Gun Control Again

Just to repeat myself, as I do about every six months. The brouhaha in Tennessee looks different when you know the real story about gun control.  To be clear, I support the right of people to protest and say any damn fool thing about gun restricting they want even if they are legislators and inciting crowds. (Though that may have some limits. It's hard to believe people are that concerned about public safety when... never mind.  You either understand this or you don't.)

There is zero evidence that the gun legislation they want to enact does anything worthwhile whatsoever. Zero. When you tell people that - and I have heard psychologists, and social workers, and whatever interact with this data time and time again, for decades - they don't believe you.  They think whatever real-world data you are citing must be just some isolated statistic, some anomaly, and you don't really understand that they are talking about if we could just make it harder for criminals...if we could just make people stop and think for a day or two...if America could just get over its love-affair with guns...all of this would FINALLY start going away. I will simply state again that none of the "common sense gun legislation" proposals actually are commonsensical. What they mean, in the end, is that they want to restrict a right for no reason whatsoever, just feelz. 

So I hope you understand, just a bit, why the gun rights people are a little touchy, maybe even too touchy on the subject.  They believe you aren't really thinking about the issue and they don't trust you. Further note, as I always say: I am not a gun owner.  I have no dog in this fight except reason.

Primary

 The Republican Nomination is not supposed to be an award for the person most badly-treated by the Democrats.

Disease Resistance

After a few more studies that have piled up in my inbox that have to do with mixing of populations, let me propose a general rule.  When one population has pretty much outcompeted another, so that there are no more Denisovans/Neandertals/Western Hunter-Gatherers or most of the high-altitude populations but their markers keep showing up at rates of 5% or so, this is nearly always because of disease - malaria, local viruses in Europe or South America - or multiple responses to single environmental pressures like altitude or cold.

So when you see science stories about "they're gone now, but they left some genes behind," those are often going to be disease resistance. These days anthropologists, and especially science writers are going to hit hard on the fact that you are a racist person for not recognising that you have these genes in you, but that is "just the bull elephant trumpeting to the herd," as Garrison Keillor said years ago. They have to say that.

Update:  Oh right.  And they are also obligated to point out that these Others had more complicated cultures, tool sets, diets, economies, and satellite dishes than you thought, you racist, because you likely still thought that "Indians" say "How, paleface."

Land Snails

I love this about eating the land snails. "Humankind only survived by eating stuff like this without regard to whether it was good for the snails, but we hope to protect a maybe similar species now by drawing attention to them."

What Did You Do? - Part One

I have been thinking about memory a great deal, including the limitations and inaccuracies. The simplest aspects I came across early. I gradually absorbed the reality that I remembered things much better than other people.  All kinds of things: school quiz items, stray facts in books, backs of cereal boxes, events that had happened, people I had not seen in years.Yet at no time did I think I was at some magical or unearthly level.  I would read about those children who could remember long strings of digits or watch those performers on TV who could glance at a half-dozen one-dollar bills for a second each and then add them all up and be as amazed as anyone, or even more. I also saw that while it was very often associated with high intelligence, there were exceptions in both directions - other smart kids who had things fade from memory quickly, or kids who were not notably academic who remembered past events at my level or better.

Games and puzzles provided dramatic illustrations. We had games in fifth grade that the teacher discontinued because I always won and it was no fun for everyone else. Other games, and legitimately cognitive/academic ones, I was only mildly good at, and that mostly from compensating for lack of the needed skill bringing in others. A few were just opaque to me. 12? -2i? x to the 4th? Bolivia?

It took a long time for me to notice that it was often the types of information. Some had an ability to remember many types of things, others mostly remembered events or people. There were kids at camp who remembered what counselors and campers had been in every cabin four years ago, and who had won awards that year. There were girls who learned and knew song lyrics - and they were always spot on for the tunes as well. I noticed things that seemed different about my own memory first, then tried to spot others and develop theories about it. I could do mental arithmetic almost automatically if it was auditory, and could recognise people by their movement from yards away, even years later. But I would sometimes freeze up with numbers on a page if someone else had written them or would stare straight into the face of a person I knew well and be unsure who they were even though I was sure I knew them.

In retrospect, becoming a research psychologist studying memory is one of the several professions I missed going for. When people are spinning theories, it is an advantage to know that some explanations cannot be universal because you yourself, or one of your relatives or closest friends is an exception, and also that some unlikely things are possible, because you have examples ready to hand.

A whole new world up for me when I started working on psych units. I found patients who remembered remote events in startling detail (usually manic at the time), and others who reported events so incorrectly, so quickly that the automatic assumption was that they had to be lying. I later encountered a few who would restructure memories within minutes. To not recall what has just been said to you is a bit of a surprise, but we all do it via inattention. But to remember it, but change or even reverse its meaning was amazing to me.  Frankly, it still is.  I intellectually know that such things occur, and I have seen it, but it still seems just impossible. It is most frequent when the emotional content overwhelms the intellectual so completely that it overrules it. "I wasn't really suicidal this morning, I just said that because I wanted attention." No, you actually tried to hang yourself and might have succeeded if you hadn't been on (clandestine, for exactly that reason) 15-minute checks. But now your boyfriend is here by surprise and you want to have unsupervised visits. And they are absolutely serious and honest. They uncertainly acknowledge that there are still marks on their neck, but that is somehow...unimportant...and we should believe them that they are safe.  How can we not take their word for it?

