From The Studies Show

Stuart Ritchie: ...and all they do is add extra noise and also add a bit of stigma. Now, I don't know about you, Tom, but when the word stigma comes into a conversation,  I always feel that maybe rational discussion is kind of about to go out the window. I don't want to be completely sort of blanket about this...

Tom Chivers: (sardonically) Yes.

 

Stuart: ...but yes, I do worry. You're about to tell me that I'm not allowed to talk about some true thing. 

 

Tom: Yeah, right. Yes, exactly.

Not Playing Fair

I am cherry picking, yes. Confirmation bias. Selection bias. All those things. We can all choose carefully and find examples of our opponents being stupid and evil. So sue me.  He's right, it's funny, and it is highly revealing.  Please note the women sitting near Breakup Guy who have a similar inability to distinguish between facts and emotions

 

Philippians 4:7

Then the peace of God, which is beyond all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  

In our discussion of the Parables today, our patristics expert informed us that the word guard does not only mean "protect," but also "confine, keep in custody," so that the heart does not spill out any of its worst contents on others, such as unkindness or contention.  I had never thought of it in those terms.

In my case, that is the more important meaning.  I can endure the unkindness and contention of others pretty well.  But I am also prone to leaving that door unbolted (or even ajar) from the inside, leaving others at higher risk.

Wexford Carol

 

End of the Season

There will be ice and snow on the rail trail from here on in, and it will be tough for toddlers and strollers especially, so someone collected up the last lost items from that section and put them at one of the stops

Confucian Sentimentalism Vs Humean Sentimentalism

This is not a topic I am knowledgeable in. Twice today I read claims about the Confucian belief that sentimentalism leads to moral weakness and public disorder.  I can intuit a bit of what that means in terms of what else I know about Confucianism, but I am not up on this at all.  Googling the topic, the link that included a few perspectives quickly seemed a good place to start. A Summary of three papers from The Rutgers Workshop in Chinese Philosophy in 2018.

I will note that I have an immediate attraction to the concept, but would like some commentary.

Horse Domestication

A transcript of a podcast by Razib Khan on Horse Domestication . Topics covered:

horse history, horse evolution, horse adaptations, horse domestication stages, horse culture, horse warfare, horse economy, horse breeding, horse mythology, horse archaeology, horse genetics, horse impact

That one is free.  He's been doing a lot about horses in his subscriber posts as well. Please note that his transcripts can be hard to read because they are automatically generated, and therefore the common repetitions and place-holders like "you know" are not edited out.

But Then I Realized That Horses Are Just Men-Extenders.

War and Peace: Horse Power, Progress, and Prosperity

RFK Jr, Flouridation, and Dentistry in General

 The Studies Show Episode 56: Water Flouridation and Dentistry

Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just a big crank? Well, yes. But is he nevertheless correct in his specific claims about the harms of water fluoridation? It’s long been argued that it’s no longer necessary, and that it might have the scary adverse effect of lowering children’s IQs. In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart look at the evidence.

While they’re at it, Tom and Stuart ask whether there’s evidence for several other dentistry-related claims. Regular check-ups; flossing; fillings; fluoride toothpaste—is your dentist just bullshitting you about any or all of these?

[This podcast was recorded just before Donald Trump selected RFK Jr. as his candidate for US Health Secretary, but that makes the episode even more relevant].

Tom and Stuart come down on the side that says the scary claims for flouridation are probably all rubbish, but OTOH it probably doesn't do much good either.  Pre-1975 there were some poorly done studies that showed enough effect that the advantage of flouridation was probably real anyway.  Since then, better and better studies have shown less and less effect.  Now that everyone is using a flouride toothpaste, treating the water no longer matters.

They then spend the second half of the podcast talking about how little evidence there is for common dental practices.  At least some things do just as well if you leave them alone, and others require only minor treatment. Lastly, even those things which do require significant intervention may compromise the teeth so much that in the long run the advantage vanishes, even though the short-term advantage was real.  Like severe toothache, for example. 

For me, it was the realisation that the dentist I liked best in my life, a dear man of the old school, probably damaged my teeth more than all the others together, and maybe even more than my night bruxism, which I have usually pointed to as the main problem.

Fertility Crisis - Cat Among The Pigeons

Second in a Series .  The first post is Is It A Crisis?

