Quotulatiousness

May 9, 2024

“The ability to believe entire gargling nonsense is strong in the [environmental] sector – as with this particular claim that we’re going to run out of rock”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall really, really enjoys kicking the stuffing out of strawman arguments, especially when they touch on something he’s very well informed about:

Some environmental claims are not just perfectly valid they’re essential for the continuation of life at any level above E. Coli. None of us would want the Thames to return to the state of 1950 when there was nothing living in it other than a collection of that E. Coli reflecting the interesting genetic and origin mix of the population of London. Sure, the arguments from Feargal and the like that a river running through 8 million people must be clean enough to swim in at all times is a bit extreme the other way around. One recent estimate has it that to perform that task for England would cost £260 billion — a few swimming baths sounds like a more sensible use of resources than getting all the rivers sparkling all the time.

Some are more arguable — violent and immediate climate change would be a bad idea, losing Lowestoft below the waves (possibly Dartford too) in 2500 AD might be something we can all live with. Arguable perhaps.

But some of these claims are wholly and entirely doolally. So much so that it’s difficult to imagine that grown adults take them seriously. But, sadly, they do and they do so on our money too.

An example:

    Wow. According to this research 40% of the 1.5C C02 budget could be used just for digital & internet use/infrastructure & 55% of the earths carrying capacity for minerals & metals for the same use.

The internet alone could use 55% of the Earth’s carrying capacity of metals and minerals? Well, to take that seriously is insane. That is not mere hyperbolic insult, that actually is insane. I write as someone who has written an entire book on this very subject (available here, for free, save your money to buy a subscription to this excellent Substack instead). There is no metal or mineral that we’re even going to run short of — in the technical, not economic, sense that is — for tens of millions of years yet. As the average lifetime of a species is perhaps 2 million years that should see us out.

So, clearly, they’re using some odd definition of how many minerals and metals we’ve got that we can use. I thought they’d do the usual Club of Rome thing (no, read the book to find out), confuse mineral reserves with what’s available and thus insist we all died last Tuesday afternoon. Rather to my surprise, no, they didn’t. They went further into raging lunacy.

It’s not wholly obvious as they don’t really quite announce their assumption, it’s necessary to track back a bit — and that’s a problem in itself. A top tip about scientific papers — if they say “As Bloggs said” then what that really means is that many people accept what Bloggs said as being true and also useful. You do not have to reprove Einstein every time you do physics, you can just say “As is known”. You’ve only got to reprove Al if that’s what you’re really trying to do.

Thus, if a definition is a referral back to something else, elsewhere, then you can be sure that the definition is a building block being used by others in their own papers. It’s a generalised insanity, not a specific one.

So, what is that limit?

    Here we quantify the environmental impacts of digital content consumption encompassing all the necessary infrastructure linked to the consumption patterns of an average user. By applying the standardised life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, we evaluate these impacts in relation to the per capita share of the Earth’s carrying capacity using 16 indicators related to climate change, nutrients flows, air pollution, toxicity, and resources use, for which explicit thresholds that should never be exceeded were defined

Now this is in Nature Communications. So it’s science. Even, it’s Science. It’s also lunatic. For, tracking back to try to find what those “resources use” are that will be 55% used up by the internet. It’s possible to think that maybe we’re going to use too much germanium in the glass in the fibreoptic cables say, or erbium in the repeaters, or … specific elements might be in short supply? As the book wot I wrote above points out, that’s nonsense. So, what is the claim?

Tracking back we get to this:

    Resource use, mineral and metals MRD kg Sb eq Abiotic resource depletion (ADP ultimate reserves) 2.19E+08 3.18E-02 JRC calculation based on factor 2 concept Bringezu (2015); Buczko et al. (2016) Resource use

That’s from Table 3.

Which takes us one stage further back. This paper here is talking about Planetary Boundaries and as with the building block idea. PBs — I assume — make the assumption that Bringzeu, and Biczlo et al have given us a useful guide to what those PBs are. Which is why they just use their method, not invent a new one. But that, in turn, also means that other people working on PBs are likely to be using that same definition.

[…]

Note what they’re doing. Humans should not take out of that environment more than nature puts back into it each year. That’s some pretty dumb thinking there, as we don’t, when we use a metal or mineral — except in very rare circumstances — take it off planet. We move it around a bit, no more. But the claim really is that we should abstract, for use, no more than is naturally added back each year.

So, the correct limitation on our minerals use is how much magma volcanoes add each year.

No, really, humanity can use no more earth than gets thrown out of a volcano each year. That’s it. To use more would mean that we are depleting the stock and that’s not sustainable, see?

May 7, 2024

But Carbon Dioxide is scary, m’kay?

