Adeste Fidelis

We learned it in Latin in grammar school.

Because that's what we did in those days.

In-Laws

I use Daughters-in-law for the plural and Daughter-in-law's for the possessive. I just noticed that this frees me up to use both if I need to, as in "my Brothers-in-law's behavior at Thanksgiving in the old days at Scituate." But I didn't choose those forms for that reason. It's based purely on what sounds right to my ear.

Just answering the important questions for you.

Birth Dearth

I have recommended the demographer Lyman Stone many times, and the interview Razib Khan did with him this fall may be the best yet. We note that developed countries have progressively fewer children and conclude that rising income depresses fertility.  But it is not so. That is only a mild correlation when isolated from other factors.  The big drivers are education, urbanisation, and the long-term projected cost of children.  He notes, for example, that South Korean culture expects that children will live with their parents until they can have a home of their own, and at the end of their twenties if they have not achieved that, the parents buy them a home. Knowing that this is the situation thirty years earlier raises the possible cost of each child, and reduces the desire to have too many. Even if they are married, they tend not to have children.  Stone notes wryly "there is no birth control as good as having your parents down the hall."

South Korea is now down to 0.6 children per woman, an insanely low and self-destructive norm. Since WWII they have become increasingly urbanised and educated, and the expectation for a person to "succeed" in some high-status job is now so enormous that people stay in school in fields they do not even like and give up all else in order to have this. 

He notes that Chinese elites have a long tradition of few children per woman, and they have long been educated, urbanised, and expected to pay for expensive education/houses/dowries. The phenomenon was disguised by serial polygamy, so that elite men had many children, while the women had few.

Fascinating discussion start to finish.

Uncomfortable update.  There is a full description of the forced attempts at heightened fertility in Romania under Ceausescu, and the horrible results of that. It includes some background I didn't know about how many of the children got put in orphanages.  I'm not sharing this information with my middle sons. They deserve to forget as much as possible.

Compared to What?

The previous post, and I may do more of them as an ongoing experiment, looks at whether ChatGPT news gives us quite what we want. Today I read an ESPN account of Boise State women's volleyball team withdrawing from the conference tournament rather than play San Jose State, which has a transgender female. I draw your attention to the paragraph about the legal challenge.

U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Kato Crews in Denver ruled Monday that the player is allowed to play, and a federal appeals court upheld the decision the following day.

The statement is true, but I thought at first that the larger issue had been adjudicated, and the general right of transgender athletes to play had already made it through a federal appeals court. Does that paragraph seem to say that to you? If you follow the links, you find that the court decisions are basically "The policy has been in place since 2022.  If you are going to contest it you don't do it as an emergency injunction basis right before the tournament.  You should have done this long ago."  That seems a fair ruling on the part of the courts, which did not rule on the general safety or fairness issues at all, intentionally.

I think that was a bit sly on the part of ESPN.  But my opposition to transgender women playing against original females may be coloring that judgement.

Now ChatGPT would report this as a source and report it at face value, perpetuating the false impression unless it had been instructed a little more specifically to look for other things.  It might also pick up information from another source which brings that issue up and follow that. It has plenty of time and energy for that, because it moves much faster than you.

To use metaphors (probably a bad thing to do with AI at this point), rabbit trails are not a problem. You can let it go down all the rabbit trails. But it is susceptible to red herrings.

Nearly A Dozen Threats

Trying out DeepNewz here for the first time. ChatGPT

Bomb Threats Against Trump's Cabinet Nominees.

Several of President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet nominees and administration appointees have been targeted with violent, un-American threats, including bomb threats and swatting incidents, according to the Trump transition team and the FBI. The attacks occurred on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, threatening the lives of the nominees and their families. Trump transition team spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt stated that law enforcement authorities acted quickly to ensure the safety of those targeted. The FBI confirmed it is investigating numerous bomb threats and swatting incidents directed at incoming administration nominees and appointees and is working with law enforcement partners.

Trump HHS pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Compares CDC Vaccine Programs to Nazi Death Camps, Calls for Imprisonment of Researchers

Recent recordings from private autism meetings reveal that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump's nominee for the Department of Health and Human Services, has made controversial statements regarding vaccination programs. In the recordings, Kennedy compared the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) vaccine initiatives to 'Nazi death camps' and called for the imprisonment of researchers involved in these programs. Over the past six years, he has also likened the act of vaccinating children to abuses by the Catholic Church, describing the CDC’s vaccine division as a 'fascist enterprise' and accusing it of deliberately harming children. These remarks have raised significant concerns about his views on public health policy as he prepares to lead the agency responsible for overseeing such programs.

