A rock crystal ring masterfully carved into the shape of a sphinx. It dates to the 19th or 20th Dynasty (circa 1295-1070 BCE)
— Things from the past 📷🎥 (@moodvintage) December 27, 2020
This piece (29944) is now in Electrum gallery in New York, USA, an agent for Phoenix Ancient Art S.A., an antiquities dealer based in Geneva, Switzerland pic.twitter.com/nXqr0IlO0I
In Opinion: Before we spend scarce resources and time trying to assess and enhance student learning, shouldn’t we maybe check to be sure that learning is what actually happens in college? #CHEarchive https://t.co/3BSLKfGKFV
— The Chronicle of Higher Education (@chronicle) December 22, 2020
From Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall
Those publicly labeled as failures normally have no choice but to leave the organization; those adjudged nonpromotable can remain, provided they are willing to stop moving ahead, or, as their influence inevitably wanes with their decreased mobility, accept being shelved, sidelined, sidetracked, or, more colorfully, “mushroomed”—that is, kept in a dark place, fed manure, and left with nothing to do but grow fat. This too, of course, is a kind of failure, indeed a serious one, and I shall discuss its consequences shortly.
Normally, despite official policies and good intentions to the contrary, those considered to be nonpromotable are not told of negative judgments about them. An Alchemy executive explains:
Well, usually you don’t tell people the truth. I once knew a guy whom I knew was about to be fired and I asked if he had been told and he had never been told. I think you should tell people explicitly. Things like that shouldn’t have to be decoded. But you can understand how it happens. Suppose you have a guy and the consensus is that he isn’t promotable. You wouldn’t ever—or very seldom—tell him.
He goes on to justify his silence:
There are people who go through life thinking they can do a lot more than they really can do. And the reason is that losing or changing jobs is a very high stress situation and most people prefer to hang on to what they’ve got—to their routine. They’re not happy but they go through life like prisoners of war not recognizing their true situation.
This is especially true in hierarchical up-or-out professional services firms; law firms, accounting firms, management consulting firms, etc. Firms with a constant need to evolve and innovate. There are valuable employees who are good at what they do but will not advance owing to some deficit such as sales or people management, or delivery, or asset creation, or leadership.
At the opening of my career in management consulting in the 1980s, we very much existed in version Jackall describes. We lost people we should have kept because they did not know they had been tagged as rising stars. We lost people we could have kept because they felt they were stagnating when in fact they were optimally placed and productive, just unable to address some critical skill or behavioral deficit. We sometimes kept people when they should have been counseled out. People who might blossom with instruction or mentorship but who turned inward and became time servers.
In management consulting it was more up-and-out than up-or-out. Yearly, you have to prove your worth and your likely advancement. If you can't do that, then you are out. Except, there is a business cycle dynamic as well. You might be top notch and with a bright future but if the business cycle turns, you might still be very successful and producing value but the excel spreadsheet says X number of people have to go and if you are junior but spectacular, out you go.
By the end of my career with the big firms we had evolved the process significantly. We graded everyone by level on empirical performance data, then ranked them within levels, recommended how behavioral, skill or performance issues might be addressed. We had clear performance metrics by level so that top to bottom, everyone got assessed regardless of vintage. Every level was assessed by the group above them in an open forum to ensure fairness across the organization. And offline, there would be conversations about edge cases and possible interventions.
The result was a greater sense of clarity of mission, an appreciation of fairness even if the empirical outcomes were disappointing, higher personnel retention, better relationships around separations, etc. It was time consuming for leadership but, I think, fairer and more effective and worthwhile.
Humans aren't the only animals that play, part 274: Monkeys climbing a tree so they can jump into the puddle below, just because it's fun 🐵 https://t.co/kD6nKcVhMQ pic.twitter.com/Ff4ORMNsb2
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 29, 2020
global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures
— el gato malo (@boriquagato) December 29, 2020
these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.
this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.
let's look. pic.twitter.com/O4sJWt7JwY
Rocky coast in the moonlight, 1830 by Johann Nepomuk Schödlberger (1779-1853)
After the snow, 1924 by Sixtus Z. von Dzbanski (1874 - 1942)
Ice Flows on the Seine at Bougival, 1868 by Claude Monet
From The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.
The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it, “Our meetings took place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus.” Even if at first no consensus exists—only the appearance of one—the group’s sense of cohesiveness works to turn the appearance into reality, and in doing so helps dissolve whatever doubts members of the group might have. This process obviously works all the more powerfully in situations where the group’s members already share a common mind-set. Because information that might represent a challenge to the conventional wisdom is either excluded or rationalized as obviously mistaken, people come away from discussions with their beliefs reinforced, convinced more than ever that they’re right. Deliberation in a groupthink setting has the disturbing effect not of opening people’s minds but of closing them. In that sense, Janis’s work suggests that the odds of a homogeneous group of people reaching a good decision are slim at best.
One obvious cost of homogeneity is also that it fosters the palpable pressures toward conformity that groups often bring to bear on their members. This seems similar to the problem of groupthink, but it’s actually distinct. When the pressure to conform is at work, a person changes his opinion not because he actually believes something different but because it’s easier to change his opinion than to challenge the group. The classic and still definitive illustration of the power of conformity is Solomon Asch’s experiment in which he asked groups of people to judge which of three lines was the same size as a line on a white card. Asch assembled groups of seven to nine people, one of them the subject and the rest (unbeknownst to the subject) confederates of the experimenter. He then put the subject at the end of the row of people, and asked each person to give his choice out loud. There were twelve cards in the experiment, and with the first two cards, everyone in the group identified the same lines. Beginning with the third card, though, Asch had his confederates begin to pick lines that were clearly not the same size as the line on the white card. The subject, in other words, sat there as everyone else in the room announced that the truth was something that he could plainly see was not true. Not surprisingly, this occasioned some bewilderment. The unwitting subjects changed the position of their heads to look at the lines from a different angle. They stood up to scrutinize the lines more closely. And they joked nervously about whether they were seeing things.
