The Tasaday

I was "strongly encouraged" as an anthropology student to watch the National Geographic special about the Tasaday tribe in the early 70s. They were supposedly a "Stone Age" tribe who were unfamiliar with metals and had not been in contact with outsiders in known memory.  It was a very romantic idea. There was discussion afterward among the professors whether it was proper for outsiders to spoil their culture by contact. It was unclear to me whether it was Tasaday culture they were protecting or our ability to study something rare. Students were encouraged to continue the discussion among themselves.  It was clear that these were matters of Great Import from the solemn tone of the documentary and the similar hushed tones of the older students who stepped up to lead those discussions. 

I had what was considered a simplistic view (because someone was impatient with another student who gave it voice), wondering whether we would bring them medicine if they were sick. What about sickness unto death? Wouldn't it be a kindness to introduce the idea of knives or something to them to improve their ability to survive? Look, I may be misremembering badly and this is all post hoc for me.  I don't recall a single conversation about it again after that night. Yet I think I recall that this was considered a grievous imposition on these poor people, who deserved to have their culture preserved. Again, I wondered why not give them the choice and see what they thought?

I later learned the whole thing was a hoax put forth by some friends of Marcos (why?), and then learned that it wasn't a hoax and the hoaxers were a hoax. I now know that I should have at minimum questioned whether this "Stone Age" description was just journalistic exaggeration and nonsense. It is exactly the sort of thing that sets hearts aflutter and sells fishwrap. 

I take it that the current understanding is that they are not a residual Stone Age tribe, but they are very remote and do not seem to have had intention of participating in a hoax. Their primitiveness is real but not fully uncommon on this southern island in the Philippines. Lots of tribes had little contact at that point, and this was simply the one with the least. Even the word "contact" is more than a little fuzzy.  If your tribe is in contact with a tribe that is in contact with another tribe that has a few people who occasionally walk into settled areas where they trade with people from off the island, don't you have some contact in the sense that you hear about other people who do things differently and get your hands on some of their smart technology if you get the chance?

I mostly bring this up only to poke fun at the idea of the holiness of leaving people alone so that we can use them for our study purposes rather than offering them choices, however indirectly.  It makes them not real people. My daughter died of a terrible disease last year and you could have saved her and did nothing?  And you call that respecting me?

How To Spot A Hoax

It looks like it's time to reprint this, just seven months later. Well, it was coming up anyway, in my most-visited posts. 

****

Well, one kind of hoax, anyway. I'm not a general hoax expert.

When the story is just too perfect, when it fits the stereotype that the hoax perpetrator wants to believe, that's a big clue. Lots of people wanted it to be true that high school boys wearing MAGA hats were saying racist things and even looking a little violent and out of control. So a Native American says "I thought they were going to lynch those black people." Really?  You thought those 16-year-olds were going to pull out some rope and wade into a group of black adults, and start dragging them out one-by-one, looking for a tree branch or a light pole?

But it would just be so cool if they were like that.  I'll bet they would be like that if they only had the chance.  It's not too far-fetched that they could conceivably do that... 

The racist note written to a black student having difficulties at Air Force Prep turn out to be written by - the victim. Yet that doesn't matter so much as the idea that it could have been written by someone else, and weneedtohaveamonologueCONVERSATIONaboutracism, because all those awful people keep denying that racism and sexism exist, so we will have to proceed as if those lacrosse players could have raped that black girl, or Emma Sulkowitz was really assaulted, that Haven Monahan really exists.  There's a new one, some actor, Smollet?  Justy Smollett?  The first I heard of the story, red flags.  Too perfect.  Most real anti-semitic events are just stupid vandalism, and don't have a poetic beauty about their violence and threats.

Real hate crimes are usually crude: some jerk shoves someone while insulting them. Those happen.  Those are real sexism, homophobia, racism, whatever. But they aren't really interesting enough to make the newspapers.  They are over in a minute.  They might involve a possibility of real violence, but they just don't have the sexiness that a real stereotype-fulfilling story does.  The public demands that a gay martyrdom be real, not just a drug deal gone bad with some other guys who worked for the same pimp.

There was a great one last year, about a black doctor who had struggled under difficult conditions working for the poor all day, then some white bigot called him a racial epithet and squealed his tires getting away in the parking garage, laughing.  My cousin posted it.  You know I am not tactful, but I worked really hard at gradually revealing that this was actually fiction.  I didn't use the words "fake news."  Not even at the end when my cousin insisted rather angrily (and another cousin unfriended me over the exchange) that even if it wasn't technically true it was true and important, because real black people go through things like this every day. Except, well, I actually do know a fair number of black doctors, and they all shook their heads and rolled their eyes when I relayed the story over the next two weeks. It should be true, dammit, therefore its falseness is irrelevant.

Yesterday I had a beauty: a woman who claimed that she had encountered a Trump protestor in a MAGA hat and a red, white, & blue top that barely covered her torso - oh, there's a nice touch. Not that no Trump supporter ever dressed that way, but it was very obliging of the woman to be something unsavory as well as stupid in just the right way, isn't it? - who said "But he's our ruler.  We have to do what he says."

Uh, Trump supporters have the opposite problem.  They might say a lot of silly or obnoxious things, but I think we can fairly rule out the docile followers idea.  I've been in many arguments with them online, including here at my own site, and let me assure you, that is not their problem. What you will find are people who say they will refuse to do X, whether the government or even their favorite president says so, and you have to pull them quietly aside and say "Uh, Phil?  You actually do have to do that.  It's the law.  Just sayin'." But hey, it would have been so cool if some trollop actually had said "He's our ruler. We have to do what he says." Those Trump people are so easily led and certainly capable of it, eh? So some woman somewhere - they think - likely said that.  And, probably a lot like that woman it the skimpy top who said something (completely unrelated that doesn't fit my current narrative), and was really annoying. So we can call it true-ish.  True, really.