The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

We are making pumpkin pie tonight, and seeing molasses often reminds my wife of this story.

It's fun to say sticky tsunami, even though it is a stupid phrase.

The tank, 50 feet high and 90 feet in diameter, contained 2.3 million gallons of molasses originally destined for use in a munitions plant. The tank, though only a few years old, seemed shaky. People who lived and worked in the North End said the tank shuddered and groaned when the company filled it. Shortly after noon, the tank collapsed with a thunderous roar. The ground shook, and witnesses said the rivets popping out of the tank sounded like machine gun fire.

Shchedryk

 

Rising Influence of Heritability

From Aporia, a preprint from a paper out of King's College, London. I don't recognise the name of the lead author Damien Morris (likely my ignorance), but Ritchie and Plomin are both big names in genetics.

Mechanisms of developmental change in genetic and environmental influences on intelligence. Damien Morris and colleagues re-examine the Wilson effect, the rising heritability of intelligence with age. Analysing longitudinal data for 10,535 twin pairs, they find that heritability rises from 24% at age 2 to 50% at age 16, while shared environmental influence declines from 65% to 10%. Non-shared environmental influence also rises.

This general model is coming to be preferred - at least by people doing actual research, not the journalists, educators, social workers, etc who wield so much influence over children: The effect of genes rises as we grow older.  This study is useful because it covers the years of childhood only, when children are usually in a setting controlled by adults, usually parents. To oversimplify, twins reflect their environment(green) more than their genes(blue) at first, and have very little nonshared environmental(red) influence. As they get older, the genes assert their dominance gradually.  The nonshared environment - different friends, different available hobbies, different teachers - grows in influence as well.  By age sixteen, the parental influence on the intelligence of children is pretty much spent.

The pattern holds for other traits, but not as dramatically as with intelligence.

DeepNewz

 DeepNewz is a new AI-powered news site with Nikolai Yakovenko (nvidia, Perplexity, Deep NFTValue, Twitter engineer, professional poker, Lord knows what else) as CEO.  I have been using it the last few days and liking it quite a bit.  Tell me what you think.

Pinay Sa Alaska

I have mentioned my daughter-in-law's online activities only occasionally.  I should do it more. Pinay means "Filipina," and is one of those self-referential terms that used to be an insult but has now been adopted proudly. YouTube account is the small one, with only 13K subscribers. TikTok is the big one with 1.3M subscribers. I would not have predicted ten years ago that we had a Filipina influencer in the family who makes significant money on top of her regular job in Nome. Then again, I would have not predicted 30 years ago that we would have Romanian sons either. Life changes. Adapt.

Notice in the first video from four years ago that she has not yet learned that the first rule of performance is "get the pretty girls out front and center." That would be herself and the three granddaughters. She is quite natural in front of the camera.

No, I have little idea what she is saying in Tagalog save for the occasional English word that falls in.  Two of the three girls used to be camera shy on family Zoom calls. Now they are comfortable having their everyday activities filmed. John-Adrian (JA to his brothers and John to his wife and friends) has always been a bit of a showman. Among his many side hustles - king crab, salmon, finding gold, fleecing people at poker on Las Vegas vacations when they have had too many drinks - he has added a TikTok account of his own.  I have no idea why people would watch him, but he has started to make money as well.  Maybe I should have an "Old guy taking walks and talking to himself" TikTok account and become an Old Guy influencer or something.

Sure you could just look up the exchange rate at XE.com.  But wouldn't you rather have Jocie explain it to you?

They were very proud when Outdoor Boys came up a second time and had John-Adrian on their weekly video, which has about 13M subscribers.

People always ask about darkness in Nome and say "Oh, I couldn't handle that." They are down to about five hours of daylight now, with another hour of half-light on each end. His brother Chris, halfway around the world in Tromso is actually above the Arctic Circle and is down to about 50 minutes of daylight now.  Both will tell you that it is the summer which is harder in the long run, because you get poor sleep many nights and it adds up.  With dark, you can turn on lights after all.

The YouTube Algorithm

I give it credit.  I would never have looked for this on my own and I have no idea what it is basing this on. Over 3.4M hits, probably. But you learn something new every day, doncha?