In the evangelical crowd my children grew up in, even in their generation there is an unusual concentration of families that have more than two children.  The church we attend has several families with four or five children (not to mention plenty of twos and threes - we have a lot of children at our church), and as they in turn network together, it is likely that some of those children will grow up and be comfortable with a large family as well. These families have a strong tendency to homeschool as well. During recent medical difficulties, my wife and I covered some homeschool days for one of them, her five plus a sixth that she has taken under her wing because his family situation is unstable and he was not doing well in public school.

It's difficult.  There are reasons why not a lot of people want this job. It is a rather distilled version of raising children in general, with the same frustrations.  Children are adorable. They say surprising things and you can watch them grow. But you don't get a lot of immediate reward.  You are trusting God or your own abilities quite a bit for eventual growth. Two of the main things you need are energy, which comes with youth, and patience, which comes with age. They are not adults and you cannot have a decent conversation with them for a long time. Erma Bombeck noted decades ago that as soon as you can have a decent conversation with them, they leave.  (Or used to in the old days.) The younger social workers with children used to admit that they found it a relief to come to work. When our children were very young I did a lot of solo child care after my night shift, which is perhaps worse for men because you can't go over to some woman's house with your kids, so are very much stuck. It is very nice to have the other adult come home.

There is something about child care that is very easy, but many people still don't want to do it.  Come to think of it, that is also true of working a night shift. This suggests that there is also something very hard, or at least unattractive about it. When things are both easy and hard, the weight of the other incentives changes as well.  Attractions and rewards that usually work for other things stop working.  Attractions and rewards that people overlook or care less about start becoming more important.

All this is prologue for a very controversial tweet, which I found offensive at first, because these women staying home with lots of children are some of my favorite people. Yet as I looked at it, I saw there was some truth in it, however overstated.

Yes, I think fertility does just come down to avoiding carceral* employment/the 4HL*. Every "weird" high fertility group we talk about is really a different strategy for not having a job. Amish, Hasidics, Afghans, the Indigent, the Rich, etc. All the same deal.

Most of the women I am referring to can be very easily pictured in competitive employment, and in fact many of them have excelled at it.  Yet there are an unusual percentage of them, now that I look at it, who have interesting and even dramatic talent, but might not thrive in typical jobs. 

If I am going to be that controversial, I may as well include Bill Burr here. (Language alert.)

*I don't know what he means by these: carceral and the 4HL

Sing We Now of Christmas

 

Is It A Crisis?

First in a series.  Let's have some broader than usual discussions. Both 30,000 ft assessments and on-the-ground woman-immediate perspectives.

We talk about the Fertility Crisis, but what if it's not? What if it's just one more adjustment in human history? The current trends are so widespread worldwide that our encouraging couples to have more children is likely to have an effect only at the margins. Those of you younger than me are going to be looking at major changes.

As I have mentioned, I have lunch with guys I went to summer studies with in 1970.  I have five children, two biological, four of the other five have two each. I am the only one with any grandchildren, two of the five biological. My other lunch-monthly partner has no children.  My men's pub night also has almost no grandchildren. When I am talking it is from a grandparent perspective; I have to work to see things from my children's or grandchildren's perspectives. The preservation of the world I grew up with or even of the nation or the species matters less to them, even in evangelical culture where it is still strong.

Cranberry mentioned some things that might make it easier for young women to have both children and the careers that they wanted, noting that the tradeoff is quite real. Demographers like Lyman Stone note that education and wanting to establish oneself before having children has cut the available childbearing years in half. Even those who want children will have fewer. If nothing ever went wrong biologically, emotionally, or financially for all the young couples, that will still likely be less than replacement as a cohort.

So we should do all those things, if they show any promise of helping. Designing narrower carseats or finding some other method of protecting little ones. (The dropoff in children accelerated when those became mandatory.) But European countries already make huge social and financial support efforts, and their numbers are dropping too. France and the Scandinavian countries kept their numbers up just below replacement for a while, but now those have dropped off too.  And those countries love babies and children. Everyone beams at them on the train. (Not that they talk, of course! That's for noisy Americans.)

The sad truth is that women design their lives for the praise and acceptance of other women more than for men, and women no longer socially admire and reward having children as much. It doesn't have to be the antipathy and disdain that a few women show that discourages women from putting in that kind of effort. It's knowing that the same amount of effort will get you more admired by other women. 

