Quotulatiousness

June 26, 2026

To address social media toxicity, you have to change the algorithm

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’ve been on social media platforms at all, you’ll have encountered aggressively obnoxious behaviour, possibly rising to actual abuse. Some people revel in it, putting on their “online tough guy” personas, but others (the majority) are disturbed and repelled by it. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up is to keep you engaged and inciting anger is one of the best ways to boost engagement.

Slide from cyberghostvpn.com

Andrej Karpathy is the man who taught Tesla’s cars to see the road and drive themselves. Before that, he was one of the founding researchers at OpenAI. In the world of artificial intelligence, he’s royalty.

A few days ago, he posted a simple, excited message. He’d been using Claude, an AI assistant, and it was blowing his mind. “It works like a real teammate”, he wrote. He was genuinely thrilled.

The replies tore him apart.

Strangers called him a shill. People who’d never built anything mocked him. The pile-on grew and grew and grew.

Then Karpathy went quiet for a moment. And when he came back, he didn’t defend his original post. He said something bigger.

“After 20 years on this platform, X has never been this toxic. The algorithm actively pushes rage, insults, and pile-ons because they get engagement. That’s why even I post and visit less now.”

Twenty years. This man watched Twitter grow from a tiny blog tool into the global town square. He survived every era of the platform. And now, for the first time, he was saying: I don’t want to be here anymore.

Elon Musk read those words and replied within minutes.

“We need a complete overhaul of the algorithm.”

Not a patch. Not “we’ll look into it”. A complete overhaul.

Think about what that means. Right now, the machine that decides what you see on X has one job: keep you engaged. And the fastest way to keep you engaged is to make you angry. Outrage gets clicks. Insults get replies. Pile-ons get retweets. The algorithm learned this on its own, and now it feeds you rage all day long because rage works.

The result: the smartest, most interesting people slowly stop posting. Why would they? Every time they share an idea, a mob shows up. So they go quiet. And what fills the void is screaming.

Musk just said he wants to tear that entire machine out and build a new one from scratch. One where the most useful, most interesting, most original posts rise to the top. Where sharing a genuine thought doesn’t get you punished.

One of the greatest minds in AI came home excited, like a kid showing off a new discovery. X beat him down for it.

That’s exactly the disease Elon is now trying to cut out.

If he actually does it, you’ll feel it in your timeline before anyone announces it.

June 23, 2026

Modern children as human hothouse plants, needing constant care and protection

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Becoming Noble, Johann Kurtz discusses how parents today treat their children in ways they largely never experienced, failing to provide them with enough freedom to allow them to develop personal autonomy as most western children have done for generations:

Giving children the freedom they need to develop agency is now a luxury good. The number of neighborhoods in which it is normal for children to leave the house and roam all day has collapsed. This collapse has come for a variety of reasons relating to security, trust, law, norms, and infrastructure.

Allowing children the privilege of freedom depends on conditions that most families no longer have access to: safe streets — yes — but also neighbors who are known and trusted, and a settled local agreement about what children are and what they are for. These conditions have not vanished, but they have concentrated, and are now a guarded secret, found only in private, privileged, and intentional communities.

This is a curious inversion of an older pattern. For most of history the peasant’s son had the run of the village while the noble’s son was kept under tutors. Now it is the wealthy child who is sent out to enjoy the freedom and adventure of camps and screenless schools, while working and underclass children are kept indoors and screened up.

Photo from Becoming Noble

It is worth being clear about the factors which underlie this transition. Otherwise, parents seeking the nostalgic “free roaming” experience are directed to explanations which are emphasized because they are unproblematic and suggest that a broad solution is available if we just move policy in a sensible direction. This includes discussions of “walkable development” and a rejection of “helicopter parenting”.

This polite framing avoids the reality that the prudent decisions available to parents are mostly made for them by the place they can afford to live, the people they live among, and how radical they are willing to be.

Children develop “agency” — the self-belief that they can independently and effectively manipulate and shape the world in creative ways — through constant experimentation and positive reinforcement.

