Quotulatiousness

January 24, 2026

Modern biochemistry through a trio of Nora Ephron movies

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

Not being a movie fan, I was only vaguely aware of the author Nora Ephron’s work being turned into movies, but Unbekoming uses three of them (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail) to help illustrate one of the major reasons why so many relationships go sour:

I think this shows stills from Nora Ephron romantic comedies.

The films show what was delivered. But neither fully explains why the delivery was so effective — why millions of women watched these films repeatedly, quoted them to friends, absorbed their vocabulary of magic and clockwork as though it described something they already knew.

The films resonated because they did describe something these women already knew. They just misnamed its source.

The Altered Audience

By the time When Harry Met Sally appeared in 1989, hormonal contraception had been widely available for nearly three decades. The women watching Ephron’s films in theaters — women in their twenties and thirties, the target demographic — were largely women who had been on the pill since adolescence. Many had never experienced an adult month with their natural hormonal cycles intact.

This matters because the pill doesn’t merely prevent pregnancy. It alters brain chemistry, affects mood, suppresses libido, and — most remarkably — changes who women are attracted to.

Research has documented that women on hormonal contraception prefer different types of men than women who are cycling naturally. The pill disrupts the normal attraction toward genetic diversity, causing women to prefer men with similar immune markers rather than complementary ones. Women who meet their partners while on the pill often experience a dramatic shift in attraction when they stop taking it. The man who felt right becomes somehow wrong. The spark disappears. The relationship that seemed stable reveals itself as empty.

The films gave this experience a name: settling. They told women that the absence of “magic” meant they were with the wrong partner — not that they were chemically disconnected from their own desire.

The Misnamed Feeling

Consider what a woman on hormonal contraception might actually be experiencing:

Suppressed libido — the pill is documented to reduce sexual desire, sometimes dramatically. A woman with chemically suppressed desire might experience her stable relationship as passionless, as “clockwork”, without recognizing that the suppression is pharmaceutical rather than relational.

Altered mood — studies show significantly elevated rates of depression and anxiety among pill users. A woman experiencing low-grade, chemically-induced depression might feel that something essential is missing from her life, that she’s “settling”, that the right partner would make her feel alive again.

Disrupted attraction — if the pill alters who women are attracted to, then a woman who chose her partner while on hormonal contraception may genuinely feel reduced attraction to him. The films told her this meant he was the wrong partner. The chemistry told a different story.

Ephron’s films offered a romantic explanation for what was partly a pharmaceutical experience. The vocabulary of “magic” versus “clockwork”, of transformation versus settling, gave women language for feelings they couldn’t otherwise explain. Of course the stable partner feels insufficient. Of course you’re still searching. Of course something is missing. The films validated the dissatisfaction and pointed toward a romantic solution: find the right partner, and the feeling will resolve.

But if the dissatisfaction was partly chemical — induced by years of synthetic hormones disrupting natural mood, desire, and attraction — then finding the right partner couldn’t resolve it. The search would continue indefinitely, the “magic” always receding, the next partner eventually revealing himself as another disappointment.

The Perfect Delivery Mechanism

This is why the films worked so well as cultural programming. They didn’t need to persuade women to feel dissatisfied; the pill had already accomplished that. They only needed to provide a framework that directed that dissatisfaction toward romantic optimization rather than pharmaceutical questioning.

A woman who felt disconnected from her partner, experienced low desire, struggled with mood, and sensed that something fundamental was missing had two possible interpretations:

  1. Something is wrong with this relationship — I need to find someone who makes me feel alive
  2. Something is wrong with my body — I need to understand what these hormones are doing to me

The films relentlessly promoted the first interpretation. They never acknowledged the second. They couldn’t — the entire romantic comedy structure depends on the premise that the right partner resolves the longing. If the longing is chemical, the genre collapses.

So millions of women absorbed the lesson: the problem is the partner, not the pill. Keep searching. The magic is out there. When you find him, you’ll know.

And they searched, and the years passed, and the window narrowed, and many of them discovered too late that what they were searching for couldn’t be found in another person — because what they had lost was connection to themselves.

Update: Fixed missing URL.

November 10, 2025

QotD: “Is it a boy or a girl?”

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

Even in our supposedly enlightened times, “Is it a boy or a girl?” is still the first question asked of nearly every newborn — and the answer continues to shape how the child is raised. Research shows that from infancy, boys and girls are touched, comforted, spoken to, and treated differently by parents and caregivers. These early experiences may reinforce sex-typical patterns of behavior that often persist into adulthood.

People are intrinsically fascinated by psychological sex differences — the average differences between men and women in personality, behavior, and preferences. Psychologists have studied this topic systematically for decades, beginning with landmark works like The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974) by Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin. That book helped spark a wave of research that continues to this day. Since then, increasingly sophisticated methods have enabled researchers to detect subtle but consistent differences in how men and women think, feel, and act.

Men and women use language and think about the world in broadly similar ways. They experience the same basic emotions. Both seek kind, intelligent, and attractive romantic partners, enjoy sex, get jealous, make sacrifices for their children, compete for status, and sometimes resort to aggression in pursuit of their interests. In the end, women and men are more alike than different. But they are not identical.

To be sure, sociocultural influences play a role in creating those differences. But environmental factors don’t act on blank slates. To understand young men and young women, we must consider not only cultural context but also evolved sex differences. We are, after all, biological creatures. Like other mammals, we share similar physiology and emotional systems, so it’s not surprising that meaningful differences exist between human males and females.