Numbered Posts

I recorded the publishing of each hundred posts over the first 19 years, and they are a diverse group. For example...

Post 1700

Post 3500

Post 5200 

Post 7900

But now that I have reached 10,000, mentioning that the last post was 10,100 seems rather silly.  I will do only the 1,000s now.

Somewhat Literary Posts, 2009

I got distracted by the election and stopped reprising posts from 2009.

Aunt Jennie The first in my Aunt Jennie's series was runner up for the Newbery in 1955 and was eventually available mostly only to collectors until recently, when The Golden Name Day was reissued, but without the Garth Williams illustrations. The comments are fun.

Tolkien Rocks (The interior link no longer works.  What's left is fun anyway.)

3) The Watcher in the Water

Dude. That totally was cool. I mean, say what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster. Shelob, Smaug, the Balrog..

Debunking the Common Belief   "Debunking" might be the surest clickbait word for me.  This one is about the myth of the lone American hero.

Ukraine Is Not Real

There is a post over at Grim's about ballistic missiles and land mines, and James jumps in with a comment that set me thinking. Go there first.

BTW, now more than ever I wish this circle was larger, because I think it is a remarkably good discourse among intelligent people who are clear where their expertise ends and their extensive general knowledge plus reasoning plus answering opposition arguments begins. I am decently intelligent myself, but my gift seems to have been attracting a very intelligent crowd. It's a great legacy. Some days I fume because I have not attracted a larger crowd; other days I marvel that I can have such conversations, which I have sought all my life.

I have cynically mentioned before that in Washington, none of these places are real. Heck most of America isn't real.  They are all merely counters on the gameboards of power in DC. No real people are dying or suffering. And it is mostly not about Democrats vs Republicans or conservatives versus liberals.  Dominic Cummings astutely pointed out that these are intra-party and intra-movement gameboards. The players are positioning themselves for votes and alliances and prestige within their own party, because that endures more than national notoriety for all but a few, and those are chancy and situational.

Montana is just one more vote in the Senate.  No people live there, only videogame characters. Should Montana feel insulted? No, because in Helena even Whitefish is only an imaginary place on the way to Banff.

Globetrotters

We don't have much of this anymore.  It used to be common in baseball as well, as in the Indianapolis Clowns, who even Hank Aaron had to play for early on to get noticed. It was not only a vehicle for black athletes to have an actual job and to show their skills, but to play out our racial conflicts, where blacks would push the boundaries of their stereotype and get to make fun of white people, but not stray too far over those borders. People were being instructed without realising it.

Choosing A Career

From Rob Henderson (bottom of page).

It is a great point, but read it in consideration of the recent post on social capital, which would suggests he might have higher status in some eyes as an office manager even at little more than half the salary. 

College graduates who studied STEM subjects are much more likely to believe they made the right choice, while those who majored in social sciences and humanities second-guess themselves. Nearly half of humanities, arts, and social science majors wish they had chosen a different field of study. (source). On this point, the social scientist Charles Murray has given one of my favorite examples for how a young person can think about career options:

In Real Education, Murray asks you to imagine that a young man has just graduated from high school.

He is trying to decide whether to become an electrician or attend college, get a business degree, and become a white-collar manager. He knows his strengths and weaknesses after taking a rigorous skills test. Something like the ASVAB, a test the military administers to measure the various abilities of potential recruits.

This kid is slightly above average in his linguistic abilities. He’s exactly average in intrapersonal and interpersonal skills (ability to understand himself and others). He is at the 95th percentile in both small motor skills (ability to exert subtle and precise control over one’s bodily movements) and spatial skills (ability to mentally rotate objects).

So he looks up the average income of electricians and managers. He sees that the average income for electricians is about $73K and the income of managers is about $84K. Should he go to college? The kid should ignore these averages. If he wants to become a manager, he will be competing for such positions against people who are much higher than him in linguistic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills. Plainly, his competitors would play social chess at a higher level than him. But his fine motor skills and spatial ability are superior to most people, even most electricians. The young man reflects on this, and sees that the 10th percentile of manager incomes is $55K. The 90th percentile of electricians is $104K. Thus, even if he obtains a bachelor’s degree (which isn’t guaranteed, given that 40% of male college students fail to graduate), he’d go on to earn far less than he would as an electrician.

This is a good example because it can be used to approach other questions.

