Most proposals are based on unprovable beliefs that are mistaken as demonstrable truth

I can't get to the original gated article but the original pointer is from Lunch with Philip Tetlock by Tyler Cowen. From an interview between the Financial Times and the University of Pennsylvania forecasting expert, Philip Tetlock.

He [Tetlock] is trying to replace the public debates he describes as “Krugman-Ferguson pie fights” — a reference to the clashes over austerity between the economist and Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman and the economic historian, Niall Ferguson — with adversarial collaboration. “You give each side the opportunity to pose, say, 10 questions it thinks are probative and resolvable, and that it thinks it has a comparative advantage in answering” and then have the two sides give testable answers . . . Here is a very clear psychological prediction: people will come out of that tournament more open-minded than they otherwise would have been. You can take that one to the bank.”

That is a very clever model. Given that most proposals are based on unprovable beliefs that are mistaken as demonstrable truth, this approach would clear the argument terrain very quickly.

I also really like the single line -

There is a price to be paid for feeling good about your beliefs.

Regrettably, authoritarians always try to off-load the price onto those least able to pay. Given that the policies that make the elite feel good also tend to have very high costs, low or non-existent benefits and high unintended consequences, this is especially tragic.

Strange times, despicable behavior, weird headlines

A few months ago, a band of Attorney Generals from seventeen states and led by the AG of the US Virgin Islands launched a shameful effort to deprive US citizens of their First Amendment rights. It was shocking in its naked grab for power. The position of the AGs was that the science of climate forecasting was so well understood that any disagreement with government, supranational and NGO climate forecasts constituted fraud.

The claim was absurd on the face of it. No science is ever settled. We are constantly adding, modifying and changing our understanding. Climate science is one of the more dynamic fields and one of the most difficult to comprehend. Climate is a complex, multi-system, dynamic, self-regulating to a degree, non-linear in nature and is handicapped by a paucity of reliable data records. Climate forecasting models have been consistently wrong and are constantly being redesigned to take into account newly understood aspects such as the affect of clouds, heat reflection, deep ocean heat storage, distinctions between volcanic dust and man made pollutants, etc. If the science were well settled, our models would provide accurate forecasts of the future and models for understanding the past. They do not.

Since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1990, it has been apparent that climate change has been simply a fig leaf for seizure of additional money and power by unelected groups and governmental entities. The crude models were then used to justify a demand for centralization of policy decision making and massive money transfers. The more sophisticated, yet still as wrong, models today still serve the same purpose.

In the subsequent quarter century the climate change authoritarian advocates have continued as they began. We had the East Anglia University data hack that revealed that all the data for the initial models had been massaged and that they had maintained no record of who changed the data, how they changed it, and under what rational the data was massaged. There was the revelation of the hockey stick model fraud. There was the uncovering of the trove of emails among the parties at the center of climate change advocacy revealing that they were coordinating with one another to actively suppress science papers that challenged or refuted their positions. There was the coordinated effort to suppress the existence and implications of the Medieval Warm Period and subsequent Little Ice Age. There was the denial that the most stable and unadulterated data (satellite temperature measures), which showed no warming, had any relevancy. There was the constant changing of goal posts and statistical game playing in order to pronounce each year warmer than the last. There was the constant effort to evoke weather as evidence of climate change and then denying the relevancy of weather when it failed to deliver the evidence expected. And on and on.

There is no doubt that climate change is real. There is little doubt that human activities have a reasonable probability of affecting that change in some fashion. But which activities, to what degree, and in what fashion remain very much open questions. We simply don't know. But "Don't know" lines no political pockets, funds no grant research, justifies no exercise of power, and elevates no busybodies over their fellow citizens. Hence, the claim that the science is settled. Regardless of the data.

Into this environment steps the US Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker and sixteen of his nearest and dearest fellow AG authoritarians. In March of this year he issued a subpoena demanding that Exxon Mobil provide copies of communications between the oil company and 90 different political and policy organizations as well as communications with any other organizations engaged in research or advocacy concerning Climate Change or policies.