Most important, a significant number of the subjects simply went along with the group, saying that lines that were clearly shorter or longer than the line on the card were actually the same size. Most subjects said what they really thought most of the time, but 70 percent of the subjects changed their real opinion at least once, and a third of the subjects went along with the group at least half the time. When Asch talked to the subjects afterward, most of them stressed their desire to go along with the crowd. It wasn’t that they really believed the lines were the same size. They were only willing to say they were in order not to stand out.
Asch went on, though, to show something just as important: while people are willing to conform even against their own better judgment, it does not take much to get them to stop. In one variant on his experiment, for instance, Asch planted a confederate who, instead of going along with the group, picked the lines that matched the line on the card, effectively giving the unwitting subject an ally. And that was enough to make a huge difference. Having even one other person in the group who felt as they did made the subjects happy to announce their thoughts, and the rate of conformity plummeted.
Ultimately, diversity contributes not just by adding different perspectives to the group but also by making it easier for individuals to say what they really think. As we’ll see in the next chapter, independence of opinion is both a crucial ingredient in collectively wise decisions and one of the hardest things to keep intact. Because diversity helps preserve that independence, it’s hard to have a collectively wise group without it.
We are in a dangerous period when we have powerful forces, commercial, political establishment, academic and governmental, which are both censoring reality as well gaslighting the population - denying things which known to be true but which are inconvenient to Mandarin Class interests.
It is ironic that the Mandarin Class is so ecstatic about diversity when they are at the same time so clearly committed to doxxing, deplatforming, censorship and other such methods in order to enforce a preferred pure orthodoxy of critical theory and social justice ideas, regardless of how destructive and at variance with reality those ideas might be.
I saw such an example of straightforward gaslighting with the New York Times's recent obituary of noted intelligence researcher, Dr. James Flynn. Flynn was a polymath and iconoclast who pursued his intellectual interests with vigor and respect. In the field of intelligence research one of the most replicated findings is that there are group IQ differences (with a normal distribution in every case). Some of these differences are large, some vanishingly small. But they exist across virtually all dimensions of "group" - by race, by sex, by class, by ethnicity, by religion, by era, by status - you can find differences in group average IQ and those differences are found and replicated by different researchers at different times. It is, indisputably, real, even if also one of the more controversial phenomena in the biological world owing to being prone to incendiary misinterpretations.
While Flynn was one the researchers most critical of some forms of intelligence research, he was also one of the most respected by those whom he was criticizing. His criticism arose not from ideology or emotionalism but from clearly articulated rational, empirical judgements and research.
Wikipedia's account of one particular instance stands in for the many controversies arising from his willingness to consider an open and independent view of the world. Criticism often came not because he was wrong but because he was willing and able to discuss realities unappreciated in some quarters.
In July 2012, several media outlets reported Flynn as saying that women had, for the first time in a century, surpassed men on IQ tests based on a study he conducted in 2010. However, Flynn announced that the media had seriously distorted his results and went beyond his findings, revealing that he had instead discovered that the differences between men and women on one particular test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, had become minimal in five modernised nations (whereas before 1982 women had scored significantly lower). Women, he argued, caught up with men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access. Therefore, he said, when a total account of the Flynn effect is considered, women's closing the gap had moved them up in IQ slightly faster than men as a result. Flynn had previously documented this same trend among ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups. According to Flynn, the sexes are "dead equal on cognitive factors ... in their ability to deal with using logic on the abstract problems of Raven's", but that temperamental differences in the way boys and girls take the tests likely account for the tiny variations in mean scores, rather than any difference in intellectual ability.
In the New York Times's obituary of Flynn this past week, there was a claim that was simply not true and yet presented as fact.
His research helped discredit the theory that differences in performance on I.Q. tests between Black and white people were a result of genetic differences.
IQ is indisputably heritable. It is among the strongest heritable traits. Virtually all biologists accept this. It is consensus understanding of the variance and diversity in the world and entirely consistent with evolutionary theory. How heritable and through what channels are much disputed issues. What is not disputed is that variance is real and that it is, contra the NYT, heritable. How heritable? From Wikipedia:
Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.
Part of the challenge behind group differences is that intelligence is a polygenic trait. There are thousands of gene contributors to measured IQ outcome so it is no surprise that group differences, however group is defined, exist. How big are the differences, why they occur, whether they are material, whether they are consequential, how they interact with health and culture and education are all disputed. But they do exist.
Part of the fear is of course purely and legitimately well founded. If you are cut from the Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment cloth, it is irrelevant whether there there are group differences of a greater or lesser degree. All humans are born with equal rights and should be treated as individuals regardless of which groups they might belong to.
But if you do not natively share this Classical Liberal belief in equality of natural rights and in individualism, it is easy to conjure nightmare fears of eugenic totalitarianism. In part because it keeps happening (National socialism being the go to example but obvious in the origins of Planned Parenthood and with innumerable state policies around the world such as is happening in China now with the Uighurs.)