Hmm. I haven't even gotten going yet and this is already 5.5 paragraphs long.  I had better go back and enter "Part One" in the title and let people get started on the issue in general before coming back to finish this.

Opposite Effect

As one goes through the little room to hang up jackets on the way to the weight room at the Y, there is a little sign in gentle script "You Are Worthy. You Are Beautiful. You Are Enough." Really?  All of us?  Are you sure?  How do you know this - you've never even met me! Does anyone look at that and suddenly think "Oh yes! I AM beautiful! Thank you for reminding me, I so much needed to hear that!" I wrote about the uselessness of generic encouragement a few posts ago, but I think this is even a little worse than that.

Clearly, they mean well.  They want to improve your self-esteem today or something.  It is the sort of thing that the people who put up these little signs say when they are leading your exercise class. (My wife is getting into online walking and balance classes, so I have these cheery, chirpy voices in the background a fair bit these day. They're fine. Nice ladies.) Guys in gyms have a different litany of encouragement, with more football coach/drill officer to it. "YOU CAN DO THIS SAMUEL! PUSH IT!" Those are both better, I think, because they are tied to something you are doing this specific moment. The words themselves are not that important, it is the timing of the delivery. 

But you don't get that credit when it's on the wall above the light switch. Upon further review, these are statements of what they think you should believe about yourself. They are quite convinced that this mindless positive chat would be helpful to you if you kept saying it to yourself, so they are prompting that. It is a mild version of that theology of positive confession, of not letting bad thoughts even enter your mind.  Turn them away at the door! Don't invite the vampire over the threshold! 

As such, it's a sermonette. And not a very good one.

Perhaps I am overthinking this.

Wind

Windy today. Wind is both invigorating and sleep-inducing.  Odd, that. 

Long before "Hamilton," I had a patient who became a friend in the early 80s who had written a play about Alexander that used lots of wind images - he was quite proud of the idea of associating Hamilton with wind. That seems like something that could be better achieved in a movie than a drama, I think.  The play was never produced, and when I saw him at the hospital again forty years later, as a geriatric patient this time, he marveled that I had remembered it. No, the play had never been produced, he sighed. He wondered if it were actually any good after all.  I hadn't read it and couldn't help him there. 

All of this is only mildly interested and somewhat poignant, except that in his two months at the hospital I re-established enough rapport with him that I was able to ask if it was his notoriety that prevented people from considering the play on its merits. He seemed a bit surprised.  He took my point immediately and thought perhaps it was true. It seemed to have never occurred to him that the fact that he had murdered his roommate a few years later might have caused his work to never be viewed in a fully objective fashion.

This is an amazing thing about memory and insight, isn't it? Was this idea not part of his thinking because of his illness, because of the passage of time (he might have know this in the late 80s and since forgotten it, after all), or some theory of artistic expression and its independence from the creator that completely dominated his thinking?  Likely none of these things in isolation, but in some combination.

For me, this was likely sparked by the book club (I got an invite from a frequent commenter here) reading of Intellectuals by Paul Johnson and the real-life backgrounds of some major influencers of modern thought - in this case Percy Bysshe Shelley most prominently. I knew people in the theater at college who thought they had especial license for misbehavior because they were artists. Yet I think we have to apply some discount for the fact that they were also 20 years old. Few of us were at our best then. Though these seem to be people who persisted in their entitlement for decades following.

As this is occurring in the context of me thinking about memory, insight, and describing my career, I wonder if it is possible for me to rank the professions I have known in order of their level of entitlement? I may or may not have a go at that. I have no fear of insulting my friends with that one.  If you come from one of those professions I'm sure you have more examples than I do, and sigh deeply at that.

SCOTUS

 Remember that we make them more partisan than they are, because we want them to be that way.

It's on us.

Unwritten Codes

 We know there are American equivalents, but I only intuit a fraction of them. When my mother remarried, we moved into a borderland of upper middle class who had some generational connection to the Saltwater Life but were not quite there. My mother and stepfather naturally took to rising and by the time the Official Preppy Handbook came out in 1980 they looked much like the illustrations for their generation. They got invited by friends in Ogunquit and Bar Harbor and Bald Peak and generally moved into some nearer borderland. They pursued no further, because they actually liked the friends they liked and the activities they found fun. Yes, the Wayland-Weston Curling Club was prestigious and they went to bahnspiels in Canada and Scotland, but they also actually enjoyed the sport and felt no need to join the slightly higher-placed clubs. Natural rather than driven elites, but still way out of my range. My disdain always showed, even when it was mixed with envy, and eventually, I could no longer have ever found my way in. 

If you don't know, you don't know. And usually, I don't.

When colleges get rid of standardised tests, they increase the power of the unwritten rules. People throw this at them, as if this is news to their admissions offices and must be curtailed. Those offices have long known this, and have long since switched to Plan B. You just don't know it yet, because there are still enough exceptions that it's not easily discovered.