Can you imagine? A Federal government official exercising the power of government to go on a fishing expedition into the lives and activities of private citizens on the wispy foundation that the AGs understand the science of climate change so much better than anyone else that any contra-position constituted fraud? What a naked display of authoritarianism and ignorance. And to make it perfectly clear that this was a political suppression of free speech, Walker included in his request not just information related to the science but also the respondents' donor lists. You can't get more corruptly political than that.

One of the entities was the Competitive Enterprise Institute and they responded:

The subpoena that you served on the Competitive Enterprise Institute (“CEI”) is a blatant attempt to intimidate and harass an organization for advancing views that you oppose. There is no way to understand your demand that CEI turn over all of its internal documents concerning climate change and its communications with a corporation, ExxonMobil, other than as an effort to punish it for its public policy views, chill its associations, and silence its advocacy.

You acknowledged as much in your remarks at the March 29 “AGs United for Clean Power” press conference in New York. You said that you launched this investigation not to carry out any law-enforcement duty, but to “make it clear to our residents as well as the American people that we have to do something transformational” about climate change, stop “rely[ing] on fossil fuel,” and “look at reliable energy.” You are entitled to your opinions on public policy, but you have no right to wield your power as a prosecutor to advance a policy agenda by persecuting those who disagree with you.

That is, in fact, the law: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). The freedoms of belief and expression guaranteed by the Constitution do not yield even to government officials’ insistence that some perceived crisis demands urgent action, the niceties of the law be damned. That is when the right to dissent matters most.

Your demand on CEI is offensive, it is un-American, it is unlawful, and it will not stand. You can either withdraw it or expect to fight, because CEI strongly believes that this campaign to intimidate those who dissent from the official orthodoxy on climate change must be stopped.

I agree, and would also note that the law does not allow government officials to violate Americans’ civil rights with impunity.

Exxon Mobil, CEI, several Republican Attorney Generals all called the Group of 17 on their totalitarian actions. Claude Walker withdrew his subpoena in May but the other AGs remain eager to suppress. As constitutional law professor Glenn Harland Reynolds noted:

Federal law makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory or district in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him/her by the Constitution or the laws of the Unites States, (or because of his/her having exercised the same).”

I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.

[snip]

As the Supreme Court wrote in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”

Then the House of Representatives got involved. Thank goodness for our republican and divided structure of government that tends, imperfectly, to be self-healing against totalitarian power grabs. Congress is now going after the Attorney Generals. In doing so they are bringing back reminders of past times and weird headlines. Such as Liberal AGs Invoke States’ Rights in Climate Change Feud With Congress by Jacob Gershman.

States' Rights? What is this, the 1960s? Democratic Party AGs claiming States' Rights? But that then forces the recollection that it was in fact Democratic Party AGs asserting States Rights in the 1960s. The right to segregation, separate but equal schools, property-baed voting rights, separate water fountains and back of the bus regulations. Bull Connor, Democrat, Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, and indeed Democrat National Convention Member whose actions led to King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. Those States Rights' people? The WSJ article notes:

The Tenth Amendment states’ rights movement is typically associated with tea party activists.

But two blue-state liberal state attorneys general are invoking the U.S. Constitution’s limits on federal powers in a showdown with a GOP-led congressional committee looking into their climate change investigations.

A coalition of law-enforcement officials led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been digging into whether Exxon misled investors and the public by downplaying the impact of global warming.

The inquiries have the drawn the ire of Republican leaders of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee who say Mr. Schneiderman is mounting a campaign of intimidation in coordination with environmental groups and trial lawyers.

[snip]

Mr. Schneiderman and Ms. Healey, both of whom stand behind their climate-change work, are balking at the committee’s document demands, saying their offices are insulated by the Tenth Amendment.

It’s questionable whether the Tenth Amendment would shield them, says Vanderbilt University law professor Robert Mikos.

The Constitution restrains the federal government from compelling state legislatures and state officers to enforce federal laws. But it’s doubtful, the professor said, it would apply to the situation here where Congress is looking to remedy an alleged constitutional violation committed by a state authority.

[snip]

Congress, he wrote in a letter last week, has the authority to examine an effort to “deprive companies, nonprofit organizations and scientists of their First Amendment rights and ability to fund and conduct scientific research…free from threats of prosecution.”