So the NYT claim that there are no genetic differences in IQ between defined groups (whether race or otherwise) is scientifically risible even though they are right to be concerned about how that knowledge is interpreted.
From Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall.
As in all professional careers, particularly those dependent on large organizations, managerial work requires a psychic asceticism of a high degree, a willingness to discipline the self, to thwart one’s impulses, to stifle spontaneity in favor of control, to conceal emotion and intent, and to objectify the self with the same kind of calculating functional rationality that one brings to the packaging of any commodity. Moreover, such dispassionate objectification of the self frames and paces the rational objectification of circumstances and people that alertness to expediency demands. In its asceticism, self-rationalization curiously parallels the methodical subjection to God’s will that the old Protestant ethic counseled. But instead of the satisfaction of believing that one is acquiring old-time moral virtues, one becomes a master at manipulating personae; instead of making oneself into an instrument of God’s will to accomplish His work in this world, one becomes, variously, a boss’s “hammer,” a tough guy who never blinks at hard decisions, or perhaps, if all goes very well, an “industrial statesman,” a leader with vision.
On one hand, such psychic asceticism is connected to the narcissism that one sees in executives of high rank. The simultaneous need for self-abnegation, self-promotion, and self-display, as managers work their way through the probationary crucibles of big organizational life, fosters an absorption with self and specifically with self-improvement. Managers become continually and self-consciously aware of their public performances; they measure themselves constantly against others; and they plot out whatever self-transformations will help them achieve desired goals.
Such discipline and effort comes at a cost but:
However, for those with the requisite discipline, sheer dogged perseverance, the agile flexibility, the tolerance for extreme ambiguity, the casuistic discernment that allows one to dispense with shop-worn pieties, the habit of mind that perceives opportunities in others’ and even one’s own misfortunes, the brazen nerve that allows one to pretend that nothing is wrong even when the world is crumbling, and, above all, the ability to read the inner logic of events, to see and do what has to be done, the rewards of corporate success can be very great. And those who do succeed, those who find their way out of the crowded, twisting corridors and into the back rooms where the real action is, where the big games take place, and where everyone present is a player, shape, in a decisive way, the moral rules-in-use that filter down through their organizations. The ethos that they fashion turns principles into guidelines, ethics into etiquette, values into tastes, personal responsibility into an adroitness at public relations, and notions of truth into credibility. Corporate managers who become imbued with this ethos pragmatically take their world as they find it and try to make that world work according to its own institutional logic. They pursue their own careers and good fortune as best they can within the rules of their world. As it happens, given their pivotal institutional role in our epoch, they help create and re-create, as one unintended consequence of their personal striving, a society where morality becomes indistinguishable from the quest for one’s own survival and advantage.
Three paragraphs of deep insight into a common phenomena which are rarely discussed and yet central to many outcomes. I have long suspected that critical theory and social justice advocates are, in part, motivated simply by a childlike incomprehension of complex achievement.
What they claim as systemic and unearned privilege are really complex behaviors and skills which they can neither see nor interpret.
From Why the Senate Shouldn’t Hold a Late Impeachment Trial by Philip Bobbitt via Ann Althouse.
the Senate is making a mistake in holding a trial of the article of impeachment, which is scheduled to begin the week of Feb. 8, after the president leaves office. Doing so subverts the law in an effort to punish someone who subverted the law.
It has sometimes been thought that any definitive construction of the Constitution is hopeless in the absence of a Supreme Court opinion. As one commentator suggested, “ [N]o one knows for sure. … Which means that the Senate can try Trump if it so chooses; it can assert its own good-faith understanding of the Constitution and see if the Supreme Court interferes.” This sort of approach has waned in recent years, however, and it is now widely accepted that analysts outside the courts have the means to weigh constitutional questions whether or not the Supreme Court has spoken. These means are the application of six well-known modalities of constitutional argument: text, structure, ethos, history, precedent and prudence. With these forms of argument in mind, let us review the question of whether a former officer of the United States may be impeached and convicted if he is no longer serving at the time of his trial.
Article II, Section 4 provides the substantive standard of law that governs impeachment. It states that “[t]he President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Article I, Section 2 provides the procedural authority for impeachments. Clause 5 states that “the House of Representatives … shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.” Clause 6 states that “[t]he Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. … And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.” Clause 7 limits the penalties that can be levied as a consequence of conviction: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States” and qualifies this limitation by adding, “but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
There is no authority granted to Congress to impeach and convict persons who are not “civil officers of the United States.” It’s as simple as that. But simplicity doesn’t mean unimportance. Limiting Congress to its specified powers is a crucial element in the central idea of the U.S. Constitution: putting the state under law.
I am no Constitutional lawyer, or any other kind of lawyer for that matter. Applying reason and precedent are weak foundations given unknown precedent. Thank goodness I see my interpretation of the situation articulated by an actual professor of law, Mr. Bobbitt.
And thank goodness he mentions the fundamental issue. We are a nation of laws, equal under those laws, and the law is in part about constraining the State itself.
We have, as a nation, fallen into a bad habit of applying one set of laws to the citizenry and a much more lenient set of laws to the Mandarin Class. One of my concerns in 2016 with Trump's election, especially given the popular cheers at his rally "Lock her up," was the possibility that he might be tempted to bring charges against Hilary Clinton. She and Bill had a long trail of pretty certain law breaking across a range of activities and had always managed the political process to escape consequences and avoid prosecution.