Retraction

I was very excited about a 2017 book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and praised it here. 

I just started Alexey Guzey's takedown of the book Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled With Scientific and Factual Errors, Sorry if you wasted money or effort on my account. The comments suggest weaknesses in the criticism and support Walker, including claims that Walker clarifies some of these things himself in later chapters. I think Guzey still has some very solid stuff here.

Lying

Bird Dog over at Maggie's passes along this study about lying. It is a topic I am quite interested in if it's got real data. In my field were usually more concerned with whose story was accurate, rather than who is telling the truth and who is lying. This is because some of the stories came from the mentally ill, who were psychotic or emotionally biased so strongly as to make their stories unreliable, but not necessarily lying. Some were lying.  So were some of the families providing us with information or occasionally, even the agencies involved. But mostly it was different slants, perspectives, and desires, which over time bent the information. It was best to be aware of the possibility of lying, but attribute variances in stories to other causes.

Still, there were times when it was important, or times when we simply learned that someone was lying, even though we had not sought the info. I heard many people - I even had to go to inservices - tell me with great confidence that they knew how to detect lying.  Some would say that they just had an intuitive goof feel for this, others that they had been trained. I figured there was probably some training out there that was founded on real information, but because so much of what I heard was pretty obviously bogus I just tuned it all out. Maybe the people in the spy business had some real info, but law enforcement certainly didn't, and teachers and social workers had great confidence but poor results as well. 

I had an advantage because I sometimes had outside information, even information from years ago, at my fingertips, so I didn't need to try and guess whether someone was lying. But this allowed me to evaluate the people claiming to detect lies as well. "He's claiming to have $4M, but when I asked him what his investments were he wouldn't tell me." Well, he lives in a house worth $2.3M and his mother says he owns it. (He might think what his investments are are none of your business, too.) I would doubt everyone but not disbelieve anyone. If someone came in claiming to have been abused I would consider even some unlikely scenarios possible, because I had seen them be true.  But I also thought this might be calculated, because I had seen that as well. 

Heck, I sometimes have something come out of my mouth and wonder if I am still sure about it, and certainly don't trust my own motives. But I have also said some unbelievable things that were in fact true. Including about my motives. I think.

There was often a focus on eyes, or hands, or posture. I'm not saying that all of these are not true.  I don't know and don't care.  I do know that some of them are, and don't know who to trust, so I trust no one. There is a text evaluation training that purports to detect lying, and some law-enforcement communities swear by it. I thought I had posted on it about five years ago but can't find it. I think I read about it in National Review. Police detectives will try to use it in court if the defense attorney isn't savvy. It has no independent supporting verification behind it.  None. I recall one aspect was red-flagging people using synonyms instead of the same words over and over again in longer written statements. This meant they were lying. Well, some of us were taught that this was just better writing and have been doing it automatically since oh, fifth grade or something. It's ludicrous.

I have heard people claim that if people say too much it's a sign of lying. Ah. So you don't like people who talk too much. Thanks a bunch. Sorry if the truth hurts. I even know a researcher whose work sometimes suggests this, even though the actual papers only identify something consistent with the above - people who put in a lot of vaguer verbiage but are short on specific details in their ongoing reports are more likely to be cooking the books. (The experimental evidence for that limited proposition looked pretty good, and seems quite believable.  But it's not the same thing as marking people down for mere quantity.  Quantity is apparently good in some settings.)

I did have one red-flag that I developed over years, and would say it to teams I worked with behind closed doors.  I would never use it in court or in a report, and with all such strictly observational data, someone might come along next week with a better-evidenced theory that incorporates it. You may not have much cause to use it, and remember, there's no research behind this but I found it a good red flag. When people are formulating an answer, they will sometimes raise their eyes slightly and look at the wall/horizon, not directly at you. Observing my own mind when I do this, I concluded that they are choosing among some alternatives of what to say. How should I put this? What tack should I take? Should I mention my sister's involvement or not? Nothing wrong with that. As their eyes drifted higher they seemed to be considering more possibilities, and my internal observation seemed consonant with this. Man! I have no idea where to start here. I could go in so many directions explaining this to them.  

Now they could be getting into the territory of deception here, of choosing too carefully how to say something. But that is in no way automatic. People stare off into space to answer or explain something all the time. But extending that increased-choices idea, when people were looking straight up at the ceiling, when they were supposedly talking to you but were leaning back in the chair and had their hands behind their head, they were choosing from an infinite number of possibilities. That is, no real filters anymore. That is, lying. I even tried it on myself, but couldn't get there. (Perhaps I find a 20% level of deception sufficient!) 

Spinning their swivel chair only confirmed it. That was actually where I started this theory, from the other end, of noticing that the swivelers and ceiling-lookers were often lying and trying to figure out what that meant.

Encouragement

Sasha Chapin has a post about encouraging others linked by Rob Henderson.  It in turn links to other articles that are valuable.  This is of course the great difficulty of reading blogs and substacks,* that the people whose writing you like will recommend and link to others who you find you also like, and the morning is shot. Chapin doesn't give the same advice I would, but I think it valuable (and maybe better).

