Ancient Terracottas in the Getty

The Getty is posting online catalogs of their stuff, including one on ancient terracotta sculptures and figurines. Above, statue of a seated poet, possibly Orpheus.

Figurine of a mourning woman; these were placed in tombs.

Mask of a Satyr.

Above, Adonis altar. Below, heads.

The Upcoming Campaign

It’s going to be nasty, isn’t it? Put the small children away until November.

– David Axelrod

The Effectiveness of SSRIs again

Long and thorough review of the evidence. The conclusion:

An important point I want to start the conclusion section with: no matter what else you believe, antidepressants are not literally ineffective. Even the most critical study – Kirsch 2008 – finds antidepressants to outperform placebo with p < .0001 significance. An equally important point: everyone except those two Scandinavian guys with the long names agree that, if you count the placebo effect, antidepressants are extremely impressive. The difference between a person who gets an antidepressant and a person who gets no treatment at all is like night and day. The debate takes place within the bounds set by those two statements. Antidepressants give a very modest benefit over placebo. Whether this benefit is so modest as to not be worth talking about depends on what level of benefits you consider so modest as to not be worth talking about. If you are as depressed as the average person who participates in studies of antidepressants, you can expect an antidepressant to have an over-placebo-benefit with an effect size of 0.3 to 0.5. That's the equivalent of a diet pill that gives you an average weight loss of 9 to 14 pounds, or a growth hormone that makes you grow on average 0.8 to 1.4 inches. You may be able to get more than that if you focus on the antidepressants, like paroxetine and venlafaxine, that perform best in studies, but we don't have the statistical power to say that officially. It may be the case that most people who get antidepressants do much better than that but a few people who have paradoxical negative responses bring down the average, but right now this result has not been replicated. This sounds moderately helpful and probably well worth it if the pills are cheap (which generic versions almost always are) and you are not worried about side effects. Unfortunately, SSRIs do have some serious side effects. Some of the supposed side effects, like weight gain, seem to be mostly mythical. Others, like sexual dysfunction, seem to be very common and legitimately very worrying. You can avoid most of these side effects by taking other antidepressants like bupropion, but even these are not totally side-effect free. Overall I think antidepressants come out of this definitely not looking like perfectly safe miracle drugs, but as a reasonable option for many people with moderate (aka "mild", aka "extremely super severe") depression, especially if they understand the side effects and prepare for them.

Today's Utterly Unsurprising Finding in Social Psychology

Narcissists do better in job interviews.

After all, who would be better at talking themselves up?

Solar Power Gets Even Cheaper

I know I write about this all the time, maybe so much that is it getting boring, but it's just very important:

If you want to know the true price of renewable energy in America—free from subsidies and mandates—look to Mexico, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Friday.

In March, Mexico’s state utility, Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), departed from almost 80 years of state-owned monopoly and let private companies bid to supply solar, wind, hydro, cogeneration, combined-cycle gas, and geothermal energy.

“The cost was about 4¢ a kilowatt-hour without the mandates, in both solar and wind,” Chu said Friday at Stanford University, where he now teaches. “Four to four-and-a-half cents with no production tax credit, no investment tax credit, no renewable portfolio standard. It’s just money, including profit. This is pretty good news.”

A GTM Research analyst revised the average price slightly higher, to about 5¢/kWh, but that price, too, is much lower than most experts would have predicted renewables would be in 2016.

“Clean energy is actually getting much cheaper than even I, as a perennial technical optimist, thought it was going to be,” Chu said.

And much cheaper than the International Energy Agency or the U.S. Energy Information Administration have predicted in recent years. As the writer Ramez Naam pointed out, last June the EIA predicted solar would cost a minimum of 8.9¢/kWh in 2020.

The average cost of electricity from coal in the US is about 6¢/kWh, and for natural gas it is 6¢ to 8¢. So unsubsidized solar power at 5¢ is a dramatic breakthrough.

