Quick hits (part II)

1) This was really good on the myth of the Alpha Wolf:

Different wolf populations have packs of different sizes, but the basic structure is the same: a mom, a dad, and their offspring. Sometimes the one-year-olds set out on their own, hoping to find a mate and start their own pack; sometimes they stick around and, as yearlings, help raise the next set of pups. As Kira Cassidy, an associate research scientist with a National Park Service research program in Yellowstone, explained, “The wolves generally in those dominant positions are not there because they fought for it. It’s not some battle to get to the top position. They’re just the oldest, or the parents. Or, in the case of same-sex siblings, it’s a matter of personality.” Cassidy specializes in wolves’ sociality, both within and between packs. Wolves do fight one another—in Yellowstone, where humans can’t hunt them, fights are the primary cause of mortality—but most fights are between packs, for territory. “In Yellowstone, maybe because there’s a lot to eat and it’s a protected area, our packs are larger, more complex family units,” she said. Where conditions are harsh, a wolf pack might number four—two parents, two pups—because so few pups survive. In Yellowstone, a pack often includes aunts, uncles, and sometimes even more than one breeding pair.

Cassidy said that one finding that surprised her came when she looked into battles between packs. She suspected that pack size would be important in determining victors. “We found that even more important than pack size was whether a pack had an old individual, male or female,” she said. At six years old, a Yellowstone wolf is considered an elder—only about one in five lives to that age. “If they have one or two older individuals, they are more likely to win—which was not what we’d expected to find.”

After that, she looked into the literature on other animals, and discovered similar findings. In times of droughts, elephant herds with a matriarch older than thirty-five do better. When there’s a salmon shortage, orcas follow the grandmother. “In the pack fights, we see that the elders don’t panic,” Cassidy said. “It seems to match up with this idea of them having past knowledge that helps the pack. They can ease their pack mates and bring them together. Or maybe the older ones help the pack avoid fights that they know they can’t win—which brings up their winning rate over all.”…

The Schenkel study that gave rise to the terminology began in 1934, looking at wolves living at the Basel Zoological Garden. The conditions, as described in the study, were rough: “Up to ten wolves were kept together in a small area with a floor space of approximately 10 metres by 20 meters.” Not only were the wolves in captivity but they had been brought in from different zoos, and were unrelated to one another. This might be the equivalent of studying the human family by observing the culture of prisoners in a holding cell. Schenkel noted that “this space as a whole was regularly defended against the zookeeper by the whole pack.”

2) An interesting argument that they way schools teach books does not foster a love of reading (I’m very grateful that my 12-year old daughter loves reading– I wish her brothers read more, but they could be worse)

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

3) I agree with Drum on this, “How about if we indict Donald Trump for something serious?”

I would really like to see Donald Trump indicted over his efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The problem is that it would be a tough case since Trump was savvy enough to avoid saying outright, “Hey, just invent the extra votes I need.” Still, everyone knows that’s exactly what he meant, and it’s a serious crime. Trump deserves to go to prison for that.

Ditto for the classified documents case. The problem is not that Trump took the documents when he left office. That might have been a mistake, after all. The problem is that even when he knew he had classified documents in his possession and he knew that the government wanted them back, he refused to return them. That’s why the FBI had to get a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago. Trump deserves to go to trial for that too.¹

But you go to war with the charges you have, not with the charges you wish you had. And right now, the charges we have are related to payoffs Trump made to a porn star. Here’s my understanding of the case:

• In 2006 Trump (allegedly) had an affair with Stormy Daniels. This is not illegal.
• Daniels threatened to tell her story while Trump was running for president in 2016. This is not illegal. (Not for Trump, anyway.)
• Trump agreed to pay her off. This is not illegal.
• But Trump wanted to keep it a secret, so he asked Michael Cohen to handle the payoff money. Trump would then reimburse Cohen. This is not illegal.
• Trump reimbursed Cohen via payments from the Trump Organization. If this were a public company, that would be illegal. But it’s not, so apparently it isn’t.
• However, in order to maintain the secrecy, the payments to Cohen were labeled “legal expenses.”

And that’s illegal. Moreover, you can argue that the payoff was a campaign expense that Trump didn’t report. That would be illegal too.

