that one), Christian churches empower Pharisees, social science research strives to report only what it thinks it already knows, militaries become increasingly able to win battles but lose wars. It is Conquest's Third Law of Politics in action. (Isegoria's whole essay on that is fun.) The movement is being taken over by those who want something other than the original goals.

The woke have had a considerable victory on their initial goal, then.  We have an America where people do consider these nuances pretty regularly. Not everyone and not always, yet it is clearly part of American life now. That they have doubled down on the anger after having won at least a partial victory is revealing, suggesting that they had some other motive for entering into advocacy - virtue signalling, personal guilt, desire to punish, lack of constructive skills, something. We know that these are present in the group, along with some nobler motives, but it is pure guesswork when it comes to individuals, so I advise you not to fall into that trap.

Congressional Investigation

I haven't watched a minute of it. The first one I recall was Watergate, a performance I believed at the time and only later learned was more truthy than true. Over time I have come to a point of some despair about these.  They are clearly necessary. We cannot stop having them, or some substitute that uncovers important truths for the American people. Yet they are always a show, increasingly orchestrated as Congress develops its artistic craft. Chesterton said that if something is worth doing it is worth doing badly, and that is a counterintuitive but very true statement. Yet there has to be some limit beyond which the deception overwhelms the information.

I have liked Andrew McCarthy's take on many things over the years. A former federal prosecutor himself, he is if anything too willing to consider an issue still open simply because it has not been pounded to the center of the earth in disproof, or to grant the assumption of good faith to participants because they have shown good faith at some other time. I like his take on the Jan 6 hearings at City Journal, and pass them along to you here. 

I would say that I wish we had some new method of conducting investigations, because by natural bureaucratic decay and trial-and-error improvement in showmanship by deeply partisan officials this method is not particularly useful.  Yet I know if we came up with a replacement, people would immediately start gaming that system as well.

As a side mention, Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent piece at City Journal as well, about Boris Johnson stepping down. 

The well-merited political demise of Boris Johnson has come about, as is often the case, for the wrong reasons. His various peccadilloes and errors, and his failure to own up to them in manly, timely, and unequivocal fashion, no doubt point to defects of character, but defects of character are what we expect in our politicians and seekers after power. They keep us entertained.

It sounds related to our situation in that way.

California's War on the Poor

Quillette is not the first publication to point out that a popular brand of liberalism, strong in California in particular, favors policies that hurt the poor. The poor have little ability to fight back at all.  The middle class is limited to a sort of veto power over politicians it finds obnoxious or policies that catch their imagination and hold their attention even while they use precious time getting to work and getting the kids educated. Sustained effort to change things is far from them, as they have to compete with paid lobbyists - indeed with entire lobbying organisations that know how to target one audience while keeping what is happening out of sight of the rest. The rich can change things in a narrow area, usually to protect the industry the work in or the value of their real estate, but even the richest of them can't affect everything.  They learn to be content with policies and politicians who favor their class and tribe in general.  It's usually enough.

I highlight this because things go off my sidebar so quickly.

Divine Punishment

Tim extends where I was going in my post about "Training the Staff" by tying the idea of punishing the patient/client/addict to the idea of taboo, and inviting divine punishment for the group if it does not punish the wrongdoer. I think that is about right.  It is connected with Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory and the importance of the axis of purity as well. Haidt was on Glenn Loury's show recently, BTW, talking about the seeming sudden stupidity of college professors and students is unlikely, given that his personal observation is that individuals are much as before, but that there is now a Systemic Stupidity, where foolishness is rewarded and sensible actions punished, creating perverse incentives. He does think that acts of moral courage are what is need to combat this, but he is not convinced there has been a general deterioration of character and intelligence. 

Anyway, back to the idea of taboo and the need for the society to punish those who offend against particular expectations.  He makes the Body as Holy Temple reference one would expect from a properly-raised evangelical, as it was a frequent warning.  I remember it well, as I was a smoker, usually the only one, in places of disapproval.  Some critics were quite direct in insisting to me that "Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit." I many times thought, though I don't believe I ever said "Actually, I very seldom sleep with temple prostitutes, which is what that verse refers to." If one wants to extend the idea to all forbidden sexual behavior I will grudgingly nod with a bit of a wince, but I think pushing it farther owes too much to more secular ideas about alcohol and tobacco, imposed on the scriptures.To extend it to drugs is no better. It is possible that God does see things in exactly this way, but the evidence is shaky, too shaky to impose on another, however one feels about not eating meat and running 10Ks oneself.

That God does sometimes punish for a people tolerating some sort of evil is true.  You can find examples throughout the scriptures.  But notice that these usually fall into two categories: direct worship of false gods, or injustice toward others. The latter often carries a double sin, that we not only do harm to someone, but then blame them for it. The poor may not be any more righteous or deserving than the rich in the abstract, but in how life plays out, people are likely to give themselves credit for being rich and blame the poor for their lot. As we do not see all choices, abilities, and circumstances even in our own lives, never mind others, we overstep whenever we make such judgements. As ridiculous as it sounds, humans are quite capable of kicking others and then blaming them for being bruised.

Breastfeeding and Intelligence

Stuart Ritchie goes through the research with a hard eye. This is one of those things that some people are really invested in being true, exactly the situation that can result in publication bias (the studies that show a null hypothesis or even negative result are more likely to be abandoned, rejected for publication, or referenced less often), as well as a perception bias, because journalists like this idea a great deal and love to puff up the claims when the report on it, so the the general public gets the idea that a positive effect has been proved over and over. 

Yet when one looks at the data and presses it hard, it turns out to be squishy.  It is interesting to watch Ritchie follow whatever trails he can find and see where they actually do go, regardless of what the signs say. We were very pro breastfeeding in this house when the oldest two were born 40 years ago.  It was a transition time, from our mothers' era that only poor women breastfed - or maybe some nurses or nature fanatics - to a time when all the best, educated, modern aware young mothers who had "done the research" as we say decided that the breast was better.  We knew one woman who nursed her daughter until she was three. 