The “independent” aspect of this formula involves developing internal psychological permission to break from prosaic norms and routines. Developing this is helped by play outside the control of authorities and interacting with the real world in settings unmediated by parents.

The closed systems that now fill children’s hours provide some feeling of agency (open world games, sprawling social media platforms, private chat rooms) without its substance. A child scrolling or playing through the programmatic logic of games is making choices, but they are only the choices that limited systems can accommodate.

Closed-system childhoods teach that there are inviolable hidden structures underneath reality and that the smoothest and most rewarding experiences are to be found when you conform with them. Experiences from boxes teach you to think within boxes. And the vice available online can be as controlling as any parent.

A few years ago, I linked to an article that graphically illustrated how the generations of an English family near Sheffield had experienced continuously diminished “range” for the children to explore:

Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.

The Metric and Imperial systems of measurement

Filed under: History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen explains the different purposes of the metric and Imperial systems:

Okay, time to explain the Imperial system, the metric system, and why attempts to replace either with the other are all retarded.

They have two different purposes.

The metric system is designed around precise measurement of objects. Its goal is to make engineering and scientific calculations simple.

The Imperial system is designed around humans. Its goal is to make calculation unnecessary.

100 degrees is really hot. 0 degrees is really cold. Anything that starts with a 5 is cool, anything that starts with an 8 is warm. No computation.

6 feet is tall, 5 feet is short.

100 pounds is light, 200 pounds is substantial, 300 pounds is heavy.

A 1000 square foot house is small, a 2000 square foot house is medium, a 3000 square foot house is large.

1 mile is a short walk, 2 miles is a medium walk, after that it takes a while.

1 acre of land is a homestead, 10 acres is an estate, 100 acres and up is a ranch or a farm.

Do you see now why it is so strange and awkward to convert from miles to feet?

It’s because converting from miles to feet is not something you’re supposed to do in the first place. Yes, they are both measures of length, so they are technically convertible, and yes, on rare occasions, you might need to do that.

But feet are for measuring humans, and things built around humans, like doorways, and mattresses. Miles are for measuring travel distance.

You wouldn’t measure the distance between Seattle and Portland in feet for the same reason you wouldn’t measure the distance between Tokyo and Osaka in mattress-lengths.

It would be silly.

This is why Americans so fiercely resistant to any notion of “conversion” to the metric system. Because it makes no sense. We already use the metric system for what it’s good for, which is doing physics and chemistry and whatnot.

But converting everyday measurements to the metric system would be less useful, generally inconvenient, and serve no purpose other than to make petty government bureaucrats happy that everything is now tidy, orderly, and worse, three qualities that bureaucrats love.

I thought about this carefully when I wrote my first science fiction novel. In the world of the 22nd century, extraterrestrial settlers (“Orbitals”) use three systems of measurement.

They measure themselves in feet, inches, and pounds.

They measure the spacecraft and habitats they build in meters and centimeters, grams and kilograms.

And they measure space travel distances in light-seconds and light-minutes.

Each system has its own natural scale.

The sole exception to this is when Marcus doses himself with drugs for high-g resistance, Miranda objects that he has taken too much, and Marcus responds by stating his mass … in kilograms.

Why?

Because they’re talking about drug doses, a engineering measurement. Drugs are dosed in milligrams per kilogram.

So, yes, the Imperial system makes perfect sense when you understand what it’s for, and no, we ain’t changing.

And, as a general rule, when an entire civilization of smart people does something for centuries, and it makes no sense to you, they’re probably not being silly.

It’s more likely there’s something you don’t know.

Most of the world switched over to the metric system, but some, like Britain and Canada still use both in a confusing-to-an-outsider idiosyncratic way:

QotD: Addiction

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Why is stigmatization in the case of drug addicts so wrong, according to Dr. Volkow? Because addiction is a disease, and nothing else. According to Dr. Volkow people resist this idea, and falsely believe “that willpower should be sufficient to stop drug abuse”. After all, if you give drugs to rats until they are addicted, they will pursue them to the exclusion of all else, to their own detriment and even to the point of death. Moreover, you can show that there are changes in their brains by comparison with non-addicted rats.