So the case against Trump is this: In order to keep his payoff of a blackmailer secret, he had it labeled as a legal expense.

This strikes me as pretty trivial, and I have my doubts that a jury would convict Trump if it goes to trial. We should probably save our legal firepower for something more serious.

And like it or not, public opinion matters too. One of the mistakes that Republicans made in their impeachment jihad against Bill Clinton was misjudging public opinion. To them, Clinton lied under oath, and a lie is a lie. It was an open and shut case.

But the public never really agreed. To them, it mattered what the lie was about. In Clinton’s case, he was lying about having an affair with a White House aide. To most people, this seemed (a) not all that big a deal, (b) completely unrelated to his fitness as president, and (c) something that of course he lied about. Anybody would. Come on.

Democrats may be making the same mistake here. To us, Trump falsified his business records, and a lie is a lie. It’s an open and shut case.

But the public, as usual, will care what the lie was about. They’re likely to think it’s (a) not all that big a deal, (b) completely unrelated to his fitness as president, and (c) something that of course he lied about. He was being blackmailed! Come on.

So tread carefully here.

4) This story is just nuts.  You read the headline and think its exaggerating. But nope. “This Principal Investigated a Sexting Incident. So the Police Charged Him With Possessing Child Porn.”

A Brush, Colorado, man is facing 12 years in prison for possessing child pornography. Even more fraught is that no one, including the government, thinks he had child pornography.

At least not in any traditional sense. Bradley Bass allegedly ran afoul of state law when he was found with explicit images of a local girl. But the 32-year-old high school principal came to have those photos in the course of a school sexting investigation carried out as a part of his job. The girl says she isn’t a victim of Bass’ and both she and her parents have pled with law enforcement to stop the prosecution.

Those requests have fallen on deaf ears. The law criminalizes possessing such photos, even if someone comes to have them while conducting a probe. There is one notable exception, however: “peace officers or court personnel in the performance of their official duties.” In other words, when law enforcement carries out such an investigation, it’s OK. When Bass carried out a similar investigation, he was hit with the potential of more than a decade behind bars, sex offender status, and the loss of his kids and job.

5) I read this headline and thought surely one of these was leaded gasoline. Indeed. “The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes“

Each of these innovations offered a brilliant solution to an urgent technological problem of the era: making automobiles more efficient, producing a safer refrigerant. But each turned out to have deadly secondary effects on a global scale. Indeed, there may be no other single person in history who did as much damage to human health and the planet, all with the best of intentions as an inventor.

What should we make of the disquieting career of Thomas Midgley Jr.? There are material reasons for revisiting his story now, beyond the one accidental rhyme of history: the centennial of leaded gasoline’s first appearance on the market in 1923. That might seem like the distant past, but the truth is we are still living with the consequences of Midgley’s innovations. This year, the United Nations released an encouraging study reporting that the ozone layer was indeed on track to fully recover from the damage caused by Midgley’s chlorofluorocarbons — but not for another 40 years.

6) Recently came across this idea of “primal world beliefs” on a podcast. I think it is a very, very cool idea:

Your beliefs about a place strongly impact your behavior while in that place. For example, if you see a place as a battleground, you’re jumpy and ready to fight. If you see a place as a playground, you play. You feel good. You make friends.

What happens if you see the whole world as a battleground? Just like beliefs about local contexts, world beliefs could impact us, but constantly. If that’s true, then depression, success, optimism, extraversion—honestly, most parts of psychology people care about—could be affected…

But all primals are not equally important. Most collapse for statistical and conceptual reasons into three big ones:

1. Safe World Belief

Those low on Safe world belief see the world as dangerous. These people don’t necessarily feel more scared or threatened in response to dangers, they are just of the honest opinion that there’s a lot more danger out there than the rest of us suspect—from germs to sharks to terrorism to getting insulted. So being alert seems responsible, and relaxing isn’t a great idea. Better safe than sorry.

 

Those high on Safe world belief see really dangerous threats as few and far between. Thus, they feel that constant vigilance is neurotic, risk is not that risky, and, in general, people should calm down.

 

Source: Grey Matter Group

Safe world belief is very strongly correlated to things like greater trust, higher agreeableness, and lower depression. Interestingly, men and women on average see the world as equally Safe. In fact, Safe is correlated surprisingly little to actual experiences of danger. This suggests that Safe world belief may be more like a lens used to interpret our life than a mirror reflecting what our life has been.