Give me a break.  You're lying. No one said that.

I am going to guess at the motives or (ahem) reasoning, but I don't insist on these. We don't know others' motives all that well - we seldom even know all of even our own motives - and motives are mixed. Projection is likely. But I think there is this idea that A) they are right-wing, and therefore Justlikenazis not very far below the surface, and we know that real nazis acted like that in another country and completely different cultural context, so...you know...don't you get it? Okay, sure, when you start insisting on things like evidence in 20thC Europe, it was actually the communists who blindly followed leaders, yes.  Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy were actually highly factionalised countries just barely held together, okay.  But it just feels  like German nazis are the best comparison here, doesn't it?  Because it would be so cool if Trump's supporters turned out to be just like that. It would vindicate us.

Let me throw in a parenting reassurance for free, because there is a parallel.  When the school calls and says your kid is getting detention and is in trouble for X, you usually know immediately if this is off-the-wall.  All five of my sons were capable of earning a detention, but a few times, there would be this accusation and you would go - hmmm. Not my kid. There is something missing from this story. The school doesn't want to hear your protest, because they deal with parents who are clueless about their kid's misbehavior all the time.  Your protest that "This is not my kid's style of misbehavior" will fall on deaf ears.  But for good parents, you know.  "My could could easily do A, or C, or G. But you are telling me he did E, and there's something wrong here.  Hold on."

Wait, this example is much fairer in reverse.  My children could have been told a story that "Your dad got in trouble for saying X to a ref." For some values of X, that would be quite possible.  Yet for others, my children would shake their head.  Nope.  Not my dad.  Not that one.  Someone is making that up.

Once you know to look for poetic perfection as a disproof, the news becomes easier. Bush splitting from the Air National Guard?  Too perfect.  John Kerry getting hat from a CIA guys?  Too perfect.

Bonus extra credit.  Some autobiographies fit the mold.

How To Spot A Hoax

Twelfth-most visited post of all time. It is new this year and already reposted once, so I figure this one got linked more than once and people found it useful. Some of you already practice this, being suspicious of hate-crime events that are just too perfect, but I think it would be good if the principle were more generally known.

Update:  The earlier post is here.  It is nearly identical except that it has many comments, some quite excellent.  I should have just brought that forward but it's too late now. If you like this at all, you may like the comments there.

*******
Well, one kind of hoax, anyway. I'm not a general hoax expert.

When the story is just too perfect, when it fits the stereotype that the hoax perpetrator wants to believe, that's a big clue. Lots of people wanted it to be true that high school boys wearing MAGA hats were saying racist things and even looking a little violent and out of control. So a Native American says "I thought they were going to lynch those black people." Really?  You thought those 16-year-olds were going to pull out some rope and wade into a group of black adults, and start dragging them out one-by-one, looking for a tree branch or a light pole?

But it would just be so cool if they were like that.  I'll bet they would be like that if they only had the chance.  It's not too far-fetched that they could conceivably do that... 

The racist note written to a black student having difficulties at Air Force Prep turn out to be written by - the victim. Yet that doesn't matter so much as the idea that it could have been written by someone else, and weneedtohaveamonologueCONVERSATIONaboutracism, because all those awful people keep denying that racism and sexism exist, so we will have to proceed as if those lacrosse players could have raped that black girl, or Emma Sulkowitz was really assaulted, that Haven Monahan really exists.  There's a new one, some actor, Smollet?  Justy Smollett?  The first I heard of the story, red flags.  Too perfect.  Most real anti-semitic events are just stupid vandalism, and don't have a poetic beauty about their violence and threats.

Real hate crimes are usually crude: some jerk shoves someone while insulting them. Those happen.  Those are real sexism, homophobia, racism, whatever. But they aren't really interesting enough to make the newspapers.  They are over in a minute.  They might involve a possibility of real violence, but they just don't have the sexiness that a real stereotype-fulfilling story does.  The public demands that a gay martyrdom be real, not just a drug deal gone bad with some other guys who worked for the same pimp.

There was a great one last year, about a black doctor who had struggled under difficult conditions working for the poor all day, then some white bigot called him a racial epithet and squealed his tires getting away in the parking garage, laughing.  My cousin posted it.  You know I am not tactful, but I worked really hard at gradually revealing that this was actually fiction.  I didn't use the words "fake news."  Not even at the end when my cousin insisted rather angrily (and another cousin unfriended me over the exchange) that even if it wasn't technically true it was true and important, because real black people go through things like this every day. Except, well, I actually do know a fair number of black doctors, and they all shook their heads and rolled their eyes when I relayed the story over the next two weeks. It should be true, dammit, therefore its falseness is irrelevant.

Yesterday I had a beauty: a woman who claimed that she had encountered a Trump protestor in a MAGA hat and a red, white, & blue top that barely covered her torso - oh, there's a nice touch. Not that no Trump supporter ever dressed that way, but it was very obliging of the woman to be something unsavory as well as stupid in just the right way, wan't it? - who said "But he's our ruler.  We have to do what he says."

Uh, Trump supporters have the opposite problem.  They might say a lot of silly or obnoxious things, but I think we can fairly rule out the docile followers idea.  I've been in many arguments with them online, including here at my own site, and let me assure you, that is not their problem. What you will find are people who say they will refuse to do X, whether the government or even their favorite president says so, and you have to pull them quietly aside and say "Uh, Phil?  You actually do have to do that.  It's the law.  Just sayin'." But hey, it would have been so cool if some trollop actually had said "He's our ruler. We have to do what he says." Those Trump people are so easily led and certainly capable of it, eh? So some woman somewhere - they think - likely said that.  And, probably a lot like that woman it the skimpy top who said something (completely unrelated that doesn't fit my current narrative), and was really annoying. So we can call it true-ish.  True, really.

Give me a break.  You're lying. No one said that.