Thus an addict has roughly the same metaphysical status as an addicted rat. He does what he does because, like Luther, he cannot do otherwise. He is a slave of his biochemistry, he is a Zombie whose master is his habit. To blame him for his behaviour is like blaming a leper for his leprosy.

This is all the most lamentable bilge, of course. When you consider what heroin addicts actually have to do to become heroin addicts it is clear that, at least to begin with, they want to be heroin addicts, it is not something that just happens to them or creeps up on them unawares. For example, they have to learn where to get their heroin, how to prepare it, and how to inject it (most people have an aversion to sticking needles into themselves and have to overcome it). They have to learn to disregard or overcome such side-effects as nausea, which is normally extremely aversive. Most of us would go a long way to avoid nausea. As a matter of fact, most addicts take heroin intermittently for some time before taking it regularly. The expression “hooked” is implicitly a lie; the addict has hooked heroin, not the other way round.

Still, it might be argued that, having become addicted, the addict loses all powers of control, but this too is not so. The experience (among many others) of American soldiers returning from Vietnam, who addicted themselves to heroin while there, proves it. They swiftly ceased to be addicts on their return to the US, notwithstanding all of Dr. Volkow’s neurocircuitous and neurochemical blather.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.

June 21, 2026

Explaining our failure to expand beyond Earth to an alien

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Space, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen pens an ultra-short story in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim that “we” need to take a lot more money from Elon Musk to benefit “everyone”:

This-individual has an outstanding query for you-individual.

Yes, Dee-six-twenty-four-prime? Ask your question.

When we-collective initialized language-idea-exchange with you-collective, you-collective had no settlements on the surface of other planets in your-collective own star system.

Yet you-collective possessed advanced chemical propulsion technology sufficient to leave your-collective native gravity well. For over a hundred cycles around your-collective star, you-collective possessed this.

Why did you not use it?

Well, all that technology was worth a lot of money.

Value-consideration-tokens, yes. Continue.

So we decided to take it away from the really talented geniuses who built, break it up for parts, sell the parts, and throw a big free stuff party.

A … free stuff party?

Yeah, for like, average dudes. The kind of guys who don’t know calculus or anything. The ones you’d want to have a beer with. We thought we’d buy them some stuff.

Instead of leaving your home planet?

Yeah.

This-individual understands, now. Conclusions have been submitted to collective-thought-matrix. Please line you-collective up in an orderly fashion for processing, classification, and reassignment and/or biomass reclamation.

QotD: Wishful thinking

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The wish is often father to the belief, never more so when our interests are in play. But even without material interests, we are often so attached to our ideas or theories that wishful thinking easily overcomes evidence that casts, or at any rate ought to cast, doubt on them. No one is immune from wishful thinking, and therefore from special pleading. Not surprisingly, the latter is easier to spot in others than in oneself.

There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.

June 20, 2026

QotD: The word “alchemy”

Filed under: China, Europe, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My favourite thing in this chapter is an etymological nugget that I suspect is too good to be true, but which I desperately want to believe. The word “alchemy” comes from the Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ (الكيمياء), which in turn comes from the Greek khēmeia (χημεία), but that’s where our knowledge of this word stops. χημεία has no known Indo-European origin, and no obvious cognates that would suggest a borrowing. There are some hand-wavy theories that it might derive from khēmet, the word for Egypt in ancient Egyptian, but it’s a stretch to put it mildly. Needham proposes the Chinese 金 meaning “gold” as the ultimate source. In modern Mandarin, this word is pronounced like jin, but the Classical Chinese pronunciation is better preserved by the Southern dialects, which variously render it as gum, gim, or, in Hakka and Southern Min, as kim. The list of English words with Chinese origins is short,1 and it would be nice to add this one.