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Chris Morrison shared some charts that show atmospheric carbon dioxide to be nowhere near high enough to be a concern … in fact, compared to ancient atmospheric conditions, CO2 may be at a potentially concerning low point:

Last year, Chris Packham hosted a five-part series on the BBC called Earth, which compared a mass extinction event 252 million years ago to the small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide seen in the last 150 years. He said he hoped the “terror factor” generated by his programme would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”. But as we shall see, the only terror factor is having to sit through an hour-long film consisting of cherry-picked science data and unproven assertions in the hope of persuading us that the increase in global temperatures in the last 150 years or so is comparable to the rise in temperatures over a considerable swath of geological time. Great play was made of a 12°C rise in average global temperatures 252 million years ago as CO2 levels started to rise, although Packham fails to report that CO2 levels were already at least four times higher back then than in modern times. The “science” that Packham cloaks himself with on every occasion is hardly served by terrorising the viewer with what is little more than a highly personal political message.

Think of all that suffering and wastage, he says about the fourth great mass extinction. I don’t think we want a comparable extinction to the one that happened 252 million years ago on our conscience, he adds. Of course, Packham is not the first person to politicise the end-Permian extinction when most plant and animal life disappeared to be replaced eventually with what became known as the age of the dinosaurs. As we can see from the graph below, even though that extinction event coincided with an uptick in CO2 levels, the general trend over a 600-million-year period was downwards ending in the near denudation currently experienced today. But scientists note that the rise started some time before the extinction event, with most of the Permian characterised by very low levels of CO2.

It is obvious why the three other great extinctions are of little interest to modern day climate alarmists. The Ordovician extinction 445 million years ago occurred when CO2 levels were 12 times higher than today, the Devonian wipe-out happen 372 millions ago when CO2 levels were falling, while the later Triassic/Jurassic event 201 million years ago occurred at a time of stable CO2. Hard to see a pattern there suggesting rising CO2 levels equals a mass extinction event. The disappearance of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is generally attributed to the impact of a giant meteorite, while the current sixth mass extinction exists only inside the head of the Swedish doom goblin, and need not detain us at this point.

Since Packham was essentially making a BBC political film promoting Net Zero, he inevitably started with the fixed view that all our current environmental problems are the fault of CO2. An intense period of volcanic eruptions that led to huge coal deposits catching fire increased CO2 levels and almost instantly sent temperatures soaring at the end of the Permian period. About 20 million years of rain subsequently followed, he observed, taking some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and order it seems was restored. Certainly, CO2 resumed a small descent but levels remained almost as high, or for some periods higher, as those at the end of the Permian period for another 120 million years. Packham does not provide an explanation of what happened to the average global temperature at this time.

The graph above shows why he avoided the subject. Temperatures did rise at the end of the Permian period after a long decline, but only as far as previous highs recorded 200 million years earlier. They then stayed at those levels for most of the next 200 million years, throughout the age of the dinosaurs. Helped by the increased levels of CO2, this is considered one of the most verdant periods in Earth’s history.

April 30, 2024

TikTok for Tots (and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and …)

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

Ted Gioia has some rather alarming information on just how many kids are spending a lot of time online from a very early age:

The leader in this movement is TikTok. But the other major platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) are imitating its fast-paced video reels.

My articles have stirred up discussion and debate—especially about the impact of slot machine-ish social media platforms on youngsters.

So I decided to dig into the available data on children and social media. And it was even worse than I feared.

30% of children ages 5 through 7 are using TikTok — despite the platform’s policy that you can’t sign up until age 13.

The story gets worse. The numbers are rising rapidly — usage among this vulnerable group jumped 5% in just one year.

By the way, almost a quarter of children in this demographic have a smartphone. More than three-quarters use a tablet computer.

These figures come from Ofcom, a UK-based regulatory group. I’ll let you decide how applicable they are to other countries. My hunch is that the situation in the US is even worse, but that’s just an educated guess based on having lived in both countries.

What happened in 2010?

One thing is certain — the mental health of youths in both the US and UK is deteriorating rapidly. There are dozens of ways of measuring the crisis, but they all tell the same tragic story.

Something happened around 2010, and it’s destroying millions of lives. […]

As early as age 11, children are spending more than four hours per day online.

Here’s a comparison of time spent online by age. Even before they reach their teens, youngsters are spending more than four hours per day staring into a screen.

Here’s what a day in the digital life of a typical 9-year-old girl looks like.

I don’t find any of this amusing. But if you’re looking for dark humor, I’ll point to the four minutes spent on the Duolingo language training app at the end of the day. This provides an indicator of the relative role of learning in the digital regimen on the rising generation.

DNA and India’s caste system

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

Earlier this month, Palladium published Razib Khan‘s look at the genetic components of India’s Caste System:

Though the caste system dominates much of Indian life, it does not dominate Indian American life. At slightly over 1% of the U.S. population, only about half of Indian Americans identify as Hindu, the religion from which the broader categories of caste, or varna, emerge. While caste endogamy — marrying within one’s caste — in India remains in the range of 90%, in the U.S. only 65% of American-born Indians even marry other people of subcontinental heritage, and of these, a quick inspection of The New York Times weddings pages shows that inter-caste marriages are the norm. While tensions between the upper-caste minority and middle and lower castes dominate Indian social and political life, 85% of Indian Americans are upper-caste, broadly defined, and only about 1% are truly lower-caste. Ultimately, the minor moral panic over caste discrimination among a small minority of Americans is more a function of our nation’s current neuroses than the reality of caste in the United States.