I am going to guess at the motives or (ahem) reasoning, but I don't insist on these. We don't know others' motives all that well - we seldom even know all of even our own motives - and motives are mixed. Projection is likely. But I think there is this idea that A) they are right-wing, and therefore Justlikenazis not very far below the surface, and we know that real nazis acted like that in another country and completely different cultural context, so...you know...don't you get it? Okay, sure, when you start insisting on things like evidence in 20thC Europe, it was actually the communists who blindly followed leaders, yes.  Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy were actually highly factionalised countries just barely held together, okay.  But it just feels  like German nazis are the best comparison here, doesn't it?  Because it would be so cool if Trump's supporters turned out to be just like that. It would vindicate us.

Let me throw in a parenting reassurance for free, because there is a parallel.  When the school calls and says your kid is getting detention and is in trouble for X, you usually know immediately if this is off-the-wall.  All five of my sons were capable of earning a detention, but a few times, there would be this accusation and you would go - hmmm. Not my kid. There is something missing from this story. The school doesn't want to hear your protest, because they deal with parents who are clueless about their kid's misbehavior all the time.  Your protest that "This is not my kid's style of misbehavior" will fall on deaf ears.  But for good parents, you know.  "My could could easily do A, or C, or G. But you are telling me he did E, and there's something wrong here.  Hold on."

Wait, this example is much fairer in reverse.  My children could have been told a story that "Your dad got in trouble for saying X to a ref." For some values of X, that would be quite possible.  Yet for others, my children would shake their head.  Nope.  Not my dad.  Not that one.  Someone is making that up.

Once you know to look for poetic perfection as a disproof, the news becomes easier. Bush splitting from the Air National Guard?  Too perfect.  John Kerry getting hat from a CIA guys?  Too perfect.

Bonus extra credit.  Some autobiographies fit the mold. Don't make me spell that out for you.

Russia Hoax

A liberal friend expressed horror a few months ago that Trump had believed Putin's claim of noninterference in the 2016 election, even when our own intelligence services had reported that it was true! She was further surprised when I nodded and said that while I didn't trust any statement from Putin, it was certainly true that the three-letter agencies were out to get Trump and could not be trusted on the matter either.

The information released by Tulsi explains that the intelligence services did in fact find there was nothing behind it, but the report was spiked by higher-ups, known to the Obama White House and Clinton campaigns, which quickly made an opposite claim.  

I am again no expert, and have to rely on who I think is fighting fair and who is not. But my prediction is that we are now on a course of

The hoax never happened

It happened but was completely different 

It mostly happened like you said, but was unimportant

It happened, but it was good that it happened

Let's move on

 

Russia Hoax and Ukraine

Steve Hsu interviews Scott Horton (transcript available) author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine .  Horton is a libertarian and antiwar activist and discusses the War in Ukraine at the beginning and end of the podcast, but the bulk of the discussion is about the accumulation of evidence that the Russia Hoax was coordinated by the FBI and CIA feeding information to media sources under the direction of the White House. Particularly disturbing was the amount of information coming from the bottom up, with agents reporting there was nothing to it, only to be told by their highest authorities to keep the investigation going anyway.

Nobody Tells Me Anything Anymore

I missed this in 2011.  It's someone's fault, dammit.

Languages usually die out when the last speaker dies, and that is usually a person who lost their last conversational partner, often a relative, just a few years earlier. Some linguists would say that the language is officially dead when there is only one speaker, as without conversation there are features that are irrecoverable even in theory, as speakers do not notice them consciously. If you have any experience with returning to a place that had unusual features you can get a sense of this. A friend now almost 80 who learned Swedish in America from her mother and especially grandparents went to Sverige to visit and used that language in conversation as well as she was able, as did her husband, who had a similar experience.  Eventually someone laughed "You sound like an old farmer!" In the quick changes in Romania after the Revolution, radio and TV programs were no longer considered dangerous and people got cell phones.  My sons, who lived in tiny Transylvanian villages in the mid 1990s, stayed briefly in foster care and orphanages in the late 90s, and came to America in 2001 went to a wedding in a bigger city (Marghita) in 2007 and quickly found that people were chuckling at some of their vocabulary, though they were speaking their first language. A word for pants or trousers was considered particularly uproarious. Only a few old people brightened and smiled benignly at its use. 

You may know examples even in America. The use of tonic for "soft drink" was common in my childhood. I don't recall whether I used it myself - I think we were likely to say soda instead, but I knew plenty of people, not just older ones, who preferred the term. Moxie and other beverages were sold as "nerve tonics" or other medicinals* a century earlier, and carbonated beverages were common earlier here than elsewhere (as were "bubblers," which actually originated in Wisconsin) so the name took. My father's second wife, who lives on in Nabnasset, MA, still says "tonic," and she can't be the only one. There may even be a few from my generation who say it. But if you multiply these things by a thousand and throw in six or seven trades or practices with their own vocabularies that are now uncommon, you may get to see how languages die in pieces, sections, and dribbles, until there is suddenly nothing left. Thus has it always been, though it is accelerated now that the children move to the cities for jobs and schooling - more true now than ever in the past 10,000 years, I think.

But Ayapeneco, an indigenous language in Mexico did not follow that pattern to the bitter end, but added a twist, which I missed hearing about at the time. The last two speakers refuse to talk to each other. I can see my brothers and myself pretending to do that while still secretly emailing or texting each other, just for the glory of it, but these two have no need to speak together for any reason, and so don't. 

Except it seems to be a hoax.  A linguistics hoax. I have written about how to detect hoaxes before (summary: if they are too perfect) but I admit I didn't see this coming.

The nearly-extinct languages mentioned in the article:

Ter Sami (note the second term, a people we used to call "Lapplanders") The last two speakers were uncontactable or dead in 2020.

Kayardild One fluent speaker may have still been alive in 2015, but only 8 spoke it in any fashion as of 2016.