Side note: this is related to the "Do women dress for men or for other women" question, hotly debated over at Grim's years ago.  It is both, of course, but the point is that we immediately assume it is for men but when we stop to think of it, it's more about being admired or accepted by other women than we had first realised.  So too here. Any individual woman is far more influenced by what her husband thinks than querying her friends whether she should have children now.  The point is that the world of women and the status it bestows is much more important than we commonly credit.

An example from an earlier generation is handcrafts. Those are still admired by women, even in the younger generations. Women will brag that a friend sews wonderfully, and mean the compliment sincerely, not condescendingly. So also with needlepoint and the like. But quilting is more art than practicality now. The type of status is different, and in some women, quite absent. My wife's knitting group is envious that she has two granddaughters interested in knitting. But they aren't very interested anymore. There's softball, basketball, and volleyball, which draws far more praise for those girls.

To me life is about learning to give, even pour yourself out for others. While having a spouse and children is certainly not the only way to get there, it is the most direct, and more reliable than the other choices.  Tet plenty of my college friends have no children and do not see that as a lack in their lives. Fertility crisis?  What's that?  Why is it important?  You can have a great life other ways.

Analogy For Prehistoric False Starts

I sometimes find it hard to get my head around previous populations, both prehistoric and historic, existing and leaving behind bones, tools, buildings, and landscape modifications but not being connected to us in any way.  This is becoming a more common caution as we see the genetic discontinuity, tool-making discontinuity, religious and cultural discontinuity.  It used to be that there were eras, that came in succession There would be Gravettian and then Solutrean and then Magdalenian, and we saw those as development, with perhaps some warlike people coming in and taking over, but still something essentially like Middle Eastern and European histories, with an essential continuity of people and gradual changes.

The shockingly different history of European arrival in the new world somehow eluded us. We still discussed that in terms of European nations holding sway over this region or that. The almost complete population replacement seemed like a one-off, of unimportant peoples being removed. 

Yet we now know that complete replacement happened a lot in history and prehistory, including in the New World before "we" got here. In Britain people will get romantic about "our ancestors" building Stonehenge.  Um, no.  Their ancestors eliminated the people who build Stonehenge. Of the Stonehengers, some distant relatives from the Continent mixed with the invaders beforehand, so that there are oddities like Cheddar Man having a relative still living nearby when they did the DNA a few years ago. But he wasn't a descendant, not by a long shot. The modern schoolmaster shared some even more distant ancestors with Cheddar Man. 

Peoples go along for hundreds or even thousands of years with some continuity, trading, exchanging daughters. Oh, a whole tribe gets wiped out here and there, but most tribes mix, move about, expand and contract. Then some tribe wipes everyone out, unless they keep the women, and all those previous peoples have no further influence on mankind. Razib took the analogy of the Roanoke Colony, a real people but only a blip on the historic record.  There have been rumors and suggestions of them having some cultural or genetic contribution to the Redbones or fully native tribes, but nothing substantial even if true.

Yet I think the analogy of modern travel fits better. I went to Romania through Hungary several times.  In Romania I had an effect - we took children home, primarily; but I was part of physical medical care, I did teaching.  In Hungary I just went through.  I had no effect. I didn't kill anyone or save anyone or impregnate anyone.  I didn't have a job, I didn't build anything or destroy anything. I left no trace. If I had gotten hit by a bus and died there, about all that could be concluded was "Gee, this guy came from really far away.  I wonder why?"

Smarter Than Me

My wife is smarter than I am now.  It pains me to admit that.

A comparison:

It was a long journey for me to go from liberal - which I considered part of my identity - to something in the conservative/libertarian range.  The issues fell one by one, perhaps beginning (pre 1980) with discovering that pro-life people were actually not monsters and even much nicer, and ending (post 1990) with gun control, where the 2A people just had the better arguments at every turn, darn it. Slowly, slowly, the treasured general liberalism slipped from my grasp.