Norm Ornstein Explains Trump's Rise

Political scientist Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute took Trump's candidacy seriously long before most pundits. In an interesting interview, he explains why, and offers a theory of how Trump did it:

But if you forced me to pick one factor explaining what's happened, I would say this is a self-inflicted wound by Republican leaders.

Over many years, they've adopted strategies that have trivialized and delegitimized government. They were willing to play to a nativist element. And they tried to use, instead of stand up to, the apocalyptic visions and extremism of some cable television, talk radio, and other media outlets on the right.

And add to that, they've delegitimized President Obama, but they've failed to succeed with any of the promises they've made to their rank and file voters, or Tea Party adherents. So when I looked at that, my view was, "what makes you think, after all of these failures, that you're going to have a group of compliant people who are just going to fall in line behind an establishment figure?"

Ornstein actually traces this arc of Republican behavior all the way back to 1978, when Newt Gingrich entered Congress. Gingrich, he says, already had his long-range plan for Republican control of Congress:

And over the next 16 years, he put that plan into action. He delegitimized the Congress and the Democratic leadership, convincing people that they were arrogant and corrupt and that the process was so bad that anything would be better than this. He tribalized the political process. He went out and recruited the candidates, and gave them the language to use about how disgusting and despicable and horrible and immoral and unpatriotic the Democrats were. That swept in the Republican majority in 1994.

The problem is that all the people he recruited to come in really believed that shit. They all came in believing that Washington was a cesspool. So what followed has been a very deliberate attempt to blow up and delegitimize government, not just the president but the actions of government itself in Washington.

Whatever success this strategy has had at winning elections, it ultimately makes it impossible for Republicans to govern using  institutions they have wrecked:

If you delegitimize government, and make every victory that occurs partisan and ugly, and then refuse to implement the policies to make things work as much as you can but instead try to undermine them, and you cut government funding, and you freeze the salaries of people in government — well, then eventually you’re gonna have a public out there that basically says, "Anything would be better than these idiots."

So when you get a Donald Trump, who is contentless, and knows less about policy, domestic or international, I would say, than any candidate in the last 50 years — including Pat Paulsen, the comedian — you have a large share of the public who say, "You know, the people who know about policy were the ones who fucked all of this up! And how could Trump do worse?"

I found this last bit interesting partly because it is what I said about Trump back in September was that he seemed to me at least as coherent as most of his rivals. Mitt Romney was as knowledgeable and intelligent as most presidential candidates, but even he had to talk all kinds of nonsense to fit in with the climate of unreason.

Map Creatures

From the newly restored Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, painted by a team of artists in 1580-1581. Below, details of the actual maps.

More News from Mosul

The British military has announced that over the past three weeks their special forces have kidnapped three "mid level" Islamic State commanders in helicopter-born raids around Mosul:

A senior source said to the Mirror: "There are a wide range of activities taking place around Mosul which allow our commanders to shape the dispositions of enemy forces prior to any engagement. Seizing enemy commanders has always been a key driver in changing the way your opponent thinks, it will unsettle them and may force them to make mistakes.

"From our point of view killing the enemy is not always the answer. If we can get a commander to change sides, as we did in Afghanistan, this can have major influence on people inside Mosul and save lives."

As with other public statements about Mosul that we discussed here before, I think there is an agenda to this announcement. The general British policy is to never comment on the activities of the Special Air Service, as they call their elite commandos. So this is no routine news briefing. I suppose they are trying to send a message, or perhaps two: they want Islamic State commanders to sweat and constantly scan the skies, and they want people in Mosul to know that their oppressors are not invulnerable.

Could it be true that the unwieldy alliance getting ready to attack Mosul – the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, Shiite militias with Iranian advisers, the US Air Force, American, French, and British special forces – is carrying out a sophisticated plan to destabilize the Islamic State so the city will fall quickly? If so, that would be truly remarkable. I rather doubt it, though.