Ritchie does not comment on other claimed benefits, which he considers quite possible, such as bonding or immunity. Those things are hard to measure, and IQ sits out that as a generally measurable item, and thus useful for research to learn more general lessons.

His eventual conclusion is that it is still possible that there is some intelligence advantage, but most of what is claimed can be eroded down to a point where if there is an effect, it is small.

Party Impressions

People do not estimate very well what rank-and-file members of the political parties are like, according to this newish study out of UChicago. I have seen such things for years, and can safely say we were never very good at it.  However, even with that said I think we might be worse now.  It is disquieting to think "who are the people who think like this?" 

*

I think I would do reasonably well at these estimates - a lot better than the average person of either party, anyway - simply by knowing base rates and political information.  Black people are about 11% of the population, vote 90% Democrat, and have slightly less participation in politics than other groups, so thinking that 44% of Democrats are black is way off.

It shows the power of the stereotypes, but the person who sent this along offered an additional bit. We don't think of the people that we actually know from parties, or we think that they are somehow always an exception to the national trends. When we hear the word "Democrat" we think of Obama/Biden/Pelosi/Harris, instead of "Lurlene next door." But there are a million times more of the "next doors."

*I loved the scene and the line when I saw the movie in 1969 and remembered it, but not until years later, after reading The Princess Bride did I connect that this bit of followers who can track over ridiculous terrain (especially the Indian) is a very William Goldman touch.

New Dialect Survey

Bert Vaux, who ran the Harvard Dialect Survey that was so popular and linked to here (including the most famous pop, soda, soda pop, coke, soft drink, and still in a few places in Northern Coastal New England tonic question) is now at Cambridge and has updated the results to include the English the rest of the world speaks. I'd like to know who that one person from Transylvania is. Once I started checking their responses, I suspect they were originally from New England or upstate New York.

It will not be immediately apparent that there are loads of results for the UK, and even some for Australia and NZ, which should remind you to go back and look at Canada (remember Canada?), Alaska, and Hawaii. It is interesting how the Canadians track British usages in some places and American in others, and this varies regionally.

For the first question I grew up saying grinder, but that no longer even makes the list. In Williamsburg they said deli sandwich and I may have kept that for a while when I got back, as grinder was going out and sub was coming in.  I thought the reference to driving a standard would have been more widespead and common. But have fun with it.

The Need For Addicts To Get Money - Opioids Part Three

Tim sends along some other bits he thinks might be useful. I will keep my ideas off here and put them in the comments as we go along

A few other things you might find interesting/helpful...

The world of think tanks and policy experts is in a completely different realm than political leadership. 

The Manhattan Institute is optimistic on harm reduction and "overdose prevention centers." The DOJ under the Biden Administration still hasn't decided whether or not they plan on shutting NYC's centers down and allowing other states to follow. This is all because of legislation Biden championed and passed. 

An interesting tidbit I ran across recently in a book about a Catholic priest who worked with Heroin users in NY in the 1950s and 60s. At the time, he noted that heavy users were spending $40-$100 a day on heroin in unadjusted dollars. I spoke with an outreach worker here in Manchester and he said he doesn't know anyone who is spending $100 a day in today's dollars.

Prohibition hasn't raised the price of opioids at all... it has dramatically decreased them by incentivizing the creation of more potent synthetic alternatives... The exact opposite of the intended policy outcome. 

The best model out there, I believe, is what they did in Switzerland. I wasn't completely convinced when my book deadline was approaching so I didn't include it. But, I'm now sold. 

They had a large open air drug scene right in front of the equivalent of their White House. They went in and allowed the people there to register for "heroin assisted treatment." All registered users could go to a clinic 2-3 times a day to receive an injection of prescription-grade heroin. The program, unsurprisingly, was quite popular. 

The illicit market collapsed and public drug use mostly disappeared. Anyone who was a "user dealer" stopped dealing and those who were just dealing lost their market. Property and violent crime dropped as anyone who had been stealing to get money for drugs no longer needed to. 

What is particularly interesting, is that with free heroin available many people decreased their usage. The unpredictability of supply tends to encourage people to binge when the drug is available. Stability decreased that drive. 

And, while I haven't seen good recent numbers on this, is how many people left the program voluntarily. If memory serves correctly it was roughly 80% of a cohort over a ten-year period. 

Some people "age out," others end up seeking treatment over time and 2-5% a year have a "spontaneous" recovery. The numbers aren't great in any given year but over the course of ten years... it adds up.

And, heroin use actually declined in the population overall with time. It turns out that one of the most powerful forces spreading heroin use is heroin users trying to make enough money to cover their own heroin use. 

I disagree with an approach that would end up with opioids available over the counter in a similar way to alcohol. I already think alcohol and cannabis advertising is problematic and that the government does have a legitimate right to limit access to potentially harmful and addictive substances. 

But, there are a host of policy options in between complete prohibition and overt-the-counter legalization. It is possible to create a highly regulated process of obtaining prescription-grade opioids that would undermine the illicit market for existing users while limiting any new users. 

There is good reason to believe that the people most motivated to divert these kinds of drugs to young people are the folks desperate to make money to buy the drugs they are addicted to. While some drugs would still get diverted to young people, it isn't clear the problem would be worse than it is now. And, the drugs that would get diverted would at least be of consistent dosing and not poisoned. 

I haven't written publicly about all of this yet but plan on doing so soon. So, if you see any flaws in my logic or see compelling counterarguments, please send them my way. 

Right now the best counterargument I've encountered is... sounds good on paper... but just wait for DC to muck it up! Which, unfortunately, is a pretty good argument.

It's Amazing We Know Anything

Listening to yet another podcast correcting what we used to think we knew about prehistory, I reflected again that it is amazing we know anything.  Or do we?  I suppose we gradually learn what things are not true, and that is something.