But this does not mean that caste is not an important phenomenon to understand. In various ways, caste impacts the lives of the more than 1.4 billion citizens of India — 18% of humans alive today — whatever their religion. While the American system of racial slavery is four centuries old at most, India’s caste system was recorded by the Greek diplomat Megasthenes in 300 BC, and is likely far more ancient, perhaps as old as the Indus Valley Civilization more than 4,000 years ago. Indian caste has a deep pedigree as a social technology, and it illustrates the outer boundary of our species’ ability to organize itself into interconnected but discrete subcultures. And unlike many social institutions, caste is imprinted in the very genes of Indians today.

Of Memes and Genes

Beginning about twenty-five years ago, geneticists finally began to look at the variation within the Indian subcontinent, and were shocked by what they found. In small villages in India, Dalits, formerly called “outcastes,” were as genetically distinct from their Brahmin neighbors as Swedes were from Sicilians. In fact, a Brahmin from the far southern state of Tamil Nadu was genetically closer to a Brahmin from the northern state of Punjab then they were to their fellow non-Brahmin Tamils. Dalits from the north were similar to Dalits from the south, while the three upper castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, tended to cluster together against the Sudras.

Some scholars, like Nicholas Dirks, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, argued for the mobility and dynamism of the caste system in their scholarship. But the genetic evidence seemed to indicate a level of social stratification that echoes through millennia. Across the subcontinent, Dalit castes engaged in menial and unsanitary labor and therefore were considered ritually impure. Meanwhile, Brahmins were the custodians of the Hindu Vedic tradition that ultimately bound the Indic cultures together with other Indo-European traditions, like that of the ancient Iranians or Greeks. Other castes also had their occupations: Kshatriyas were the warriors, while Vaishyas were merchants and other economically productive occupations.

Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas were traditionally the three “twice-born” castes, allowing them to study the Hindu scriptures after an initiatory ritual. The majority of the population were Sudras (or Shudras), India’s peasant and laboring majority. Shudras could not study the scriptures, and might be excluded from some temples and festivals, but they were integrated into the Hindu fold, and served by Brahmin priests. A traditional ethnohistory posits that elite Brahmin priests and Kshatriya rulers combined with Vaishya commoners formed the core of the early Aryan society in the subcontinent, with Shudras integrated into their tribes as indigenous subalterns. Outcastes were tribes and other assorted latecomers who were assimilated at the very bottom of the social system, performing the most degrading and impure tasks.

The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib Khan

This was the theory. Reality is always more complex. In India, the caste system combines two different social categories: varna and jati. Varna derives from the tripartite Indo-European system, in India represented by Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. It literally translates as “color”, white for Brahmin purity, red for Kshatriya power, and yellow for Vaishya fertility. But India also has Shudras, black for labor. In contrast to the simplicity of varna, with its four classes, jati is fractured into thousands of localized communities. If varna is connected to the deep history of Indo-Aryans and is freighted with religious significance, jati is the concrete expression of Indian communitarianism in local places and times.

April 29, 2024

“The Earth goes around the Sun, or so they would have you believe …”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on a recent “grand theory” from Andrea Matranga, an Italian economist who outlined his thoughts in a paper accepted by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, summarized in the sub-hed “Hunter-gatherers were better off than Neolithic farmers, diet-wise — until Earth was hit by seasonal extremes caused by Jupiter’s gravity”:

Reconstruction of a neolithic farmstead at the Irish National Heritage Park in Ferrycarrig.
Photo by Jo Turner via Wikimedia Commons.

Matranga’s own explanation for the invention of agriculture is: “Believe it or not, it is down to extraterrestrial forces”. Yes, that’s an actual quote from a cheeky Twitter thread in which Matranga summarizes his hypothesis colourfully. The real idea is that the period of the Neolithic Revolutions coincided with a time when seasonal temperature and rainfall differences were maximized by coinciding features of Earth’s orbit — features attributable mostly to Jupiter’s gravitational tug on us.

The Earth goes around the Sun, or so they would have you believe, and Earth’s rotational axis is tilted relative to the Sun, which creates the seasons. But the Earth’s motion has other subtle wobbles and shimmies caused by Jupiter: the eccentricity of its elliptical orbit grows and shrinks, and the rotational axis “precesses”, or wobbles, meaning that the face of the Earth pointing toward the Sun at our closest approach to it changes over time.

The implication of this is that over a period of millennia, and particularly in what we think of as the “temperate” zones, the magnitude of climate seasonality will itself change in a somewhat chaotic way. For some periods much longer than a human lifetime, seasonal changes might be almost beneath notice; a few millennia later, they become a dominant feature of human experience. And one hemisphere of the planet — say, the northern one — might end up with a lingering developmental advantage because it was favoured at the right moment by the precession of Earth’s axis.