Lengilu Three native speakers as of 2000. Bye-bye.

Mabire Sorry to be so ethnocentric, but a chief named Souleyman Dabanga sounds like a humorous character by PG Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh. The other two speakers were elderly siblings in 2001, and Dabanga now lives in another village. Not promising.

Tehuelche the last speaker died in 2019

Emine Sinmaz is not a language, as I originally assumed, but the writer of the article.

*Sponge-Headed Scienceman, who literally wrote the book on Moxie is now working on a book about the early history of soft drinks in New England - or maybe just New Hampshire.  I already know a couple of the stories about that, but will hold my fire until publication.  I wouldn't want to depress sales, ya know.

Odd Reasoning

There has been a lot of commentary - more on Twitter and on comment threads than in full articles - angry at the hypocrisy of governments and supposedly responsible organisations which applauded protests even though they were breaking the CoVid rules they had insisted people follow only days earlier.  That's fair. I will give something of a pass to groups that are merely cowardly, not wanting to put their businesses and livelihoods in jeopardy over their lack of C19 advice when that's not part of their mission.  Those folks are mostly just saying "Don't hurt me," like the greengrocer in Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless." Sad, I suppose, that Americans have to begin to act as they did in Czechoslovakia (remember Czechoslovakia?), but there it is.

Others really are displaying that the protests seem a more efficient way to acquire power and/or punish enemies than the virus and are cynically striking one flag and raising another.  All this you know, and you can read about it from better writers than I many places these days.  It is already an unoriginal thought.  What has gone less-noticed is the response of those who already thought the response to the virus was excessive.  They had already fully moved to the position that it has been the government, not the virus that destroyed forty million jobs, because that fits their narrative of government and their political opponents wanting nothing more than control over them. That government is more likely stupid, run by risk-averse busybodies, as libertarians have been insisting for decades, is less inspiring somehow.  Like the protestors, they want to be heroes in their own minds, bravely resisting The Man.

Yet this has gone even one step further. I keep seeing comments that seem to regard the hypocrisy as proof that C19 was never dangerous to begin with. This may be related to my flyover country post. They didn't know anyone nearby who died of it, so therefore no one did. It was all a hoax from the start.  I have seen the word hoax, repeatedly, yes, and not confined to the one extreme prediction of deaths before we had instituted any protective measures, but to the current situation. It was not merely a badly wrong decision in their eyes.  It has to be worse than that.

Let's review.  I suspect, as a non-expert, that whether the virus recurs every year is no longer in our control if it ever was.  If it becomes a yearly event we will just have to live with adjust to it, as we have adjusted to bad events all of human existence.  A second yearly illness, worse or not worse than the yearly flu, will simply be our lot, and our adjustments will be at the edges, of another vaccine if we are lucky, fewer shopping trips and social events if we are older or compromised, and less contact with older people if we are young, more frequent masks and hand-washing, less touching, hugging, handshaking - that's about it. That may not sound so bad compared to the intense avoidance of each other's contagion we are now engaged in, but please note these are real changes, and they will have a real economic impact on many livelihoods until we develop workarounds or substitutes.  There's a lot of culture and habit tied up in those things, too. Ask the grandmothers who can't see and hug their grandchildren.  It ain't nothing.

And this will be on top of what is already a sunk cost of death and disability. By September 1st we will have 150,000 deaths, if we are lucky. The number of people severely disabled or chronically compromised is unknown, but already noticed by professionals (though routinely ignored even by the people who warn us to remain cautious). I guess we'll notice when we start getting the bill for those disability checks. That is more than the Hong Kong flu over three years, about 2.5x the worst flu year in the last twenty (61,000), and more than six times the average flu year of 24,000. That's without a resurgence or reemergence, and after severe protective measures.

Desperately Seeking a Clue

Here we go again with the gas prices. The worldwide price of oil per barrel is coming down. So for that to be manipulated by the oil companies, there would have to be thousands of people at hundreds of companies in on the plan. Including, for example, Ahamdinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Saudis, Gazprom... yeah, they all want a Republican majority really badly.

I can’t think of a better way to shout “Hey! I have no clue how the economy works! It’s all a mystery so I just make simple guesses that I can understand!”

In related news, my uncle sent me an IQ hoax that’s been circulating. He apparently thought it was legit, and he should know better. He’s a Mensa member out in NoCal, and should have some intuitive sense of what the numbers mean, even if he doesn’t pursue psychometrics with any vigor. He sent me the supposed study by the Lowenstein Institute of Scranton, PA that estimates the IQ’s of presidents since 1973.

Without even knowing whether the Lowenstein Institute is biased, or sloppy, or even exists, this is the sort of hoax that people shouldn’t be falling for. The supposed IQ’s of our recent presidents were 182, 176, 174, 155, 147, 132, 126, 122, 121, 105, 98, and 91. I won’t tell you what numbers are assigned to whom, even for fun. Because it doesn’t matter; those numbers are a dead giveaway, another one of those signs people wear that say “I have no idea what a standard deviation is! I have no clue how IQ is measured or what it means!”

There was a similar urban legend that came out after the last election that supposedly showed the average IQ’s of the various states – the objective being to point out what idiots the Red States are, of course. I think Conneticut was at the tope with 115, Utah at the bottom with 85. This is just nuts. 15 points is a full standard deviation, and whole states are not an SD above or below the national average (and Mormon-heavy Utah isn’t likely to be the lowest in any event). You might, if you worked very hard, be able to find a small town dominated by a presitigious college where the average IQ is one SD above average. You will not find an entire county, let alone a state, that far above (or below) average.