Some professional anthropologists even today, and nearly all of them not so long ago believed that primitive hunter-gatherers must be much like hunter-gatherers of the present era. Yet the situations are different.  Today's crew are in most cases consigned to those environments that others don't want.  They live on the margins of agricultural lands, of farmers or herders.  Foragers are a category between, but also exploit various niches. Even in those situations farther from agro-pastoralists, as in the deeper Amazon or upper Papua New Guinea, the hunter-gatheres have knowledge of them.  They have goods to trade, or trade for and so are integrated into those economies, even at a distance. 

CS Lewis pointed this out decades ago, that we have no business assuming the modern H-G's are at all like the older ones.  they might be a developed improvement; they might be a deterioration; they might be simply different. He made fun of HG Well's pretending to know about primitive tribes and their hierarchy. When there was a powerful chief "no one was allowed to touch his spear."  Well how on earth are we to know such a thing? Ridiculous. And while Wells was perhaps extreme in his being poetic about it in this way, even the professionals make up the most amazing things about prehistoric peoples on the basis of little or no evidence.  They were more peaceful than us, or more violent. Women were held in greater esteem, or worse. The shared things equally or they competed for food even with siblings, children, and mates. They had great respect for nature/their prey/their captured opponents or they had callous contempt.

We don't even know what environments they favored. Many are now under the ocean and unexplored. The environments that remained inhabited were repurposed: plowed under, built upon, burned over regularly. We are certain of their stability and reverence for the ancestors who lived there for centuries - until we find a boat or their DNA shows they came from 500 miles away. They had beer, they didn't have beer. Their origin stories were of central importance to them...except when we find that the people who didn't have nosey Europeans asking them what their origin stories were didn't seem to care about that so much.

The lives of our parents are something of a mystery to us, I don't know why we think we understand the thinking of reassembled bones with a set of antlers buried with them. I have recently posted that we make categories in order to break them, and it wasn't so long ago that I had fun with the idea of the tribe that made grandfather's thigh into a flute. It would perhaps be best if we did not allow students, especially in anthropology, to read any theories at all, and certainly not to hold any opinions or take a side in a controversy.  Because once we have accepted a theory, it takes more energy to get rid of it than to acquire it in the first place. St. John's, the Great Books College in Maryland, teaches human knowledge, including science starting with what was believed in ancient times, replacing it every year with what science/literature/philosophy taught in the succeeding era.  I completely get the idea and I think it is inspired.  OTOH, I don't know of great scientists and philosophers coming out of that program. We may be so completely wired to hold onto our ideas that if you take that away from us we just find something else to be a bitter clinger about. 

Which causes me to humorously note that Obama did have a point about bitter clingers.  Where he went wrong was in believing he doesn't do the same things just as much, or more.  We are all Bitter Clingers, with varying degrees of insight.

Leanne Morgan

 

And this

Old Friends

It is relatively easy to locate old friends online now, except those who share a name with too many others. But even when there are 20 Barbara Blanks, you can usually narrow it with a few keywords or checking for age and likely location. You can find news about them, even if it is now seven years old, or where they were living when their mother died in 2009, and in my generation, a FB page is likely. 

I was sleepless and had been thinking of some people I knew in technical theater at W&M, a man and a woman. They were in the rank of second tier of friends, that group of about 20 people after the first 10. So I tried to find them online - it took about 10 minutes each. Doug looked promising - he was not a believer when I knew him but had become a Presbyterian minister.  He has an autistic son adopted from Romania. I was looking for a way to communicate and then found on his FB his photos, many of them with strong political messages and then about a sermon he had just preached with the tagline "Along with extolling Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a morally evolved humanity and railing about the narcissistic greed of billionaires in space..." Pastor's with strong politics on their FB worry me - in any direction.  So I don't want to catch up with him after all.

The woman was similar.  She is married and looks marvelous, but her FB page has entry after entry of "No" symbols over guns and coathangers, plus a photo (looks like at W&M old campus) of women in Handmaid's Tale costumes.  So I don't want to catch up with her either.  It's who I have become at this point - if that's the most important thing about you that you have to lead with is signalling angry politics, then I'm not interested. 

 

Had I run into them at a reunion, the conversation might not have gone there - I am pretty good at steering people away right out of the gate before they have a chance to signal to me "Are you one of us?" as people do these days. I figure most of my college friends are liberals, and I'm still fine with talking to them. But it is simply a bad state of affairs that so many people need to get that billboard out there, knowing they are going to offend half the country but not caring, so great is their need to show what their tribe is. Because no, it's not that they care about these things so much that they are bravely risking criticism. People generally aren't even volunteering for advocacy for these things, let alone going out and doing anything for young women or people in dangerous areas. They care about the symbolism.  It's all for show and they have to put it on a billboard. 

Would I be just as irritated if they agreed with me more?  I can think of examples in my favor, that I really do dislike the display more than the particulars.  But I'll try to be alert in terms of what I actually do.  My memory from FB was that my quickest "Don't follows" were two conservatives, followed by about ten liberals.  But I may delude myself.

Training The Staff - Opioids Part Two

Update: Fresh example from today of people rejecting drug solutions. Third-to-last paragraph.

Three Shall Be The Number! 

When I worked on a neuropsychiatric behavioral unit, we would often have a behavior plan for the patient to discourage some behaviors and encourage others. The Behavior Plans were much beloved by some of the staff who felt that many misbehaviors needed to be taken in line, even with an air of punishment, rather than just waiting around for new medications to work or testing results to come back. The behavioral psychologist would chuckle that "three shall be the number" of behaviors we were targeting to change. We would have to discuss as a team what was key, usually assault or explosive threats or urinating inappropriately.  And then that would be it, for now. It got too confusing to try and include too many targeted behaviors. Long experience had taught him that keeping the focus on three behaviors was the ticket.  Once those were addressed, we could move on to other behaviors if necessary. This forced the staff to consider what is really important.