To understand why psychological and behavioral sex differences evolved, the key concept is parental investment theory, developed by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in 1972. The basic idea is straightforward: the sex that invests more in offspring tends to be more selective when choosing a mate. This selectivity follows basic evolutionary logic: those with more to lose are more cautious and risk-averse. To put the stakes in perspective: raising a child from birth to independence in a traditional, preindustrial society requires an estimated 10 million to 13 million calories — the equivalent of about 20,000 Big Macs. For women, reproduction is enormously expensive.

Men also incur reproductive costs, though of a different kind. On average, they have about 20 percent more active metabolic tissue — such as muscle — that fuels their efforts in competition, courtship, and provisioning. While pregnancy requires a large, immediate investment from women, men’s reproductive effort is more gradual, spread out over a lifetime. In evolutionary terms, both sexes pay a price for reproduction, but in different currencies — women through gestation and caregiving, men through physical competition and resource acquisition.

Yet while nature can inform our understanding of human behavior, it does not dictate how we ought to live. A clearer grasp of sex differences can help guide our decisions. It cannot define our values.

Rob Henderson, “Sex Differences Don’t Go Away Just Because You Want Them To”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2025-08-03.

September 10, 2025

The hard limits of education

Filed under: Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his substack, Freddie deBoer argues that “education doesn’t work”, in that you can’t educate someone beyond their innate abilities no matter how much money you throw at the problem:

For some time now, I’ve been arguing for a perspective on the value of education that does not map cleanly onto any major contemporary ideological position, political party, or school of educational philosophy. My overall thoughts on education1 are as follows:

  1. In any given population, the ability to excel academically (whether or not you call it “intelligence”) is, like almost all other human abilities, plottable as a normal distribution: that is, a few people will be really bad at it, a few people will be really good, and the majority will be somewhere near the middle.
  2. Because some people are simply better at school than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students; this means that “closing the performance gap” between the worst and best students will only be possible if you use the best strategies for the worst students and the worst strategies for the best ones — and even then the most talented students will probably adapt pretty well, because that’s what being a talented student means. Another way to put it: if every student in America were equally well funded and every student equally well taught, point 1 above would still be true.
  3. Resistance to these two points is pervasive because we collectively participate in a “cult of smart” that overvalues academic performance vis-à-vis other human excellences. That is, because we value “intelligence” as a unique excellence, necessary to our approval, we cannot admit that some people simply aren’t smart. (By contrast, we have no trouble admitting that some people can’t run very fast or lift heavy weights, because those traits are not intrinsic to social approval.)

In so many human domains, we’re willing to accept that some people are naturally advantaged, bound by some inherent trait to be better than others, whether it’s physical attractiveness, the visual arts, musical performance, athletics, memory, sense of direction, language learning, charisma … We are, generally, perfectly willing to accept that different human beings have profoundly different strengths and abilities. But with education and intelligence, we’re unwilling to countenance the simple reality that some people are better equipped to succeed and some worse. It wasn’t always this way. For much of human history, that some people were simply smarter than others was accepted as a matter of course. In particular, and unfortunately, inherent group differences have historically been asserted in cognitive ability, and education was typically walled away from those who weren’t of the right class, gender, race, or station; this, obviously, was unjust and a terrible waste of human talent. In the last 50 years, however, a combination of forces2 has led us to overcorrect and embrace the opposite conclusion, that all individual people have equal ability to excel academically. This has led to all manner of ugly consequences, including blaming those who lack academic talent for their own immiseration and unfairly pinning educational failures on schools and teachers that they are not responsible for.

Our educational debates are largely useless because most people engaged in those debates assume out of hand that, absent unusual circumstances like severe neglect or abuse or the presence of developmental or cognitive disabilities, any student can be taught to any level of academic success, and any failure to induce academic success in students is the result of some sort of unfortunate error. Some tend to ascribe the failure to reach academic excellence as the result of exogenous social variables (like poverty and racial inequality) while others insist that students who have failed to learn to standard are evidence of failing schools and feckless, untalented teachers. My own perspective insists instead that as with any other kind of human ability, academic ability is unequally distributed across the population, with some destined to excel, some destined to struggle, and many destined to meet various levels of mediocrity. My belief is that this tendency is the result of some sort of intrinsic or inherent academic potential, that just as in natural talent for playing a musical instrument or playing a sport, there is such a thing as talent in school, and like all other talents, this one is not distributed equally to all people and is thus not fair.

I in particular hold these three beliefs with descending levels of confidence – the first is an empirical truth that is not debatable, the second is an obvious conclusion to draw that’s difficult to avoid given the first, the third is speculative but appears to be the most likely reason for the first two:

  1. At scale, the relative academic performance hierarchy is remarkably static, with very few students significantly moving to higher or lower positions of educational success over the course of academic life.
  2. The remarkably consistency in student performance over time, even in the face of immense investment and relentless pedagogical and policy efforts to alter student performance, strongly suggests some individual attribute that constitutes an inherent or innate academic potential, predilection, or tendency.
  3. The most direct and parsimonious explanation for this attribute is genes.

What I’m here to demonstrate today is the core empirical point that makes up the first belief: despite the widespread assumption that any student can be educated to any level of performance, in reality students demonstrate a certain level of overall academic ability and gravitate to that level of ability throughout their academic lives, with remarkable fidelity at the population level. Decades of grading data; standardized test scores; cross-sectional, longitudinal, observational, and experimental studies; along with many other types of ancillary and convergent evidence, ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement.3 We can reliably teach some (but never all) students certain knowledge, skills, competencies, and concepts that they did not possess before being taught, which we might call absolute or criterion-referenced learning. But all of these can also be assessed on a relative basis; whether students can read or do algebra or apply the scientific method are all questions that have polychotomous rather than binary answers. That is to say, students can be better or worse at the various cognitive and academic tasks learned in school, and we can assess these abilities and then assign them ranks in a relative distribution, which if our instruments are sound will almost always be normal or Gaussian – some kids will be excellent, some will be terrible, some will be in-between, and they number in each percentile will follow a predictable curve.