I will use a related post to discuss how meaningful a bell curve is in discussing intelligence, and the difficulties of measurement, but for openers you need to bear this in mind. Any claim of an IQ over 140 should be viewed with suspicion, not because such people don’t exist, but because what it means is uncertain. 1 in a hundred people have an IQ of 141 or better, so all of us know a few. If you work in certain specialized fields, you might know many people above the 141 level. But the one-in-a-million level kicks in at around 176, so there’s only 300 of those in the country (theoretically). And remember, of that 300, about a third of them haven’t finished school yet. So 182 is just ludicrous, especially when you throw a 176 and 174 in next to it.

As with the belief that people are manipulating the price of oil, the belief in these statistical enormities about IQ says much more about the intelligence – and the insecurity – of the person who believes it.

You can make intentionally selected small groups that have high average IQ's. This is one. I have only about 30 hits a day, and I know a few people at the site have stratospheric IQ's. I doubt many here are below 120. So this group might average over 132 (2SD, 98th percentile). Gee, I wish we did more than fool around here.

Revel to Wolfe to Volokh

Reposted from 2013

With an assist from Grass.

Eugene Volokh tracked this down seven years ago.  It remains a favorite story of mine.

I wanted to get the source for the "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe," so I tracked it down to Tom Wolfe's "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," republished in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976). In the process, I found a more extended discussion that struck me as worth repeating. Here's the relevant excerpt, from pp. 115-17 of the hardcover edition; it reports on a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965, in which the participants included Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine, Günter Grass, and Wolfe:

The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folsk waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn't make any sense out of it. . . . This was the mid-1960's. . . . [T]he folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester's book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. . . .

Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.

"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn't you say! . . .

Moon Landing

I remember the event, but I don’t think it had much impact on me, then or now.  I was a camp counselor, and we had the campers watch it on a small TV, the director being aware of the significance of the event. I was more concerned with a girlfriend who was a counselor an hour up the road, planning a surprise visit on my day off. I vaguely remember having heard there was a music festival coming up in New York, but was so sure I would not be given permission to go to it that I gave it little thought.  Also, I was concerned with developing and maintaining coolness in general, making sure that my sneakers, my hair, my choice of music illustrated that I was much more with it than other 16 y/o’s, more like a college student really.

Nor have I ever gotten that excited about it.  Just a few years later another girlfriend suggested it was all a hoax, the first time I had considered such a shocking thing. Yet even then it was a matter for shrugging.  Either way, so what? I had a brief later interest when Alan Shepard from NH went to the moon and hit a golf ball, but I don’t even remember which mission that was or what year. The idea of using the moon to accomplish something, whether research or mining or manufacture, always caught my attention a bit more.

I can understand admiring the technical difficulty, the whole desire to do something just to prove it can be done (and that you are the one who can do it). Because we can.  Because it’s there. To be the first. The joy of accomplishing something difficult. I can picture myself enjoying being part of such an endeavor. Yet observing it in others?  Mild congratulations. Yngwie Malmsteen is probably the fastest lead guitarist and does what others cannot quite manage, but I don’t think he’s often very good. I don’t see the point. If you are a heavy metal guy, speed is often part of the allure. Technical precision does have value, but it’s not everything.

I might feel the same way about pure mathematics if it didn’t have a centuries-long record of turning out to be eventually useful.  I loved playing with numbers and algebra well into college and recall the joy of discovering a hidden property of a series or algebraic relationship.* But it’s only mildly interesting to me to watch someone else have that experience.  I suppose watching my children learn things is an exception to that.  But in celebrating great math, I am celebrating its potential usefulness. Mere beauty and elegance can be found in many other places.

So. Moon. Fine. I’m still not convinced it’s been a great leap for mankind, other than its derivative effects of making computers smaller and so forth. One criticism of going to the moon has not panned out, however. CS Lewis and others believed that actually landing on the moon would destroy the romance of it, and I doubt that has proved out in anything other than the most limited fashion.  We just moved our men from the moon and men from Mars further out in imagination.  I don’t know the science fiction genre well enough to know if the women from distant planets are still regarded as probably very sexy, but that was apparent even to a teenager that the fantasy was simply a way to talk more about sex. Even Heinlein did it.  Come to think of it, that was another supposedly very exciting thing that I had little interest in. Venusian girls always seemed a bit creepy to me.  Perhaps I just don’t have much interest in outer space in general, if I can’t even get interested a moon landing and potential sexy babes there.

*Here’s one: 1³ + 2³ = (1+2)², 1³ + 2³ + 3³ = (1+2+3)², 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ = (1 + 2 + 3 + 4)²… it’s just fun to notice

Another Corner Heard From

The always-irritable but often correct Spengler at the Asia Times comments on the financial crisis.

An enormous hoax has been perpetrated on global financial markets during the past 10 years. An American economy based on opening containers from China and selling the contents at Wal-Mart, or trading houses back and forth, provides scant profitability. Where the underlying profitability of the American economy was poor, financial engineering managed to transform thin profits into apparently fat ones through the magic of leverage.

No One Asked...

...but my suspicion is the attack on the McCain worker is at least partly a hoax.

Universal Language

The idea that we would all get along better, or perhaps progress scientifically if we all spoke the same language has a long steady minor popularity, never disappearing but never becoming much of a force either. I have never thought the getting-along part was particularly persuasive. Serbs and Croats speak the same language, America's bloodiest war was between sides which both spoke English, and worldwide, civil wars often include combatants who understand each other quite well, thank you - and that's the problem.  Is it worse when opponents also speak different languages? Perhaps. I might even say probably.  But mutual intelligibility is at best a percentage improvement, not a cure.

Does shared language improve scientific progress? It seems to have worked with Latin in Europe in the Middle Ages, and American science PhD's used to require facility in a language used in one's field, both for reading articles and interacting with peers in other countries. German and French were favored for this when I was in school, though Russian was popular in some fields.