To the title topic. Over a longer course, and reaching the tipping point this week, I have to admit that my wife is smarter than I am. I say that lightly, even playfully, yet I am talking about a real conclusion. Smarter is a word that always has a context, so that each of us might be smarter in this domain or that, but as a general statement it has to be one's whole life at present. In the 1980's it was she who reluctantly admitted "You really are smarter than me," and while I attempted to be a gracious winner and always find points of praise I have clutched this concession to my bosom ever since. She has always had domains where she exceeded me, but mine were (ahem) more important. 

Our vocabularies are similar, hers slightly better. She has distanced me ever-further in inspired word-puzzling.  Wordle came into our lives and she gets it in two much more often than I do. Her spatial intelligence is better (engineer's daughter) despite my improvement over the years. I am much better arithmetically - but here's the key to what I'm talking about: we don't use that so much these days. The hundreds of memorised numbers I made my living with no longer need to be called up. We rarely have to compute something. To try to hide my ego behind the claim the well I could if I needed too is rather hollow. Smarter includes context. 

She has always been better at natural history, the birds, wildflowers, fungi, and animals of the world. Well, biology major and school librarian I consoled myself. Yet when I took specialties of my own such as constellations and trees, and put in effort over years, when she took those up she passed me in a month. She intuits what identifying information is important. I never had as much use for it as she did, but now I have greater need of it. Context.

I have been good with names and faces.  She is spectacular. My remote memory is unusually good - but few other than myself use that. Despite kicking herself frequently for something she has forgotten, her recent memory is better than mine.  I ruefully say that Google replaced me and my network of like-minded friends who relied on each other's specialties to always be able to quickly know things.  It used to be a humblebrag, that I could converse off the top of my head about Negro League baseball, colonial America, CS Lewis and the Inklings, Indo-Europeans and a hundred other subjects. There was a day when that was useful. But, as Aragorn said "That day is not today." Humorously, I can sing all the verses of the Superchicken theme, which hardly anyone can do, but everyone can pull it up on their device when I get stuck on a section.

I still talk better than her, and though many will deny it, listen better.  Although maybe it's just me she doesn't hear. 

This week was brutal.  The PC started acting very badly, and we decided to switch to an iMac. Migrating the data was not working, likely because the hardware was too damaged.  I had some things to try.  She had more things. She also understood the manuals, online videos, and Apple support more quickly than I did. She is adjusting to the Mac differences much more quickly than I am.

Irritations from 2009

I get irritated about a lot of things, don't I?  Seldom angry, perpetually irritated.

The Truth Is Veiled. A prominent elderly psychiatrist is puzzled year after year about the attitude of religious people to suffering . Mostly because he never asks them.

A General Note on a Type of Blog Commenter.  Peace Out

Guarantee A relative guaranteed that the boy would commit suicide that night if we released him.  I was relieved.

Good Advice in the Supermarket Parking Lot

 

O Little Town of Bethlehem

I promised myself I would not get dragged into doing choir this Christmas, but the director brought me the tale of woe that the already-distressed bass section had lost yet another gent for medical reasons. So with no rehearsal until that morning I am going to attempt to fill in the bottom this Sunday at the 9 AM traditional service.  It's a beautiful piece.

Fertility Crisis

I will not be posting until I get the new computer (Apple this time) but a comment by Cranberry under Birth Dearth has me thinking, and I may do a short series of posts on the topic when I am up and running again.

China Overview

One of the participants in book club passed along an article in Law & Liberty by David Goldman ("Spengler") on the origins of Chinese governance. 

China’s unique geographic conditions required from antiquity a centralized tax system to fund infrastructure and a centralized bureaucracy to administer it. It never persuaded the peoples it absorbed into the Chinese empire to speak a common language or to confess the same religion. Ethnicity has no role in Chinese statehood.

The book club member, who lives in Silicon Valley and whose wife is from China, says he agrees with about half of the article.  He didn't say which half.

Stroke

My desktop has had some sort of stroke and is only gradually learning to talk again. Of course we let the Dell support lapse about three months ago...

2009 - Lighter Fare

Selfish and Profligate. The US uses an embarrassingly large percentage of American flags, and Europeans similarly cut other countries out of the market on European flags. And that's not all.  There is an embarrassingly long list of things that developed nations use more of.  Learn what you can do about it.

Flannelgraphs 

Worcester Lunch Car Diners.  And we learn that there is still one in Worcester.

Terry at Wheat Among Tares discovers something worrisome about her Post 666