More Robins

Like many other Americans suburbs, our neighborhood is full of robins. And some of them seem to be remarkably stupid about where they nest. In my early days here I chronicled the pair that built their nest on top of the ladder that was leaning next to our back door. Those actually raised some chicks that fledged and flew off. A few years ago another pair built their nest in the rose bush right next to the gate between our front and back yards; they couldn't handle the traffic, so they abandoned their eggs and skedaddled. Now we have this nest about two feet from our front door, with four eggs in it now. Every time you open the front door, or approach it from the outside, a robin shoots up squawking from the nest, sometimes flying past a foot from your face, to the great alarm of both parties. But so far they haven't given up, so maybe we will have baby robins in the front yard soon.

Experimenter Effects

In the study of psychic phenomena, it happens all the time that people who believe in psi get positive results and people who don't get negative results. The general name for this is the "experimenter effect." As Scott Alexander notes,

the phenomenon is sufficiently well known in parapsychology that it has led to its own host of theories about how skeptics emit negative auras, or the enthusiasm of a proponent is a necessary kindling for psychic powers.

But are more "scientific" fields any better?

Other fields don’t have this excuse. In psychotherapy, for example, practically the only consistent finding is that whatever kind of psychotherapy the person running the study likes is most effective. Thirty different meta-analyses on the subject have confirmed this with strong effect size (d = 0.54) and good significance (p = .001).

Then there’s Munder (2013), which is a meta-meta-analysis on whether meta-analyses of confounding by researcher allegiance effect were themselves meta-confounded by meta-researcher allegiance effect. He found that indeed, meta-researchers who believed in researcher allegiance effect were more likely to turn up positive results in their studies of researcher allegiance effect (p < .002).

It is quite remarkable how good we humans are at fooling ourselves, and scientists are no exception.

What to do about High School?

As you can see from the graph above, education reform efforts over the past twenty years have raised test scores for elementary and middle school students. But not for high school students; whatever gains have been made in elementary school seem to disappear in high school.

I can't help but think that this has something to do with how many kids simply hate high school. My two older sons thought it was hell on earth; after the second one dropped out he told me he would rather go to prison than go back to school. My elder daughter on the other hand attended a high school of the arts in a special writing program that she loved, and she did very well.

Whether anything can be done to make high school less miserable for the mass of students is an interesting question. I have a feeling that the answer is no, at least in the current educational climate. After all, in countries like Japan and Korea where high school students seem to learn a lot, they hate it even more than Americans.

Of course that implies that teenagers can learn a lot even when they're miserable, but apparently American society just doesn't apply enough pressure to 16-year-olds to keep them slaving away at work they hate. I have long wondered whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly it is bad to make people miserable, but on the other hand if we let teenagers do whatever they wanted few would end up with the skills they need to get that all important office job.

Trump and Ryan

I think this exchange gets at a lot of what has happened in the Republican Party this year:

Paul Ryan: I am not ready to endorse Donald Trump. . . . I think conservatives want to know: Does he share our values and our principles on limited government, the proper role of the executive, adherence to the Constitution? There’s a lot of questions that conservatives, I think, are going to want answers to.

Trump: I'm not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda. . . . Perhaps in the future we can work together and come to an agreement about what is best for the American people. They have been treated so badly for so long that it is about time for politicians to put them first!

Ryan and his allies have made a religion of conservatism, with a creed to which they expect all Republicans to swear fidelity.

Trump counters that what really matters is the people – or his people, anyway – and politicians should put defending their people above a bunch of lofty language about a 225-year-old piece of paper. If the Constitution says we can't discriminate against Muslim immigrants, to hell with the Constitution. Defending the people against terrorism should come first.

And before anything else, Republicans need to win. Why, Trump asks, would anybody listen to Mitt Romney, who couldn't even beat Obama? All of his adherence to the party line didn't end up helping any conservatives, because he didn't get to be president.