Esperanto, that favorite of European idealists since the 19th C still has adherents. It looked like it was going to disappear after a century of mild success, but the internet has created a new community of speakers and writers. Still, the growth has not been explosive, as other communication changes related to the internet have been. While there are East Asians who learn it, it is going to attract few learners whose main language is not European and even Western European.  There are some Slavic elements, but it has largely Romance and Germanic foundations. If you originally speak Japanese, your effort is going into English, not Esperanto. It has a popularity among those who resent Americans and the domination of English on the international stage. But then, you have to take an artificial stand that you, Urdu-speaker, are going to side with the rest of Western Civilisation instead? Unlikely.

Interlingua, whatever its virtues, has very few users and is very heavily Western European.  There is no incentive for a speaker of Mandarin, Tamil, or any of the Arabics to learn it. Not gonna happen. There was also an invented language by a Swiss priest in the 19th C. Began with a "K," I think.* Never caught on anywhere.

So the constructed languages don't seemed to have achieved enough velocity for liftoff.

That leaves us with languages currently spoken, or simplified versions of them. French was the language of diplomacy and so known throughout the world and even favored in those places where English was hated. But French has faded. If the world were only the Western Hemisphere, some Spanish-Portuguese combo might win out over English and certainly French. But there is more to the world than that, much more. One might think that English-speakers would universally prefer that their own language remain the standard international language, but there is plenty of sentiment that it's just not fair, and symbolic of colonialism and capitalism and American hegemony and boy-we-hate-McDonalds-and-our-ugly-culture. Not that these folks are going out and learning Mandarin in any numbers, which would be the first credible alternative. They might know some nice European language to show their internationalist bona fides, but their advocacy for anything else is basically that schoolchildren should be made to learn whatever, because America is on it's way out, dammit, and we need to stick it to those Trumpsters and other jingoists. Anyway, it's the kids who will do that work, not them. Many (not all) who are anti-English because of cultural imperialism smuggle in Whorfian ideas, the belief that one's language influences or even dictates how one sees the world, also called The Language Hoax.

Because Mandarin, even though it starts with an enormous advantage of a billion speakers right out of the gate, is hard to learn.  It has tones, which are very difficult to even imitate, let alone master, if your ears did not start picking them up before age five. It is not like learning bad English or bad French, where your mispronunciations can be pieced together by natives. Mandarin is based on single syllables with varying tones, and getting the tone wrong does not mean you are saying "woman" badly, but another word entirely, multiple times in each sentence. Further, speakers of Indo-European languages in general, and very especially Americans, are used to non-native speakers butchering their language yet understanding them anyway.** 

More importantly, whether it's fair or not, English got in first, learning the languages of other people at least in part in order to trade, and teaching its own tongue at the same time. English is not just the language of airlines, but of travel in general, and most places like tourists even when they hate them. American culture has permeated the world. K-Pop, Bollywood, and other Asian popular expressions are on the rise, sure, but they are starting from so far back as to be nearly invisible. China will gain traction because of numbers alone.  They apparently already quietly influence Hollywood's choice in ways we seldom notice. 

There are simplified forms of English used internationally, such as ELF, Basic English, and Global English or Globish, which native speakers are not that familiar with. While supposedly aiming for a standard small-e english that can be understood by Magyars and Malagasys who have no other language in common, in practice each region develops its own versions. Not a terrible thing, I understand, as there is still a lot of intelligibility and it allows people to feel some control.

But doesn't English spelling ruin everything so much that it just has to fall into disfavor eventually? I recall as far back as elementary school reading SRA articles moaning about enough, cough, through, though, bough, thought. (Crazy spelling happened because literacy was becoming more widespread even before the printing press, and just as there were more people who could write things down in English, the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th-16th C occurred, rendering a lot of the spellings obsolete. Spellings change much more slowly than spoken language, and so are retained.) Yes, that's a problem. But it's not a problem of speech. In writing, we can suss out what someone means if they put it down phonetically.  Trust me on this.  My older Romanian son still doesn't spell well, but we can read his texts just fine. Spelling is a definite obstacle for an adult learner who wants to look like she knows what she's doing, but it is not an obstacle to understanding. Also, it is often overstated. Most words are phonetic, and even the ones which aren't are usually off on only one sound, with the rest being unimpaired.  The main disconnect is in stressed syllables, between how a word looks like it should be accented and how it actually is.

It's going to be English for a long time.

 *Volapuk. Close.

**The Soviet Union kicked this backwards a fair bit. As most movement was considered suspicious and internal travel generally discouraged - except for Russians needing to run stuff - the Slavic languages became more isolated, not less, despite the stated goals of unity.  And the Romanians and Moldovans, speaking the only Romance languages in the bunch were really screwed.

Hate Hoaxes

I was going to update my post How To Spot A Hoax linking to good articles by others, but when I hit three in one day I decide the topic is being well-covered without my adding to it.  The update is that there is no update.

College Protests: One Thought

 One of my responsibilities at the psychiatric hospital is to gather the testimony for involuntary commitments, which I pass on to the legal department to submit to probate court. There are two things we must prove: mental illness and dangerousness*.  I solicit information from potential witnesses - hospital and statewide ER staff, family, police, case managers, neighbors.  Inexperienced witnesses often focus entirely on how ill the person is. Oh, he's talking to himself all the time (so am I).  She's out-of-control, sleeping with lowlifes (so are thousands of other women in the state).  He's obsessed with swords, he's got dozens on his wall (so does the State House). She thinks someone is releasing gas into her apartment while she's at work (she does _what_ about that?) I often have to repeatedly redirect people into identifying for me what actual dangerous thing they have seen the patient do.

She yells at the neighbors. Meh.
She pounds on their doors at one in the morning.  Okay, now we're getting somewhere.  She could get punched or even shot.
She said she's going to buy a gun and shoot them. Yep, that we can use.  Did she say this in your presence?
No, she said that to her sister last summer.  Eh, that's probably not going to hold up. What's your sister's number?
YOU PEOPLE NEVER DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS.  YOU LET HER OUT OF THERE TOO SOON LAST FEBRUARY.  SHE'S NOT LIKE THIS WHEN SHE'S ON HER MEDICINE.  SHE'S RUINING HER LIFE.  HER CHILDREN DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH HER ANYMORE.