Exxon has leveled similar charges in court papers, describing Ms. Healey’s probe as an “abusive fishing expedition into ExxonMobil’s climate change research over the past 40 years.”

Strange times. It seems like we ought to have a better political class than is in evidence now.

The power to corrupt

Following on from Sunday's post, Smarter people are more prejudiced against larger numbers of people than anyone else, there is another article of interest.

In my first post, I commented on sociology research indicating that people with higher IQs were more prejudiced against more people than those with lower IQs. Based on the numbers, high IQ are four times more prejudiced than lower IQ people. It's sociology so all the numbers are suspect but an interesting possible insight.

This morning I came across Does Power Really Corrupt by Matthew Sweet. It is an interesting round-up of the state of our current knowledge. The answer is that we don't know whether power corrupts. Early sociology studies strongly suggested that it did but they were poorly designed experiments with strong vectors of confirmation bias. The replicability has been poor. The field is ideologically skewed and biased towards an affirmative answer regardless of the data.

Egloff has been doing research since 1993 and is used to the bloody process of peer review. But he was shocked by the hostility towards his work. “I am not on a crusade,” he says. “I am not rich. My family is not rich. My friends are not rich. We never received any money from any party for doing this research. Personally I would have loved the results of the Berkeley group to be true. That would be nice and would provide a better fit to my personal and political beliefs and my worldview. However, as a scientist…” The experience of going against this particular intellectual grain was so painful that Egloff vows never to study the topic of privilege and ethics again.

Who, then, is right? Are powerful people nicer or nastier than powerless ones? How can we explain the disparate answers yielded by these two sets of data?

It may be that rich people are better at disguising their true nature than poor people. If being generous in public brings rewards, then rich people might be more inclined to help old ladies across roads. Selfish driving is consistent with this idea: the anonymity of the road means that aggressive petrolheads need not worry about damaging their reputations. And Keltner points out that the data come from people’s accounts of their own charitable giving, and not from watching them in the act. “We know from other studies that the wealthy are more likely to lie and exaggerate about ethical matters,” he says. “Survey self-report data in economics and face-to-face data in psychology capture different processes. What I say I do in society versus how I behave with actual people.”

But it is also possible that the problem lies not with the survey data but with the psychological experiments. Over the past year, this possibility has become the subject of bitter debate. In August 2015, the journal Science reported that a group of 270 academics, led by Brian Nosek, a respected professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, had attempted to reproduce the results of 100 psychological studies. Ninety-seven of the original studies had produced statistically significant results. Only 36 of the replications did the same. Those numbers threatened to undermine the entire discipline of experimental psychology, for if a result cannot be replicated then it must be in doubt. In March 2016 a panel of luminaries claimed to have detected serious shortcomings in the methodology of Nosek’s paper. The inquiry was led by Dan Gilbert, a Harvard professor with a history of hostility to the replicators. (“Psychology’s replication police prove to be shameless little bullies,” he tweeted in 2014, defending another researcher whose work was questioned.) When a journalist from Wired magazine asked Gilbert if his defensiveness might have influenced his conclusions, he hung up on them. Psychology’s “Replication Crisis” might not yet be over.

In September 2015, five social psychologists and a sociologist published a paper in the Journal of Behavioral and Brain Sciences that suggested why psychology might show privileged people in a bad light. Left-wing opinion, contended Jonathan Haidt and his co-authors, was over-represented in psychology faculties. This, they suspected, might be distorting experimental findings – as well as making campus life difficult for researchers with socially conservative views. “The field of social psychology is at risk of becoming a cohesive moral community,” they warned. “Might a shared moral-historical narrative in a politically homogeneous field undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends? We think so.” So does Boris Egloff. “It was a great and timely paper,” he says. “I congratulate them on their courage.” But it came too late for him. “We spoilt the good guys’ party,” he says.

So the answer is that we simply do not know whether power corrupts and we are not likely to know out of the current sociological academy - they are too undisciplined in their science and too ideological in their convictions.

My suspicion is that the answer will be a weak yes, highly contingent on roles, structures, personality traits, industry and circumstance. Some people with some personality traits in some roles, within some structures, in some industries under circumstances of low transparency and low accountability are likely to display some predictable changes in degree of measured corruption.