But the Chinese alchemists by and large weren’t after gold, their goal was eternal life instead. In fact aurifaction originated as an instrumental “warm-up” exercise for the main event. Everybody knew that the reason gold was the most perfect metal was because it was a harmonious and balanced combination of the elements. So if the same harmoniousness and lack of internal contradiction could be achieved within a living organism, then the consequences would obviously be physical immortality and superhuman abilities. Elemental harmony, biological harmony, social harmony — in the light of Chinese metaphysics these goals were all reflections and intimations of one another. And the first two at least could be brought about by the same methods: the application of various potions and elixirs designed to increase or reduce the influence of a particular element. The same principle forms the cornerstone of Chinese medicine today.2

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.

  1. My favourite of these, since it seems so unlikely, is “ketchup” deriving from 茄汁 (“tomato sauce” in Cantonese), perhaps via the Malay kicap.
  2. Needham’s third lecture is about the most recognizable and well-traveled example of Chinese medicine — acupuncture — and contains the intriguing assertion that naloxone administration totally cancels acupuncture’s efficacy for pain relief. This suggests that acupuncture’s mechanism of action may have to do with stimulating the body’s production of naturally-occurring opioids. There’s some evidence the placebo effect could be related (fascinatingly, naloxone also appears to eliminate the placebo effect).

June 18, 2026

Rules for you young plebs, but not rules for us

Filed under: Education, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The generation that defined itself as “the youth generation”, “the hippies”, etc., are now nailing down every possible way to have fun so that youngsters can’t do what they loudly and proudly did at the same age:

Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.

We’re banning raves, because we don’t want you having fun where we can’t watch you. By the way let me tell you about Woodstock.

We’re cracking down on underage drinking. It’s bad for you. Yeah of course we hit up the pubs at your age it was great.

We’re banning smoking, but just for you — the smoking age will go up one year every year. Oh yes of course, we used to be able to smoke inside everywhere, it was great really.

We’re banning flavored vapes. We don’t have any evidence they’re bad for you, you just like them too much.

We’re banning dodgeball during recess, someone might get hurt. Yeah we really enjoyed dodgeball too.

We’re banning flirting, because it might make the girls uncomfortable.

We’re locking you in your room for the next two years. Yes we know you’re in no danger from the virus, but we’re worried that you’ll get us sick. By the way you have to take this needle if you want to leave your room again. Yes, twice. Well there will be boosters too. No, we aren’t worried about side effects, that doesn’t effect us at all.

We’re closing the frat houses, because we don’t want you having fun without our permission. Please join these officially sanctioned university clubs instead.

We’re bringing in labor from the third world to work the service jobs, so you can’t have a summer job.

You need to go to university to get a good job. By the way we’re raising the price of tuition. Oh look we’re raising it again. Don’t worry there are loans. At interest.

Actually we’re giving the good jobs to the foreigners we just imported, to make up for our racist past. We are very good people. No of course we aren’t sacrificing anything. You just have to take one for the team.

Also, we’re giving the foreigners the houses. We needed to increase real estate prices. For our pensions, you see. Sadly no, you’ll probably never be able to afford one yourself. By the way don’t forget to pay your taxes. Need to support those pensions somehow! Eh? No, we’re giving ourselves tax breaks of course. Seniors discount you know.

Oh by the way, that one thing you still have, now that we’ve banned joy and kicked every ladder out from under you? That social media stuff you kids like? You guessed it! We’re banning that too! Just for you though, we’re still going to watch AI videos on Facebook. It’s for your safety, you see. We’ve noticed that you’re all getting rather irate, and we think it would be better for your mental health if you shut up for a while. Why don’t you just go outside?

Eh? No of course we aren’t going to stop Ahmed and his twelve illiterate cousins from raping your sister, that would be culturally insensitive, which would make us feel very bad, and we can’t have that.

Update: Added missing URL.

June 12, 2026

The mystical powers of climate change, is there anything it can’t do?