  1. Helpfully summarized by my friend Alan Jacobs here.
  2. On the well-meaning side, you have a cheery kind of simplistic egalitarianism, which is emotionally defensible but which ultimately hurts people who lack natural talent, as The Cult of Smart describes; on the less salutary side, the rise of educational blank slate thinking can be traced to the neoliberal turn in American economics, where the dismantling of the labor movement and the steady erosion of the social safety net left ordinary people with no path to basic economic security other than through the college-to-white-collar-work pipeline – which only works for everyone if everyone is equipped to handle that kind of school and work.
  3. Absolute performance = teaching students to do/understand something they couldn’t do/understand before. Taking a student who couldn’t do long division before and teaching them how to do long division is absolute learning; teaching a student the steps in the Krebs cycle such that they can describe them after not knowing anything about them previously is absolute learning; helping a toddler to memorize the alphabet is absolute learning. Tests that are concerned only with the demonstration of the ability to perform a given academic competency or skill (AKA criterion referenced tests) are fundamentally tests of absolute learning. Relative learning = helping any individual students or group of students improve relative to peers/the performance spectrum. One student outperforming other students on a test of long division is an expression of differences in relative learning; observed performance gaps like racial or gender gaps are reflections of relative learning; competitive admissions processes are evaluations of relative ability/learning. Aptitude and achievement tests (AKA norm referenced tests) are fundamentally tests of relative learning.

June 23, 2025

How Sex in War Breeds Boys – W2W 33

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 22 Jun 2025

That prolonged war triggers an increase in male baby births had been ordered since at least 250 years. This “returning soldier effect” happens again during WW2 and right after. How this happens is a mystery, but research in the past decades might provide some answers.
(more…)

February 10, 2025

Immortality, ancient versus modern

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

Immortality used to be something you only got in the eyes of others, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing”, but modern tech bros want the other kind of immortality … the one where you don’t actually die:

In ancient times, you attained immortality by doing great deeds.

Today you attain immortality by getting blood transfusions from teenagers, and freezing your body for later revival.

Needless to say, there’s a huge difference between these two strategies.

In the first case, you serve others by your great deeds — eternal renown is your reward for this. But folks seeking immortality today are the exact opposite. They have reached peak narcissism — other people are, for them, literally just a source of fresh blood (or stem cells).

Until recently, I thought those Dracula movies were just a story to scare little kids. I now know that they’re an actual playbook for Silicon Valley elites.

With a better business plan, our Transylvanian count could have raised some serious VC money.

Nowadays he would be running a medical rejuvenation startup with a billion dollar market cap

Not long ago, I would have thought that the tweet below was a joke. But not in the current moment.

By the way, don’t miss the motto on his shirt.

I’m tempted to make some joke about this — but we’ve now arrived at a point where reality itself morphs into dark comedy. No punchline is necessary

And here’s another similarity between tech billionaires and the monsters in old horror movies. Somebody recently sent me a link to a website that sells bunkers to tech elites, and they remind me of dungeons in a Frankenstein film.

Go ahead, click on the link. Don’t let me stop you.

In both instances, horror is the right term.

Just looking at these things and imagining some delusional transhumanist getting on the table in his dungeon for a rejuvenation procedure is very creepy.

But there are some similarities between ancient heroes doing great deeds, and today’s Silicon Valley transhumanist. They both want to be like the gods (only their methods are different). Also, they are both admired leaders in their respective societies.

That’s the part that troubles me most. If the dude slurping up stem cells in a bunker was just another crazy person, I wouldn’t worry about it. But, unfortunately, these unhinged narcissists include some of the most powerful people on the planet.

December 27, 2024

QotD: Adapting to “permanent” food surpluses

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

We late-20th century Westerners are the only humans, in the entire history of our species, to have achieved permanent, society-wide caloric surplus. I’m well aware that it’s not actually permanent — it is, in fact, quite precarious, as the oddly-empty shelves at the local supermarket can confirm — but we have adapted as if it is. And I do mean adapted, in the full evolutionary sense — evolution is copious, local, and recent. Just as it doesn’t take more than a few generations of selective breeding to create an entire new breed of dog, so the human organism is fundamentally, physically different now than it was even a century ago.

More to the point, this is a testable hypothesis. I’m a history guy, obviously, not a biologist, but you don’t need to be a STEM PhD to see it. All our physical structures still look the same in 2021 as they did in 1901, but our biochemistry is far different. Just to take two obvious — and obviously detrimental — examples, we are awash in insulin and estrogen. Time warp in a laboring man from 1901 and feed him a modern “diet” for a week; the insulinemic effects of all that corn syrup etc. would put him in a coma. Even if he didn’t, the knock-on effect of all that insulin — greatly ramped-up estrogen — would deprive him of a lot of his physical strength, not to mention radically alter his mood, etc.

Severian, “The Experiment”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-25.

November 23, 2024

Common sense on males in female sports from … checks notes … the United Nations?

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

Ramesh Thakur summarizes some of the findings from a recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls which somehow defies the narrative from most of the legacy media in the Current Year:

Has Hell frozen over? Uncommonly for the UN (think Antonio Guterres with the global warming hyperbole), one of its recent reports is full of common sense. In the last three years, I have been critical of UN performance regarding some high-profile issues, including World Health Organisation failings in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and a power grab for future pandemic management; lawfare against Israel by the world court and International Criminal Court; and UN Women’s betrayal of the raison d’être for its creation and existence with a shamefully delayed acknowledgment of the weaponisation of mass rape, sexual violence, mutilation and public humiliation of Israeli women on October 7th 2023.