This doesn’t have to take the form of coaching or intense feedback sessions, although if you have a relationship with someone such that you can give them detailed feedback, that can be a real gift. Often, the best way to do it is to issue a very specific compliment. People love specific compliments. Something like, say, “I really love how naturalistic and easygoing your writing is. You’re really great at capturing mundane emotions—you make common human experiences come alive in a way that’s unusual.” One thing worth remembering, here, is that people never receive feedback on their work. Even people with a seemingly large number of friends, colleagues, Twitter followers, etcetera, might be receiving a paucity of feedback, and might be totally in the dark about what they’re doing unusually well.

I commented there that Lord of the Rings would not have been completed - would not have been completed, ever - had CS Lewis not harassed Tolkien about it, particularly in the last two years before it went out to the publisher. Tollers spoke movingly about his friend's contribution in this in later years. 

I did a lot of encouraging at work, in ways as various as I could come up with. I heartily dislike the generic "You guys are doing great work" sort of compliment from people who have only the vaguest idea what is up.  It would be irritating to get some little appreciation package from the head of the social work department with a couple of Hershey's kisses**, some gold stars, and an identical peppy but bland note to all of us. This is because I knew that some of my coworkers absolutely sucked at this job but no one would man up to fire them, and they got one too. But something specific? Someone noticing what was the real deal?  Pure gold. I could go a long time even on very little of that fuel.

Example: a supervisor in the late 80s found me quite irritating, and I knew both her (unattractive and illegal) personal reasons for this and her work-related (mostly unjustified but understandable) reasons for this. I would say the quiet part out loud, and there came a time when our branch of the department was going to get stuck with something just because no one else wanted it. I kept asking her at meetings to push this back upwards and even offered to help, and in the meantime, gave a couple of very solid reasons why this was a bad idea for us. Eventually, it came to us anyway, and she had to sign off on it.  A year later she came to me and said "David, you are the only person in the department who isn't complaining about this.  You are just doing it and moving on. After how strongly you opposed this, with the others not making much noise about it, I expected the opposite." I explained what my theory of authority - a good evangelical biblical approach from the 80s - was to be bold in advice and criticism, but then defer to authority once the decision had been made. "I'd heard you say something like that a few times, but I didn't think you really meant it. Everyone else does the opposite. And I really understand what you are doing at meetings now much better." There wasn't a lot of direct compliment in all that, but the implied compliment and the understanding of what I was doing were clear.

I have always done this in my personal life as well, looking for opportunities to encourage. I am well up on the Gaussian distribution on this trait.

And yet I actually don't do it half as well or a tenth as often as I should.  Which is rather an indictment of how poorly we all do. I'm the smartest kid in the dumb row.  Not good enough.

*Brad DeLong ""A substack is just a blog with a bigger tip jar."

**I ate 'em anyway, of course.

Hoofbeats

 "Boomtown" was the song most people remembered from the show.

The coastal New England accents here, starting right away with the first guy, are just tremendous.  If you want to learn the accent, start with them.  Some of people in the video are locally famous as well, and of course there's Leno and Wright.

But I liked "Hoofbeats" better.  It was a little darker.

When I moved to Sudbury, people took care to point out where his house was. Rex Trailer was a big deal, even if you were a suburban hippie and "too old for that stuff" in 1971. He came from Ft Worth and was an actual cowboy, not just a show cowboy, and ended up in Massachusetts pretty much by accident.

Footprints

I don't think I mentioned it before, but the White Sands footprints have been known about for a couple of years now. They are thousands of years earlier than we used to think humans came to the New World - like 20K BC versus 13K BC, a big difference. The doubt seeps in because there are no bones, so carbon dating from the organic material to identify the strata is a bit more risky. Still, it is considered pretty solid.

Nor is it the only pre-Clovis find. There are sites in Mexico and the Northwestern US that may not be related to any current humans, so presumably died out eventually without descendants, yet they were here. We tend to dismiss tribes if they weren't "our" ancestors, but really, define our. Do we think people who have no descendants now are not quite real?  I suppose there is an evolutionary fitness definition that means you aren't real if none of your grandchildren have any kids, but we don't usually conceive of it that way.  And a tribe that dies out isn't really any different, is it?

Caribou Hunting

 

I asked him what the bridge was - train? Road? Kitzrutin River, So only two hours more from home in Nome. They had been on snowmobile 9 previous hours that day - and a similar amount to get out there. Not for me, thanks.

 

But in the end, three caribou.  Apparently you are supposed to call them bou. JA's share is probably going to be about 150 libs.

Riddle

 What do you call a snake who works for the government?

A Civil Serpent

"Vesuviano" about Stanford Law Speech

Over at Ann Althouse, she quotes commenter "Vesuviano" under the New York Times article (not linked) about free speech at Stanford. 

