Tuesday Links

The other argument I am seeing a lot of is the affordability "crisis," which may be a crisis of perception, or anxiety, or values instead. David Foster and bsking have also had things to say on it. My wife's mother had a cleaning lady who came in once or twice a week for years, and people have nannies now. Before that, lots of people had maids or cooks that put in a lot of hours. With larger and multigenerational families and big Victorian houses there was more work per household. Many labor saving devices were not yet invented.  But Matthew Iglesias points out that the reason people don't have servants now is not because their wages are less, but because servants wages are more. 

Lyman Stone links to two problems for the hereditarians 

Dizygotic twins reared apart 

There has been actual fraud, excused by prominent researchers 

and comments himself that we have in fact modified real-world phenotypic intelligence  with things right under our noses. He analogises to better visit because of glasses, contacts, and surgery even though genotypic eyesight isn't any better

Maybe Y'all Really Do Need Jesus by the always controversial and entertaining Cartoon Hate Her.  She is a one of the rare adult converts who had no religious upbringing whatsoever.

The Great Downzoning "It was once legal to build almost anything, everywhere. Then, in the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?"

Has an English Civil War Already Begun?  

 

For Unto Us

 

Fuentes Astroturf

 Nick Fuentes' fame and stats look to have been manipulated.  His followers are manufacturing his retweets with foreign and/or anonymous accounts. 

Mainstream media thought they were tracking organic sentiment on the right. In reality, it was reacting to manufactured noise. Fuentes is an extremist entertainer with a niche following. But coordinated amplification networks have artificially pushed him into the center of national discourse.

 This is going to be harder to discern every year - what photos, videos, and statistics are real and which have been faked.

Links from 2013

 Opinion, Fact Schoolchildren can make a distinction that sometimes eludes those with advanced degrees

Is Confidence Better Than Correctness?  

Jason Collins: "I'm a Basketball Player." My little sendup of an already obscure player coming out in 2013 is even more distant now.  It continues to be the case that few male professional athletes are gay, while very high percentages of female professionals are lesbians.

Teaching the Opposite Lesson. I still think of this sometimes. 

World's Largest  Two of the photos are unavailable, but the Moxie Bottle House is now in Union, ME - we visited it on our puffin trip this summer, and not only the giant Milk Bottle but lots of other roadside architecture is at this wonderful site.

 

Monday Links

 There is a lot more debate, or at least debate between people I have heard about, on hereditatrianism.  It is getting rancorous and I am finding that part unpleasant. There is no practical reason why I need to follow the debate, I am just fascinated by it and have been for a few decades. But I am also only in it for pleasure now, and can drop it if it is less...fun...entertaining...something. I don't need the grief.  But I will continue following it for now.  I usually put up posts on controversial topics if I mostly agree with them, less often if they are simply interesting new looks. But I am duty bound to post more of both sides on this one now, because of my own uncertainty. I will say that there is not only new evidence, but new arguments on the field, and keeping up will mean some updating for everyone. 

I won't hit you with all of them at once. There was ACX on 12/3, two mixed in today and 2.5 tomorrow. After that we'll see.  

 The return of psychiatric eugenics Thomas Reilly at Rational Psychiatry shows how it is not only a hateful idea, it won't won't work.  It's been tried. Sasha Gusev, who I have not been fond of, gets this one exactly right, so perhaps I am on my way to revising my opinion about him.

Twins Reared Apart Do Not Exist Another essay attacking one of my central hereditarian beliefs. We'll see if the ground continues to shift. 

Inventing the Dishwasher 

Europe is Under Siege  I wanted to argue with parts of this, but some of it is uncomfortably true.

Of course motherhood drives the gender wage gap by Ruxandra Teslo.  Lyman Stone gives credit to Camille Landais and Henrik Levin rather than Claudia Grondin for the heavy lifting on this, even though Grondin won the Nobel Prize for it. 