Trump offered Republican voters this choice: do you want some kind of conservative priest who can recite doctrine all day, or a winner who will fight for you whether that's in the doctrine or not? His victory shows what the average Republican voter thinks.

MsScribe and the Bewildering Human World

Fabulous, in a sick way:

In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fanfiction authors and readers get embroiled in an apocalyptic feud between people who think that Harry should be in a relationship with Ginny vs. people who think Harry should be in a relationship with Hermione. This devolves from debate to personal attacks to real world stalking and harassment to legal cases to them splitting the community into different sites that pretty much refuse to talk to each other and ban stories with their nonpreferred relationship. These sites then sort themselves out into a status hierarchy with a few people called Big Name Fans at the top and everyone else competing to get their attention and affection, whether by praising them slavishly or by striking out in particularly cruel ways at people in the “enemy” relationship community.

A young woman named MsScribe joins the Harry/Hermione community. She proceeds to make herself popular and famous by use of sock-puppet accounts (a sockpuppet is when someone uses multiple internet nicknames to pretend to be multiple different people) that all praise her and talk about how great she is. Then she moves on to racist and sexist sockpuppet accounts who launch lots of slurs at her, so that everyone feels very sorry for her.

At the height of her power, she controls a small army of religious trolls who go around talking about the sinfulness of Harry Potter fanfiction authors and especially MsScribe and how much they hate gay people. All of these trolls drop hints about how they are supported by the Harry/Ginny community, and MsScribe leads the campaign to paint everyone who wants Harry and Ginny to be in a relationship as vile bigots and/or Christians. She classily cements her position by convincing everyone to call them “cockroaches” and post pictures of cockroaches whenever they make comments.

Throughout all this, a bunch of people are coming up with ironclad evidence that she is the one behind all of this (this is the Internet! They can just trace IPs!) Throughout all of it, MsScribe makes increasingly implausible denials. And throughout all of it, everyone supports MsScribe and ridicules her accusers. Because really, do you want to be on the side of a confirmed popular person, or a bunch of confirmed suspected racists whom we know are racist because they deny racism which is exactly what we would expect racists to do?

MsScribe writes negatively about a fan with cancer asking for money, and her comments get interpreted as being needlessly cruel to a cancer patient. Her popularity drops and everyone takes a second look at the evidence and realizes hey, she was obviously manipulating everyone all along. There is slight sheepishness but few apologies, because hey, we honestly thought the people we were bullying were unpopular.

MsScribe later ended up switching from Harry Potter fandom to blogging about social justice issues.

Oh, the humanity.

This is actually a summary of a very long account you can read here.

Church of Yemrehanna Kristos, Ethiopia

Painted ceiling, early 12th century. Via the History Blog.

Backing Trump Despite it All

Mark Krikorian:

Donald Trump is unfit to be president. He’s a braggart and a liar. And a serial adulterer. He’s behaved shamefully during the primary campaign. He wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if he tripped over it in the street. He doesn’t know even the Cliff Notes version of any policy issue. The idea that the party of Lincoln and Reagan, Coolidge and Eisenhower, Justice Harlan and Senator Taft has nominated Trump is appalling.

And I'm going to vote for him anyway.

Krikorian goes on to explain that the people the president appoints are in toto more important than just the president, and he expects that a Trump administration will be staffed with Republican party types he will prefer to Hillary appointees. Which is true up to a point. But the decisions a president makes still matter, and Trump has shown evidence of both awful judgment and a refusal to take advice, even an unwillingness to listen to advice that might be heard as criticism. So making him president still seems to me a bad bet for a person of conservative temperment.

A Public Death and a Secret Addiction

Speculation and uncertainty surrounding the death of Prince is converging on an ugly explanation:

Prince Rogers Nelson had an unflinching reputation among those close to him for leading an assiduously clean lifestyle. He ate vegan and preferred to avoid the presence of meat entirely. He was known to eschew alcohol and marijuana, and no one who went on tour with him could indulge either.