Enter Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. It’s a relief and a pleasure to acknowledge her positive report “Violence against women and girls in sport“. Published on August 27th, it was presented to the UN General Assembly last month. She notes that until very recently, the need for a separate category for females “to ensure equal, fair and safe opportunities in sports” was a “universally recognised principle”. Maintaining separate-sex sports is a proportional action that corresponds to legitimate aims within international law. Females also have a right to privacy under international law which is forfeited by compelled mixed-sex spaces in intimate facilities. Alsalem explained to Fox News on October 21st that this is primarily a human rights issue, not a cultural or an individual issue.

Biological advantages for males in competitive sports include strength (162% greater punching power on average!), weight, muscle mass, speed, height, reach and endurance. Separate categories for males and females were created to recognise this biological reality and provide equal, fair and safe opportunities for females to win recognition, prize money, fame and career advancement. Allowing biological males into female sports is unfair and amounts to cheating by males who are simply not competitive in male sports (think swimmer Lia Thomas). It steals women’s dreams, aspirations and rewards. Alsalem’s data show that more than 600 female athletes in over 400 competitions have lost nearly 900 medals across 29 different sports. Other reports document instances of injuries from trans-on-females encounters, including teeth knocked out, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures. Thus safety is yet another another concern.

Despite the unfairness, invasion of privacy, opportunity costs and safety risks, many athletes and coaches who object to trans-inclusion policies are silenced or forced to self-censor at the risk of losing sporting opportunities, scholarships and sponsorships. Many who do speak out despite such formidable hurdles are accused of bigotry, suspended, expelled and subjected to unfair disciplinary proceedings. Many (like Moira Deeming) face hostility if they assemble to discuss how to deal with these issues, violating the fundamental human rights to freedom of belief, opinion and expression. Some have quit sport entirely under the cumulative stress. Because “biological sex is central” to women’s “experiences of discrimination and violence”, countries that permit biological men to compete in women’s sports deny women “their femaleness”. To counteract the “worrisome trend”, she recommends the creation of open categories in sports competition and non-invasive and confidential sex screening procedures to ensure fairness, safety and dignity for female athletes alongside inclusive participation for everyone.

The trans-extremist assault on female spaces in the workplace and sporting arenas has been in the thick of the culture wars. Amidst the wreckage of those wars, the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) industry has morphed into DIE (division, intolerance, exclusion), promoting resentment, language-policing and unjust outcomes instead of real solutions. Trade-offs are central to public policy decision-making. The last major issue on which this was ignored was the panicked response to Covid and we will be paying for the resulting disasters for many years yet. By putting the spotlight back on the importance of balancing competing and clashing rights through policy trade-offs, this report provides a key to navigating our way out of the wreckage. It’s potentially also helpful in Sall Grover’s appeal in the Giggle v. Tickle case, as is the return of Trump to the White House. Alsalem is right to note that these policies originate from and exist almost entirely in Western countries. Their hold on many parts of the UN system is evidence of the hegemony of Western ideas and practices as the global norm. The adoption of trans and multigender language and the inclusion of trans athletes in international sports is confirmation of cultural imperialism at the cost of women-specific human rights.

November 4, 2024

Violence and sex differences

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lorenzo Warby discusses some basic biological differences between men and women and how those differences account for much of the variance in violent behaviour:

Human anatomy fundamentals: advanced body proportions
design.tutsplus.com

(Note on usage: Sex is biological — i.e., which gametes a body is structured to produce. Sex roles are the behavioural manifestation of sex. Gender is the cultural manifestation of sex.)

Adult human males have, on average, about twice the lean upper body mass of adult human females. This means that adult human females have, on average, 52 per cent of the upper body strength of adult human males.

The consequence of this is that men dominate violence between adults. They dominate victims — another male is far more likely to be a physical threat or obstacle than a woman. Men even more strongly dominate perpetrators.

A Swedish study found that one per cent of the population committed almost two-thirds of all violent crimes. That one per cent was almost entirely male. Four per cent of the population committed all the violent crimes. That four percent was almost 90 per cent male1 and constituted just over seven per cent of the male population.

These patterns of behaviour do not require any “hard wired” differences by sex in human brains. They merely require that men have about twice the upper body strength of women. They represent strategic behaviour within that context.

Indeed, these results are not compatible with sex-differentiation being strongly “hard-wired” in brains by sex. The overwhelming majority of men do not commit any violent crimes, while some of the perpetrators —almost eleven per cent — were female.

What makes it even clearer that these patterns represent strategic behaviour—that is, responses grounded in (biological) constraints and capacities — is that men and women each make up about half the perpetrators of violence against children.

When women are dealing with the physically stronger sex, they are much less likely to use violence than is the physically stronger sex. When they are dealing with a systematically weaker group of Homo sapiens — children — they are as likely to be perpetrators of violence as men.

These patterns represent strategic behaviour. They represents actions responding to constraints and capacities. You get sex-differentiated patterns when the constraints are different between men and women. Our sex-differentiated biology is enough, on its own, to produce sex-differentiated patterns of behaviour.

So, even in (then) peaceful Sweden, one in 14 men are violent. That a significant proportion of men are violent predators informs female behaviour, as the systematically physically weaker sex.

Men dominate sexual violence because they are physically stronger, have penises and cannot get pregnant. That is enough to have men dominate sexual violence without any sex differentiation in the “hard-wiring” of brains at all.

We are embodied agents. How we are embodied makes a difference for our behaviour.