That she was guilty of a range of crimes of which she likely would have been found guilty were she outside the Mandarin Class seemed reasonably certain. On the other hand, we do not want election winners exacting vengeance through the court systems on defeated opponents. A bad precedent. Between the bad choices of letting the probably guilty go free versus creating the precedent of elections leading to prosecuted opponents, I preferred the former. As eventually became clear, did Trump.
Instead we got the less anticipated opposite. The establishment politicians in league with the machinery of the Deep State then spent four years trying to prosecute pseudo-crimes against the election victor.
And they are still doing so, eroding norms and creating bad precedents as they seek to destroyer any interlopers into the sweet rentier system of the Mandarin Class.
Bobbitt then goes into deep detail justifying his position. It is a nice touch that Bobbitt ends his essay with:
Although it will be familiar to most readers, I think it is appropriate to recall the famous passage in “A Man for All Seasons” in which Sir Thomas More confronts his future son-in-law about the pitfalls in cutting legal corners to pursue wickedness:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
The Epic of Gilgamesh: The first novel in history written in 2100 BC
— Tudor architecture (@ArchitectureTud) December 27, 2020
Mentioned in the “Bible “ pic.twitter.com/jIoriYkW4d
"Plagues happen in any era and only this one could have contained the effects as well as it did. Even aside from the vaccine, supply chains in food and most other goods withstood a once-in-a-century shock with almost eerie smoothness." https://t.co/DrgI1gifAP
— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) December 22, 2020
Amazing how fast Boston Dynamics' robots have gone from first faltering steps to this. Amazing and a little scary... 🤖 https://t.co/Zeb8emgPoe pic.twitter.com/sPugkjcgBN
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 30, 2020
Redskins Change Name To 'Lizard People' To Better Represent Population Of Washington, D.C. #BestOfTheBee https://t.co/B1viKMyjNE
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 1, 2021
What's with the southern tip of Italy though? pic.twitter.com/0tizsb4vy6
— Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) December 27, 2020
Followed by the cat! by Harald Slott-Møller (Danish, 1864-1937)
From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie. Page 245.
In spite of the perverse incentives, in spite of the publication system, in spite of academia and in spite of scientists, science does actually contain the tools to heal itself. It’s with more science that we can discover where our research has gone wrong and work out how to fix it. The ideals of the scientific process aren’t the problem: the problem is the betrayal of those ideals by the way we do research in practice. If we can only begin to align the practice with the values, we can regain any wavering trust – and stand back to marvel at all those wondrous discoveries with a clear conscience.
Émile Zola defined art as ‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’. As we’ve witnessed over and over throughout the book, this definition could equally well apply to science – or, at least, to the way science is currently done. The corners of nature with which science deals are seen through all-too-human temperaments, with their attendant prejudice, arrogance, carelessness and dishonesty. You needn’t believe that science is just one among many equal ‘truths’ to agree that it’s definitely a human activity, and thus that it bears the imprint of human failings.
Mallard to go? Dig of Pompeii fast-food place reveals tastes https://t.co/J4zz0FMd4d via @MailOnline @romanhistory1
— Roman History (@romanhistory1) December 26, 2020
hello and welcome to my TED talk pic.twitter.com/pT2dr3VTiw
— Riva (@rivatez) December 21, 2020
Green heron using a piece of bread as bait to catch a fish. Amazing example of animal tool-use. https://t.co/kVlWEOP6s1 pic.twitter.com/SKpi0B9NI2
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 28, 2020
Gus figuring it out..
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) January 1, 2021
Never give up! pic.twitter.com/YVwkKI0C77
Not one single California city makes this list. Not. Even. One. https://t.co/9pBAAXQTHu pic.twitter.com/AtuIoLWvSK
— Michael Lomio 🏳️🌈 (@MichaelLomio) December 27, 2020
Inside Courtyard, Seville, 1920 by Manuel Garcia Rodriguez (Spanish, 1863-1925)
But what about the vast majority of African Americans and Latinos? Even in the best of times, back in February, our economy was failing many of these minorities, as well working people in general. Corporate mea culpas about racism and solidarity with BLM may blunt criticism, but assertions of guilt don’t address the fundamental problem of diminished expectations, particularly in minority and working-class communities that continue to suffer economic distress and hopelessness. Minorities make up over 40% of the nation’s working class and will constitute the majority by 2032.
[snip]
The elitist vision of minority outlook was epitomized by the Obama Administration, where African Americans and other “people of color” enjoyed enormous influence and access while the conditions for middle- and working-class minorities generally declined. Minorities with elite degrees flourished, but policies that protected banks and targeted homeowners wiped out much black and Hispanic wealth. “The first black president in American history,” notes the widely-read Marxist blog Jacobin, “ turned out to be a disaster for black wealth.”
Just as traditional liberalism has stopped benefitting the majority of workers, the new progressive version seems likely to fail even more spectacularly. A Biden Administration may coo more and say the “right” things, but it is unlikely to replicate the remarkable success, pre-COVID, of the Trump years, where minority unemployment hit record lows and the incomes of the least grew faster, for the first time in decades, than those of the upper classes. Indeed in a host of areas—starting with energy policy—the Administration embraces blue state priorities that often work against minority uplift and leave most abandoned on the edges of our society.