In 1969 I was a student at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Members of the American Nazi Party were allowed to visit the school and present their point of view that the Holocaust had not happened. The event was held after school in the cafeteria, and expectations for students who chose to attend were made absolutely clear to us by the principal. We were to be respectful at all times; we were not to interrupt the speakers; anything we had to say could be said in the Q & A afterwards. Those of us who attended prepared ourselves extremely well and did as we had been directed. During the presentation we took notes, sat on our hands, kept our mouths shut, and did not interrupt the speakers in any way. Then afterwards in the Q & A we absolutely shredded them. When they left, they knew they had been soundly trounced by a bunch of high school history geeks. It was a very valuable experience to me, and a lesson that ideas, no matter how vile, should be argued, defended, and defeated in public.

Sounds about right.

Tweets

Contrary to what we keep hearing, people go on twitter to get information (and real researchers are on there) and in the hopes of finding something humorous, not because they want to get angry. Yes, some of them consider insults about their opponents to be funny if it is presented in any kind of format that is supposed to be humorous, and some actually do go to Twitter to get angry. But more usually, they seek amusement, and curse themselves for the wasted time searching out funny content, not what has happened to their personalities.

I like this guy.

ChatGPT as DM

Someone tried to enlist Chat GPT as their Dungeon Master.

I read a few pages, it looked like fun, but not enough to move me to do anything further. If any of you read farther and learn something surprising leave it here. ChatGPT is going to do some things well, others not, I suppose.

Conscience

 "A clear conscience.  When did you acquire this taste for luxuries?"

A brilliant show, or so I imagine it from the clips I have seen. I admitted that to my children apologetically, even though they all know that we have not had a TV for decades and I never see anything in its entirety. But Ben assures me that this is a very millennial approach, to browse through shows rather than watch them, so I am now simply au courant.

They Are All Good Dogs

"Don't you miss Merry?" (our wirehaired dachshund who lived to be 19)

"I miss the Merry of the first 16 years, I don't miss the Merry of the last three," and then my usual followup "Life is more genteel without animals." We have no current pets. My wife might get a dog the day after I die, but even she is learning to be happy with other people's dogs instead. Hello sweetie dog! Yet even I have some appreciation of them.  

Especially online.

Trump Indictment

I haven't followed it, and there may be more to it than what I am hearing. But Ann Althouse, who doesn't much like Trump, is quoting Andrew McCarthy, who doesn't much like Trump, and Glenn Greenwald, who doesn't much like Trump, who all say these indictments are put up jobs. His accusers want to stick it to The Man, but they are The Man, not him. 

I said eight years ago that there was (and is) plenty of reason to dislike Trump, but somehow his opponents have to keep making stuff up to drive that spike to the center of the earth anyway. He can't even just be Hitler, their usual comparison.  He has to be Hitler and Putin and Bull Connor and Sauron. His opponents are the ones who made him, not his supporters. If they could have just treated him like an everyday opponent he would have had much less power.  Their desire to allow him no power gave him power. He leveraged popular hatred of their hatred into support for his campaign. Those who felt kicked around reasoned that if the Chosen Ones hated him so much, he must be pretty good.

He isn't Pretty Good, but he's doing it again. They have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind.

What ChatGPT Is and Isn't

ChatGPT is not going to take your job, but someone who knows ChatGPT might. This is not something to skip over. ChatGPT is an extraordinarily important evolution in Natual Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence...This is a game-changer outright. It is not an AGI.  It is not Artificial General Intelligence something like the HAL9000 computer from A Space Odyssey 2001, it is not the Star Trek computer.  It doesn't even think as a human being would, but it definitely has very striking human characteristics...Now, the AGI isn't here, and it won't be here for quite some time.* If ever. But ChatGPT?  It is possible that this is the landmark where they say "This might be where we started."**

David McKay "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants"

On YouTube

Podcast

I am not finding a transcript.  Sometimes you only get those if you are a subscriber. 

Update: See James's comment below about transcript.

He talks about how best to think about what it is doing (It is a probability engine, not a supercharged search engine) and thus how to use it.  Also, how not to use it, and why some uses of it are going to be unhelpful for a long time.

*I like nice definite time estimates like that.

**Another one of those over-specific predictions.  Look, I get it. This is a domain where we have all seen some things happen much fast than expected and others much more slowly. I thought this was a good use of my half-hour anyway.

Post 9100 - Bee Gees

 

A bit much on the vibrato. Lyrics on that second one, uh...

New York Review of Books

It's good to get the clarification from someone who is much more in touch with the terrain, in this case Steven Pinker talking about Paige Harden, a left-hereditarian who has come under great attack. 

It didn't save her from an idiotic attack from the New York Review of Books, which for about 50 years, has had idiotic attacks on - it's been kind of the vanguard are the establishment, the Empire striking back consistently, for any claim that there is any biological, genetic evolutionary basis to anything. They're the enforcer of the blank slate dogma. And it was true when Gould was one of theirs and he and Richard Lewontin were the major repeat contributors. Now it's been picked up by Marcus Feldman, and Paige Harden was the was the victim of that.

 I don't think I had ever located the center that exactly myself.  In fact, I know I didn't.

Don't Point Out Contradictions

I noted for years that in the intellectual culture, nothing about humans was allowed to be innate - except sexual orientation, which could only be innate. I hoped that people would recognise the inconsistency and think about the issues rather than just accept what was considered the proper answer.