 

2. Enticing World Belief

Those low on Enticing world belief see the world as dull. In their view, truly beautiful and fascinating things are rare. Therefore, treasure-hunting, social exploration, risk-taking, and so forth, are only appropriate when it’s a sure bet.

Those high on Enticing world belief are of the opinion that treasure is around every corner, in every person, under every rock, and that beauty permeates everything. Therefore, exploration and appreciation are not naïve. It’s simply the rational way to live.

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Source: Grey Matter Group

Enticing is very strongly correlated to things like curiosity, gratitude, and happiness. Like Safe, Enticing is uncorrelated to wealth or privilege; anyone can see the world as Enticing.

3. Alive World Belief

Those low on Alive world belief see the world as a machine with no awareness or intentions. Since the universe never sends messages, it makes no sense to try and listen for any. Just as machine parts are interchangeable, so too are people: the world doesn’t need you for anything special.

 

Those high on Alive world belief think everything happens for a purpose and listen constantly for those purposes. To them, life is a relationship with an active universe that animates events, communicates, and has a role for each of us to play.

 

Source: Grey Matter Group

Alive is strongly correlated to things like spirituality and having purpose in life. Though religious people tend to see the world as Alive, plenty of non-religious people do, too.

You can probably guess that I see the world as safe, enticing, and mechanistic.  Fun quiz here. 

7) Paul Waldman, “How much does charisma matter? DeSantis is putting it to the test.”

Liberals are horrified by Ron DeSantis, both in terms of what he has done so far as governor of Florida and what he might do as president. But many take comfort in this frequently repeated idea: Whatever his appeal to the Republican base, DeSantis is so lacking in charisma that winning the presidency would be exceedingly difficult.

 

This observation has come from both DeSantis’s critics and admirers. He is “reserved and dry” and has a challenge “forging connections with people.” He’s “pinched and humorless.” He “just doesn’t have the charisma to command a national political stage.” He “has the charisma of a pair of cargo shorts.”

It hasn’t seemed to hurt him so far, though. He was narrowly elected governor in 2018, reelected by a large margin in 2022 and has become the most prominent contender for the 2024 presidential nomination not named Donald Trump.

Ever since German sociologist Max Weber theorized about charisma in the early 20th century, scholars have considered its impact on politics — though many struggle to define it. Some describe it as “personal magnetism.” Others locate it in the bond between the leader and their followers; as historian David A. Bell wrote, “charisma is not just an individual quality but a relationship.” It only exists insofar as others perceive it.

Even if Republican voters are attracted to DeSantis, they don’t seem to be getting swept off their feet. They like what he’s done in Florida; they like his crusades against liberals; and they think he would be a smarter, more disciplined version of Trump. It’s all exceedingly rational.

Yet all those who made it to the White House in recent decades have possessed at least one of two kinds of charisma. On the personal level, many had a charm that enabled them to connect with people individually.That was especially true of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The other form of charisma was a more distant version — the kind you can see through your TV or on a jumbotron. They could hold a rapt crowd in their hands and move them emotionally. That was especially true of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

In almost every recent presidential campaign, the more magnetic personality prevailed. The failed nominees — John McCain, John Kerry, Bob Dole, Hillary Clinton — were outshone by their opponents.

8) Yglesias on poverty: “Don’t overthink poverty in the United States”

American anti-poverty programs do a lot to reduce poverty

 

What shifts my read of Desmond’s work from “somewhat annoyed” to “actually angry” is his claim that the United States has made no progress against poverty in 50 years.

That’s just not true. It is true that there are flaws in the way the official poverty measurement is calculated, and I assume this is why Desmond mentions an additional metric called the Supplemental Poverty Measure. But then he implies, without quite saying so, that SPM poverty hasn’t fallen either, which also isn’t true:

In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.

On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.

What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.

I’m concerned that this passage won’t come in for the vigorous criticism it deserves. Desmond is a big deal in scholarship and the New York Times Magazine is a big deal in journalism, and most people aren’t going to want to call them out for how irresponsible this is. It’s also not the kind of academic/journalistic error that conservative or “heterodox” people like to get mad about — Tucker Carlson isn’t going to do a segment about how irresponsible it is.