Filed under: Environment, Media, Soccer — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Canada, all problems are now blamed on US President Donald Trump. It’s a fantastic get-out-of-trouble move for politicans like Prime Minister Mark Carney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and even mayors of towns and cities across the Demented Dominion. But even the malign powers of the Bad Orange Man seem puny in comparison to the amazing powers of — gasp! — CLIMATE CHANGE:

Every now and then I suspect there is a game played by bored elites to see which of them can get away with the most asinine “climate change” claim. There have been some doozies: lack of UFOs, “climate change” anxiety, increased sugar consumption, engineering short people. On and on and on ad infinitum.

Today we meet what could be the winner in the contest. Experts are claiming World Cup matches could be slower. Now instead of ninety-plus minutes running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts, we’ll get ninety-plus minutes of somewhat slower running around ending in zero-zero ties and dramatic shootouts. Because “climate change”.

Seems to me, though, that if we really wanted to save time, we could have all matches begin at the shootouts. The whole tournament could be over in a day. Take that, “climate change”!

Here’s the claim, appropriately announced on a PR site, a site whose specialty is juicing dull and dubious headlines: “Climate Central finds climate change has increased the likelihood of heat that could slow players for 97 of the 104 matches, threatening game speed and fan safety.”

What will happen to the other 7 matches they don’t say. Probably they will end in shootouts.

Details:

    Previous research shows temperatures above 82.4°F can reduce sprint frequency, total distance covered, and recovery time, impacting not only player performance and safety, but also match tempo, tactics, and overall style of play.

Previous researchers discovered — and stay with me, here — that when it’s hot outside people outside in the heat act like people act when it’s hot out.

Where would we be without previous researchers?

[…]

As you have surmised, we don’t have to believe any of this: the scenarios are all silly, proving that the stunning new research is purely performative, a way to signal the vices and predilections of the researchers. As proof, we oblige the PR site which asks us to quote this:

    As global temperatures continue to rise, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, the 2026 World Cup could become another example of how climate change can disrupt sports and traditions people cherish, forcing a reevaluation of how the game is played.

This is all ridiculous, and only saved by the charge of falsity by adding that “could.” Meaning might, which also means might not.

They also provide this quote they ask us to re-quote:

    Alex Jacobs, professional player formerly with the Jamaican Premier League:
    Heat is not new. But extreme heat — made more likely by heat-trapping pollution driving climate change — might just be a difference maker in this summer’s edition of the biggest sporting event on the planet.

Way these quotes work is that either the PR firm, or the organization employing the PR firm, write them for victims, who are sought out and asked to sign on. The people allowing their names to be used are, of course, fully responsible for the words used, and even often believe them. But there’s no mistaking that stilted prose of the manufactured quote. Nobody talks like this. This prose is not conclusive, but whenever you see it, it’s a darn good reason to dismiss the claims made.

Of course, using a highly visible public event to advance the climate change agenda is nothing new, they’ve literally been doing it for decades now. Media outlets have always had a bias toward the most dramatic outcome, if only for marketing purposes — “if it bleeds, it leads” — but even the more skeptical outlets have drifted in the climate hysteria direction over time:

We have complained many times that the public is presented with a picture of climate science systematically biased towards alarmism. And it’s not just our anecdotal impression. We have data, in the form of a new study from the US National Bureau of Economic Research saying the government delegates who write the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) overstate the science in the underlying report, and then the media further overstates what’s in the SPM. The study authors used multiple AI systems to extract key scientific statements in every IPCC Assessment Report since 1990, track how they were summarized and what the accompanying media coverage said. Using a statistical model they measured the way the statements get changed or twisted at each stage. There were some surprising results and some unsurprising. Unsurprisingly the data showed the UK Guardian has by far the most climate coverage of all major media outlets and is also the most biased. Another unsurprising result is that the overall media bias regarding the severity of climate change has been consistent over time. A surprising result (to many, but not to us) is that the only major media outlet exhibiting precisely zero bias was Fox News. Otherwise most right-leaning outlets adopted the left-leaning outlets’ alarmist bias as of 2007, again unsurprising to us. And there’s much more.