But we are a long way from knowing that at this point in time.

Not left:right but industry specific

A friend recently asked whether emigration was likely to jump if Donald Trump won the election. I answered:

No. The threat to leave if an individual does not get the result they want is a long standing, perennial and empty threat. Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood founder, threatened to leave if John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960. She objected to his Catholicism. She did not leave. So the threat goes back at least 56 years. There is no good evidence of any election outcomes measurably affecting emigration and immigration flows. Immigration and emigration flows are primarily determined by macro-economic influences with the size effects swamping most other influences.

My response was based on accumulated knowledge and involved no research. I had looked into this during some earlier election, perhaps Romney/Obama in 2012 and that was the conclusion I came to at that time and had seen nothing to contradict that since then.

But as often happens, once a question is out there, your mind is alerted and you begin to see better researched answers without even looking for them.

Researching a separate issue, I came across Here’s why you won’t really move to Canada if Trump wins in November by Adam Alter.

His answer is consistent with my original response. He provides the data showing that there is no discernible shift in emigration flows after elections. However, Alter relies more on the psychology of the event as an explanation of the phenomena than I would.

There are at least two reasons people overestimate the effect of election outcomes — and other life events — on their enduring well-being. The first is the tendency to forget that life goes on even after traumatic events. Most of our lives consist of a series of mundane events: rising in the morning to eat breakfast, going to work, commuting home, etc. These prosaic events have a greater effect on our daily well-being than, say, election results do, and they tend to be similar for winners and losers, or accident victims and lottery winners. If Trump wins the presidency, the pain of his victory will eventually subside for Democrats, and their lives will be dominated by the same pedestrian events that dominated them before the election.

The second reason that defeat stings less than we fear before our candidate loses is that humans have a tendency to overestimate how long severe psychological pain will last. Just as we might treat a deep gash with antibiotic ointment and bandages, we’re equipped with a sophisticated psychological immune system that targets serious emotional injuries. Self-soothing is distracting and mentally exhausting, so we tend to employ it only for major injuries. As Gilbert and his colleagues explained, “A wife may do the costly cognitive work necessary to rationalize her husband’s infidelity (‘I guess men need to try this sort of thing once to get it out of their systems’), but not his annoying habits (‘I guess men need to experiment with leaving their dirty dishes in the sink’), and thus the wife’s anger about her husband’s disorderliness may outlive her anger about his philandering.” Ardent Democrats may find a Trump presidency more painful at first, but their psychological immune systems should therefore kick in more keenly.

Well,yes, perhaps.

But reading his response leads me to elaborate on mine.

The first elaboration is that there is a matter of pertinence. Most of the declarations about leaving if the preferred candidate does not win only occur in the context of federal elections and usually in the sphere of presidential contests. You don't often hear declarations that "If Governor X doesn't win, I'm moving to ..." or "If Mayor Y doesn't win ...." or even "If Senator Z doesn't . . . "

We live in a republican system of government with three layers (federal, state and local) and in each we have three branches (legislative, judicial and executive). We have lots of checks and balances. In fact, the outcome in one branch at one level of government is hardly determinative of anything. In terms of day-to-day living, local government is far more consequential than state government and state government is more consequential than federal government. Most of everything that the federal government does is a 10% cap on the heavy lifting done locally and at the state level.

Whichever candidate wins the federal presidential election, the result is not much more than a token. In terms of what it means for everyday life, the consequence is miniscule. Hence, when some bombast has to consider whether to leave, they have to consider whether a career disruption, a lower standard of living, the cost of actually moving (in the many thousands of dollars), etc. and hold that in balance against the fact nothing has actually changed in their day-to-day life. They don't leave because the economic equation and the political consequence equation just don't add up to a compelling proposition.