Matranga pulls together a lot of math, astronomy and geography to show that the local Neolithic Revolutions coincide with maximum local seasonality, and then he builds some economic models of primitive society to suggest what effect this might have had on social organization and population evolution. Alfred Marshall would have told him to burn this part of his paper, but perhaps the equations are necessary for appearances. The crucial point is that Matranga has found a strong possible explanation for the Neolithic paradox — why, and when, humans in many places adopted a form of social organization that seems to have left most of them worse off on average.

For it’s not just the average that matters. In a world that was more or less the same year-round, hunter-gatherers didn’t have to worry about food storage: they could migrate cyclically within a small range, following wild game, to keep up with modest seasonal effects. But if the seasons then got more intense, food storage would become more important to the long-term survival of the group: one winter could now finish everyone off.

April 27, 2024

Climate science or climate “science”?

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

David Friedman is a very intelligent man and I wouldn’t want to face him in a debate, even on a topic I feel well-informed about. He’s not a scientist and hasn’t made a serious study of climate but he can read the reports and make up his own mind. He’s inclined to believe the data available indicates that the planet is warming but he isn’t convinced that this is enough to justify the kind of authoritarian controls that climate activists demand:

The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second is the claim that changes we have good reason to expect if we do not take appropriate action to prevent them will have very bad consequences for us.

Much of the criticism I have seen of the argument has to do with the first half, with critics arguing that the evidence for global warming, at least the evidence that it is caused by humans and will continue if humans do not mend their ways, is weak. I do not not know enough to be certain that those criticisms are wrong; climate is a very complicated and not terribly well understood subject.1 But my best guess from watching the debate is that the first half of the argument is correct, that global climate is warming and human action is an important part of the cause. What I find unconvincing is the second half of the argument, the claim that climate change we have good reason to expect would have catastrophic consequences for humans.

Obviously one can imagine climate change large enough and fast enough to be a very serious problem — a rapid end of the current interglacial, for example. If, as I believe is the case, climate is not very well understood, one cannot absolutely rule out such changes.2 But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen. I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of a few degrees centigrade over the next hundred years resulting in a sea level rise of less than a meter.3

Comparing a map of global temperature to a map of population density shows densely inhabited regions with average temperatures from about 10°C to about 30°C, with some of the most densely inhabited regions at the high end of the range. I could find no empty areas that are hotter than all populated areas, hence no areas that are depopulated only because of how hot they are. If people can currently live, work, grow crops over a temperature range of twenty degrees it is hard to imagine any reason why most of them couldn’t continue to do so about as easily if average temperature shifted up by two or three degrees, with a century to adjust to the change.

That raises the question with which I titled this post: Does climate change catastrophe pass the giggle test? Is the claim that climate change on that scale would have catastrophic consequences one that a reasonable person should take seriously?

[…]

A different version of the catastrophist argument is the claim that climate is unstable, that an increase of a few degrees could trigger a much larger increase. That might be plausible if current temperatures were so high that additional warming would raise them above any in the past. But although present temperatures may be higher than any in the past two thousand years, as discussed in an earlier post, the Earth is much more than two thousand years old.

The graph below4 shows estimated global temperature over the past five hundred million years. While present temperature is high relative to the recent past it is cool relative to the more distant past, more than thirteen degrees below the high of the past hundred million years.

We are currently in an ice age, defined by geologists as a period when there is an ice cap on one or both poles. For most of the past five hundred million years there wasn’t.

The claim that we have good reason to expect climate change on a scale that will produce not merely problems for some but catastrophe for many is one that no reasonable person should take seriously.5

    1. As some evidence, as of 2018 the temperature projections produced by the IPCC’s elaborate analysis did a somewhat worse job of predicting actual temperature than a straight line fit from the date when warming restarted after the midcentury pause to the date of each of the first four IPCC reports.

    2. We cannot absolutely rule out catastrophic changes either caused by anthropogenic warming or prevented by anthropogenic warming. There is, in fact, some evidence, discussed in an earlier post, that the reason the next glaciation is not already starting is anthropogenic warming — not current warming due to the industrial revolution but warming that started some eight thousand years ago due to the invention of agriculture.

    3. From Future Climate Changes, Risks and Impacts. RCP8.5 was originally designed as an upper bound on how high future CO2 emissions might be and assumed a level of world population growth that, so far, is not occurring, so should probably not be included.

    4. The headline of the news story I found it in: “A 500-million-year survey of Earth’s climate reveals dire warning for humanity”.

    If life gives you peaches, make cyanide from the pits.

    5. The weaker claim that climate change will produce net costs for humans is, in my view, less obviously true than many believe. For reasons see my past posts on the subject.

April 24, 2024

What Were Victorian Attitudes Towards Sex?

Filed under: Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published Dec 15, 2023

They’re famously thought of as a buttoned up prudish bunch, but we all know they loved to bump uglies as much as anyone today.

Were the spanking punishments of boarding schools really the origins of brothels? Who were the pin-ups of Victorian women? And what did the saucy portrait Queen Victoria gave to Prince Albert look like?