The authors identified three forms of bias: severity, in which a summary picks the upper end of a range of claims, uncertainty, in which a summary downplays caveats and qualifiers, and scenario in which worst-case scenarios get foregrounded. They used a numerical scale from -2 to +2 that captured bias in either direction: a positive number indicated that the summary was biased towards alarmism and a negative number indicated a bias in the opposite direction. Then they averaged the bias measures together and measured them at two stages in the game of telephone. The “TS-to-SPM” stage compared statements in the author-written Technical Summary to how they were worded in the government-written Summary for Policymakers. The “SPM-to-media” stage looked at how statements in the SPM were then reported in the press. The authors examined the TS-to-SPM stage for every IPCC Assessment Report from 1990 to 2023. They only looked at the SPM-to-media stage from the 2001 Third Assessment Report (AR3) because that’s as far back as their media library went.

[…]

That’s right, folks. Even the right-leaning outlets have also gone in for alarmist bias, at least since 2007. Indeed, the media’s bias converged in size and direction over time, as shown in this chart:

For the AR3 in 2001, right-leaning outlets on average understated the climate findings while left-leaning outlets overstated them. But thereafter both sides shared the alarmist bias. Which reflects the success of alarmist activists in the post-An Inconvenient Truth era (2006) driving skeptical voices out of the media. That campaign didn’t eliminate bias, it only replaced one form by another, with the result that the overall media landscape became entirely one-sided.

The uniformity of the bias can also be seen in this chart:

The right-leaning outlets in red are about as bad as the lefties in blue, except for Fox News which is the only outlet with no measurable bias and the Wall Street Journal which had an overall negative (anti-alarmist) bias.

June 8, 2026

QotD: Re-use, recycle, and contaminate

Filed under: Economics, Health, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At the start of the twentieth century, American consumers were still living in what today’s greens would consider a state of grace. They carried their own baskets and cotton bags to the grocery store and brought home food wrapped in biodegradable paper. They didn’t use disposable towels in public bathrooms, which provided cloth towels attached to rollers. There were no Styrofoam cups for coffee and no plastic bottles of water. When people wanted water in a public place, they’d get it from the spigot of a drinking fountain by filling a tin cup chained to the fountain.

This “common cup” was the ultimate reusable product — much to the horror of public-health experts, who blamed it for spreading tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria, meningitis, and other diseases. Alvin Davison, a biologist at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, analyzed cups from public schools and reported in 1908 that a single sip from a student left a residue of 100 dead skin cells and 75,000 bacteria. He used the scrapings from one school cup to induce fatal cases of pneumonia and tuberculosis in guinea pigs.

His article “Death in School Drinking Cups” provided support to “Ban the Cup” campaigns around the country. The first successful one was led in Kansas by Samuel Crumbine, a colorful doctor who had started his career in Dodge City (he was the model for Doc Adams in the long-running Gunsmoke television series) and went on to lead various public-hygiene crusades. The term “flyswatter” comes from a slogan he popularized, “Swat the fly” (which came to him while listening to the crowd at a baseball game urging a hitter to swat a sacrifice fly ball). After watching train passengers with tuberculosis and other diseases drinking water from a common cup, Crumbine got so upset that he threw the cup out the train’s window, and proceeded to persuade his colleagues on the state board of health to ban the common cup in trains, schools, and other public places in Kansas in 1909.

The ban left Kansans with a new problem: What were they supposed to use at a public fountain? Fortunately, as Crumbine later recalled, “Necessity proved to be the mother of invention.” Shortly after banning the cup, Crumbine was visited by a former Kansan named Hugh Moore, who brought with him samples of a product that his brother-in-law had invented: round paper cups that could be stacked in a dispenser next to a fountain. Crumbine’s endorsement provided crucial help to Moore in selling his product, originally called Health Kups and later renamed Dixie Cups.

John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.

June 7, 2026

Morality and humour

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof):

There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.

Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.

The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain’s way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism.

Because it isn’t appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things.

This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold.