O Helga Natt

 Effortless

 

In The Bleak Midwinter

As I covered earlier this year, it is called Midwinter even though it is at the beginning of winter because Autumn and Winter were generally lumped together as one season called Winter, Spring and Summer lumped together and called Summer.

 

Caps

There were cap pistols in the early 60s, but we didn't see those often.  They malfunctioned too easily and had to be replaced, so only rich kids from other neighborhoods had those. We just had the paper tape, which you hit with a hammer, or more likely just a rock. Some kids thought these were amazingly exciting, hearing the little explosion. My friends and I weren't so interested.  We might bang out a dozen of them once in a while. You couldn't bring them to school.  Big trouble for that.

 I can still smell them.

6-7

 Middle school kids find it subversive to say this, and will insert it in wherever they can.  Most don't know where it comes from, having picked up from their peers as a saying ok kids famous for being a saying of kids. Some probably know that it comes from Maverick Trevillian from Maryland, who said it on camera at a youth basketball game, after which it went viral.

I'm suspicious of a kid whose mother named him Maverick, right off the bat.  I can imagine being reassured if it's a family name, maybe even taken in honor of the TV cowboy of two generations ago. There are ways out of this.  But in general, that mother is telling you something about what she's going to encourage in this child. Still, probably mostly harmless. A bit of a show-off.

But that is only halfway back in the story. Maverick got it from a highly recruited basketball player* in Atlanta who has made several videos using the phrase with the usual "I don't know/ comme ci comme ca/ either-way/ mezzo-mezzo" hand gesture, palms up. He stages being asked questions like "What time is dinner?" or "How do you rate this Starbucks drink?" and answering "Six, six-seven" while his friends laugh. Maverick saw those videos.

The highschool player got the phrase from a highlight film of pro basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is 6'7". In the soundtrack underneath the film is a song by the drill rapper Skrilla called "Doot Doot." In the son he uses the unexplained phrase "six seven" in the context of shooting someone and knowing he is dead. All sorts of stories sprung up about how the two were connected, but someone finally had the clever idea of asking Mr. Skrilla what he meant.  It is a reference to 67th St in Philadelphia, where he and his friends hang out. "Six-seven" meant he was going to brag about the killing to his friends in the neighborhood. He wasn't using it after that one time until all this went viral, but now he uses it frequently and his fans go nuts over it.

The middle schoolers mostly don't know any of this upstream origin. It's just something they say that seemed vaguely forbidden at first and is now just an in-slang to show they know what's cool. 

 *Talen Kinney.  I had to look it up. I don't know if he's 6'7"

Good King Wenceslas

 You can't get more authentic than a cold Czech cathedral. Everyone bundled up.

 

Completed Family Size Will Plummet

From Lyman Stone, who has taken the article out from behind the paywall Completed Family Size Will Soon Plummet to Unprecedented Depths . We are below replacement and going lower in the next decade or two. There is a theory that it's not fewer children, but delayed fertility ending up with the same number of children. That doesn't turn out to be true.

Stone has pointed out elsewhere that this decline tracks with the decline in marriage. Married people have almost the same number of children as they did decades ago, and unmarried women have the same amount each. It's just that there are a lot more unmarried women now. 

Coventry Carol

 

Down the Rabbit Hole

A very cold looking rabbit hole.  I was trying to remember the name of Telemark skiing. Tavistock, Tuckahoe, termagent... I was on the recliner with the dog on my lap so I couldn't get up.  Transiberian. Tullamore. Twilight of the Gods. I finally gave up and looked up "hybrid skiing," which did not help at all. "Norwegian skiing styles" finally brought it to earth.  The Grokipedia entry is good, but suffers from lack of illustration or photos. I found videos on YouTube - it's very pretty when done right, though it looks clumsy at first. I got to the part that said "For safety in avalanche-prone areas, telemark practitioners carry the "big three" essentials: an avalanche transceiver (beacon) that transmits a signal for location during burial, a collapsible probe to pinpoint depth, and a lightweight shovel for rapid excavation, enabling group rescues within critical minutes" and decided to read up on the part of Norway where it was invented, Rjukan, halfway between Oslo and Bergen. The tallest mountain in Norway, and it has an internal funicular in the mountain.