[snip]
For all that President Biden’s inspiring talk of unity represents a necessary salve after the often-excessive divisiveness of Trump, the new Administration’s focus on “systemic racism” simply nationalizes the race-based politics common in those areas, like California and New York, that now have control of the federal apparat. These policies—from affirmative action to Maoist “struggle sessions” reborn in corporate seminars—have catapulted minorities into important-seeming jobs but have brought little actual progress to most in minority communities. As the activists and their corporate sponsors preen over “defunding police,” it is predominately minority communities who face the greatest threat from renewed levels of violent crime in cities such as New York.
But, as demonstrated in a recent report for the Urban Reform Institute, generally speaking minorities have done much better—in terms of income and homeownership—in deep red states and regions than in the more “enlightened” blue regions. In fact, among larger metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, the median African-American income, adjusted for costs, is more than $60,000—compared to $36,000 in San Francisco and $37,000 in Los Angeles. The median income for Latinos in Virginia Beach-Norfolk is $69,000, compared to $43,000 in Los Angeles, $47,000 in San Francisco, and $40,000 in New York.
One critical measure can be seen in homeownership. Property remains key to financial security: Homes today account for roughly two thirds of the wealth of middle-income Americans. Homeowners have a median net worth more than 40 times that of renters, according to the Census Bureau. Yet in some parts of the country, notably California and the Northeast, housing prices are often out of reach for most minorities. Black home ownership in areas like Atlanta and Oklahoma City borders on 50%, compared to one third in Los Angeles, Boston, or New York. Among Hispanics, Pittsburgh, Akron, and St. Louis stand out while the least affordable housing markets include the four large California metros, Honolulu, and Boston.
The lower quintiles of the class system consistently suffer great negative consequences from policies rooted in the notions of restitutional justice promulgated by the cocooned and privileged Mandarin Class. The hallucinations of the moral preening establishment wings of both parties will continue to make things worse, more divisive, and more dangerous so long as they pander to elite ideologies such as social justice and ignore the hard work of economic growth which is the elixir of class progression.
My phone number growing up was 208. That’s the whole number. One time I asked the operator to connect me to another number and the operator said without checking, “Honey, your grandmother isn’t home now.” That’s a small town.
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) December 23, 2020
Oops:
— Lorrie Goldstein (@sunlorrie) December 20, 2020
Germany's far-reaching program to reduce the share of fossil fuels used in energy production has achieved almost exactly what the U.S achieved, but at greater expense: Why? Because, unlike Germany, market forces drove the reductions in the US. https://t.co/WNKtR8B7gW
While contested, I believe there is reasonable ascent to the path dependence of development around the world. The classic example is technological emergence. Countries which transitioned from stone age to iron age or agriculture to urbanism earlier than others, on average have higher levels of development (as measured by per capita income) today.
It is an inordinately complex field, especially in determining the magnitude of an early change and the persistence of magnitude of consequent impact.
This study suggests one specific scenario might have less path dependence than one might have anticipated. From The long-term causal effect of U.S. bombing missions on economic development: Evidence from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and Xieng Khouang Province in Lao P.D.R by TakahiroYamada and Hiroyuki Yamada.
From the Abstract:
This study investigates the long-term causal effects of U.S. bombing missions during the Vietnam War on later economic development in Laos. Following an instrumental variables approach, we use the distance between the centroid of village-level administrative boundaries and heavily bombed targets, namely, the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos and Xieng Khouang Province in northern Laos, as an instrument for the intensity of U.S. bombing missions. We use three datasets of mean nighttime light intensity (1992, 2005, and 2013) and two datasets of population density (1990 and 2005) as outcome variables. The estimation results show no robust long-term effects of U.S. bombing missions on economic development in southern Laos but show negative effects in northern Laos, even 40 years after the war. We also found that the results do not necessarily support the conditional convergence hypothesis within a given country, although this result could be unique to Laos.
Just a data point, but interesting in the larger discussion of path dependence.
I had not fully comprehended the complexity of pain generation in recovery of foot surgery with significant rheumatoid arthritis as a precondition. The physical therapy required to facilitate the mechanical recovery of the surgery conflicts with the need to avoid activities which inflame or exacerbate already inflamed joints.
One consequence is that for the first time in years I have watched some TV during the day as a means of distracting myself from unpleasant levels of pain. Pain which has to simply be accommodated because there is no means of squaring the circle between physical therapy, arthritis and changing medication regimens.
Recently I have revisited the television series Bones which I occasionally watched when it was broadcast live. The central theme of the series is the nature of logic and intelligence in balance with humanism, faith and emotion. Science and heart as it were.
Yesterday, I very much liked the answer of the character Zach Addy in a discussion of their respective belief systems.
I’m an empirical rationalist all the way. Unless you talk to my mother. Then I’m Lutheran.
High minimum wage and universal basic income are two policy approaches which are popular on the left, contradict widely accepted economic theory, have occasional natural experiments in states or among OECD countries and are widely studied but with non-consensus results.
No matter where you stand on either policy, you can always find a study that supports your position. There are many field like this. However, when you dig into them, you frequently find that the studies are plagued by multiple issues such as low or non-random population samples, non-independence, absence of rigorous methodology, p-hacking, etc.
If you are an empirical rationalist, the volume of cognitive pollution is frustrating that those involved in the field cannot arrive at a consensus conclusion based on voluminous research.
Perhaps there is a change in the offing though. From Myth or Measurement: What Does the New Minimum Wage Research Say about Minimum Wages and Job Loss in the United States? by David Neumark & Peter Shirley.