And my cat Dante’s favorite joke is “I BITE your toes! … but actually, I don’t bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!”

Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I’ve never yet seen anything funny that couldn’t be understood this way.

But there’s a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don’t interrupt defense mechanisms.

They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic.

This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it’s a threat.

The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.

The Ancient Greeks: 01 – What Made Them Special? (e) Science, Art, and the Limits of Greek Freedom

Filed under: Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 31 Jan 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

This final section examines what the Greeks achieved with the intellectual tools they developed — and where those tools fell short.

It discusses Greek science through figures such as Archimedes and the Antikythera Mechanism, highlighting both technical brilliance and flawed cosmology. It then turns to Greek art, explaining why Greek sculpture represents a decisive shift towards realism, embodiment, and the truthful representation of the human body.

The section concludes with an assessment of Greek democracy: its radical nature, its severe limits, and its enduring influence.

The lecture ends by drawing together the central argument: the Greeks were not morally exemplary, but they were intellectually revolutionary.

June 6, 2026

Lies “in a good cause” are still frickin’ lies

Filed under: Business, Food, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This was posted in late May, but only came to my attention today, so apologies if you’ve already waded through the details here:

The problem with this meme is … well, just read the article.

This meme keeps entering my feed and it bugs me every time I see it. For search engines and the visually impaired: it shows, on the left, a large McDonald’s French fry priced at $1.99. On the right, it shows a delectable fruit cup, including mixed berries, cubed melon, and prominent slices of starfruit priced at $5.99. The caption above both declares, “The Problem With Our Food System”.

Invariably, this meme is met with earnest rejoinders, often in thread 🧵 form, explaining the complexities of food distribution. One particularly clever one that I just saw introduces the concept of “Malicious Design” as a sort of secular creationism where the limitations imposed by nature are imagined as human systems intentionally engineered to harm the masses. Threads like these usually go on to describe how potatoes are cheap, hardy, and practically preserve themselves, while berries are delicate, seasonal, and expensive to ship. They argue that the price difference is simply the natural consequence of supply chains, not the machinations of a capitalist oligarchy trying to keep the proletariat down.

All of that might be true.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because the entire discussion rests on a premise that is demonstrably false.

Not the stuff about potatoes or berries or supply chains. Not even the stuff about the oligarchs insofar as, if they are trying to poison us, they are doing a middling job at best. The problem is that everyone accepts the meme’s starting point as if it were genuine. They never check the most basic fact: the prices themselves!!!

Let’s start with the French fries, because they are on the left and because I have the McDonald’s app on my phone. I can tell you without looking that $1.99 is the wrong price for a large fry because I am a fast-food proletarian myself.

Behold: in my market — Omaha — the price is $4.39. According to the Interwebs, this is a pretty representative price nationwide outside of larger cities. The reason we are considering a large fry instead of a small, which still comes in at a whopping $3.99, is because the meme uses a picture of a large.

Already, the price of the fruit cup and the French fries are much more comparable. Ah, but those crafty capitalists know that the stupid masses will steer toward the cheaper option, regardless of the health risks, even if it is only to save a penny. That’s how the fast-food-to-pharma pipeline gets you! By tricking you into passing on the much healthier and obviously more delicious fruit cup. (Never mind last week’s newsletter about all the poisonous chemicals they’re spraying on the fruit.)

So, I will check on the fruit cup now. The first wrinkle is that the image of the fruit cup does not come from the McDonald’s app. That’s because McDonald’s doesn’t sell a fruit cup in most — if any — markets. If they did, it would arrive to the store frozen and the kid who was supposed to move it from the freezer to the refrigerator last night will have forgotten to do so, meaning that what you will receive is a cup of brightly colored ice cubes that you can pretend to enjoy in a couple of hours. (source: 5+ years personally serving in the McTrenches coinciding with the deployment of the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfait™.) In other word, you will not see these two items side-by-side on the menu.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because I can’t actually find that particular fruit cup. Reverse image search turns up a big fat nada. Not on any fast food site, online grocery store, stock photo outlet, food blog, or news page.