Similarly, innate differences between groups of humans - men and women, different racial and ethnic groups, mountain people and valley people - were also not allowed. I would point out that I had always found it easier to accept that I just wasn't athletic, or just couldn't visualise spatial problems, or just wasn't coordinated enough, than to keep hearing that I had poor character and just hadn't tried hard enough, like those others who attributed their success to hard work (also likely heritable, BTW) and other virtues they could give themselves credit for. I hoped people would ponder what the real insult was, what the real cruelty was.

Such things have not worked out that way.  People did see that there was a contradiction, but they doubled down on the craziness and denied the next level of reality instead.

Improvement

"Man will become better if you show him what he is like" Anton Chekhov, quoted by Steven Pinker.

Like I said: Saying the quiet part out loud. Can't understand why folks don't like this.

Also by Chekhov, and even less generous of spirit. "There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality." I think that a lot.

Quick Review

Though these things are seldom quick.  I get carried away.

Once I have worked a topic to death I don't tend to return to it here very often. I just assume because I have covered a topic with some thoroughness and repetition that is as locked as solidly into your heads as into mine. This is of course amazingly stupid of me. I constantly use and reuse the information about early Indo-European history, for example, and doubt that many of you have even a fraction of the fascination that I do about this.  You have your own fascinations. But Indo-European is an anchor point, a nexus of my understandings about language, both English and related languages but also linguistic principles and changes in general. When I think about genetics, I am constantly doubling back on Yamnaya y-haplogroups (R1b especially), whether their insane amounts of violence are genetic or cultural/opportunistic, fixation of certain traits. It's my pool of examples for understanding everything else. Eurasian geography. When I think of academic battles and competitions, the push and pull of fashions and schools of thought about the IE Urheimat is one of my models (I also use 20th C psychology). Sometime the controversy is internal - people really believe in the Anatolian or the Pontic Steppe theory. Sometimes the controversy has more to do with external forces from modern culture or even personalities. Some people deeply wanted Marija Gimbutas to be right for modern reasons, some wanted her to be wrong.

I shall impersonate ... a man.

Come, enter into my imagination, and see him:

Boney, hollow faced, eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision.

Okay, probably not that last. But this is what goes on in my head. I take a summary from from Kevein Stroud's History of English, which I have edited somewhat. Full transcript of that episode

They had cattle and sheep. Domesticating horses was not easy. The necessary docility must have been a one-in-a-thousand mutation, and some would say the horse is still barely domesticated. But it gave these early(4200 BC) Indo-Europeans access to the steppes. Horses are not only a source of food in themselves (and one that can feed itself through the winter by breaking through ice with their hooves), but a significant advantage in herding other animals.  They are portable dinners that also do specialised work for you. A genetic mutation allowed the I-E's to consume milk and dairy products which allowed them to become dairy farmers and support bigger and healthier populations and to maintain large herds without having to slaughter them for food.* So as the size of the tribes increased, the physical size of the tribe members increased, and the size of their flocks increased. So that meant their power and wealth increased. It also required more mobility since large herds need more land to graze. This resulted in a sophisticated system of guest-host relationships. (They seem to have been an amazingly violent people, even compared to the violent people who were already there. Even at the far edge of their establishing control at the western end of Europe they displaced the builders of Stonehenge by wiping them out. And those weren't a gentle people. Yet they also show an intensity of guest-host reciprocal relationships that are not founded solely on kin groups, which came to be a European standard for later global dominance.) But to really exploit the grasslands you need to be able to carry water and shelter with you.  Otherwise you have to stay in the river valleys. When the covered, wheeled, wagon was introduced a short time later, by 3400BC, their mobility increased exponentially. They were now masters of the steppes. They were on the move.

We’ve now entered the era of the pastoral nomads. Movement and migration became the norm for these people. The horse and wagons had transformed the steppes from an ecological barrier to a transcontinental highway, and it enabled the spread and expansion of the original Indo-Europeans. We are now ready for the expansion of the Indo-European language. As I said, with the growth in the population of these tribes, combined with the growth in the size of the herds, there was a constant need for migration and expansion. It was basically a nomadic lifestyle which meant move or die. Sometimes this expansion occurred through military power. Sometimes it occurred through migration and displacement of other peoples. Sometimes it occurred through intermarriage, and coalition-building and integration. Sometimes it was likely a combination of these factors. So the original Indo-European language expanded with the expansion of these people but not always through military conquest. But these Indo-European people tended to be the dominant people in these new societies, and the language of the dominant group tends to perpetuate. So that was typically the original Indo-European language spoken by the people. Earlier I mentioned that around 4200 BC or so, Indo-European herders were beginning to spread southwestward around the Black Sea in a counter-clockwise direction. And as you may recall, they encountered farming settlements in the Balkans west of the Black Sea. And the archaeological evidence indicates that many of these settlements were abandoned and overrun by the Indo-Europeans. So historians believe this branch of early Indo-Europeans were the early ancestors of the oldest known branch of the Indo-European family tree – the Anatolian Branch. Note that this was just from the horse-riding alone, overrunning the locals.  The lactose mutation and the wagon weren't part of the picture yet.