The disagreement among studies of the employment effects of minimum wages in the United States is well known. What is less well known, and more puzzling, is the absence of agreement on what the research literature says – that is, how economists even summarize the body of evidence on the employment effects of minimum wages. Summaries range from “it is now well-established that higher minimum wages do not reduce employment,” to “the evidence is very mixed with effects centered on zero so there is no basis for a strong conclusion one way or the other,” to “most evidence points to adverse employment effects.” We explore the question of what conclusions can be drawn from the literature, focusing on the evidence using subnational minimum wage variation within the United States that has dominated the research landscape since the early 1990s. To accomplish this, we assembled the entire set of published studies in this literature and identified the core estimates that support the conclusions from each study, in most cases relying on responses from the researchers who wrote these papers.
Our key conclusions are: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults as well as the less-educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly-affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.
That accords with my research over the years but it is nice to have it from specialists in the field spending dedicated time in pursuit of the answer.
To avoid being eaten, the eastern hognose snake will writhe in fake agony, throw up, poo itself, and finally lie still, belly up, mouth wide open, tongue out, blood dripping from its mouth. pic.twitter.com/rd3ofghFdB
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) December 22, 2020
Our best pals 🐶💙 pic.twitter.com/WCZIEHXU4n
— CCTV_IDIOTS (@cctv_idiots) December 31, 2020
“If you look at the slope, the incline of cases we’ve experienced as we’ve got into the late fall and soon-to-be early winter, it really is quite troubling" said anthony fauci.
— el gato malo (@boriquagato) December 27, 2020
as ever, he's just plain wrong. he is, once more, reporting "cases" without regard to testing levels. pic.twitter.com/plzIasjQXU
Hit the road, Jackby Ray CharlesHit the road, JackAnd don't you come backNo more, no more, no more, no moreHit the road, JackAnd don't you come back no moreHit the road, JackAnd don't you come backNo more, no more, no more, no moreHit the road, JackAnd don't you come back no moreWoah, woman, oh, woman, don't treat me so meanYou're the meanest old woman that I've ever seenI guess if you say soI'll have to pack my things and go (that's right)Hit the road, JackAnd don't you come backNo more, no more, no more, no moreHit the road, JackAnd don't you come back no moreHit the road, JackAnd don't you come backNo more, no more, no more, no moreHit the road, JackAnd don't you come back no moreNow, baby, listen, baby, don't ya treat me this-a way'Cause I'll be back on my feet some… More
Rural Winter Landscape, 1903-04 by Anshelm Schultzberg (Swedish painter, 1862-1945)
From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie. Page 229.
A particularly intriguing idea is to create a shortlist of grant applications that are all above a certain quality level and then allocate the funding by lottery. Given that the scientific system is supposed to be a meritocracy, this perhaps sounds bizarre. As one set of lottery proponents put it, however, the current system is so bad at allocating money that it’s ‘already in essence a lottery without the benefits of being random’. An analysis in 2016 found that the scores given to potential US National Institutes of Health grants by reviewers had almost no correlation with the quality of the eventual research produced from the grant (measured by the number of citations it received). If that’s the case, a substantial portion of the time scientists spend buffing up their grant proposals is wasted. Indeed, by one calculation, ‘the value of the science that researchers forgo while preparing [grant] proposals can approach or exceed the value of the science that the funding program supports’.
For #TilesOnTuesday the floor of St. Nikolaus at Ruffenhofen, Franconia. The church, located 600 m northwest of the Roman fort in Ruffenhofen, was built in the 13th century with building material taken from the fort. The floor was paved with #Roman tiles. 1/2#RomanArchaeology pic.twitter.com/t4xi417kwe
— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) December 22, 2020
no single change to san francisco public school has wrought so much disaster as the lottery-based admission. persistent, adamant experimentation with the system is not reasonable, but ideological; a disastrous outcome is acceptable provided every young life is *equally* damaged. https://t.co/bLy8bdOG8h
— Mike Solana (@micsolana) December 19, 2020
I’ve seen this image shared a few places lately without context, but it’s a picture of Mercury (the tiny black dot) crossing the face of the sun. I captured this image about a year ago when this transit happened. Really puts the scale of the sun in perspective! #space #opteam pic.twitter.com/CC3DEOaR17
— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) December 27, 2020
From 2020 to 2021 in 1 minute.. pic.twitter.com/DjejiShX0o
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) December 31, 2020
About as surprising as the sun coming up tomorrow: https://t.co/tkqZw6XDo5
— Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) December 26, 2020
A wonderfully sweet story. From Retiring Delta captain meets the air controller whose grandfather hired him by Pete Muntean.
During commercial aviation's pandemic downturn, countless veteran airline pilots are retiring to save the jobs of their younger cohorts. But it was during Captain Paul Holmes' final flight for Delta Air Lines that a chance conversation with an air traffic controller brought him back to his early days with the airline.
Tipped off to Holmes' retirement flight, Boston Center controller Ashleigh Goldberg keyed up her microphone and asked if he flew for Northwest Airlines before it merged with Delta in 2008. Goldberg said her grandfather, William Hochbrunn, was a Northwest pilot.
"Bill Hochbrunn was your grandfather?" asked a surprised Holmes.
"Affirmative," Goldberg replied.
A few seconds of stunned silence followed until Holmes explained that Hochbrunn, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, hired him at Northwest Airlines in 1981.
Do successful local nudge interventions maintain efficacy when scaled state or nationwide? We investigate, through two randomized controlled trials, the impact of a national and state-level campaign encouraging students to apply for financial aid for college. The campaigns collectively reached over 800,000 students, with multiple treatment arms patterned after prior local interventions in order to explore potential mechanisms. We find no impacts on aid receipt or college enrollment overall or for any subgroups. We find no evidence that different approaches to message framing, delivery, or timing, or access to one-on-one advising affected campaign efficacy. We discuss why nudge strategies that work locally may be hard to scale effectively.