Read the whole thing, I believe is the term d’art for this. H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.

June 5, 2026

The Lord of the Flies was just a novel

Filed under: Books, Health, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

We often use The Lord of the Flies as a shorthand way to illustrate the darkness in the hearts of men, and that, absent civilizations, men descend into a hellscape of violence, hatred, and all-against-all destructive competition. Yet the real-life case of a group of boys isolated for an extended time didn’t go at all the way the novel did:

More and more I’m learning that the nihilistic claptrap we were all told was genius was just Leftist demoralization propaganda.

Situations like this have occurred, and the children didn’t turn into little monsters. In fact they survived quite well.

In June 1965, six boys named, aged 13 to 16 “borrowed” a fisherman’s boat hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand. After a storm damaged the sail and rudder, they drifted for eight days surviving on fish and rainwater collected in coconut shells, before washing up on the rocky uninhabited island of ‘Ata.

Rather than descending into chaos during their months there the boys created a mini society. They planted vegetables, collected and stored rainwater, and maintained a permanent fire. They even built a gymnasium with homemade weights, a badminton court, and chicken pens.

They divided daily chores using rosters, resolved conflicts with time-outs instead of fighting, began and ended each day with songs and prayers. One boy, Gilligan’s Isle style, constructed a guitar from driftwood and coconut shell to boost morale. When one of the children broke his leg falling off a cliff the others set it with sticks and leaves and took over his work. They ate fish, coconuts, eggs, wild taro, bananas, and later chickens they had discovered in an ancient volcanic crater.

They endured this for for fifteen months, and never once turned into murderous thugs. A far cry from what we were told would happen.

It wasn’t just William Golding manufacturing dark stories, of course:

QotD: Modern men and the need for male spaces

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Many internet men have pointed out the dwindling of male spaces, while internet women cheer for their disappearance.

Internet men believe that some kind of man-space is essential. A place for men to be men, mentor other men, and tell younger men the secret wisdom to get their lives on track. That if only we had these spaces, everything would be great for men because we’d all know the secret wisdom that doesn’t actually exist.

Internet women believe that male spaces are dens of misogyny. Places where trollish men want to gather, away from the eyes and ears of right-thinking people, so they can poison other men with hate and bigotry.

Which is silly. Men don’t hate women because other men told them to. They see women being women, and that does the trick just fine. In fact, if a man is getting hourly blowjobs from every woman whose path he crosses, then some group of troll men try to tell him women suck, he’d be confused at how uninformed these men are when women are clearly awesome.

Women’s behavior is the number-one driver of misogyny. Not men telling other men women suck.

And that’s the point of male spaces. Not secret manly-man wisdom, not chattering about woman-hate. A space where men can just be. Without women there.

Women are … a certain way.

This is especially true of middle-class and richer women, and even a little more true of white women than other kinds. But true of all women to some extent.

Women have this way about them — everything they do, say, everything about how they behave — that just subtly communicates that they do not have a lot of experience with consequences. That they are just not that used to considering consequences seriously before doing something.

I’m usually hesitant to use political buzz-words in a non-ironic way, but I think the term “privileged” is pretty perfect for this situation.

A woman’s reality — her experience — is a world where consequences just aren’t quite as big of a deal for her as they are for others. She’s never really had to consider consequences with quite the same intensity.

It’s important to note that this isn’t some kind of overt, intentional flaunting as women stride around, consequence-free, thumbing their noses at us. Women don’t even know this is a thing. They’ll deny it fiercely if you tell them. They don’t feel privileged, and their feelings are always real. They’ll even tell you that you’re the privileged one, not them. Because that feels right to them.

It’s not something they do on purpose, and it’s not even that frontal and pronounced. It’s very subtle. Just this subtle way that women are. When they talk, act, make decisions.

This makes them very irritating. Even women find each other irritating.

Archwinger, “Male spaces are because women are irritating”, Archwinger’s Substack, 2026-02-25.

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