Today we go Betwixt the Victorian Sheets with Dan Snow, from History Hit sister podcast Dan Snow’s History Hit, to find out all about Victorian relationships.
(more…)

QotD: The psychological trap for teens in our social media-saturated era

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

I’ve written a lot on how teenagerhood used to be. In my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, it was just given that any one person would “be” many different things over the course of his or her adolescence. I myself was briefly a metalhead, a skater, a jock, a nerd, and a preppie, and I think I’m forgetting a few. And I was far from an outlier. That’s just the way it worked back then, because that’s how you figured out who you really are. There comes a point in every metalhead’s life, for instance, when he realizes that metal kinda sucks. Oh, it’s great for pissing off your parents, but once that’s accomplished, there’s really nowhere else to go with it. So you move on, your scratched Ride the Lightning CD being the only relic of your youthful Metallica phase. And since everyone else is doing the same thing, no one is going to call you out as a hypocrite, lest you come back with “Oh yeah, Jessica, you’re so cool in your cheerleader outfit. Weren’t you a Goth last semester?”

These days, though, your “phases” are all over social media. If you pick one, you’d best be prepared to stick with it permanently. And it can be permanent indeed — ask the kids who decided to “transition” when they were fifteen and are now killing themselves in record numbers, because they weren’t really “transgender”, since that doesn’t actually exist. Given all that, there are only a few “safe” identities for kids to pick, and they’re pretty much all just flavors of SJW. Which is why the #wokeness seems to be coming on so strong. There’s really only one or two “safe” ways to express your “individuality” — you can be an SJW berating other SJWs for insufficient #wokeness in the matter of race, or gender, or perhaps health (vegans and covidians), but that’s about it.

Severian, “Mail Bag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-11.

April 23, 2024

Justin Trudeau’s legacy may not be something he ever wanted (or imagined)

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper outlines some of the attitudinal changes among Canadian voters during Trudeau’s term in office, with opinions shifting away from things we used to consider settled once and for all. Canada’s Overton Window is moving (relatively) quickly:

Front view of Toronto General Hospital in 2005. The new wing, as shown in the photograph, was completed in 2002.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s been among the most volatile and untouchable third rails in Canadian politics: The adoption, at any level, of a private health-care system.

In the last federal election, a Conservative statement about “public-private synergies” was all it took for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to brand it as a right-wing assault on the “public, universal health-care system”.

But a new Ipsos report shows that “two tier health care” is not the threat it once was.

Among respondents, 52 per cent wanted “increased access to health care provided by independent health entrepreneurs”, against just 29 per cent who didn’t.

Perhaps most shocking of all, almost everyone agreed that private health care would be more efficient. Seven in 10 respondents agreed that “private entrepreneurs can deliver health care services faster than hospitals managed by the government” – against a mere 15 per cent who disagreed.

“People understand that the endless waiting lists that characterize our government-run health systems will not be solved by yet another bureaucratic reform”, was the conclusion of the Montreal Economic Institute, which commissioned the poll.

As Canada reels from simultaneous crises of crime, affordability, productivity, health-care access and others, it’s prompting a political realignment unlike anything seen in a generation. But it’s not just a trend that can be seen in the millions of disaffected voters stampeding to a new party. As Canadians shift rightwards, they are freely discarding sacred cows that have held for decades.

If Canadians are suddenly open to health-care reform, it helps that they’ve never been more dissatisfied with the status quo. The past calendar year even brought the once-unthinkable sight of the U.S. being officially called in to bail out failures in the Canadian system.

April 20, 2024

“Identity quakes”

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle explains why some people cling to aspects of their worldview so tightly because to admit that they were mistaken would actually threaten their individual identity:

Both Gosse’s memoir and Potter’s dramatisation grapple with what Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (in their book How to Have Impossible Conversations) call an “identity quake”, the “emotional reaction that follows from having one’s core values disrupted”. Their point is that when arguing with those who see the world in an entirely different way, we must be sensitive to the ways in which certain ideas constitute an aspect of our sense of self. In such circumstances, to dispense with a cherished viewpoint can be as traumatic as losing a limb.

The concept of identity quakes helps us to understand the extreme political tribalism of our times. It isn’t simply that the left disagrees with the right, but that to be “left-wing” has become integral to self-conceptualisation. How often have we seen “#FBPE” or “anti-Tory” in social media bios? These aren’t simply political affiliations; they are defining aspects of these people’s lives. This is also why so many online disputes seem to be untethered from reason; many are following a set of rules established by their “side”, not thinking for themselves. When it comes to fealty to the cause, truth becomes irrelevant. We are no longer dealing with disputants in an argument, but individuals who occupy entirely different epistemological frameworks.