The system would fall apart quickly at first, unless it was with staff who had implemented many before. A patient might earn the right to go out on an unsupervised privilege for 30 minutes by following the program. But somehow it would not happen, because he would get in trouble for something else and the privilege be cancelled. When we discussed this, some irate worker from an off-shift would say "I just can't see letting Jeremy out on privileges right after he has called the nurse vile names." But vile names weren't on the list of three.  If we want to include it, we would have to take something else off.

Because the Behavior Plan was not so much designed to change the patient's behavior as the staff's behavior. One had to be careful where this was said, but it was true.  It was the staff which could not focus on what was important, and they needed to develop the discipline of sticking to the program. The patient would start getting it right as soon as we did. 

We would send the patient home after patiently reducing the target behaviors over six weeks and the pattern would repeat. A month later the community team would complain the behavior program "wasn't working."  We would have them in for a discussion and return of the patient, and it would gradually come out that they were no longer using the real behavior program, if indeed they had ever done so.  They had reverted to what they had been doing before, festooned with pieces of our plan. We would keep them talking long enough, and someone would eventually spill the real thinking. "We don't want Sam to stop hitting women because he's getting tokens, we want him to do it because he understands it's wrong!" This would be a developmentally disabled client they were talking about. You can make the necessary leap that the reasoning is equally bad when talking about drug addicts or schizophrenics. What is the behavior you want to change?  

The best reply was when the psychiatrist pulled out his wallet and took out some bills. "I work for these little green paper tokens every day.  So do you."

****

Something similar comes up in the treatment of sex offenders. Those acts really activate even professionals who are supposed to be dispassionate.  Behind closed doors I have heard nurses advocate for castration, or for the patient not to get the medical care or prefered diet or rights of communication and visitation that are required by law, because it just infuriates them to see such people enjoying themselves or being happy. They want them to have at least some suffering so that they'll KNOW. 

Or going in the other direction, because for some reason these are individuals that people just want to either punish or rescue, will be staff making impassioned pleas that the goal for Jimmy should be rehabilitation, that he learn not to even want to do these bad things anymore.  Learn empathy or something. Have lots of therapy.

But even offenders who have lost the use of their genitals somehow (don't ask) can still molest and traumatise victims. And rehabilitation is tough to measure - and we can get fooled by guys who are working 168 hours a week at fooling us while we are only working 40 to not be fooled. When we focus on rehabilitation, without noticing we start to think about giving them more freedom eventually.

No. The number one priority is the safety of the public.  If we could send them to islands forever, it wouldn't matter if they enjoyed it, if we sent them good scotch and lots of porn.  Not really, from a public health perspective. From a philosophy of valuing the individual we might want them to be improved, even redeemed, and that might even be "more important" in some cosmic sense. But if he's convicted and you are turning him over to me as a consequence, it's not really my job to weigh whether the salvation of one soul is worth the molestation of five hundred children.  My first job is to keep the public safe.  Not to punish or rescue the offender, because when those creep in, public safety goes to hell.  It just does. What is the real result you want? Learn to swallow the other stuff.

*****

I think of this whenever drug addiction interventions are discussed. What are the changes we want to see? Fewer overdoses? Less drug use in general? Do you mean smaller dosing or fewer people? A reduction in young people picking up the habit? Fewer people making money in the industry - legal or illegal? Perhaps what we want is there to be less crime, especially theft and intimidation, around the addiction. It is not merely an intellectual exercise to make our interventions more efficient - though it might do that. We find our focus on the few things that are key in order to reveal our mission creep. 

Because mission creep very often involves bad motives, of wanting to punish or rescue people.  So that they'll KNOW how much they have hurt others, and know how much we disapprove. Or that they will change inside in some hard-to-define way. When drug legislation is brought up, comment sections explode with mission creep, usually in the direction of punishment or rescue, though a half-dozen other things like cost or precedent can come in. We should punish the drug companies that make money on this. Why should this be my problem at all? It's their life. No, we don't want to give addicts needles (or a place to shoot up or methadone) because that will just encourage them.  If you subsidise something you get more of it, right?  You guys are just stupid.   

Update: Gateway Pundit, which has become a ridiculous site, is upset about harm reduction methods. Biden is handing out crack pipes across from a NYC preschool filled with 3-4 year old children. Presumably not Joe himself, and the children aren't walking to school from six blocks away unsupervised.

The principle of not rewarding bad behavior is a good one, because it has some effect and is philosophically appealing as well.  But it carries two huge blind spots. First, you might want to reward a bad behavior when the alternative is a terrible (even deadly) behavior, as here. Secondly, the more important part of the reward-punishment system is not punishing good behavior. Somehow we are willing to punish people making a poor attempt, just so our name isn't associated, our hands aren't dirtied by rewarding - one could say "helping" just as easily - problem behaviors. When you look at how you have actually learned trial-and-error, reward-and-punishment lesson, in your life or in the raising of your children, you will likely find that rewarding partial compliance, or at least not punishing it, has been what worked with you and your children.

I was a purist who didn't like the Harm Reduction methods at first.  They proved themselves to me with their successes in front of my eyes.

American Cartel - Opiods Part One

Grim linked to a WaPo piece about American Cartel, an expose of pharmaceutical company corruption, enabled by politicians and corruption, and its effect on the opioid crisis

I asked my friend Tim McMahan-King, author of Addition Nation to comment. You have been introduced to him here more than a few times before. He dashed off some thoughts immediately, which I pass along, largely unedited. He spent more time on related questions, but did offer some thoughts based on the article. We exchanged a couple more emails, and I will likely pass one of those along as well.  The section of video he links to with Jeffrey A Singer of Cato Institute in a debate sponsored by Reason is quite good. 

This spurred further thinking of mine on treatment and punishment, which I will put up shortly in a Part Two.  There will likely be a Part Three in a day or so. 

Tim welcomes your comments.

I haven't read the book but if I do I will update my thoughts. 

But, based on this article I have thoughts. And, these are all things I've been mulling over with Bethany... so you might be getting a longer email than you bargained for. 