But I am.

Over the past 50 years, the United States has spent a considerable amount of money on new programs designed to lift the living standards of low-income people. The reason this hasn’t reduced OPM poverty is that OPM poverty excludes those benefits by definition. The SPM includes them, and the SPM does in fact show poverty falling over time. Desmond elides this by saying that SPM poverty indicates a higher rate than OPM poverty, but that’s neither here nor there. A time series of the SPM shows a Great Society drop, then a Clinton drop, and then an Obama drop. When the welfare state expands, SPM poverty goes down…

An expansive welfare state is expensive

I think the best answer is that just as all kids in America are entitled to K-12 schooling whether or not we think their parents have made great life choices, all kids in America should be entitled to some basic material living standards. There should be a monthly child allowance for all kids, probably one that starts quite large, then tapers when the kid hits kindergarten and again when the kid turns 14 or 15. You should get this allowance whether you’re rich or poor or anything in between; we can make the system progressive through taxes.

A program like that would be relatively simple to get people signed up for because eligibility is easy to determine.

It would avoid any “poverty trap” or “welfare dependency” perverse incentives, and I would hope it would minimize the toxic pitting of people against each other based on their circumstances in life. Kids have needs — policy should account for that. And just as Social Security massively reduces elder poverty without being “an anti-poverty program,” a Social Security benefit for kids would massively reduce poverty among children.

The problem is that while it’s analytically simple and easy to describe, it comes with a hefty price tag. I don’t think it would be costly in economic terms to finance a program like this with broad-based taxes. Indeed, in a lot of ways I think it would be superior to the current practice of bolting together a jumble of different programs for families. But the numbers involved are big and scary, GOP elites think it’s a bad idea, and Democratic Party advocacy groups who like this idea generally have higher priorities.

So policy entrepreneurs are left trying to improve life for low-income people with a mix of means-tested programs that are either in-kind (SNAP) or work-linked (EITC) and really sweating the details to try to maximize the benefits of scarce program dollars. That work is very complicated and technical because these programs all have their own legislative histories and design parameters, and some of them interact with each other.

But to say that the state of American anti-poverty programs is complicated is very different from saying that the persistence of poverty itself is complicated. Poverty persists because straightforward, highly effective solutions are politically untenable in the short term, leaving people in the trenches to deal with a very complex situation. Part of the role of those of us in the article-writing community should be to clarify this, not to layer new levels of complexity onto it.

9) Patricia Schroeder was awesome.  I used to assign a great excerpt from her memoir to my Gender & Politics class, “Patricia Schroeder, Feminist Force in Congress, Dies at 82”

10) Honestly, it seems truly crazy to me that people would honestly think women are more erratic than men. “Guess Which Sex Behaves More Erratically (at Least in Mice): A new study finds male mice more unpredictable than females, challenging century-old assumptions used to exclude females from research because of their hormones.”

For decades, male mice have been the default in scientific experiments that test new drugs or examine the connections of the brain. The reason? Female mice, which experience a four- to five-day cycle of fluctuating ovarian hormones, were thought to be too complicated. Accounting for the hormonal changes was viewed as too cumbersome and too expensive.

But the estrous cycle has little to do with how female mice behave, according to a new study that used machine-learning software to track the second-to-second behavior of animals exploring an open space. Male mice actually exhibited more erratic behavior than females did.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology on Tuesday, challenges century-old stereotypes that kept female animals out of laboratory research — and, until the 1990s, barred women from clinical trials.

The new research is “tipping all of these assumptions about sex differences and the influence of hormones on their head,” said Rebecca Shansky, a behavioral neuroscientist at Northeastern University and a co-author of the new study.

11) “Parental Nonadherence to Health Policy Recommendations for Prevention of COVID-19 Transmission Among Children”

Introduction

People are not always honest about their medical information¹ or adherent to medical recommendations,² including the public health measures (PHMs) against COVID-19 (eg, not reporting symptoms, breaking quarantine).³ During the COVID-19 pandemic, parents experienced greater increases in stress compared with nonparents due to additional child-related PHMs (eg, school closings, quarantine rules for children).⁴ We examined the prevalence of misrepresentations of and nonadherence to COVID-19–related PHMs by parents regarding their children (eg, breaking quarantine rules by sending their child to school so that the parent can work), their reasons, and associations of individual characteristics with these behaviors.