I understand the concept of nudging but have never been particularly enthusiastic about its use by government. It strikes me as one more encroachment on the democratic process and the idea that citizens should shape law and behaviors through the legislative process. Nudging comes across as the State trying to shape citizen behaviors instead.
This finding suggests that perhaps it is much ado about nothing. Effective in limited circumstances but not scalable. I can live with that.
From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie. Page 215.
Another option is to use an even more rigorous version of pre-registration. In this scenario, a scientist submits the registration itself to peer review and, if it’s approved and the reviewers agree that the study design is sound, the journal commits to publishing the eventual paper no matter how its results come out. Only then do the scientists start to collect their data. Not only does this type of study, called a ‘Registered Report’, kill publication bias stone dead, by removing the pernicious link between the statistical significance of the results and the decision to publish, but it reduces p-hacking as well, since you have to agree to your analysis with the reviewers beforehand and can’t just alter it post hoc without making it very clear what you’ve done. Best of all, it nullifies many of the perverse incentives that lead to bias and fraud in the first place. You know you’re going to get a publication in any case, so there’s no longer so much pressure to beautify your findings.
Only a man harrowing clodsby Thomas HardyOnly a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walkWith an old horse that stumbles and nodsHalf asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flameFrom the heaps of couch-grass;Yet this will go onward the sameThough Dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wight2Come whispering by:War's annals will cloud into nightEre their story die.
A provocatively intriguing essay. From The New National American Elite by Michael Lind.
In the third decade of the 21st century, the Social Register still exists, there are still debutante balls, polo and lacrosse are still patrician sports, and old money families still summer at Newport. But these are fossil relics of an older class system. The rising ruling class in America is found in every major city in every region. Membership in it depends on having the right diplomas—and the right beliefs.
To observers of the American class system in the 21st century, the common conflation of social class with income is a source of amusement as well as frustration. Depending on how you slice and dice the population, you can come up with as many income classes as you like—four classes with 25%, or the 99% against the 1%, or the 99.99% against the 0.01%. In the United States, as in most advanced societies, class tends to be a compound of income, wealth, education, ethnicity, religion, and race, in various proportions. There has never been a society in which the ruling class consisted merely of a basket of random rich people.
Progressives who equate class with money naturally fall into the mistake of thinking you can reduce class differences by sending lower-income people cash—in the form of a universal basic income, for example. Meanwhile, populists on the right tend to imagine that the United States was much more egalitarian, within the white majority itself, than it really was, whether in the 1950s or the 1850s.
Both sides miss the real story of the evolution of the American class system in the last half century toward the consolidation of a national ruling class—a development which is unprecedented in U.S. history. That’s because, from the American Revolution until the late 20th century, the American elite was divided among regional oligarchies. It is only in the last generation that these regional patriciates have been absorbed into a single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. This is a truly epochal development.
#OnThisDay in 1790, scholar Jean-François Champollion was born in Figeac, France. He would use the Rosetta Stone to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs pic.twitter.com/rNOkaAFFVm
— CANI (@ClassAssocNI) December 23, 2020
Every payment by credit card through a FL court gets charged a 3.5% convenience fee by CiviTek.
— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) December 18, 2020
CiviTek is owned by the ass'n of FL elected court clerks. It makes millions.https://t.co/tJ3lQEKVC3
Lots of ways to rig the system.
I was unaware that YAK REGALIA existed, but I’m now glad it does. https://t.co/vMbU2wafie
— KeepCalmAndDrawl (@FormerlyFormer) December 27, 2020
If the sex differences in COVID-19 mortality rates were reversed, we'd be bombarded with articles in the prestige media entitled "Patriarchy kills: systemic sexism is quite literally fatal." Instead, outlets approach this disparity dispassionately, analyzing possible causes.
— Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) December 23, 2020
A Girl in Front of a White Cottage, 1921 by Alfred Broge (Danish, 1870-1955)
From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie. Page 206.
Making it easier for scientists to publish replications and null results might reduce publication bias. But what about the other forms of bias we encountered, having to do with p-hacking? Many dozens of papers, and even entire books, have been written on the pitfalls of p-values: they’re hard to understand, they don’t tell us what we really want to know and they’re easily abused. There’s truth to all these criticisms. In broad terms, what is needed is less focus on statistical significance – a p-value below the arbitrary threshold of 0.05 – and more on practical significance. In a study with a large enough sample size (and high enough statistical power), even very small effects – for example, a pill reducing headache symptoms by one per cent of one point on our 1–5 pain scale – can come up as statistically significant, often with p-values far below 0.05, though they could be essentially useless in absolute terms. The economists Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey call this the ‘sizeless stare of statistical significance’, where scientists develop a laser-like focus on p-values at the expense of considering, as Ziliak and McCloskey put it, the ‘oomph’ of their effect.
Liberals want only liberal outlets to exist and only liberal commentators to be heard from, and everything else to be classified as criminal or otherwise banned, and the more honest ones are admitting this with greater and greater candor: https://t.co/jnVaZJFIdY
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 22, 2021
Click for the whole thread.
It is hard not to see Mussolini's formulation of totalitarianism, "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State," in this Democratic Party position. They do not want opposition and they are perfectly fine voiding the First Amendment to get there.