Pharmaceutical companies trying to up profits while mocking people using their products checks out. 

DC politicians listening to lobbyists for powerful corporations and failing to do basic regulatory due diligence checks out. 

It doesn't take much for me to believe bad things about large corporations or the corrupt influence of big money lobbyists.

What doesn't check out is the implied message that the overdose crisis is "big pharmas" fault. Or, that if DEA regulators were able to stop the flow of prescription pain meds back in 2016, we'd have fewer overdose deaths today. 

Opioid prescribing peaked in 2012. Diverted prescription opioids became a lot more expensive and so a lot of users shifted to illicit opioids. 

There have been some methodological changes in how the CDC has tracked the percentage of the population with an opioid use disorder but we don't actually have a lot of reason to believe that the percentage of the population addicted to opioids has changed that much since at least 2002. 

The three big driving factors for overdose are the number of people who use, how often they use, and the likelihood of harm in any given use. The two things that have shifted the most is the frequency of use and potential harm per use. 

I'm painting with some broad strokes but... you can pop a pain pill 2-3 times a day or so and function fairly normally. Crush and snort those pills and now your life gets more complicated as the highs are more intense and you need to use them more often. 

Switch to IV heroin and things get even harder. You aren't always sure what the dosage is or if there are adulterants. But, at least the high last 6-8 hours so you can get through a work day without bad withdrawal. Or, you can spend the night at a shelter and not use while you are there. 

But, drug traffickers figure out that you can smuggle illicit fentanyl a whole lot easier and make a whole lot more money. Fentanyl is a shorter-acting  and withdrawal kicks in around 4 hours in. Now, you can't go to work without shooting up during the day and you can spend the night in a shelter without using or going into withdrawal. 

So, our population of opioid users hasn't grown, it's possible it's even gone down. But, of that population of opioid users, their frequency of use has gone up increasing the chaos in their lives and the likelihood of them being unemployed and on the streets. Likelihood of dying goes up because dosing is even harder for fentanyl and the frequency of use is higher. 

The danger of the drug supply is tragically on display with teen overdoses. Since the pandemic began, teen drug use has plummeted. Teens tend to get their drugs from each other and at parties, lockdowns stop the parties and fewer teens have access to drugs. BUT, teen overdoses have more than doubled in two years. Drug traffickers aren't very good at dosing and mixing and so you can have a batch of 1,000 fake pills and 100 of them are weak and 100 of them could have a lethal dose. 

Here is an interesting debate hosted by the folks at Reason. I've linked to the portion where the Cato Institute guy, Jeff Singer, goes over addiction rates and shows they aren't correlated with overdose rates. 

I think he overstates his case but he is an important antithesis to some of the dominant narratives. 

All that to say is that I won't be surprised if it is some good reporting on bad people who did bad things. But, the analysis on what is driving the overdose crisis will be way off.

Language Signalling

I listened to a woman use the construction latinx in public setting. It was used entirely in passing, as people from Latin America were not the topic of discussion, nor was there any focus on how one might understand new ways of addressing people or showing sensitivity.  It seemed automatic. There was no particular hectoring tone about it, though I believe that is always the subtext when using a cultural phrasing that the group itself is indifferent or even hostile too, as is true here.  At least, as of a couple of years ago. The fashion among Hispanics may be changing for all I know. Native Americans did not used to care a whit about some mascots and names of sports teams, or were even much in favor of their group being commemorated locally in a team name. Those poll numbers have changed over time, proving that astroturfing can work, I suppose. I am in favor of people changing their own language to express some cultural idea. I dislike it being enforced on others who do not share the idea, but are now under pressure to like it.

Yet it occurred to me that the communication was not so much a quiet assertion that "this is the correct term, and you should use it too," as a class signaler of "I have been connected to a graduate school in one of a related range of subjects (social science, education, politics, some of the arts and humanities) in the last decade or identify strongly with that group." It has a sermon in it, but even more of a brag. I doubt very much the woman perceives this about herself - though she is a linguist and should be alert to layers of meaning.  But it is not an expression that is preferred by Americans with recent ancestry in Latin America in general, just the certain ones.  The better ones, who know more about how people should behave. That weakens the claim that "this is a usage that keeps us on the path to less prejudice and greater respect." Therefore, an additional signalling is likely. "I am speaking the code of a particular group, like a bird chirping out its territory."

It is not a bait-and-switch or motte-and-bailey or any other specific example of pretending to mean one thing while meaning another, it is just another lack of personal insight.

Pierre The Pelican

 The original Pierre, mascot for the New Orleans Pelicans in 2013.  He was so creepy, looking half like a horror movie clown, that there were complaints and they regrouped.

They cooked up this whole story about an injury at the All-Star game and even had him showing up with his beak wrapped in bandages.

That a beak could grow like this is implausible even in the complete fantasyland of sports mascots.  OTOH, realism is irrelevant.  Entertainment and sales of merch are key. This is the current mascot.

Pelicans in folklore are goofy, gooney birds that one thinks must fish passively, like herons wading in shallow water looking for frogs. Pelicans are in fact pretty intimidating, and despite the completely wrong beak, the first Pierre is probably closer to the truth.

Update: Cambias points out the other mascot, maybe even creepier

Excess Mortality

Lyman Stone has been one of my sources for the pandemic. "From the perspective of excess mortality, the pandemic in the United States seems to finally truly be over."

Sunny Afternoon

Remember that tax rates were upwards of 90% if you were in the upper brackets in those days, so the irony of having a yacht but also being squeezed was quite real for the young bands from the poorer classes who suddenly came into money in the 60s.  See also the Beatles' "Tax Man." They hadn't learned how to shelter that, as the rich had long ago. Though things had gone steadily downhill for inherited wealth over the previous century as well.  PG Wodehouse and Downton Abbey capture the end of an era.