 

Methods

This survey study recruited a national, nonprobability sample of US adults through Qualtrics for an online survey about COVID-19 experiences (participation, 1811 of 2260 [80.1%]) from December 8 to 23, 2021. The survey asked whether parents had ever engaged in 7 types of misrepresentation and nonadherence behaviors regarding COVID-19 PHMs for their children (Table 1) and reasons for these behaviors (Table 2). Additional methodological information is published elsewhere.³ The University of Utah Institutional Review Board deemed the study exempt and granted a waiver of informed consent owing to no risk or minimal risk to participants. The study followed the AAPOR reporting guideline.

The final sample consisted of 1733 US adults. The analyses included the 580 parent participants (33.5%) who had children younger than 18 years living with them during the pandemic. Race and ethnicity data were collected because COVID-19 and public health measures disproportionately impacted individuals from underserved populations. Descriptive statistics examined the prevalence of and reasons for misrepresentation and nonadherence, and multiple logistic regression was used to explore potential associated characteristics. Significance was set at 2-sided α = .05 with P values adjusted using Holm-Bonferroni correction. Analyses were performed using R Studio, version 1.4.1106 (R Program for Statistical Computing).

Results

Among the 580 participants, the mean (SD) age was 35.9 (8.8) years; 403 (70.2%) identified as women compared with 171 (29.5%) men and 6 (1.0%) other or missing. In terms of race and ethnicity, 80 participants (13.8%) were Hispanic, 5 (0.9%) non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaskan Native, 14 (2.4%) non-Hispanic Asian, 86 (14.8%) non-Hispanic Black, 389 (67.1%) non-Hispanic White, 5 (0.9%) more than 1 race, and 1 (0.2%) White with no ethnicity specified.

One hundred fifty participants (25.9%) reported misrepresentation and/or nonadherence in at least 1 of 7 behaviors; the most common behaviors were not telling someone who was with their child that they thought or knew their child had COVID-19 (63 of 263 [24.0%]) and allowing their child to break quarantine rules (67 of 318 [21.1%]) (Table 1). The most common reason was wanting to exercise personal freedom as a parent. Additional reasons included wanting their child’s life to feel normal and not being able to miss work or other responsibilities to stay home (Table 2). In an exploratory multiple logistic regression, no characteristics (eg, education, religiosity) were associated with misrepresentation or nonadherence.

Discussion

In this survey study of US parents, one-quarter engaged in misrepresentation or nonadherence regarding PHMs for their children. The most common reason was to preserve parental autonomy. Additional reasons included wanting to resume a normal life for their child and the inability to miss work or other responsibilities, among other reasons.

These results suggest that some PHMs implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 may have been compromised due to misrepresentation and nonadherence by parents on behalf of their children, contributing to COVID-19–related morbidity and mortality. In addition, some children appear to have received a vaccine that was not fully tested and approved in their age group.

12) This story is wild! “Last year, a fox broke into a bird enclosure in D.C. and killed 25 flamingos. The zoo refused to let him strike again.”

At the back of Bird House, the fox may have noted the way the 74 flamingos ambled across their nearly 10,000-square-foot enclosure. Something about their movements may have struck him as curious. Great hunters of birds, foxes have cognitive processes that may contain an algorithm alerting them when an animal’s wings aren’t working. In the wild, some flamingos power up to Andean peaks or glide, pelicanlike, for miles along the coast. But not these flamingos. They were permanently grounded when zoo staffers removed their flight feathers three days after they were born, to make sure they wouldn’t escape their enclosure.

Wing clipping is cruel in part because it shrinks a bird’s world: A land animal’s range is a two-dimensional shape on a map, but a flying being can explore a truly voluminous chunk of the Earth’s atmosphere. Grounded birds are also more vulnerable to mass slaughter. If a fox came upon a flamingo flock in the wild, he’d be lucky to get his teeth into one before the rest flew away. But the zoo’s flamingos would never fly away, even under direct attack. They couldn’t. They were trapped like hens in a coop…

Flamingos are large birds; some weigh nearly half of an adult male fox. Their size did not deter him. “Foxes are the ultimate opportunists,” Dan Rauch, a wildlife biologist for D.C., told me. “They’re happy to make meals of field mice, snakes, Canada geese, and everything in between.” Keeping low to the ground, the fox would have moved toward the birds in quick, measured steps. If he saw one of the birds glance in his direction, he would have stilled every muscle. When he got within leaping range, an adrenal thrill would have surged through his limbs. Feeling playful, like a kit romping around in the den again, he would have sprung forward in a lethal pounce.