But Prince appears to have shielded from even some of his closest friends that he had a problem with pain pills, one that grew so acute that his friends sought urgent medical help from Dr. Howard Kornfeld of California, who specializes in treating people addicted to pain medication.

Dr. Kornfeld, who runs a treatment center in Mill Valley, Calif., sent his son on an overnight flight to meet with Prince at his home to discuss a treatment plan, said William J. Mauzy, a lawyer for the Kornfeld family, during a news conference on Wednesday outside his Minneapolis office.

But he arrived too late.

When the son, Andrew Kornfeld, who works with his father but is not a doctor, arrived in Chanhassen, the Minneapolis suburb where Prince lived, the next morning, he was among those who found the entertainer lifeless in the elevator and called 911, Mr. Mauzy said. Emergency officials arrived but could not revive Prince. He was dead at 57.

Opiate pills are a clean, neat high – no smoke, no smell, no needles, no scars, no obvious signs other than an intermittent zoned-out state easy to blame on other things – and quite a few of the addicted are people whose fastidiousness kept them from indulging in messier vices. This used to be a joke, as in, "maybe if you smoked and drank more you wouldn't have this drug problem," but I don't find it amusing any more.

Prince's death points to another important side of this epidemic, the role of pain and injury. Prince, we now discover, suffered from chronic pain from oft-injured hips. Like many other musicians, actors and dancers he took pain pills so he could perform despite the injuries. Drug abuse is rampant among dancers in particular for just this reason – they are often injured and need to perform anyway, and unlike professional athletes they don't face any sort of drug testing scrutiny. It is hard to estimate how many of the millions of Americans who abuse opiates got started in this way, but probably quite a lot of them.

Prince may also have suffered from depression, the other great gateway to addiction. This is disputed among his friends, but if it is true it puts him in the same sad boat as millions of others. Many people are sad and anxious in a way that SSRI's don't touch, and for some of them opiates soothe their pain in a way that nothing else does.

Which is why opiate addiction is, I think, a social as much as a medical problem. Why are there so many people confronting pain alone?

Trump's "Working Class" Supporters

Nate Silver:

As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

Notice that the median voter for all the candidates has an income above the national norm, because of the oft-noted fact that poor Americans are much less likely to vote.

But I think it is important that despite what you have read, Trump's supporters are not people who have lost out economically. He draws support from all income groups, including the wealthiest. The core attribute of his voters is not economic pain but ethno-cultural anger.

Villa Cimbrone

Villa Cimbrone is a famous jewel on Italy's Amalfi Coast, overlooking the sea just outside Ravello. The oldest sections were built around 1100 CE, by the Acconciagiocco.

In the fifteenth century the house passed to the Fusco family, who held onto it into the 17th century. For a while it belonged to the pope, and then in the 19th century it was acquired by another wealthy local family, the Amici.

Much altered over the years it was described in 1861 by a visiting Englishman like this:

incomparable ... where the most beautiful flowers you can imagine flourished, coming from numerous plants of the South ... redesigned and enriched with countless ... ornamental features, small temples, pavilions, bronze and stone statues.

In 1904 it was purchased by another Englishman named Lord Grimthorpe, who despite his Dickensian title was a charming fellow and a noted gardener. He and his daughter, Lucille Becket, are largely responsible for the grounds as they exist today.

The "Avenue of Immensity" and the statue of Ceres at its end. Since 1976 the villa has been a hotel.

The cloister, now used for weddings.

Gore Vidal:

Twenty five years ago I was asked by an American magazine what was the most beautiful place that I had ever seen in all my travels and I said the view from the belvedere of the Villa Cimbrone on a bright winter's day when the sky and the sea were each so vividly blue that it was not possible to tell one from the other.

This spot is called the Terrazzo dell'lnfinito, that is, the Terrace of Infinity. After reading about these spaces I have decided that I need to give more impressive names to the rooms in my own house, and the parts of my garden.