  I am already going too long.  That will do. There will be a quiz on this tomorrow morning.         

 *The lactase persistence theory is now less accepted. I think it has to much going for it to be completely eliminated and think it is still a partial solution. I had a thought how it might be partly salvaged, and asked Greg Cochran over at West Hunter what he thought.

Prehistory

I spend more time on prehistory than history these days, but it occurs to me that almost everything is prehistory.  I don't only mean that written documents only appear very late in the human record, though that is part of it. But even once writing and inscriptions come into play, they record so little that 99.99% of the rest of existence goes unrecorded. We have developed excellent methods for figuring out what languages names on columns, or palace financial records mean based on very little information, and it is loads of fun to know anything with any certainty about the past.

Certainty. Funny. In my nostalgia tour I have uncovered radically different memories of the same events among my friends - and these are highly literate people, often with excellent memories. When only two people remain who even remember that a particular event occurred, as happens with my brother and me, how ephemeral is the human record of it anymore when we disagree about what happened? Eyewitness testimony is increasingly regarded as almost pointless.

Literacy was widespread in NW Europe after 1500, which means there were more people who could read than there had been a few centuries earlier, but still not very many. Outside of that small area, there was less reading and writing still. Does that mean that most of Russia was prehistoric even though some history was being written in Moscow? How long do we consider the Native American record to be essentially prehistoric?  Okay, how about the comparatively literate puritan settlers? We think of ourselves as having copious records of them, but that is only comparative.  Really, we have no records of human existence, just a few scraps here and there. The internet has allowed many more people to record bits of their lives, and this is a qualitative as well as quantitative difference, I think. How much of my life exists now in record before my blog and current email address? My mother dutifully kept a baby book on me, and there is a birth certificate and baptismal record. We had a few report cards. A few photos. The school system records my attendance, as does my college. There are yearbooks that record a bit more about me. We kept some photos.

Really, there is nothing.

We are still living in prehistory, with occasional rays of sunlight piercing the forest cover.

Cooking Experiments

The rule I know but somehow cannot learn is: one experiment at a time. If you are trying something new, an interesting recipe with one of those awesome pictures and the directions say "beef, pork, chicken, or duck..." it is probably not good to say "Duck! Why didn't I think of that!?" New recipe. Stick to the first three.  And if you are operating from the this was really good at that restaurant/Barbara's house/ the food festival in Boston you are in even more danger.

First make the dish as close to the one you were so impressed with first. Because you will learn things from that. Do not switch in the duck or the salmon, and dear God not the the prawns or the shrimp on your first attempt.  I say this to you with great severity, because you should know this, you stupid person. And also because I keep getting this wrong forty years out. 

Next, because you agree with me and know that I am right but find yourself doing it anyway I will tell you the next rule. Do not even consider a second experiment.  This is not only because you double the chances of something not being quite right for unexplained reasons, though that should be enough, you fool, you fool. It also doubles the chances that you will not have quite the right ingredients. You always have both kinds of soy sauce, or a little smoky bacon in the back, or (almost) fresh rosemary in a little bag in the cheese drawer, leftover from a few days, week, okay week-and-a-half, uh, three weeks ago...gee, where is that now...

I admit that I have had culinary experiments where I am on my fourth substitution - but not terrible because the third and fourth ones were ingredients where I had two tablespoons but not a third and zipped in some worcestershire/lemon juice/almond flour instead - but these have been rare.  Hardly ever have I done this. And hardly ever was I in a hurry so that I decreased the time for cooking and upped the temperature 25 degrees.

It occurred to me that there was a parallel from my theater education and likely there are parallels in every field. Do the simple thing first.  See how that went. In theater I was competent in acting and literature before I took a single course.  Not brilliant, but... But in Theatre 202 (second semester: technical theater), we had to design costumes for a something, then design a set, then a lighting design. They told us to keep it simple, and in fact insisted on it.  Design a box set. Something like Chekhov, or if you want something Significant and Serious, Synge or Miller (yawn). Not I-think-"Macbeth"-on-playground-equipment-would-be-so-deep. Costume something that other people have actually heard of and you might be asked to do if you are ever stuck being the costume designer for a light opera company in Des Moines...not a 1952 Scandinavian novel that no one has ever made into a playscript. Or light the basic set with little equipment - because as the high school drama coach you will have no budget - for Tennessee Williams, not Maeterlinck.  You ain't there yet, dude.  You ain't playin' at that level.

Let me point out, in case you missed it, that the bad examples above were not made up.  Okay, I was 18.  So sue me. Though as I turned 22 for my final project I was still attempting to be Ionesco or David Garrick, and going down in flames. 

I can see it in the career I eventually had as well. Don't give the intern the unclear-diagnosis murderer as a therapy training ground.  8th-grade Home Ec was right: sew a drawstring bad. Cook biscuits.