Women have, on average, half the lean upper body mass as men not so much because they are smaller—the average differences in height and weight are nowhere near as large. A much more significant factor is that women have a higher fat content to their body, especially their upper body.

They have a higher fat content because human brains are energy hogs, and women are structured to be able to support not just one, but two or more, energy-hog brains — i.e. babies and toddlers. More fat means more readily-available stored energy. That extra female fat enables us Homo sapiens to be the most body-shape dimorphic of the primates: far more so than any of our ape cousins.

This goes to the other biological constraint that produces sex-differentiated behaviour. Women can get pregnant, men cannot. The risk profile differs for men and women, and not just for the risks of pregnancy and childbirth but also for child-rearing.

    1. The text of the paper and the summary table have different numbers for female offenders. As the text states that 10.9 per cent of offenders were females, which agrees with the table but not the figures given in the text, I have corrected accordingly. Fortunately, it does not affect the logic being presented.

October 8, 2024

QotD: The competitive instinct

Filed under: Gaming, Quotations, Soccer, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I once saw an interview with basketball player Charles Barkley, in which he discussed his retirement. Barkley was a Hall of Fame player, and like most of those guys, he hung on a few seasons too long. Even having lost a step or three, Sir Charles was still a decent player, but that’s all he was — a decent player, but getting paid like a superstar and with a superstar’s reputation. A few seasons after retiring, he admitted as much. He said something like (from memory) “I’d guard a guy and think, ‘this is going to be easy, this guy is terrible’. And then he’d beat me, and I’d realize I just got beat by some guy who’s terrible, and then I knew it was time to hang it up.”

One thing chicks of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to genders don’t realize these days is how competitive men — actual biological males — are hardwired to be. Things like World of Warcraft and fantasy football only exist because the genius who invented those figured out a way to tap into that heretofore-unexpressed male competitiveness. And indeed, it’s the guy who’d never even dream of putting on shoulder pads who’s the most insanely competitive guy in a fantasy football league or (I’m certain) a whatever-they’re-called in World of Warcraft. Even the uber-dorks in the Math Club and the Speech and Debate Society went after each other like Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. It’s just how guys are … or, at least, how guys used to be.

[…]

When it comes right down to it, that’s why men of a certain age simply don’t get “women’s sports”. Few will be as crustily chauvinistic as yer ‘umble narrator, and come right out and say it, but here goes: Women’s “sports” are just a shoddy knockoff of the real thing, because women just aren’t wired that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitive women, or athletic women — obviously there are, some very athletic and very competitive — but the female of the species just isn’t wired to put in the work the way males are. When faced with the prospect of three straight hours in the batting cage, swinging at curve after curve until your blisters have blisters and your shoulders feel like they’re falling out of their sockets, most women will quite sensibly ask “why bother?” Competition-for-competition’s-sake, even when it’s only against yourself in those long, long, looooong hours in the cage, just doesn’t motivate them the way it does us.

Which is why a person’s reaction to Simone Biles, or the USA Women’s soccer team, or the WNBA, or what have you is an almost perfect predictor of their age, not just their “gender”. I judge sports as sports. I don’t care about soccer, but if I did, I’d care about it as soccer — meaning, I’d want to see the best possible players, playing at the highest possible level. Women’s Olympic teams — that is to say, all star teams, the very best players — routinely get smoked by teams of 15 year old boys. Sir Charles is pushing sixty, but he could dominate the WNBA right now, in street clothes. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Pee Wee or rec leagues, but if you’re going to take a paycheck for doing it, then I want to see exactly what I paid for.

In estrogen-drenched, synchronized-ovulation Clown World, it’s all about appearances. Sure, she let her team down and wussed out (while still talking up how great she is), but can’t you see that it gave her the sadz? Sure, Megan Rapinoe et al keep getting smoked by 14 year old boys, then choking in international competition, but can’t you see her out there, with her pink hair and her tats and her Strong, Confident Empowerment? The “competition”, such as it is, is an excuse for the display. Michael Jordan ought to give baseball another shot. We know he can cry. These days, that’d get him a first-class ticket to Cooperstown.

Severian, “On Competition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-02.

June 9, 2024

QotD: The biological importance of salt to humans

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… regardless of whether it was used in agriculture, for preservation, or for cooking, salt was also essential. The human body is constantly losing salt through sweat, and to a certain extent urine, but it tries to keep the blood’s salt concentrations maintained at a certain level. So as the blood loses salt, the body also ejects water to adjust. Ironically, as you lose salt your body responds by drying you out. Without constantly replacing the salt in your body — which is only ever stored for a couple of days at a time — you will at first feel fatigued and a little breathless, but increasingly weak and debilitated, as though sapped of all energy. The slightest exertion would start to bring on cramps, then problems with your heart and lungs, as your body continually shed water. If these did not kill you — and they probably would — you would essentially die through desiccation. The process would be all the faster if you became ill, rendering even the slightest dehydrating fever or bout of diarrhoea utterly lethal.1

A population deprived of salt was thus one that was weaker and more prone to disease — and at a time when the vast majority of the economy’s energy supply came from the straining of muscle, both human and animal, that weakness in effect meant a severe energy shortage. Although the main fuels for muscle power were carb-heavy grains like wheat, rye, oats, and rice, the indispensable ingredient to getting the most out of these grains was salt — just as how nuclear power uses uranium as its fuel, but also requires a suitable neutron moderator. A population deprived of salt would quite literally be more lethargic and sluggish, making it less productive and poorer too.