Since the publication of the Cass Review, we have seen countless examples of this kind of phenomena. Even faced with the evidence that “gender-affirming” care is unsafe for children, those whose identity has been cultivated in the gender wars will find it almost impossible to accept the truth. Trans rights activists have insisted that “gender identity” is a reality, and their “allies” have been the most strident of all on this point. As an essentially supernatural belief, it should come as no surprise that it has been insisted on with such vigour, and that those who have attempted to challenge this view have been bullied and demonised as heretics.

Consider the reaction from Novara Media, a left-wing independent media company, which once published some tips on how to deceive a doctor into prescribing cross-sex hormones. Novara has claimed that “within hours of publication” the Cass Review had been “torn to shreds”. Like all ideologues, they are invested in a creed, and it just so happens that the conviction that “gender identity” is innate and fixed (and simultaneously infinitely fluid) has become a firm dogma of the identity-obsessed intersectional cult.

Identity quakes will be all the more seismic within a movement whose members have elevated “identity” itself to hallowed status. When tax expert Maya Forstater sued her former employers for discrimination due to her gender-critical beliefs in 2019, one of the company’s representatives, Luke Easley, made a revealing declaration during the hearing. “Identity is reality,” he said, “without identity there’s just a corpse”.

This sentiment encapsulates the kind of magical thinking that lies at the core of the creed. So while it becomes increasingly obvious that gender identity ideology is a reactionary force that represents a direct threat to the rights of women and gay people, there will be many who simply will not be able to admit it. In Easley’s terms, if their entire identity is based on a lie, only “a corpse” remains. From this perspective, to abandon one’s worldview is tantamount to suicide.

QotD: Cyber-addiction

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

Researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry say the distractions of email and such extract a toll on intellectual performance as similar to that of marijuana. The study of 1,100 volunteers found that attention and concentration could be so frazzled by answering and managing calls and messages that IQ temporarily dropped by 10 points. The resulting loss of focus due to “Crackberry”, in fact, was judged to worse than that experienced by pot smokers.

This, of course, cannot really be a surprise. It is a great hallmark of modern life that over-indulgence in practically anything can be turned into pathology given enough time and clinical studies.

Jeff A. Taylor, Reason Express, 2005-04-26.

April 18, 2024

“… the scary part of town, the place where the true freaks and degenerates hang out, is general topology“

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

John Psmith does his level best to make mathematics interesting to layfolk like you’n’me:

In our end of year post I threatened to write more math reviews, and multiple people in the comments egged me on. So now, with Jane laid up in the final stages of pregnancy, I have seized control of the Substack for a very special lightning round of math textbooks I recently enjoyed. No, wait! Don’t close the tab! I promise that some of these will be fun for non-mathematicians as well.

  • Counterexamples in Topology, by Lynn Arthur Steen and J. Arthur Seebach Jr.

The mathematicians I have known included some eccentric characters. In fact when one considers research mathematicians as a class, it’s usually the normal people who are the exception. But there are degrees of weirdness. One of the most delightful things about the world is how fractal it is, and this extends to human hierarchies. Take any unusual group of people — frequent-flyers, monastics, the ultra-wealthy, members of genealogical societies — and zoom in on them, and it turns out there are even stranger or more elite subgroups buried within. This is true of mathematicians too, each subfield has its reputation, some of them regarded with awe, others with disdain. But ask any mathematician, “Who are the real weirdos? Who are the ones who are truly cracked?” The answer will be unanimous: it’s the topologists.

Topology is the study of spaces in the most abstract sense, so abstract that they may not even support a well-defined notion of distance (if your spaces are guaranteed to have distances, then you are now doing geometry rather than topology). Topology takes a coarser view of space: forget about curvature, distance, or really anything involving numbers at all. To a topologist, two points can be “near” each other or not, “connected” or not, and beyond that it doesn’t matter. This is the source of all the jokes about topologists mistaking donuts for coffee cups,1 but the kind of topology that studies multi-holed donuts, algebraic topology, is actually comparatively tame and normal. Also relatively normal is differential topology, which is the next neighborhood over from differential geometry, and which produces cool videos like this.

No, the scary part of town, the place where the true freaks and degenerates hang out, is general topology. General topology is where we go to figure out the basic definitions and frameworks that underlie the rest of topology. It’s about exploring what nearness and connectedness even are, and when mathematicians are trying to figure out what things are, that usually means probing the outer limits of what they can be. So general topology turns into the study of the most bizarre and deformed and disturbing spaces accessible to human cognition. No wonder its practitioners are a little weird.

Which brings me to this book, whose perversity is laid out right there in the title. It’s a big book of counterexamples to statements which seem obviously, intuitively correct. In general topology, things that seem intuitively correct are usually wrong:2 the field is notorious for proofs that almost work but twist out of your grasp at the last moment. A big book of counterexamples is exactly what you want for understanding why your proof that “all Xs are Ys and all Ys are Xs” falls flat. Seeing the logic fail is one thing, but seeing a concrete example of an X that is not a Y (or vice versa) brings it home with a satisfying finality.