 The tea room.

 The entrance. Quite a place.

Donald Trump is the Republican Nominee

Have a nice day!

Outsiderism vs. Getting Things Done

I've been listening to The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House (2014) by Chuck Todd. Todd is a real insider journalist, the political director of NBC News and moderator of Meet the Press, so judge what he says accordingly.

In Todd's telling almost everything Obama did wrong during his first term came from lack of experience and a refusal to do things in the time-tested Washington way. Obama and his closest aides came into office determined to change the way Washington works. A symbol of this was their opposition to earmarks in spending bills, the traditional way politicians brought home the goods for their districts or states. To Todd, all the problems Obama has had getting bills passed can be traced back to this rigid unwillingness to make sausage like an old-fashioned pol. The Tea Party Republicans who took over the House after 2010 had a similar rigidity and an identical hatred of earmarks, and the result was complete legislative paralysis. Limited by their own rules, neither side had anything to offer that the other wanted. Todd also places some blame on Obama's famous lack of interest in schmoozing and making friends and all that back-slapping stuff. Todd doesn't make this the centerpiece of his narrative – as I said, he thinks Obama's real problem is highminded rigidity – but he clearly thinks Obama could have found some Republicans to make friend with if he had tried.

That was probably too negative a way to begin. Todd obviously admires much about Obama, including his intelligence, incorruptibility and concern for the nation. Todd is also very good on the challenges faced by the administration, from terrorism to the birthers. But he also obviously thinks Obama could have accomplished even more if he had relied more on friendship and deal-making and less on intellect and high principles.

If Todd has a hero, it is Joe Biden. Biden was friends with everyone and this sometimes enabled him to reach deals with Republicans when Obama could not. The best case of this came when Obama was trying to get the START nuclear arms reduction treaty through the Senate, which required 67 votes and therefore some Republican support. In Todd's telling, the Obama people were in a White House meeting, with Harry Reid on the phone from Capitol Hill, strategizing over whether Reid should schedule a vote on the treaty when they didn't have enough Republican votes securely locked down. Biden comes in, says, "Harry, schedule the vote, I'll get you the votes you need", goes back to his office, gets on the phone to his old Senate friends, and eight hours later has all the pledges of support necessary.

From this inside perspective much turns on how well the West Wing is run and thus on the ability and personality of the chief of staff and a few other key players. To Todd, it is imperative that these people be Washington pols with decades of political experience and large networks of connections. In the way he tells the story, things like who was invited to the meeting and who called which Congressman first determine the fate of the Republic. I have never been sure how seriously to take this sort of stuff. Sometimes it seems to me that there is a whole lot of scurrying and posturing and so on and in the end what happens is what everyone expected at the beginning. But one person who absolutely agrees is Obama. When he picked his cabinet and senior staff in 2008 he disappointed his more Hopey/Changey backers and friends by selecting mainly veterans of the Clinton administration or other Washington insiders. Todd, of course, thinks this was exactly the right thing to do, and he attributes much of Obama's success to the presence around him of professionals like Hillary, Robert Gates, Timothy Geitner, and Rahm Emanuel.

This has made interesting reading in the midst of this crazy election season. From every side (well, except Hillary's) we hear that insiders are the problem, that Washington professionals can't be trusted, that we need new blood and new ideas and a radical change in how Washington operates. And here is Chuck Todd, vastly knowledgeable about recent Washington history, saying that even Obama was too much of a moralistic outsider to really operate effectively in the capital. From his perspective the notion of a Sanders or Trump administration must be laughable. Or maybe terrifying.

Franck K. Lundangi

Franck Lundangi, born 1958, is an artist, poet, philosopher, and former starter on the Angolan national soccer team who now lives in Paris. According to his gallery,

Lundangi ’s art explores the themes of life, death and love. His inspiration comes from silence. Franck Lundangi ’s approach can be described as spiritual, and cosmological.