Salt’s unique properties made it a serious tool of state. In 1633 king Charles I’s newly-appointed Lord Deputy for Ireland, Baron Wentworth, advised controlling its salt supply as a way to make the Irish utterly economically dependent on England. Given salt was “that which preserves and gives value to all their native staple commodities” — herrings, butter and beef — then “how can they depart from us without nakedness and beggary?” Salt would be a method of control, and a profitable one too, being “of so absolute necessity” that it could be sold to the Irish at inflated prices without much dampening demand: salt “must be had whether they will or no, and may at all times be raised in price”.2 Much like economists today, Wentworth saw revenue-raising potential in taxing goods with such unresponsive or “inelastic” demand.

Wentworth’s scheme to control the Irish never came to be. But a great many other countries did choose to tax it. Given a minimum amount of salt had to be consumed by absolutely everyone, monopolising its sale — and levying what was effectively a tax by inflating the price well above the costs of importing or producing it — could function as kind of indirect poll tax, levied more or less per head of both people and livestock, but without any of the administrative hassle of taking and maintaining an accurate census in order to impose such a tax directly.

When compared to other necessities like grain, salt did not need to be traded in especially large quantities either, meaning that its supply could be monopolised with relative ease. And it could not be produced everywhere. Salt tended to be lacking the further you got from the sea coast, unless there happened to be some relatively rare inland sources like salt lakes, brine springs, or rock salt mines. And it could even be lacking on the sea coast where it was either too humid or too cold to get salt cheaply by evaporating seawater using the sun, or where there was insufficient fuel for boiling the brine. These places were thus prone to being charged inflated prices, while the states that controlled places where the costs of production were low — in warmer and drier climes where the salty water of coastal marshes could cheaply be evaporated using only the heat of the summer sun — could extract especially large monopoly profits from the difference. The revenue from controlling solar salt thus became the basis of many kingdoms, some unusually powerful republics, and even empires.

Anton Howes, “The Second Soul”, Age of Invention, 2024-03-08.

    1. Roy Moxham, “Salt Starvation in British India: Consequences of High Salt Taxation in Bengal Presidency, 1765 to 1878”, Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 25 (2001): p.2270–74.

    2. George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century (Maunsel and Company Limited, 1919), p.244, which has the transcription of Wentworth’s proposal

January 27, 2024

Modern academics “were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Gad Saad offers an action plan to bring our universities back to a slightly more reality-based view of the world and prevent further postmodernist deterioration:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

This year, I am celebrating my 30th year as a professor. During those three decades, I have witnessed the proliferation of several parasitic ideas that are fully decoupled from reality, common sense, reason, logic and science, which led to my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. As George Orwell famously noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”. Each of these ideas were spawned on university campuses, originally in the humanities and the social sciences, but as I predicted long ago, they have infiltrated the natural sciences, and now can be found in all areas of our culture.

These destructive ideas include, but are not limited to, postmodernism (there are no objective truths, which is a fundamental attack on the epistemology of science); cultural relativism (who are we to judge the cultural mores of another society, such as performing female genital mutilation on little girls?); the rejection of meritocracy in favour of identity politics (diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) as the basis for admitting, hiring and promoting individuals); and victimhood as the means by which one adjudicates between competing ideas (I am a greater victim therefore my truth is veridical).

I was first exposed to this pervasive academic lunacy via my scientific work at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and consumer behaviour. Central to this endeavour is the fact that the human mind has evolved via the dual processes of natural and sexual selection. Nothing could be clearer, and yet I was astonished early in my career to witness the extraordinary resistance that I faced from my colleagues, many of whom were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans.

Apparently, human beings transcend their biological imperatives, as they are strictly cultural beings. This biophobia (fear of using biology to explain human phenomena) is the means by which transgender activists can argue with a straight face that “men too can menstruate and bear children”. Biology is apparently the means by which the patriarchy implements its nefarious misogyny, making us all “wrongly” believe that men can on average lift heavier weights and run faster than women, notwithstanding a litany of evolutionary-based anatomical, physiological, hormonal and morphological sex differences.

According to radical feminists, these differences are largely due to social construction. Hence, a man who stands 6-4 and weighs 285 pounds can wake up one day and declare himself to be a transgender woman. Anyone who disagrees with this notion is clearly a transphobe.

October 3, 2023

“Just play safe” is difficult when the definition of “safe” is uncertain

Filed under: Food, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman on the difficulty of “playing safe”:

It’s a no brainer. Just play safe

It is a common argument in many different contexts. In its strongest form, the claim is that the choice being argued for is unambiguously right, eliminates the possibility of a bad outcome at no cost. More plausibly, the claim is that one can trade the risk of something very bad for a certainty of something only a little bad. By agreeing to pay the insurance company a hundred dollars a year now you can make sure that if your house burns down you will have the money to replace it.

Doing that is sometimes is possible but, in an uncertain world, often not; you do not, cannot, know all the consequences of what you are doing. You may be exchanging the known risk of one bad outcome for the unknown risk of another.

Some examples:

Erythritol

Erythritol was the best of the sugar alcohols, substitutes tolerably well for sugar in cooking, has almost zero calories or glycemic load. For anyone worried about diabetes or obesity, using it instead of sugar is an obvious win. Diabetes and obesity are dangerous, sometimes life threatening.

Just play safe.

I did. Until an research came out offering evidence that it was not the best sugar alcohol but the worst:

    People with the highest erythritol levels (top 25%) were about twice as likely to have cardiovascular events over three years of follow-up as those with the lowest (bottom 25%). (Erythritol and cardiovascular events, NIH)

A single article might turn out to be wrong, of course; to be confident that erythritol is dangerous requires more research. But a single article was enough to tell me that using erythritol was not playing safe. I threw out the erythritol I had, then discovered that all the brands of “keto ice cream” — I was on a low glycemic diet and foods low in carbohydrates are also low in glycemic load — used erythritol as their sugar substitute.