But the real reason I love this book is the names, oh, the names. Let me flip through the table of contents with you: are “the Infinite Cage” and “the Wheel Without Its Hub” examples of topological spaces, or planes of the underworld? Are “Cantor’s Leaky Tent” and “Tychonoff’s Corkscrew” important counterexamples, or Level 2 wizard spells? I could spend hours idly leafing through this book, pondering these twisted and prosperous spaces, imagining them as worlds in themselves, imagining the bizarre sorts of creatures that might live there. Is this a math textbook or an RPG sourcebook? Trick question, they’re the same thing.

    1. One of the proudest moments of my mathematical career was when I attended a faculty tea and a distinguished topologist asked me for a donut and I handed him a cup of coffee instead. Everybody lost it. Alas, I turned out to be much worse at math than I am at improvisational comedy, and my mathematical career ended shortly afterwards.

    2. This is why we have the “separation axioms“. Every rung on that latter is the “well, actually …” to something that seems self-evident but isn’t.

April 17, 2024

QotD: The mid-life crisis, male and female versions

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

Most men get over the strippers-and-sports-cars overreaction pretty quickly, generally to be replaced by a new outlook on life. The guys who have come through the midlife crisis are generally a lot better people — more focused, more outgoing, far less materialistic — because they’ve taken up, however briefly, the perspective of Eternity. If you’re religious, you wonder if you’ll merit heaven. If you’re not, you wonder how you’ll be remembered. Either way, you start thinking about the kind of world you want to leave behind you, and what you’re going to do to achieve it with whatever time is left to you.

Which is why I’ve found the COVID overreaction so bizarre. Realizing your own mortality changes things. You can always tell, for instance, when it has happened to a younger person — when they come home, combat vets often act like middle-aged men going through a midlife crisis. Readjustment to civilian life is hard. Read the great war narratives, and it’s clear that none of them ever really “got over it”. Robert Graves and Ernst Junger, for instance, both lived to ripe old ages (90 and 103, respectively), and were titans in fields far removed from battle … and yet, the war WAS their lives, in some way we who haven’t been through it will never understand, and it comes through in every line they wrote.

If the Covidians were really freaking out about COVID, then, I’d expect one of two broad types of reaction: Either party-hearty midlife crisis mode, or a new determination to get on with whatever’s left of life. Obviously neither of those are true, and I just can’t grasp it — these might be your last few weeks on Earth, and that’s how you’re going to spend them? Sitting in your apartment like a sheep, wearing a mask and eating takeout, glued to a computer screen?

If you want a measure of just how feminized our society has become, there you go. Call this misogyny if you must, but it’s an easily observed fact of human nature — indeed, it has been observed, in every time, place, and culture of which we have knowledge — that post-menopausal women go a bit batty. Though a man might know for certain that he dies tomorrow, he can still keep plugging away today, because he’s programmed to find real meaning in his “work” — we are, after all, running our snazzy new mental software over kludgy old caveman hardware.

Women aren’t like that. They have one “job”, just one, and when they can’t do it anymore, they get weird. In much the same way high-end sports cars would cease to exist if middle aged men ceased to exist, so there are entire aspects of culture that don’t make sense in any other way except: These are channels for the energies of post-menopausal, and therefore surplus-to-requirements, women. You could go so far as to say that pretty much everything we call culture — traditions, history, customs — exist for that reason. Women go from being the bearers, to being the custodians, of the tribe’s future.

Severian, “Life’s Back Nine”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-11.

April 16, 2024

For you, is no autobahn

Filed under: Environment, Germany, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

eugyppius on the German federal government’s latest brainstorm to achieve their mandated emissions targets:

“Old Autobahn” by en:User:DF08 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

… despite the headlines, they are not going to take away our cars. Amazingly, not even the Greens want to do that. For once the story is not about German authoritarianism, or woke insanity or anything like that. Rather, it’s about how nobody can really bring himself to care about the climate anymore – not even our forward-thinking, progressively minded, environmentally responsible political establishment.

For the backstory, we must go all the way back to the pre-Covid era, when aggressive climate legislation was popular even with centre-right CDU voters, and before the electorate had a taste of what Green policies like the draconian home heating ordinances really feel like on the ground.

Back in those halcyon days, when the child saint Greta Thunberg was cutting class to save the earth, Angela Merkel’s government passed the Climate Protection Act. The law mandates a 65% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030, an 88% reduction by 2040, and an utterly unrealisable carbon neutrality by 2045. In the near term, the Climate Protection Act also establishes maximum annual emissions levels for various economic sectors. Should a given sector exceed its maximum, the responsible Ministry must submit an ominous “action programme” to bring things back on target.

The Climate Protection Act is archetypal climate nonsense. Politicians like to take credit for Doing Something about the climate, but because Doing Something amounts to massive economic restrictions and drastic interventions in daily life, they would prefer not to Do that Something themselves. Far better is to pass legislation committing future governments to Do Something and let them deal with the mess. Then you can reap the short-term rewards of being tough on carbon emissions, without bearing direct responsibility for all the chaos that actually being tough on carbon emissions would unleash. Alas, time marches forwards at a steady pace. I am sure that 2030 sounded like an unimaginably distant date when it was floated at the Paris Accords in 2015, but now it is a mere six years away. That is becoming a big, big problem for the climatists.