So now I'm into googlemaps wondering if this is close enough for my son to go from Tromso - not likely - and it occurs to me, as I'm sure it would all of you, whether it was easier to drive from Rjukan to Murmansk by going up Norway or going through Sweden and Finland. That's the beautiful thing about maps versus terrain. "Easier to drive to Murmansk" takes on an actual meaning.  It may be that no one has ever driven from Rjukan to Murmansk, and googlemaps just assembles the shorter segments. So now I am wondering why someone might drive from Rjukan to Murmansk, whether the easy way (29 hours) through Sweden and Finland, or the long way (37 hours) through Trondheim and Alta. A Russian ski bum, maybe. I imagine the Russian ski bum for a couple of minutes. Norway is about 1500 miles long, and about half of that it is less than 100 miles wide, including the many islands. For perspective, New Hampshire is about 100 miles wide at its widest point. So now I'm trying to look up exactly how long and how wide it is, and I remember Svalbard.

Does Svalbard count as part of Norway? Yes, but you have to cross 500 miles of ocean to get to it, and then it's another 300 miles long. They share it with the Russians. Were there fish there?  It was discovered before 1700 (actually well before, 1596) but why did they stay? It's less than 1,000 people and the primary employment is coal mining. Then tourism, then research. Tourism. Cruises are $8K, flights are $500 RT in summer.* I see the point of going someplace really far north, just to do it, but one you have landed and said "There! That ought to shut my cousin Richie up!" what do you see? Tripadvisor says there are private tours focusing on spectacular views or the coal mines. They run over $1000 per person. There is one tour that is only $10, so I had to check that out.  I mean, who is hunting for a bargain at that point? Longyearbyen’s Downtown GPS Self Guided Walking Tour. 60-90 minutes, currently only $9.75 No reviews yet. I recommend the photos at the link. Sums it all up nicely. 

All this took a little more than an hour.  Very satisfying. 

*Less that $225 RT in January.  Seems impossible. But I'm finished and am not going to research it further.

How Bad Are Things Really?

Another solid, numbers-and-logic based essay at ACX: Vibesession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. I have seen a few people trying to sort this out, and this is as good or better than any.

Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass.

Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.

Are the youth succumbing to a “negativity bias” where they see the past through “rose-colored glasses”? Are the economists looking at some ivory tower High Modernist metric that fails to capture real life? Or is there something more complicated going on? 

Alexander first assesses the vibes according to usual metrics of consumer confidence and optimism. Are people, especially young people that discouraged and pessimistic or is this just click-seekers on social media? Answer: It's overstated but real. Next he looks at economists assessment of how we are doing, over the last five months, five years, and five decades. The short answer: Things are unevenly better all the time, but a few key things are worse.

And in particular, housing costs were at historic lows 2010-2012 - mortgages, interest rates, rents - and have risen since then. So they aren't bad until the covid years, but if you are young, they sure look it. That could be your vibes right there. 

What looks like a throwaway line jumped off the page at me: Partly because the bill for ~50 years of NIMBYism has finally come due.  Maybe I am overreading that, but it rings true. Housing is expensive because we don't have enough of it. Contractors make more money on bigger houses on more acreage, so that's what they build.  Everyone knows we need to build more houses of less than 2500sf on 2 acres that cost half a million, but all the ways of getting there run into the roadblock of towns and neighborhoods not wanting that. 

I was going to guess that getting more people into affordable houses would solve both the wealth accumulation and the vibes, because once people are in a house they are more likely to give up their weekends and travel, stay married, and volunteer in the community. But that's the reasoning that got us into the housing bubble of 2008.  Maybe that would have not been as bad if we had regulated the mortgage market more tightly.  Rule of thumb: When a percentage of Republicans asks for tighter regulations while everyone else is opening the throttle, that counterintuitiveness is worth examining. 

Still, I have to think getting to the More Housing side of things would help. 