 

 

As here, the dancers, especially the teenage ones, were more in the background at first, though there were professional dancers brought in some weeks. The fan mail brought in all-girl troupes every week, of which the Scottish pop-music singer Lulu said "They mostly wore white boots to the knee and short skirts and the camera would go up the skirt and it was all very risqué." There was more to come, as the teenage "regular kid" dancers were increasingly female, and the camera angles and knickers became part of their show in the 1970s as well. Oh tempora, o mores! As I go through binges of 60s-70s music videos I thought I had detected that change over time, and my reading today confirms it.  I suspect American Bandstand might show something similar if someone were to check it out.

Mandatory Voting

Update: As a counterpoint to both this point and my "Australians" post, Jonathan pushes along this link to an essay by Helen Dale that suggests the good Australian things may not be transferable, and also may come only as a package deal with some things Americans would very much not like. Still, I would suggest that pieces might be able to be pulled out and played with.  there's nothing that makes them obviously inseparable.

***

My impulse has always been to regard just about anything mandatory as suspect, with exceptions. I am also one who believes that voting should cost you a little effort, to filter out some of people who pay no attention and are just voting their feelings and last-second impressions. I have kiddingly said that they should try to make it actively difficult to vote.  It did occur to me that the extension of that idea would be that only fanatics would be voting so...maybe not such a good idea after all.

So I just reflexively thought mandatory voting was a bad idea, a feel-good measure so that people can believe they have involved everyone. But listening to Claire Lehmann make a case for doing that, as Australia does, has challenged my thinking on this. I will condense her thinking, hopefully accurately. Because everyone votes, people are more likely to trust that the election is the majority opinion, and more likely to just get on with life. Given the rancor every four years since 2000, it isn't likely going away with everyday measures. Politicians campaign less and are less concerned with "firing up the base" to drive turnout, so positions are more moderate and expressed less angrily.* This reduces the incentive for paying for votes and repurposing ballots in shady fashion. Getting a ride to the polls is not left to local parties with buses and vans, which, as we all know, could be fairly easily driven to another district instead without it being easily noticed. **That struck me as a real plus. Though voting is required, the penalties are not severe.  She missed a local election and was fined $20, which she hasn't gotten around to paying yet.  She will, but she doubts they will come after her if she doesn't because of the expense. Because voting is mandatory there are clearer updated records and it is easy to accomplish.  There aren't long lines and waits because people know what to expect every election. 

And if you are really irritated at being made to show up, the protest of leaving it blank, writing in one name on a single race, or even spoiling the ballot is certainly possible. A quiet habit of people leaving races that appall them blank, once it becomes commonplace, becomes a message of its own over time. 

Relatedly, "douglas" posting at Grim's put up a video about implementing the electoral college for the states as well as federal elections.  I find the tone of the video irritating, but if you just stick with the idea itself it's worth considering.  

In both cases we are not going to see anything done on a national level, but there might be some possibility at the state level.  Places that already have a lot of internal unity - Vermont, Utah, Hawaii, Alaska - might give either experiment a run.

*This may be one of those cart-and-horse situations I referenced in my last post on Australians. It may seem to them that their electoral system makes them calmer and more moderate, but their overall fifth-cousin similarity may be what does that. 

**It eliminates another vulnerability as well. I still think it is possible that Kerry stole Wisconsin in 2004, and one of the tactics was slashing tires the night before on the Republican vans for picking up Milwaukee voters to bring to the polls. There is also an intimidation factor for future reference among the vulnerable by doing things like that.

Skepticism

I have long described myself as suspicious of all authority, but listening to one very observant and clever person today, perhaps that is not so. At the moment I am distressed by much of what I see on the Identity Politics side and I am 75% on the traditional side in the very public Culture Wars.  The short version is that I am not so much in favor of the traditions of 50-100 years ago as those farther back. I am not skeptical about science and the scientific method, but I am skeptical about scientists, particularly when they move off their specialty and start talking politics. 

I should rethink the whole generalisation.

Australians

Listening to Razib's interview with Claire Lehmann*, an Australian who edits Quillette has set me down some familiar tracks.  I am arguing with her in my head at a lot of places, yet I recommend it anyway. She has an interesting comparison between the extremity of two values, equality and liberty, that are shared between the two cultures but not in the same way. For the record, I think she gets America partly right - better than most - and I appreciated hearing her take on equality. 

She does get the idea of benign socialism backwards, confusing the cart and the horse, but that seems to be common to Scandinavians, NW Europe, and even Canada (though less so), so it's unsurprising. She sees the country as more relaxed and trusting because they have more redistribution. No, people will tolerate a lot more redistribution when everyone looks like second cousins (and actually are fifth cousins) and are therefore more relaxed and trusting. I think this is just too uncomfortable for those cultures to admit, that their generosity and concern for "everyone" does not result from their superior moral instincts, but from their primitive ethnic recognitions. This has become a Hyde Park soapbox of mine over the years. It applies to their supposed tolerance as well.  Hello?  We actually have different races, religions, and ethnic groups here, including many who just got here. Not many countries are even playing in America's league on this one. Only recently has Australia started fielding immigrants from China, India, Philippines, and Vietnam. About 10% of the total. Australia is UK-descended. Rant over. 

No, not quite over.  The different size of places also gives them a false picture of the number of terrible events that happen in America versus their own country.  The US is 13x the population of Australia, so bad things of all description that happen to them once a year happen to us once a month.  It not only affects their perception, it affects ours. We think we are way more dangerous also.  Okay, rant really over now.

But back to the general ideas of liberty and equality.  I had heard long ago that in Australia people are very concerned with people not putting themselves above others. If you are a rich CEO you are still expected to mix with the locals and have a Foster's (or whatever that state's favorite beer is).  No side, as the English would say. The Scandinavians, especially the Swedes, also have this attitude, but I don't know if it's quite the same thing.  Someone with more international experience with me might want to weigh in on that. Americans approve of this idea, we like it greatly.  But we are less extreme in it.  If rich people want to hang out together instead of with us and drink more expensive wines** we mostly shrug, disapproving only mildly. We have our reverse snobbery down pat and don't get too exercised. So we get it, but we think maybe they take it too far, especially when they look at us with annoyance because we don't fully share it.  It bothers them that America has this kind of separation and inequality in attitude.  Why do we put up with it? 