Looking at averages can help. But knowing your unique set of abilities and unusual circumstances, along with broader statistical trends, enable you to make wiser decisions about your major and chosen career.

Also, the up-front cost of college is not entered into the discussion, which would push the monetary consideration even farther in the direction of a trade. And yet people still choose that over the trades, and mate availability may be part of that.

Vaccination

There are not many places on earth where we have detailed cause-of-death data from before the era of widespread vaccination. Massachusetts is one of those places. From 1842-1877, 70% of all deaths were from diseases which we today have vaccines to prevent.

 

Has Snopes Changed Back?

I am truly asking this.  I am not giving an answer. And man, I was much happier when I was avoiding politics, before I somehow got sucked in in October as the election heated up.  After this I am going to go back to interesting anthropology bits; evolutionary psychology as it relates to current mating patterns (I still have one son in Duxbury unattached; and it fits into my next category as well); nostalgia - especially on YouTube; and CS Lewis/Inklings.

I used to love Snopes, and over a decade ago thought that a Snopes-like site in Arabic would do the world a lot of good. Then I started getting reports it was slanted left and eventually followed up on a crazy-sounding idea that the Chinese were using parts of aborted fetuses to make cosmetics.  Snopes said this was "False."  Not even "Mixed."  But their own description revealed that Okay, not everyone does it. And even those who do don't do it a lot.  We don't think.  Though it's hard to get a straight answer out of China. I didn't think that qualified as "false," and subsequent uses around 2010 revealed some odd political slants as well. It was likely a decade ago that I learned that the couple had divorced and the man had remarried a very liberal woman who was injecting interpretation.  Though that's a vague memory at this point and I don't much care. I hadn't been back.

But the challenge was issued in the comments on another site that Kamala had slept her way to the top and this was airily dismissed as having been debunked, so I googled it, and got a lot of other links about her, including her Wikipedia entry that acknowledged she had "dated" him and he had appointed her to some entry-level political positions. When I put in Kamala Harris Willie Brown I did finally get links that addressed the issue, including Snopes.  So I bit. Snopes called the accusation "Mixed," and acknowledged that they had dated when she was 29 and he was 60. Umm...He had separated from his wife for over a decade but was still technically married. Well, read it yourself. To me it looks like they are explaining away a fair bit. She slept her way to the middle, then affirmative action took over for her rise.  The Wiki entry talks about people who praised her career as a prosecutor, listing the terrible kinds of people that all prosecutors prosecute.  I have read other descriptions that she made her bones offering young black men terrible plea deals, the usual way of dealing with backlogs. I am not in a position to judge that either way.

But give this background story to some other candidate or in some other century and what would we say? Powerful older married man sleeping with a woman half his age and giving her political appointments?

Have any of you used Snopes recently for anything political? What's your take?

Bad Election Narratives

Was it racism that did Harris in?  Sexism? Turnout Troubles?  Billionaires for Trump? 

I doubt I would agree with many of the author's political leanings, but he plays it straight and by the numbers as a sociologist who looked hard at the common explanations and found them all wanting

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives, by Musa al-Gharbi at his substack Symbolic Capital(ism)

Critically, until somewhat recently, the voting patterns of men and women were not that different. Whoever got the lion’s share of the male vote tended to win the female vote too. This changed after 1996. And it didn’t change because men suddenly grew more Republican (they didn’t). It changed because women shifted aggressively towards the Democratic Party in the mid-90s, and consistently gave Democrats around 54 percent of their vote for every cycle since, irrespective of who was at the top of the ticket or what the pressing issues of the day were.

He believes this month's numbers are a continuation of trends over the last 30 years, in particular the division between those who have what he calls symbolic capital, making their livings in big tech, finance, media and entertainment, big law, branding, versus physical goods and services. We constantly note what good money people can make in trades and wonder why young people, particularly young men who seem to have diminished status these days, don't flock to them.  This may be a large part of it.  In the current world, they sense that higher status is held by those in the professions which rely on the manipulation of symbols rather than objects.

The old joke is that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two groups and those who don't, so I am always suspicious of over-streamlined narratives like this. Folks is folks, after all.  But this has a lot of explanatory power and will take some additional thinking about.  He has at least one book We Were Never Woke.

Whaddya Gonna Do In a Little Canoe?

 Looking for another old camp song, circa 1959, I came across this one. I asked my wife if she had sung it at Girl Scout camp, and she assured me that her mother would never have allowed such a thing. It has a fun twist in the second verse.