You could say that Merkel’s Climate Protection Act bequeathed the hapless Scholz government a small collection of ticking time bombs, which they’ve developed a considerable interest in defusing. One way to do this, is to revise the Climate Protection Act and remove its strict sector-based emissions limits before anybody is forced to field a climate-saving “action programme”. In the meantime, they’ve been studiously ignoring the requirements, which is why our Minister of Economic Destruction Robert Habeck could be found complaining back in June that no cabinet ministers were complying with Climate Protection Act emissions limits.

April 15, 2024

Is “Big Trans” in retreat?

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan considers just how much things have changed in recent years, especially with the publication of the Cass Report on the true medical situation for children being prescribed puberty blocking or opposite sex hormones … and it really doesn’t match the rhetoric we’ve been hearing from activists over the last few years:

Tribalization does funny things to people. If you’d told me a decade ago that within a few years, Republicans would be against Ukraine defending itself from a Russian invasion, and Democrats would be pulling the Full Churchill to counter the Kremlin, I’d have gently asked what sativa strain you were smoking.

If you’d told me the Democrats would soon be the party most protective of the CIA and the FBI, and that Republicans would regard them as part of an evil “deep state,” ditto. And who would have thought that a president accused in 2017 of having “no real ideology [but] white supremacy” would today be doubling his support with black voters, and tripling it with black men? Who would have bet the Dems would go all-in on Big Pharma when it came to Covid vaccines? And who would have thought Republicans who long carried little copies of the Constitution in their suit pockets would lead a riot to prevent the peaceful transfer of power? You live and learn.

But would anyone have predicted that the Democrats and the left in general would soon favor a vast, completely unregulated, for-profit medical industry that would conduct a vast, new experimental treatment on children with drugs that were off-label and without any clinical trials to prove their effectiveness and safety? In the 2016 presidential race, both Dem contenders railed against Big Pharma, with Bernie going as far as calling the industry “a health hazard for the American people.” Back in 2009, you saw MSM stories like this:

    The Food and Drug Administration said adults using prescription testosterone gel must be extra careful not to get any of it on children to avoid causing serious side effects. These include enlargement of the genital organs, aggressive behavior, early aging of the bones, premature growth of pubic hair, and increased sexual drive. Boys and girls are both at risk. The agency ordered its strongest warning on the products — a so-called black box.

Nowadays, it’s deemed a “genocide” if you don’t hand out these potent drugs to children almost on demand. Drugs used to castrate sex offenders and to treat adult prostate cancer have been re-purposed, off-label, to sexually reassign children before they even got through puberty. Big Pharma created lucrative “customers for life” by putting kids on irreversible drugs for a condition that could not be measured or identified by doctors and entirely self-diagnosed by … children.

And what if over 80 percent of the children subject to this experiment were of a marginalized group — gay kids? And the result of these procedures was to cure them of same-sex attraction by converting them to the opposite sex? I simply cannot imagine that any liberal or progressive would hand over gender-nonconforming children, let alone their own children, to the pharmaceutical and medical-industrial complex to be experimented on in this way.

And yet for years now, this has been the absolutely rigid left position on sex reassignments for children with gender dysphoria on the verge of puberty. And for years now, those of us who have expressed concern have been vilified, hounded, canceled and physically attacked for our advocacy. When we argued that children should get counseling and support but wait until they have matured before making irreversible, life-long medical choices they have no way of fully understanding, we were told we were bigots, transphobes and haters.

The reason we were told that children couldn’t wait and mature was that they would kill themselves if they didn’t. This is one of the most malicious lies ever told in pediatric medicine. While there is a higher chance of suicide among children with gender distress than those without, it is still extremely rare. And there is absolutely no solid evidence that treatment reduces suicide rates at all.

Don’t take this from me. The most authoritative and definitive study of the question has just been published in Britain, The Cass Report, by Hilary Cass, one of the most respected pediatricians in the country. It’s 388 pages long, crammed with references, five years in the making, based on serious research and interviews with countless doctors, parents, scientists and, most importantly, children and trans people directly affected. In the UK, its findings have been accepted by both major parties and even some of the groups who helped pioneer and enable this experiment. I urge you to read it — if only the preliminary summary.

It’s a decisive moment in this debate. After weighing all the credible evidence and data, the report concludes that puberty blockers are not reversible and not used to “take time” to consider sex reassignment, but rather irreversible precursors for a lifetime of medication. It says that gender incongruence among kids is perfectly normal and that kids should be left alone to explore their own identities; that early social transitioning is not neutral in affecting long-term outcomes; and that there is no evidence that sex reassignment for children increases or reduces suicides.

How on earth did all the American medical authorities come to support this? The report explains that as well: all the studies that purport to show positive results are plagued by profound limitations: no control group, no randomization, no double-blind studies, no subsequent follow-up with patients, or simply poor quality.

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