Well, it's very sad.  Usually it's mostly true, and the frustrated relatives quite properly want their loved one to have the best life she can.

Yet sometimes, when one digs deeper, we find it's not all that true. In the case above, the patient had never said anything about a gun to her sister.  The sister had heard that from other family members, but no one seemed to know where it came from.  The pounding on the door happened once, when she smelled smoke, and there was smoke. What turned out to be the real problem was that the patient acts like a little girl.  On her own time, not at her job.  She has crayon drawings all over the kitchen (Dora the Explorer, not the new adult fad).  She buys lots of barrettes, and stuffed animals, and flowered underpants. It creeps people out when they visit and they complain at her, so she doesn't let anyone now.  So there may not actually be any stuffed animals anymore.

We're not going to become the underwear police, either.

Is she ill?  Maybe. But telling me that it's not only Dora but Disney Princesses and playing with dolls doesn't change things.  Tell me what's dangerous. Give me an example of what is provably dangerous.

I think of this when I read the college reports of racism, of parties that black girls aren't welcome at, of the KKK being on campus at Mizzou. "Rape culture" seems to have a very flexible meaning. Any of these things could be. But you have to give some hard evidence.  Statistically, it must be true that there are at least some racists at Missouri.  But some people are awkward. And sometimes people don't hear correctly. And sometimes the story turns out to have no identifiable origin.  Or worse, is a hoax, of which there have been many. In fact, I assume the dramatic incidents on college campuses are probably hoaxes at this point.  Regular bigots usually just shout things or show up after dark with a spray can.  If there's anything more creative than that, I'm suspicious.

There is something that is very troubling in the complaints/demands from protest groups at the schools.  I don't know what percentage of students they represent. 1%?  90%?  Dunno. I would like to think that it's hardly anyone, just some troubled people who are congenitally resentful, with the rest of the campus going about their business.  Yet it's enough that administrators take it seriously.  But the complaints far too often focus on administrators (and professors, students - and Society?  The World?) having to validate their world-view. Other people not simply taking their word that they are being harmed is itself considered an additional harm. Any pushback is considered further evidence that the whole place is invalidating, requiring even more apology. It's a bottomless pit.

*Technically, we must show that the dangerousness results from the mental illness, but that's a refinement we needn't bother with here.


I have a second thought.

Apples, Oranges, and Gun Control

There was good discussion at my Liberty Alliance post, and bsking was her usual statistical self.  It is a more useful skill than what I provide, but I hope I can still be of service.  After a few days has gone by, I tend to move discussions to a new post rather than write something long under the old one - as I used to in the old days.

How can it be that there are studies showing masks provide some group protection and other studies that show they don't make any difference?  The first thing I notice is that they are usually measuring different things. Sometimes what is being measured is how much people are wearing masks. Sometimes what is being measured is whether masks are mandated are not. Those seem the same at first, but a second glance shows they are quite different. One is a more hard science look, the other is more of a sociological take. We can see this if we compare it to gun control laws.  Chicago has lots of gun control laws - mandates, if you will - while New Hampshire has few. But that doesn't tell us much about whether people are obeying those laws or not and whether they are being generally safe with guns, does it? So too with masks. Just because they are being mandated does not necessarily mean any increase in the actual behavior. 

I am pretty annoyed at sites that should notice the difference but either don't see it, or worse, don't mention it because it doesn't fit their aims. A couple of Insty writers trumpet studies that show mandates don't help, and the takeaway that a lot of people have, judging from the comments, is that masks don't do any good. It is an advocacy site and can print what it wants, but insofar as it purports to be publishing news and promoting intelligent discussion, they should be more evenhanded - or at least keep reminding people what they really are. There is secondly a months long quiet dishonesty, in that right from the beginning they have been insisting "People won't put up with these restrictions. Real Americans aren't like that." Then when people resist wearing masks, and the numbers go down and the disease keeps spreading they say "See?  Masks don't work." 

Similar discussions about restaurant closings, school attendance, distancing and other measures flow from this, but I am just sticking with masks at present for simplicity, and because it is the easiest of measures to follow through with.  While they are a genuine hardship for some*, they generally aren't.

It is very possible from this disparity to take the view "Well fine then.  Mask mandates are no more effective than gun control, so we shouldn't have them."  I have a general sympathy with the idea that restrictions on freedoms, even small ones, should show some use or they should not even be considered. But there is a difference here, and perhaps a crucial one.  No one is claiming that gunshot wounds don't hurt people. There aren't comment boards angrily pointing out that lots of ammo is used without anyone getting shot, so this whole gun safety idea is ridiculous. Gun  owners are often the first to tell you "Dude, get some training." People acknowledge the danger but insist it can be managed, and that it actually reduces danger in other directions. If the people of an area were insisting that a gun can't hurt you, even I might reluctantly conclude some sort of restriction should be in place until we could smack some sense into them.

And yes, there are plenty of people saying exactly that about masks, without making any distinctions of masks properly made and properly worn, or particular circumstances.  I have heard them live and so have you, usually males being dismissive and implying that you are being a bit of a coward for buying into that nonsense.  This is usually accompanied by some very bad extra reasoning, such as "this is mostly a hoax, which I can tell because I don't know anyone who has gotten this," or assertions that the deaths aren't really Covid or aren't any more than usual, or are fewer than the number of people who die from x, y, or z. Dude, don't help any schoolchildren with their science homework, okay?