Frozen bananas, put through a food processor or super blender along with a couple of ice cubes and some milk, cream, or yogurt, make a pretty good ice cream substitute.1 Or eat ice cream and keep down your weight or glycemic load by eating less of something else.

It’s safer.

Lethal Caution: The Butter/Margarine Story

For quite a long time the standard nutritional advice was to replace butter with margarine, eliminating the saturated fat that caused high cholesterol and hence heart attacks. It turned out to be very bad advice. Saturated fats may be bad for you — the jury is still out on that, with one recent survey of the evidence concluding that they have no effect on overall mortality — but transfats are much worse. The margarine we were told to switch to was largely transfats.2

“Consumption of trans unsaturated fatty acids, however, was associated with a 34% increase in all cause mortality”3

If that figure is correct, the nutritional advice we were given for decades killed several million people.

    1. Bananas get sweeter as they get riper so for either a keto or low glycemic diet, freeze them before they get too ripe.

    2. Some more recent margarines contain neither saturated fats nor transfats.

    3. “Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies”, BMJ 2015; 351 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h3978 (Published 12 August 2015)

September 27, 2023

The fascinating world of trees

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

The latest book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf examines Tristan Gooley’s How to Read a Tree:

Okay, I admit it: I read this book because I wanted to know more about the trees in my yard.

I’m afraid that’s not how Tristan Gooley means it to be used. He’s an expert in what he terms “natural navigation“, which means finding your way wherever you’re going using the sun, moon, stars, weather, land, sea, plants and animals. He teaches classes in it. He tested Viking navigation methods in a small boat in the north Atlantic and wrote a scholarly paper about it. He traveled the desert with the Tuareg. He’s the only living person to have crossed the Atlantic solo in both a plane and a sailboat.1 Meanwhile, I consistently walk a block in the wrong direction when I come out of the subway. But I am interested in trees!

Do you think much about trees? Could you draw one from memory and come up with something besides a fat green lollipop? Can you describe a tree you walk past every day with something more than its species and “leaves turn a pretty color in the fall” or “had its whole middle chopped out because planting trees directly under power lines is a terrible idea”? (Or if you live somewhere urban enough to have buried power lines, “they really, really should have made sure all these ginkgos were male”.)2 My guess is that you can’t, because most of us couldn’t, but trees deserve some real thought. They are actually fabulously, unintuitively weird, and learning just a little bit about how they work will dramatically enhance your ability to understand why the world around you is the way it is. I don’t expect I’ll use a tree to find my way any time soon, but since reading the book I’ve started spotting things in my yard and my neighborhood that I’d never noticed before — and noticing things is halfway to understanding them. (Which is, of course, why you must not be permitted to notice that which you are not supposed to understand.)

The most fundamental insight here is that trees are not like animals. This sounds breathtakingly obvious (and indeed, when I shared this pearl of wisdom at the dinner table everyone laughed at me), but it’s hard to internalize. Our increasingly urbanized and domesticated lives have so impoverished our natural imaginary — the available stock of symbols, metaphors, and archetypes through which we understand the natural world — that we’re more or less limited to commensals and charismatic megafauna, and are therefore vaguely surprised when we encounter organisms that work differently.3 And trees really do work differently, in a wide variety of ways that make perfect sense when Gooley points them out.

What are these differences? Well, for one thing, where animals have their physical architecture written into their genes, trees — like all plants — have potential. Sure, they have general growth habits4 (you’d never mistake a willow for a maple), but compare two trees of the same species — even two genetically identical trees cloned from grafts or cuttings of the same parent — and you’ll find dramatic structural differences depending on how the individual tree grew. This isn’t true for animals: one lion might be smaller than another, or bear the scars of an old injury, but all lions have four legs with the same joint anatomy. A lion will never grow a new leg, drop an old one, or add new tendons to support a particularly overworked limb. Trees, on the other hand, do all of those and more, following general rules dictated by species but growing in response to the conditions they encounter. And because only the top of the tree continues to grow up — a branch five feet off the ground will still be five feet off the ground in a decade, though quite a lot thicker — you can read a tree’s whole history in its structure. As with looking at a genome, looking at a tree is a way of looking into the past.

Trees seek the light. Just down the street, my neighbor’s entire front yard is shaded by three enormous oak trees planted in a rough triangle and each arching gently away from the others (with a surprising similarity to the Air Force Memorial) as they try to escape each others’ shade. A few blocks away is a survivor of a similar situation, an old pine tree that’s branchless most of the way up its trunk so you can really see the alarming 15° lean with which it grew. Some long-gone giant cast the shade that sculpted this tree into its present funny shape, and if we were in the woods we might be able to see its stump — Gooley encourages the reader to greet a woodland stump by looking for the “footprint” of the missing tree in its surroundings — but I suspect this one was probably removed to make way for the foundation of the nearby house. (Given the apparent age of the pine and the house, its old neighbor probably met its end around the time the new streetcars turned this farming village on a railroad into a proper suburb.)

    1. The late Steve Fossett did it first, but since he holds about a billion other records it feels churlish to take this from Gooley.

    2. Only female gingkos drop those awful berries. There are entire all-male cultivars that make fabulous trees, and somehow, inexplicably, I spent every autumn of my childhood scraping horrible stinky mush off the bottoms of my shoes. Why.

    3. Also on this front, I recommend Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, which is exactly the sort of book about fungi you would expect someone named Merlin Sheldrake to write.