Reinforced by this MSNBC interview.
Speaking of greater and greater candor, here's yet another authoritarian discussion on MSNBC with Joe Scarborough and Ken Dilanian discussing the need -- which Dilanian says many Dems believe -- for a new War on Terror on US soil:
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 22, 2021
(follow @tomselliott)https://t.co/LKRavlWGL2
The alarm bells ring even louder when one of the Democratic Party primary candidates (and former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, is equally concerned by this sudden infatuation with totalitarianism.
.@joebiden Your leadership is needed now to denounce those like John Brennan & Rep Schiff who are advocating for targeting half the country as potential domestic terrorists. Truly unite the American people around our Constitution & the rights that are endowed to us by our Creator pic.twitter.com/OpemBm4biS
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) January 24, 2021
Tulsi is no Blue Dog Democrat, and if she is concerned, we should all be concerned.
Yet another example of rising Democratic institutions falling away from commitments to freedom of speech and intellectual diversity.
Brandeis wrote that “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher.” While that observation concerned wrongdoing by the government, it seems particularly apropos today on our campuses where impeachments and removals are now seemingly the rage... https://t.co/SBAZxrwO9n
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 25, 2021
Click for the thread.
The armies of Carthage permitted the city to forge the most powerful empire in the western Mediterranean from the 6th to 3rd centuries BCE. https://t.co/YpH3bgVgmi pic.twitter.com/NuHd2jpwxc
— Ancient History Encyclopedia (@ahencyclopedia) December 21, 2020
Fascinating insight into the mind of an elitist. In a previous message she let me know she has enough money to live for years without working. pic.twitter.com/0weboVkaL6
— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) December 18, 2020
The way this silo collapses.. pic.twitter.com/LV0TClCW4w
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) December 26, 2020
Evidence of the welfare magnet hypothesis in Denmark. https://t.co/q67wkgw2HW
— (((The Alex Nowrasteh))) (@AlexNowrasteh) December 21, 2020
The Ettrick Shepherd, 1936 by James McIntosh Patrick
From Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie. Page 202.
This final chapter will sketch out some answers to these questions. First, we’ll look at the wide array of changes that could be made to prevent – or at least mitigate the effects of – our four main problems: fraud, bias, negligence and hype. Then, we’ll discuss ways to alter not just the day-to-day work of scientists, but the culture of science itself. Some of the changes we’ll cover are already in progress; others are radical proposals that would revolutionise the way science is done.
It is interesting to note that these four indictment are prevalent against the mainstream media as well.
#Viking cart, Viking ship museum, Oslo, Norway. 9th c. by Jumborois on Flickr. pic.twitter.com/eBMOjBRRoq
— Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart) December 21, 2020
the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, 2020 edition: pic.twitter.com/1Vaq4pXrij
— el gato malo (@boriquagato) March 20, 2020
MRI scan of a person moving their eyes back and forth. Amazing how much the optic nerves move around inside the skull! https://t.co/x7K8Wu5to8 pic.twitter.com/BEvQZ6QxyL
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 26, 2020
Here's one reason why social media is such a vector for misinformation: It's hard to go viral with so many voices talking at once. One way to cut through the noise and get attention is to say something no one else is saying. It's a lot easier to do that if you just make stuff up.
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) January 11, 2021
It’s probably more to do with the penis tbf. 🍆 pic.twitter.com/lbKJ32sXa2
— Alexandra Bee 🐝 (@AlexaWhiteBee) December 29, 2020
Wow, turns out that media elites and foundation-funded activists who purport to speak on behalf of minority groups are completely full of shit. Shocker https://t.co/z9c3tCByA9
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 21, 2020
Snowy Churchyard, s.d. by Sophus Jacobsen (Norwegian painter) 1833 - 1912
By virtue, I mean habits of moderate action; more specifically, acting with due restraint on one's impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences. Scarcely anyone favors bad character or a lack of virtue, but it is all too easy to deride a policy of improving character by assuming that this implies a nation of moralizers delivering banal homilies to one another.
Virtue is not learned by precept, however; it is learned by the regular repetition of right actions. We are induced to do the right thing with respect to small matters, and in time we persist in doing the right thing because now we have come to take pleasure in it. By acting rightly with respect to small things, we are more likely to act rightly with respect to large ones. If this view sounds familiar, it should; it is Aristotle's. Let me now quote him directly: "We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control."
Seen in this way, there is no conflict between economic thought and moral philosophy: The latter simply supplies a fuller statement of the uses to which the former can and should be put. We want our families and schools to induce habits of right conduct; most parents and teachers do this by arranging the incentives confronting youngsters in the ordinary aspects of their daily lives so that right action routinely occurs. What economics neglects is the important subjective consequence of acting in accord with a proper array of incentives: people come to feel pleasure in right action and guilt in wrong action. These feelings of pleasure and pain are not mere "tastes" that policy analysts should take as given; they are the central constraints on human avarice and sloth, the very core of a decent character. A course of action cannot be evaluated simply in terms of its cost-effectiveness, because the consequence of following a given course--if it is followed often enough and regularly enough--is to teach those who follow it what society thinks is right and wrong. Conscience and character, naturally, are not enough. Rules and rewards must still be employed; indeed, given the irresistible appeal of certain courses of action--such as impoverishing future generations for the benefit of the present one--only some rather draconian rules may suffice. But for most social problems that deeply trouble us, the need is to explore, carefully and experimentally, ways of strengthening the formation of character among the very young. In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.
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