13) This book review from Scott Alexander is just something else:

Around the wide world, all cultures share a few key features. Anthropologists debate the precise extent, but the basics are always there. Language. Tools. Marriage. Family. Ritual. Music. And penis-stealing witches.

Nobody knows when the penis-stealing witches began their malign activities. Babylonian texts include sa-zi-ga, incantations against witchcraft-induced impotence. Ancient Chinese sources describe suo yang, the penis retracting into the body because of yin/yang imbalances. But the first crystal-clear reference was the Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century European witch-hunters’ manual. It included several chapters on how witches cast curses that apparently (though not actually) remove men’s penises…

So as a nature documentary, The Geography of Madness is kind of a bust. Still, Bures rescues it with some great analysis of culture-bound mental illness.

A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too.

Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities – many cultures have something something penis something witches – but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it.

THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis in order to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit which will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions – not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%”, you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing.

In Rajasthan, India, people come to the hospital with gilahari (lizard) syndrome. Patients say a lizard-like mass, sometimes visible as a skin swelling, is crawling around the body. They express terror that it will reach their airway and suffocate them.

Japanese people may contract jikoshu-kyofu, a debilitating fear that they have terrible body odor. No amount of reassurances by friends and psychiatrists can convince these people that they smell normal, nor will any number of deodorants or perfumes make them comfortable.

The French suffer from bouffée délirante, where a perfectly healthy person suddenly becomes completely psychotic, with well-formed hallucinations and delusions – then recovers just as suddenly, sometimes over hours or days. This is not how psychosis works anywhere except France and a few former French colonies.

Traditional Chinese medicine monitors the balance between yin and yang. The male orgasm can deplete yang, and sure enough in China (but nowhere else) some men suffer traditional symptoms of yang depletion after they orgasm. “The symptoms can last weeks to months after a single orgasm, [and include] chills, dizziness, [and] backache”.

The phrase “run amok” comes from Malaysia, where it referred to a specific phenomenon: some person who had been unhappy for a long time would suddenly snap, kill a bunch of people, then say they had no memory of doing it. Malaysian culture totally rolls with this and doesn’t hold it against them; the unhappiness is a risk factor for possession by a tiger spirit, which commits the killings. Although Malays have been doing this since at least the 1700s, there are some fascinating parallels with modern US mass shootings that suggest the damn tiger spirits have finally made it to the US common psychological origins.

14) NYT, “Conservatives Aim to Build a Chatbot of Their Own: After criticizing A.I. companies for liberal bias, programmers started envisioning right-wing alternatives, making chatbots a new front in the culture wars.”

15) Terrific from Josh Barro, “Why Won’t the Editors of Nature Follow the Data and Listen to the Science?”

So why does Nature still believe that “science” must speak out?

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 Theirnew editorial never explains why. It rehashes arguments about why Trump (and other right-wing leaders like Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orban) are bad. But it does not even try to marshal an argument for why actions like running their pro-Biden editorial constitute a useful response to that badness:

The study shows the potential costs of making an endorsement. But inaction has costs, too. Considering the record of Trump’s four years in office, this journal judged that silence was not an option…

At a time when the world needed to unite to deal with these and other global threats, he took an axe to international relationships, pulling the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the United Nations science agency, UNESCO. He moved to defund the World Health Organization, and he walked away from a deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) that the United States had carefully negotiated with Europe, China and Russia to prevent Iran’s government from enriching weapons-grade uranium. It is hard not to think of a worst-case scenario for public health, climate change or nuclear security had Trump remained in office today…

Nature doesn’t often make political endorsements, and we carefully weigh up the arguments when considering whether to do so. When individuals seeking office have a track record of causing harm, when they are transparently dismissive of facts and integrity, when they threaten scholarly autonomy, and when they are disdainful of cooperation and consensus, it becomes important to speak up.