While I am on a rant, I will revert to my usual rants as well.  Not all of the disruption is because of the government, but lots of people are focusing on the government actions as a synecdoche for all the misery in their lives. With this many deaths, restaurant attendance was going to go down anyway, and restaurants are notoriously fragile. Also, many businesses concluded they don't want the risk for staff, vendors, and customers regardless of what the government was mandating - and liability questions are also looming an uncertain. Next, I keep hearing "They told us this was supposed to only be two weeks to flatten the curve."  That's a fully reasonable complaint.  The rug was pulled and the various reasons why are fair game for discussion.  But you know what else they said back in March? "They" said it was "just the flu," which would be 23K deaths in a year, and then "a bad flu," which would be 60K. "They" said that Florida was handling things much better, Texas had very few cases, California had way fewer cases than New York, and why couldn't we all be more like South Dakota? "They" said that the US wasn't going to get hit as hard as Italy or France because...something. Except the "they" in those previous statements are not the "experts" (always in quotes) but the self-appointed experts who were critics, who no longer mention what they used to claim. 

As I have said before - with lower numbers - you can make the argument that 400,000 deaths isn't a lot, especially when it's mostly old people who were going to die in 1-24 months anyway.  That is a seismic shift in American culture to regard the elderly that way, and it has been predicted over the last few decades because of how expensive we are getting to be.  But you could make that claim, yes. I don't like a culture taking that attitude toward life, but many tribes have done even worse - think ice floes and seal blubber. Just admit what you said, and what you are saying, or you haven't got the right to criticise what others said and are saying.

*As noted in comments under a previous post, people who can't have glasses fogging up when they are working and people who have hearing deficits have real hardships.

USAF Prep

I called this when it came out, but I thought it would just be buried and I would never know.

Another hate crime hoax.

Real hate crimes are mostly just stupid, with primitive name-calling or shoving someone.  One of our cars was vandalised 25 years ago.  Someone spray-painted SATIN on a side of the car, then tried to paint the hood but ran out of room and had to drop to the next line, so that he ended up writing LOS-SER. The minute they show any planning or are too good to be true, I am suspicious.

Ways of Knowing

When my oldest was a small boy, he took it into his head that not fastening our seat belts would cause us to get into an accident. He had clearly picked up associations we had made between the concepts of accident and seat-belt.  The distinction between "in case we get into an accident" and "because we'll get into an accident" is not easy when you're three or four. No real harm done at the time.  He fastened his seat belt willingly and we didn't think he'd graduate from highschool with that misapprehension.

There are a lot of theories and descriptions of the various ways people come to think they know things and what they trust.  They are not mutually exclusive.  We all trust our own experience while attaching some importance to what we hear happens to others.  We all have authorities we trust, but also trust our own ideas and reasoning. We also have opinions about what other people trust in ways of knowing. We particularly dislike it when those benighted other folks trust the wrong authorities or exhibit poor reasoning.  We also mix categories. In the long sorry state of CoVid commentary, we have had lots of complaints about people trusting "experts," always in sneer quotes, yet our solution is nearly always that they instead believe...different experts.  Ones that we like better.

The other suggestions are usually worse. Too many people trust only what their personal experience is, believing this is somehow representative of the real world, and ignoring what people smarter than they are are saying. There are half dozen over at Maggie's - which has a wide readership and thus provides a forum where knuckleheads can have their say, which is very American - and even one at Grim's who have claimed "Y'know how I know this virus is all a hoax?  Because I don't know a single person who's had it." My first temptation is to say "Dude, don't help any kids with their science homework, okay?" Yet it is true that we all are affected by what drifts by our dock on the river.  Glenn Reynolds made the interesting observation that this may operate like AIDS in reverse.  No one took that disease seriously until they knew someone who died from it, and then it suddenly went to the top of the list of problems the country needed to solve. He mentioned that he had C19, it wasn't a bad case, and most people he knew about didn't have bad cases, and thought that many people were going to conclude that the disease wasn't that big a deal.  I think his prediction is likely true. I disliked his tone that this was a generally accurate, good conclusion to come to, though he refrained from going that far. 

This gave me an immediate new example to draw from, however.  I had many patients (and two coworkers) who eventually died of AIDS in the 1980s, and heard of more from my theater days in the 70s, even though I think I knew of none from any of my social circles by then. Most of my friends knew no one who had the illness. I knew that both their personal experience and their personal experience were not the whole story. The same is happening now.  College professors are not likely to have a representative sample of the danger of the disease, they will have an underestimate, unless there is some other factor in their lives, such as a family member in assisted living.  Health care workers are likely to have the opposite bias in their sample. They will know a disproportionate number of people who have the illness, and a disproportionate number who die from it. Their prism is slanted such that it skews to the other end of the spectrum. I will note additionally that when you know people who died, it just naturally has a large impact. In strictly logical terms, perhaps an excessive impact, but...death is an important consequence, y'know? Not one that human beings are supposed to be dismissing too easily.

There are other groups which are going to have more exposure to Covid deaths than others.  Pastors and people who are on prayer chains do not only hear about their friends and immediate circle, but the relatives of their friends and their frightening circumstances. That is a biased sample, to be sure, but it is not pretend.  I'm not sure what further groups would have too many representatives of the dead and which too few. Relatedly, those whose circles of exposure are those who are not in much danger even if they get the illness seem to focus on their own personal risk and their insistence that they should have the freedom to make that assessment, while those who know many who are at the mercy of the safety habits of others are more likely to favor controls to limit the damage of the poor decisions of those others. Neither is an unnatural bias, but you should know which tendency your life circumstances tilt toward.

I write all this not to tell you which experts you should choose.  Others can advise you better than I on that. I am overconfident that I can sort through which experts to trust, but that needn't affect you.  However, I am qualified to ask you to look carefully at what your sample and your experience is.  What is the age group of the people you interact with most? What would you predict their level of danger would be in a general situation if they lived somewhere else? If they have relatives or friends who get injured or sick, is your situation such that they would tell you, or are you sheltered from that knowledge? 

And next, how much does this personal bias, which is a natural but unscientific influence your assessments. There's no quiz on this.  No one is grading your answers except yourself.