Sleuth

Mystery within mystery, trap within trap, and who has the final card to play? I loved Sleuth when it came out and tried to get others to go see it, but no one was much interested. I don't think I took a date to it either time I saw it, and it was unusual for me to go to a movie alone. I then rented it and showed it to my children when they were in high school and junior high, but they were not much impressed either. The poor quality of the picture on the TV may have had something to do with it.

So now I am trying it on you, to see if you will like it.

Merely Cultural Statements

We went to the annual "Beer and Benedictines" lectures at St Anselm's College at pub night.  We hadn't planned on the pub being taken up with that, but it was fun. Engineerlite cornered the Benedictine priest for conversation afterward, and I cornered the Chem professor who discussed fermentation and its history. We went on for about ten minutes, and I got to hit the information about Gobekli Tepe and the fermentation of wild rather than cultivated grains, and the myth of unsafe medieval water requiring mixing beer in with the family supply and other such oddities, and a good time was had by all four.

But then the prof inexplicably wanted to go to more modern events and complain about how terrible it was that Trump had been such friends with Putin, at which I mildly demurred with some statement that I thought Donald was always convinced he could do business with people and therefore put on that appearance, but actions told a somewhat different story.  People who are not knee-jerking Democrats know that this could be stated much more emphatically, but I didn't.

Predictably - and I saw where all this was going even as it was unfolding, he went on to say that "at least" Trump had just been indicted. A quick exchange revealed that he does not understand some of the issues involved about what the underlying crime is and is not, and that the need to make a very solid case when prosecuting someone from the opposition party is heightened. Again, I thought I was mild in my pushback about this. He didn't seem to quite get what I was saying. They seemed to be new ideas to him. He was unsatisfied.

He then said he thought Biden had been doing a great job in Ukraine. We had not come near this subject in any way before this. I allowed that the situation was impossible, and the fact that we were not actively in WWIII was worthy of some credit. He was clearly annoyed at this point, and said he thought it was really important that we strengthen the power of NATO. Well, it might be.  It's one of the POV's that has circulated since the beginning and has some thoughtful adherents. Another POV, that extending NATO membership has been unnecessarily provocative, and Ukraine is only 50% worth of our attention is one of the competing views, which also has some thoughtful adherents. 

I took no position.  What I wanted to say at this point was "You are making cultural statements, attempting to declare what your social group is, rather than strictly intellectual and foreign policy statements.  I'm not convinced you actually know much about these issues."

I didn't of course. But even hard science professors at Catholic colleges seem to be making their political decisions on the basis of tribal identification at this point. It's part of why I doubt that "better education" is likely to have much effect. This gentleman has a 99th percentile ability to deal with numbers and data. He doesn't use it - for personal reasons, whether emotional or social. 

When my oldest was about five or six and I had just started reading "chapter books" to him, he asked about one of the characters in the Lloyd Alexander series "Is he on the good team or the bad team?" I think this is bout the level we are playing at here.  "Are you on the good team or the bad team?"

Estimating Time

I stopped wearing a watch at some point as a young man and have never gone back to it. Whether that is horse that taught me to estimate time after a twenty-year stretch or cart that allowed me to forego that I don't know. But I am very good, sometimes exceptionally good at this for some reason.  I am not often good at those pre-tech skills like sense of direction or estimating distance or amounts, so it is mildly surprising. Yet even in childhood, when as a car game to shut us up my mother would say "tell me when we have gone a mile" and I would look at the speedometer and move the dial up or down for when it was a minute or two minutes later, I sometimes nail it within a second or two.  Even now,when I set the timer for seven minutes, or decide to walk for 90 minutes, I am spot on nine times out of ten.

Yet here's the thing.  That tenth time I can be wildly off. There is a time-counting mechanism in my brain which allows me to daydream and come back somehow, but once in a while it shuts off and I show up at the party with potato salad for the afternoon feast, not noticing that the sun has long since set and I should have been bringing an evening dessert heavy with chocolate or alcohol or both. Or the cheese toast has been broiling for 27 minutes and is inedibly crisped and on the path to household fire danger.

Similar Pleasures of Deduction

Relistening to podcasts about how linguists determined where the Indo-Europeans were originally from*, it occurred to me that I enjoyed this in the same way that I enjoy Tom Wessels and Reading the Forest Landscape and the general idea of forest succession underlying it. It is not all blue-sky dreaming, there is real data to be dealt with, plus some ability to check one's conclusions with other information. It is similar to a geometric proof, staring at something and trying to figure out what is relevant and how hard or soft the information is.  

Psychiatric diagnosis is much fuzzier, because there are 10x more factors brought to bear on the final problem, but I liked that puzzle for the same reasons, and discerning motives is much the same.  I am less fascinated by treatment plans, which really should be the more important task, unfortunately. It is detective novel stuff, whether one favors the Conan Doyle or Chesterton approaches, which is rather like playing 3-dimensional "Clue," whatever that might look like.

*Episodes 6-9 would be a good starting point.

Caribou

So John-Adrian* is off on a 10-12 hour snow machine ride to Bering Land Bridge National Preserve to hunt more caribou. His share was 100 lbs last time, and I don't know how much caribou he thinks his family is going to eat this year, but he enjoys it. I've had reindeer, which was very nice, but never caribou.