For people who prattle on about the importance of listening to the science, the editors of Nature sure haven’t done that here — they have looked at scientific evidence that the thing they did had effects counter to their own stated objectives, and they have cast that evidence aside, responding with a conclusory argument that “silence is not an option.”

Of course, there is the real reason the editors of Nature felt they had to run the Biden endorsement editorial: It made them feel good.

Freddie deBoer had a useful post last week about the word “woke” and what exactly people mean when they throw it around. It’s not my favorite word — I agree with Freddie that it would usually be more clear to talk about “social justice politics” — but I think he’s right that the problem with the vagueness and slipperiness with “woke” isn’t that much greater than problems with other terms like “liberal” or “moderate.” Lots of political terms mean different things to different people while still being a useful shorthand when discussing trends and tendencies in our politics.

In explaining what he thinks “woke” means, I think Freddie is right to focus on the fact that “woke” politics is inherently performative — more about holding the right views than about doing anything to turn those views into policy. He wrote:

“Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene — woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

Nature’s idea that they had an obligation to speak out against Trump in the forum they control — that “silence is not an option” — flows directly from this idea that the purpose of politics is to declare good moral ideas. By this measure, Nature’s editorial endorsing Joe Biden was a success; it demonstrated that Nature’s editors have the right moral commitments and that they hate Donald Trump for the right reasons. That the editorial persuaded readers of the wrong thing — to listen less to the scientists at Nature — is immaterial, because woke politics is not about convincing people and influencing their behavior; it’s about separating the morally upright from the deplorable.

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16) Excellent post from Emily Oster on the calculations involved in thinking about when to get a mammogram.

17) Loved this from Derek Thompson on how to think about AI:

Recently I gave myself an assignment: Come up with a framework for explaining generative AI, such as ChatGPT, in a way that illuminates the full potential of the technology and helps me make predictions about its future.

By analogy, imagine that it’s the year 1780 and you get a glimpse of an early English steam engine. You might say: “This is a device for pumping water out of coal mines.” And that would be true. But this accurate description would be far too narrow to see the big picture. The steam engine wasn’t just a water pump. It was a lever for detaching economic growth from population growth. That is the kind of description that would have allowed an 18th-century writer to predict the future.

Or imagine it’s 1879 and you see an incandescent light bulb flutter to life in Thomas Edison’s lab in New Jersey. Is it a replacement for whale oil in lamps? Yes. But that description doesn’t scratch the surface of what the invention represented.  Direct-current and alternating-current electricity enabled on-demand local power for anything—not just light, but also heat, and any number of machines that 19th-century inventors couldn’t even imagine.

Maybe you see what I’m getting at. Narrowly speaking, GPT-4 is a large language model that produces human-inspired content by using transformer technology to predict text. Narrowly speaking, it is an overconfident, and often hallucinatory, auto-complete robot. This is an okay way of describing the technology, if you’re content with a dictionary definition. But it doesn’t get to the larger question: When we’re looking at generative AI, what are we actually looking at? …

Here is another analogy that comes to mind, grandiose as it might initially seem. Scientists don’t know exactly how or when humans first wrangled fire as a technology, roughly 1 million years ago. But we have a good idea of how fire invented modern humanity. As I wrote in my review of James Suzman’s book Work, fire softened meat and vegetables, allowing humans to accelerate their calorie consumption. Meanwhile, by scaring off predators, controlled fire allowed humans to sleep on the ground for longer periods of time. The combination of more calories and more REM over the millennia allowed us to grow big, unusually energy-greedy brains with sharpened capacities for memory and prediction. Narrowly, fire made stuff hotter. But it also quite literally expanded our minds.

Our ancestors knew that open flame was a feral power, which deserved reverence and even fear. The same technology that made civilization possible also flattened cities. The ancient myths about fire were never simple. When Prometheus stole it from the gods, he transformed the life of mortals but was doomed to live in agony. The people building artificial general intelligence today don’t need media mythmaking to inflate their ego; they already clearly believe in the humanity-altering potential of their invention. But it is a complex thing, playing at Prometheus. They have stolen from the realm of knowledge something very powerful and equally strange. I think this technology will expand our minds. And I think it will burn us.

 

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