One could reverse the picture on ideas of liberty.  Some Americans went ballistic in accusation against the Australians for have something like concentration camps over Covid quarantine. To Australians, if you wanted to come into their country you had to quarantine for fourteen days, and no, they weren't going to take your word for it. They had reasonably comfortable facilities you had to go to. Don't like it?  don't come. Then in the underpopulated areas (40% of the population is in the SE corner) there aren't many hospitals.  People from out on the periphery who had been exposed were helped to similar facilities.  After two weeks they went home. I don't know the level of pressure applied, but it wasn't forced at gunpoint. (Some) Americans get angry at Australians for not objecting to this infringement on liberty. Well, maybe we do get a little crazy on the topic.  We do have people who insist that if you don't have autonomy you don't have anything, that all your freedoms are suddenly in jeopardy, whether slowly or quickly. 

But what interested me about all this - yes I have taken a long introductory road to talk about something more original - is contemplating how much of this comes from founder effects.  Three of the four British waves of settlement to America - which resulted in our government, laws, and a lot of our public culture, even if other groups contributed greatly to everything else that make up America - were already egalitarian. Tidewater Virginia (and much of Maryland, South Carolina) was hierarchical, but the other groups weren't. This was not so in Europe, nor would it be for a long time. By the time of the French Revolution egalite, liberte, and fraternite may have been in the air, but the egalite part was already different in America. We weredn't bothering about that as much because we already had it, at least in comparison to Europe. The reader will notice the great exception to this was slavery, which even though it was mostly in the regions settled on hierarchical terms, was tolerated everywhere on American soil. It's a pretty solid exception to liberte and fraternite also. 

Still, people have always been capable of going about their daily lives swallowing camels, saying "well, other than that..." and the American ideals of the time focused on liberty in not only the Declaration and Constitution, but all the supporting material. Fraternity, however conceived (there were a few versions in Europe), was also of lesser importance here.  If you were unhappy you could move, and people did. We did not have any official nobility in the states, and that alone separated us from Europe on the matter. The defensiveness with which Australians and Scandinavians adopted equality may stem from their (comparatively) more recent experience of it being a real thing

Australians, on the other hand, were founded as a penal colony and over 200,000 came over the first 80 years in that fashion. Other kinds of settlers came as well, but it was not just the first batch or two of Australians who were felons (about two-thirds were repeat offender thieves), but a constant resupply. The word "liberty" had a different meaning there.  One might think that liberty would then be of outrageous importance in their mind, but perspective is needed.  To be no longer serving a sentence and being allowed to own land for farming or grazing would seem like quite hearty dose of freedom to them. The issue in question after the first few decades was what status those ex-convicts should have. In fits and starts, the Australians decided on full rights and full citizenship. As an unplanned consequence, the fact that only 15% of the convicts were women meant that women had more choices and opportunities than elsewhere.  They married more prosperous (usually older) men, were allowed into professions more readily, and did not face the dangers of abandonment and mistreatment as much. They were in the Commonwealth and there was still nobility on the fringes of experience, but there was not slavery, and having come from officially worse status was an enormous part of founding Australia society. Equality was an open question, fraternity somewhat automatic, and the importance of liberty was less pressing because it was comparative.

Australian wealth was based on mining and agriculture, not manufacturing, complicated trade, collecting rents from inherited property, entertainment, or finance.  I suspect that has a great deal to do with its equality focus as well, though I haven't thought about it at length.

Americans tolerated hierarchy more, because after Abolition, it was unofficial.  It might be on based on fame, wealth, education or a half-dozen other measures, but it was unenforceable, based on perception (plus leveraged advantages of power, sure).

*I can get to the transcript at that link because I am a subscriber.  I don't know if you can as well.  Probably not, but give it a try, those of you who don't listen to podcasts much.

**All wines are more expensive than what I drink

The Reality of Prostitution

A link to Psyche from Rob Henderson's newsletter, The Reality of Prostitution is Not Complex.  It Is Simple, by Rachel Moran. 

While it is fashionable for some female academics, journalists and social commentators to declare the validity of prostitution as employment and to endorse and support this fiction in their books, articles and opinion columns, I note that they resolutely will not practise what they preach. They are not usually willing to have their own bodies used to prove their point. What’s always been particularly galling to me about socially privileged upper middle-class women who popularise these views is that, just like Marie Antoinette before them, they are so far removed from the experience that they cannot relate to it even at a conceptual level. That they are handsomely remunerated to opine on what’s good enough for desperate women is just the spit and polish on the insult.

*****

Also from the newsletter, which has been connecting me to things I would not ordinarily run across:

"Although the presence of a non-depressed friend significantly reduced your chances of feeling depressed, a depressed friend was six times more likely to make you depressed than a happy friend was to make you happy." Robin Dunbar Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships

Claiming Egypt

Historians trying to fluff up African influence on Classical Mediterranean civilisations, and thus on Western Civ in general, have asserted for years that Ancient Egyptians were black and their accomplishments based on Nubian and sub-Saharan knowledge.  This is still widely accepted in some academic circles, and was even the subject of an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this year. Heather MacDonald at City Journal was not impressed.

Europeans, or at least the British tabloid the Independent, also like the idea that they are more rightfully descended from the Ancient Egyptians than even the modern Egyptians are. "Ancient Egyptians more closely related to Europeans than modern Egyptians, scientists claim." The paper the breathless headline was based on seems to be actually pretty good, but says just about the opposite.