The second elaboration is speculative. Alter's article mentions Rush Limbaugh (conservative) threatening to leave if ACA is passed. After some searching, I found Stephen Baldwin (actor), and that's about it in terms of anyone of any public prominence on the conservative side. Most of the claims to leave seem to come from the left side of the spectrum the Rev. Al Sharpton, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Lena Dunham, Eddie Vedder, Alec Baldwin, Robert Altman, Pierre Salinger, Barbara Streisand, Lynn Redgrave, Eddie Griffin, Samuel L. Jackson, Barry Diller, Katie Hopkins, Omari Hardwick, etc.. And that's just from the first google page of results.

There is something more going on here.

Yes, there seem to be a lot more left leaning leavers than right leaning. That sort of makes sense given that conservatism (granted, a big tent) is often characterized by a more visceral love of country that would preclude departure.

But perhaps it is not a left right issue at all so much as it is an industry issue. Look at the list of leavers. They are virtually all in the entertainment industry. Yes it is an industry noted for its liberalism but so are tech, journalism, finance, and the academy. Where are the prominent tech, journalism, finance, and professors proclaiming their commitment to depart? Maybe they are out there but I am not seeing them in the search results. And that makes some sense from a career and self-interest point of view.

The academy does not pay near as well outside the US and who would give up the golden ring of tenure to start the grind again elsewhere for much lower money? Same with journalism. There is perhaps more latitude for finance and tech, but still not a lot. There is no other Silicon Valley and the closest rivals (Research Triangle, Route 128, Silicon Alley) are still in the US.

So perhaps this is not so much a left/right issue as it is a peculiar quirk of the entertainment industry involving tribal and moral signaling.

Humor, art and poetry

Heh.

Theresa May stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but she had fled#poetry #art pic.twitter.com/MqXr3KyGxS

— Matthew Ward (@HistoryNeedsYou) July 11, 2016

Their vast carelessness

In a recent column, Maureen Dowd alludes to a Great Gatsby quote which so well describes the Clinton's and the plutocracy in general. From Chapter 9 of The Great Gatsby. Such a great description of all the moral narcissists and virtue signalers among the clerisy and chattering classes. The Tom and Daisy Buchanans of the world.

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

The man o’ independent mind

A Man’s a Man
Robert Burns 1795

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man’s a Man for a’ that:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a coof for a’ that:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.

Smarter people are more prejudiced against larger numbers of people than anyone else

Well that is an interesting trove of data I have not seen commented upon. From Answering Unresolved Questions about the Relationship between Cognitive Ability and Prejudice by Mark J. Brandt and Jarret T. Crawford.

Their data size is 5,914 individuals which is reasonably respectable for sociology and their data set and their formulae are posted online which is also best practice. Still, it is sociology, so caveat emptor.

Their questions boil down to whether high cognitive people versus low cognitive people are more or less prejudiced and whether there is a difference between the targets of prejudice. They construct a list of groups who attract varying degrees of opprobrium. They then collected expressed degrees of prejudice as well as a proxy measure of IQ from some 5,900 participants.

The list is follows. Those at the very top are the groups against whom high cognitive individuals are most biased (in bold) as well as those in bold at the bottom who are the target of the greatest prejudice from those with the lowest demonstrated cognitive ability. The groups in the middle (in italic) suffer prejudice from either or both groups but with a small effect size.

Christian Fundamentalists
Big Business
Christians
Tea Party
The Military
Conservatives
Catholics
Working Class People
Rich People
Middle Class People
Poor People
Labor Unions
Mormons
Feminists
People on Welfare
Whites
Liberals
Illegal Immigrants
Muslims
Blacks
LGBT
Atheists
Asian Americans
Hispanics

The results aren't too surprising. High IQ people are most biased against Christians and especially those with strong faith, as well as against business, conservatives, tea partiers, and those associated with the military.

Those with lower cognitive distinction are more prejudiced against LGBT, atheist, Asian-Americans and Hispanics.

Groups in the middle who are victims of some, but not especially strong, prejudice are Feminists, Mormons, Union members, Poor people, Middles Class people, and the Rich.

The researchers are more interested in the categorization of types of prejudice. Read their paper for that discussion.

I was struck by something rather different. Group sizes.