I draw your attention to the section "The Brooklyn Theory of Everything," for some additional surprising insights. 

Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

I mentioned our home Advent liturgy, which we use as a table grace. We have a responsive reading from Isaiah, a short reading around the themes of each week - light, lamb, king, hope - light the candles, and close with this.

The lyrics are Charles Wesley, the tune is Stuttgart.
 

Tallis Canon

It is also a round.  But it doesn't have to be, does it?

 

Testing the Limits

 Evolution is as lazy as it can possibly be without you dying. That's what efficiency means.

Nature Nurture Debate

 The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate A simply great summary of the recent controversy on heritability over at ACX.  

…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one 

 The hereditarians declared victory (Cremieux on X, Emil Kirkegaard on Substack) 

But the nurturists declared victory (Sasha Gusev on Substack) 

I have leaned toward the former view for years, but want to get this right.  Cremieux and Emil Kirkegaard claim that their opponents are wrong because of initial bias and not wanting to look at the data. Sasha Gusev claims that his opponents are wrong because they are pig-headed fools and generally stupid.  Longtime readers know where I am going to put my trust on that one.

But still, I want to get it right, and Scott Alexander explains it to me in terms I can understand. I commented there. 

Somalis

I don't object to making group immigration decisions on the basis of the best group information we have available of who will be most likely to adapt to American ideals.  These are people we don't know all that well, even after vetting, and we are asking current citizens - often our poorest citizens - to absorb the risks while the wealthy are separated from the problem.

But once you are here you are judged as an individual, and Trump is simply wrong to judge the group. 

The opposite argument, that "most Somalis are not criminals" is a mild version of the identity politics that conservatives and libertarians are supposed to reject. That is true.  90% of everyone is not criminals, and on the front side we are allowed to differentiate between 90 and 99% Not Criminals. But once they are here that goes out the door.  We don't accept that they should have more lenient rules because they are marginalised people; we should not accept that they have stricter rules because their countrymen have done poorly. Whether there should be heightened scrutiny is a bit different, and I think those things can be hard to separate, but we should strive to. 

The Sudanese came to America in two waves.  I know something about this personally.  The second wave was South Sudanese and did not have high criminality.  Many have had trouble academically, but that's another subject. The first wave of (North) Sudanese had a great deal of trouble adapting to cultural norms, especially as regards women. It is fine with me that discerning who was who in this informs our future decisions on which Sudanese are admitted. 

But once they are here, they are here and stand or fall on their own. We can't have this both ways. 

Substack

Because I am signed up for it I could put up my own articles very easily. I would just write them here and then copy them into the other form.  In light of the previous post, I wonder if that might go wrong in unexpected ways and I because a different writer, likely worse. I used to cross-post at Chicago Boyz as well and still could, but fell out of the habit.

Well, I have other things to think about at present, and this doesn't seem interesting or important enough to me. 

The Business of Outrage

 Karen Read and the Business of Outrage at the True Crime Times.

Like the author, I was not surprised that the mere mention of her name increased clicks, but I was surprised at the extent of it.  I do believe in rationality and choice.  But sometimes we are just pigeons hitting the bar for another pellet of food.

 He’s building his brand, finding it difficult to get traction, and every post has a couple hundred views and maybe a handful of likes. Then he tweets something innocuous about Karen Read, and suddenly the views are in the thousands. He does it again, this time with something more provocative. And the views grow. And he begins to learn that the quality of the reactions—good or bad, pro or con, supportive or troll—doesn’t matter. A view is a view. A hate retweet gooses the stats just as much, and sometimes more, than a supportive one. In the ancient days of social media—circa the year of our Lord 2008—the “ratio” was a thing to be dreaded. Now, it’s all engagement, whether good or bad.

Thank you to bsking for the link 

Hard Launch

 Let's do a hard launch for Advent.  It caught me by surprise this year until my wife brought out the Advent wreath and the nightly liturgy we have been doing for over forty years. But we can catch up with a suicide clutch on the music for you.