The quick summary is No and No. Over at Unsupervised learning, Razib goes into the recent genetic evidence, which supports neither proposition in the least. The closest group to ancient Egyptians genetically is (wait for it) modern Egyptians. As many other places in the world show significant population replacement, that level of stability is actually unusual.  The myth of closeness to modern European blood comes from the addition of sub-Saharan genesto Egypt  since ancient times, most likely from the constant stream of slaves brought in over the last millennium, and slave/soldiers from West Asia as well. Modern Egyptians have at least 20% sub-Saharan admixture on average and a little more West Asian, where the ancient Egyptians had "none" and "little". Therefore, the reasoning goes, because the Europeans also have very little, they must be more closely related to those old advanced civilisations than the current inhabitants. There are a few problems with the reasoning, but the simplest form is "they were related to the older Europeans who are mostly gone from the genetic record now." To paraphrase Wally from Dilbert, "Those were other Europeans." The inland Sardinians are about the only remnants of those.  Probably the Basques as well.

And from that paragraph you can see how they couldn't have been black, either. They are themselves.

Rich Nephew

The Department of State's new Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption is Rich Nephew. Not from the Bee. 

From the comments on the tweet I got this from, that is known as an aptonym, such as a colonial dentist named Dr. Toothaker up here.

After Roe

What next?  I have been somewhat optimistic, that we will have a few years, perhaps a decade, of wrangling at the state level about where the lines should be drawn.  I will predict anger, extremist rhetoric, and accusations of bad faith on both sides, but would have said in the end it will come down to a collection of uneasy truces. I was basing this on the everyday people on both sides that I know who are not extreme in nature, however strongly they feel about most issues. I often tend to just write off advocates as fundraisers and speechifiers, useful for what they accomplish, but not representative of the views of their movements as a whole.

Sometimes I'm wrong about that, and this may be one of those times.  David French's essay over at The Dispatch "Roe is Reversed and the Right Isn't Ready" suggests my estimation of the pro-life temperature may not be as good as I thought.  He would know far better than I. He is seeing an amount of anger, extremism, and willingness to be punitive than I see in real life or where I visit online.  Yet I tend to hang out with reasonable people as much as possible, so that may not be a good sample.

Slight change of topic: He relates the arguments to others from the right recently, including vaccine avoidance and resistance to even such minor inconveniences as masking. He quotes a Brown School of Public Health estimate that being under-vaccinated cost us over 300,000 deaths. You are welcome to have a go at where the study is wrong, and public health educators do tend strongly to claims of how much good intervention will do. But still, it's a big number, even if you cut it down to size, yet we still have people on conservative sites insisting that the vaccines killed more people and refusing all information they don't like.

If we want to insist that some things are worth the risk - a sentiment I would generally agree with - we at least have to be honest about what the risks actually are, in number of pregnancies not terminated, elderly people exposed to disease, immigrants entering illegally, all of it.

Odd Diet Update

Graph Paper Diaries so seldom updates that it moves to the bottom of the sidebar quickly, so I usually highlight every new post. This one is about obesity research, and some of the odd things that actually might prove to be partial solutions. I stress partial solutions, as there is increasing evidence that different things work for different people, and things that affect digestion - as opposed to motivation or even calories in, calories out - keep rising to the top.  We are exposed to novel chemicals (lithium may affect some.  those who take it as a medicine often have weight gain), and they do not have predictable effects on us. We eat differently than our ancestors in a hundred ways, and the overall impression I have of the obesity increases is of a system that is hitting the margins of its effectiveness, breaking down in different places for different folks. Or more likely, no longer working efficiently in one main way in an individual plus 3-4 other ways of smaller effect. 

How food is prepared and gut biomes seem to be showing up in the research in odd ways. If you are eating mostly healthy and encouraging a good set of bacteria, but have one or two foods that most people can tolerate but have a bad effect on your particular digestion (alcohol, sugar, a particular grain), they tear it all down again.  Treading water. Unless we have real discomfort or really want to be rid of the weight, we aren't going to do a hundred controlled experiments on ourselves. However, we are usually willing to take a flyer on something that works for a good percentage of people.  It's just discouraging that there ain't nothing out there that seems to work on 50% of us.

I will note again that there is a slow climb in obesity throughout the 20th C, consonant with more food availability.  Then in 1980, the graph goes more sharply upward, and in unpredictable ways.  Also, anorexia increases at the same time, at least possibly a paradoxical effect that we see with other chemical exposures such as medicines. Does benadryl make you jittery or sleepy? For most people it's sleepy, but it could be either. Or neither or both. 

So the same rules apply as on any controversial science, of not jumping to either conclusion too quickly.  I'm increasing resistant starches myself, which works for some people.

He's So Unusual

 

We went to see "Anything Goes" at the Seacoast Repertory - a very good production on a small thrust stage with steep seating. They played this song which I had not heard before in the wait time before the curtain. 

I stage managed the show over fifty years ago, and some of the music I had not heard since then.  There are a variety of librettos and plots, which always worries me, because we tend to prefer what we first hear as the "correct" version. The lyrics were quite similar, the choice of songs moderately so, and the plot quite divergent from what I knew. Characters in, characters out; scenes in, scenes out. Still, the choreography and staging in a small space was excellent, the singing very solid, the costumes (except for the wigs) and sets quite remarkable for small budget. The lighting wasn't great. 

Maybe i can stand to go back to the theater again after all.

March 2013

An old post from 2013 was appropriate to a discussion over at Grim's, so I linked to it in the comments there.  As often happens when I scan the titles of a batch of older posts, I read some, and think to myself "That deserves to be said again." I looked at the SPLC's list of hate groups back then. The organisation was very concerned that neo-nazis were on the rise since the election of Obama. So I looked at what they said about NH in specific.

Hate Groups 

"I can't find any connection of the group to NH, but there must be something, otherwise no one would have mentioned it.  Maybe they're having membership problems since Zach quit in 2009 when his wife had a baby, Stephan moved to Florida, and the knuckleheaded brothers Hans and Lou joined the military. And oh yeah, Bill is doing time for having too much oxycontin out in the barn."