Those against whom High IQ people are most strongly prejudiced (Christian Fundamentalists, Big Business, Christians, Tea Party, The Military, and Conservatives) are large population sizes. 101 million Americans self-identify as fundamentalist, there are 219 million Christians, there are 53 million who self-identify as Tea Party, 115 million who self-identify as Conservative, and there are 23 million Americans who are either active duty or retired military. In aggregate (omitting the double counting of Christians and Christian Fundamentalists), High IQ people are prejudiced against 419 million people. Obviously there is still some double counting (a military person who is also Christian for example). Still, that is a large number of people to bear bias against.

How many people do Lower IQ people bear prejudice against? 106 million. So High IQ people carry about four times the amount of prejudice as Lower IQ people. That is not the idea of themselves carried by the cognitive elite.

Fascinating to see it quantified.

You can see why there is such frustration in the electorate and resentment against the "elite." Let's take the elite as Higher IQ for the moment as a workable but not especially robust proxy. They carry a strong measured prejudice against 219 million of fellow Americans who are Christian. But the Higher IQ carry no measured prejudice against the 2.8 million Americans who are Muslim. That's good. Ideally, no one would be prejudiced against anyone.

But if you are part of the great 219 million who are on the receiving end of elite prejudice, you might be concerned. Particularly if the elite apparently are beneficially disposed to smaller groups such as LGBT, Muslims and Atheists (together about 35 million).

There is a common trope that the progressive elite hate America. I think that that is a bad faith assumption and also not accurate.

But looking at these numbers you can see why many people can easily reach the conclusion that the cognitive elite (affiliated with the progressive elite) are not only prejudiced against them but are favorably biased in favor of much smaller groups. This is especially so when you see that the cognitive elite have a medium range bias against both the working class (102 million) and the middle class (118 million).

Indeed, a great majority of Americans (roughly some 275 million) are on the receiving end of Higher IQ progressive elite prejudice because they are either working class, middle class or Christian.

The cognitive Higher IQ carry more prejudice against a much larger number of people than those with Lower IQ. And just to be clear, Lower IQ doesn't mean stupid; just mid-ranged.

I think these numbers yield some insight to the rising irritation of the electorate against the vested interests and established elite. They see the higher levels of prejudice demonstrated by the cognitive elite, and indeed experience that prejudice. And at the same time, the elite wish to ignore the consent of the governed, usually on the grounds of greater morality and wisdom. The numbers suggest that that justification is false and Trump, Brexit and other such events suggest that the electorate is tired of the moral preening of the elite and see the prejudice on display and are mad as hell and not "going to take it anymore."

Contact me if you are interested in the spreadsheet with the numeric calculations.

Beaver slides

Yesterday I was down in the nature preserve checking out some downed trees across the creek. We have deer, blue heron, box turtles, red tailed hawks, pileated woodpeckers, soft shelled turtles, snapping turtles, and much other birdlife, wildlife and botanical life. Despite two centuries of development in the area, we have forty acres including a surviving couple of acres of old growth forest with some trees that are 3-4 centuries old. A marvelous gem. And right in the city. It takes a lot of volunteer time and effort, but it is worth preserving.

For years I have heard talk of beavers in the general area and have kept my eyes open for any evidence of their presence in our preserve. As of yesterday, I have the first indication that they have moved in. Along a thirty foot length of the creek bank I saw perhaps a dozen trails from the vegetative edge down to the water (see picture below). Googling it, I see that these are referred to as beaver slides.

Click to enlarge

I don't know for certain yet, but it seems like we have new neighbors. Welcome!

Distracted from distraction by distraction

In today's sermon, our minister quoted the line

Distracted from distraction by distraction

It is from T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, third stanza. The Four Quartets were written over a six year period and finally collected together in 1943.

The third stanza is worth reading in full.

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

Eliot was writing about sense, wisdom, choices, tradition, grace. But with eyes of the present, we can read the same words as startlingly prescient of our current social media-rich, always connected environment.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

[snip]

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

[snip]

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

Perhaps our challenge is not with technology per se but with technology as an amplifier of the human condition which is sometimes prone to descend lower, descend only into the world of perpetual solitude.

Perhaps the issue is not technology but our continuing inability to strike the right balance between technology's inner world and the world of sense, fancy, and spirit. That suggests that the problem is not technology but in the human system itself.

Worth re-reading the whole poem in a contemporary light.