    4. In fact “tree” is really just a growth habit, evolved independently by thousands of unrelated species of plants, because trees are the crabs of the plant kingdom. [NR: Do read that thread, it’s quite amusing}

August 10, 2023

QotD: The variable pace of evolution

Filed under: Books, Environment, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The central argument of Gelernter’s essay is that random chance is not good enough, even at geologic timescales, to produce the ratchet of escalating complexity we see when we look at living organisms and the fossil record. Most mutations are deleterious and degrade the functioning of the organism; few are useful enough to build on. There hasn’t been enough time for the results we see.

Before getting to that one I want to deal with a subsidiary argument in the essay, that Darwinism is somehow falsified because we don’t observe the the slow and uniform evolution that Darwin posited. But we have actually observed evolution (all the way up to speciation) in bacteria and other organisms with rapid lifespans, and we know the answer to this one.

The rate of evolutionary change varies; it increases when environmental changes increase selective pressures on a species and decreases when their environment is stable. You can watch this happen in a Petri dish, even trigger episodes of rapid evolution in bacteria by introducing novel environmental stressors.

Rate of evolution can also increase when a species enters a new, unexploited environment and promptly radiates into subspecies all expressing slightly different modes of exploitation. Darwin himself spotted this happening among Galapagos finches. An excellent recent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, observes the same acceleration in humans since the invention of agriculture.

Thus, when we observe punctuated equilibrium (long stretches of stable morphology in species punctuated by rapid changes that are hard to spot in the fossil record) we shouldn’t see this as the kind of ineffable mystery that Gelernter and other opponents of Darwinism want to make of it. Rather, it is a signal about the shape of variability in the adaptive environment – also punctuated.

Even huge punctuation marks like the Cambrian explosion, which Gelernter spends a lot of rhetorical energy trying to make into an insuperable puzzle, fall to this analysis. The fossil record is telling us that something happened at the dawn of the Cambrian that let loose a huge fan of possibilities; adaptive radiation, a period of rapid evolution, promptly followed just as it did for the Galapagos finches.

We don’t know what happened, exactly. It could have been something as simple as the oxygen level in seawater going up. Or maybe there was some key biological invention – better structural material for forming hard body parts with would be one obvious one. Both these things, or several other things, might have happened near enough together in time that the effects can’t be disentangled in the fossil record.

The real point here is that there is nothing special about the Cambrian explosion that demands mechanisms we haven’t observed (not just theorized about, but observed) on much faster timescales. It takes an ignotum per æque ignotum kind of mistake to erect a mystery here, and it’s difficult to imagine a thinker as bright as Dr. Gelernter falling into such a trap … unless he wants to.

But Dr. Gelernter makes an even more basic error when he says “The engine that powers Neo-Darwinian evolution is pure chance and lots of time.” That is wrong, or at any rate leaves out an important co-factor and leads to badly wrong intuitions about the scope of the problem and the timescale required to get the results we see. Down that road one ends up doing silly thought experiments like “How often would a hurricane assemble a 747 from a pile of parts?”

Eric S. Raymond, “Contra Gelernter on Darwin”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-08-14.

July 5, 2023

The “orgasm gap”, yet another problematic front in the war of the sexes

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

Janice Fiamengo discusses the faked orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally and its role in the ongoing arguments over the “orgasm gap”:

An iconic moment in modern movie history is the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989), when Sally stuns an incredulous Harry with her rendition of a convincing orgasm. Her bravura performance causes shocked silence in the restaurant until one woman, sitting nearby, says admiringly (or enviously), “I’ll have what she’s having.”

The scene and the woman’s amused reaction told of a simple reality with wit and without judgement: some portion of women — perhaps many — are convincing fakers, and even a sexually experienced man will find it hard to be sure.

Many women in the movie audience laughed in recognition, and many men likely scratched their heads, wondering why anyone would need to fake sexual enjoyment. Some men may have remembered times when they faked it too. In the romantic-comedic world of the movie, the scene symbolized one of the differences between the average woman and the average man that only a generous and committed love could bridge.

A few years ago, When Harry Met Sally turned 30 years old, and its anniversary prompted a number of reflection pieces, some turning a harsh feminist lens on the film’s gender politics. In “‘I’ll have what she’s having’: How that scene from When Harry Met Sally changed the way we talk about sex,” Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post found in the fake climax scene a salutary revelation of male sexual arrogance. For Bonos, Harry is a typical macho man, someone who doesn’t care about a woman’s pleasure. The fact that the whole point of his conversation with Sally had been his confidence that he was giving women pleasure simply confirmed his emetic masculinity.

According to Bonos, the fact that some women fake orgasm supposedly reveals that women’s sexual pleasure is “not prioritized” in heterosexual relationships, and Sally’s performance gave sobering evidence of a gendered pleasure gap. It was implicitly the man’s fault that his partner felt the need to lie to him about her sexual satisfaction, and his desire for her to orgasm proved his typically male ego. Bonos’s analysis was an egregious violation of the spirit of the movie but was eminently faithful to the feminist perspective. The politics of grievance had come a long way in three decades.

Right on cue, studies in human psycho-sexuality are now taking up the same theme, alleging a culturally imposed “orgasm gap” between men and women in which men outpace women in the frequency with which they report orgasm during sexual intercourse (86% for men vs. 62% for women, according to one national survey).

Remembering how consistently feminist pundits have expressed outrage at male incels‘ (alleged) sense of “entitlement” to sex, I cannot help but find it ironic how unapologetically researchers assume a female entitlement to orgasm. Apparently, the whole society is to be concerned if women fail to climax every time they have sex, while no one has compassion for young men who face a lifetime of sexlessness. The prime exhibit is “Orgasm Equality: Scientific Findings and Societal Implications“, a paper published in 2020 by three female researchers at the University of Florida. The paper not only surveys the literature on the subject but also makes recommendations for “a world of orgasm equality”.

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