When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears.

From Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking by John Protzko and Jonathan W. Schooler.  From the Abstract:

In five preregistered studies, we assess people’s tendency to believe “kids these days” are deficient relative to those of previous generations. Across three traits, American adults (N = 3458; Mage = 33 to 51 years) believe today’s youth are in decline; however, these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits. Authoritarian people especially think youth are less respectful of their elders, intelligent people especially think youth are less intelligent, and well-read people especially think youth enjoy reading less. These beliefs are not predicted by irrelevant traits. Two mechanisms contribute to humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids: a person-specific tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels and a memory bias projecting one’s current qualities onto the youth of the past. When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears. This may explain why the kids these days effect has been happening for millennia.

History

This is Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, built in the 1920s.

Why so grand? Because Hollywood was making 800 films per year and 75% of the American population went to the movies weekly.

What were they watching? Well, 1920s cinema was much stranger than you realise... pic.twitter.com/fQixmksQ7b

— The Cultural Tutor (@culturaltutor) May 4, 2024

 

An Insight

Proteins are what perform useful functions in the body, but the vast majority of DNA does not code for any protein - rather, it regulates which proteins get made

The same is true of our legal code - it's mostly junk. A short 🧵 about viruses, evolution, and regulatory capture pic.twitter.com/u2JrsK1ASu

— Andrew Côté (@Andercot) May 3, 2024

 

I see wonderful things

Medieval stained glass fragment incorporated in a later window at the church of All Saints, East Barsham. pic.twitter.com/melXaf89jU

— Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart) May 4, 2024

 

Offbeat Humor

The French government this week wanted to organise a big conference on working 4 days a week, but then realised Wednesday and Thursday are bank holidays and everyone is taking Friday off.

France in May: you can't even get enough people for a meeting to discuss working less pic.twitter.com/mqmrwp19bb

— Stanley Pignal (@spignal) May 6, 2024

 

Data Talks

Experimental philosophy paper in Nature Communications on the concept of wisdom across cultures

Findings: Striking invariance across 8 different cultural regions. In all of those cultures, the two core dimensions are reflectiveness and empathyhttps://t.co/A3taU6hpHY pic.twitter.com/3FW74okif0

— Experimental Philosophy (@xphilosopher) May 9, 2024

 

Magpie eating cake, 1865 by Rubens Peale (English, 1784–1865) 

 

Click to enlarge.

How rich life had been and how silly,

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

by W. H. Auden

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,

when grief has been made so public, and exposed

     to the critique of a whole epoch

   the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die

among us, those who were doing us some good,

     who knew it was never enough but

   hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished

to think of our life from whose unruliness

     so many plausible young futures

   with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes

upon that last picture, common to us all,

     of problems like relatives gathered

   puzzled and jealous about our dying. 

For about him till the very end were still

those he had studied, the fauna of the night,

     and shades that still waited to enter

   the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he

was taken away from his life interest

     to go back to the earth in London,

   an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment

his practice now, and his dingy clientele

     who think they can be cured by killing

   and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed

simply by looking back with no false regrets;

     all he did was to remember

   like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told

the unhappy Present to recite the Past

     like a poetry lesson till sooner

   or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,

and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,

     how rich life had been and how silly,

   and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend

without a wardrobe of excuses, without

     a set mask of rectitude or an 

   embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit

in his technique of unsettlement foresaw

     the fall of princes, the collapse of

   their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life

would become impossible, the monolith

     of State be broken and prevented

   the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way

down among the lost people like Dante, down

     to the stinking fosse where the injured

   lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,

deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,

     our dishonest mood of denial,

   the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,

the paternal strictness he distrusted, still

     clung to his utterance and features,

   it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

     to us he is no more a person

   now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:

Like weather he can only hinder or help,

     the proud can still be proud but find it

   a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:

he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth

     and extends, till the tired in even

   the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered

till the child, unlucky in his little State,

     some hearth where freedom is excluded,

   a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,

while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, 

     so many long-forgotten objects

   revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;

games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,

     little noises we dared not laugh at,

   faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free

is often to be lonely. He would unite

     the unequal moieties fractured

   by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will 

the smaller possesses but can only use

     for arid disputes, would give back to

   the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all 

to be enthusiastic over the night,

     not only for the sense of wonder

   it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes

its delectable creatures look up and beg

     us dumbly to ask them to follow:

   they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice

if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,

     even to bear our cry of 'Judas', 

   as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave

the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:

     sad is Eros, builder of cities,

   and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

And the moon stood still over Jericho.

Coda 

by Louis MacNeice

Maybe we knew each other better

When the night was young and unrepeated

And the moon stood still over Jericho.

So much for the past; in the present

There are moments caught between heart-beats

When maybe we know each other better.

But what is that clinking in the darkness?

Maybe we shall know each other better

When the tunnels meet beneath the mountain.

 

I'm actually a hillbilly from Appalachia, but for the moment, I self-identify as a Jew.

While Biden opened his presidency with the improbable claim that he would be a uniter rather than a divider, I certainly did not anticipate this act of unity.

Just as an aside, the brawling, justice seeking, cantankerous nature of the Scots-Irish (concentrated especially in the Appalachians) has been well documented in Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer and Born Fighting by James Webb.  

The Scots-Irish, rock-ribbed Presbyterians have always been a disproportionate percentage of our leaders and of the military.  And have also been long reviled by the bien pensant of the Mandarin Class.  They have been characterized as white supremacists, Christian Nationalists, anti-semitic racists.  Materially untrue but that's the received stereotype among the Woke elite.  

In his desperate pursuit of Somali and Muslim votes in Michigan and other mid-west states, Biden has been especially indulgent of the noisy, violent, flag burning (American and Israeli), anti-semitic protesters on campuses and select blue cities near you.  A blatant and unpleasant anti-semitism alien to most Americans and certainly to most Normals.

So I really liked this rather striking example of unity.

I'm your huckleberry by Martin Hackworth.  The subheading is 

Yo, you over there in the keffiyeh asking about Zionists on this bus. I'm actually a hillbilly from Appalachia, but for the moment, I self-identify as a Jew. Come on over and let's have a chat.

Appalachian, Scots-Irish Presbyterian whites happily self-identifying as Jewish in order to right a demonstrable wrong.  Now there's a Uniter for you.  An amusing essay that captures a vibe that I think is quite real and unreported.

Echoes of Next of Kin from 1989.