Strange stuff, I admit, but for some reason I like it.

And when something strange and new grabs you, why argue?

Celtic Gold Ring, 5th c BCE

Halstatt period. Notice the faces. Up for sale at Timeline Auctions.

Weight Loss, Metabolism, and the Biggest Loser

Back in 2009, federal scientist and reality TV fan Kevin Hall had an idea: to use a season's worth of contestants on The Biggest Loser to study what happens to people's bodies after they lose a lot of weight. The results make pretty grim reading – unless you are looking for excuses, in which case they are gold.

It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.

Researchers knew that just about anyone who deliberately loses weight — even if they start at a normal weight or even underweight — will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends. So they were not surprised to see that “The Biggest Loser” contestants had slow metabolisms when the show ended.

What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.

Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.

People can lose weight and keep it off, but only if they make it one of the central goals of their lives.

Protesters in Baghdad Demand Government by Experts

Fascinating events in Baghdad over the weekend:

Protesters stormed Iraq’s parliament Saturday in a dramatic culmination of months of demonstrations, casting uncertainty over the tenure of the country’s prime minister and the foundations of the political system laid in place after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Security forces declared a state of emergency in the Iraqi capital after demonstrators climbed over blast walls and broke through cordons to enter Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, also home to ministries and the U.S. embassy. Many were followers of Iraq’s powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has been urging his supporters onto the streets.

Lawmakers fled the building in panic, with some berated and struck as they left. Others were trapped in the basement for hours, too afraid to face the crowds who complain that the country’s political class is racked by corruption.

And what is it, exactly, that the former firebrand al-Sadr and his followers want?

Street protests began last summer, when tens of thousands demonstrated against corruption and a lack of services. They were reinvigorated when Sadr put his weight behind them earlier this year, calling for Iraq’s government to be replaced by technocrats.

Under immense pressure, Abadi has tried to reshuffle his cabinet and meet the demonstrators’ demands. But he has been hampered by a deeply divided parliament, and sessions have descended into chaos as lawmakers have thrown water bottles and punches at one another.

So what al-Sadr wants is what self-proclaimed "centrists" in the US always say they want, an end to partisan squabbling and a technocratic government focused on concrete results.

Maybe we could lend them Michael Bloomberg; I hear he's restless in retirement and might want to get back into politics.

Back to Changing Society: the Dubious Effects of Progressive Agitation

Here's a round-up of some disturbing findings from social psychology that one has to consider when thinking about any plan to change society.

On complaints that tests are biased against minorities:

We know exactly what happens when minorities are told tests are biased against them: they do worse on those tests. This is the essence of the idea of “stereotype threat” – for example, one can improve women’s performance on a math test simply by telling them that the test is not biased against women. So maybe we should stop doing exactly the thing that we just proved hurts women and minorities’ educational performance.

On educating children away from drugs:

nearly every study on DARE programs has found that they increase drug use, sometimes as much as 30%.

On "sensitivity training":

A comprehensive review of 31 years of data from 830 mid-size to large U.S. workplaces found that the kind of diversity training exercises offered at most firms were followed by a 7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management. The number of black, female managers fell by 10 percent, and the number of black men in top positions fell by 12 percent. Similar effects were seen for Latinos and Asians.

Besides, just talking to people about diversity makes them more likely to think in terms of racial and ethnic categories.

Plus, calling people racists makes them more racist. In fact all attempts to change people's attitudes run afoul of things called the "boomerang effect" and the "backfire effect." Basically, people hate to be criticized, and the main thing that happens when you criticize them is that they get defensive and find ways to justify their beliefs and actions.

It should of course be said that this is all social psychology, so none of these findings need be taken very seriously. There are studies that purport to show the opposite. On balance, though, the findings that show these reverse effects are stronger and better attested than anything showing that these measures help. There is simply no evidence that complaining about rape culture reduces rape, or that fulminating against racism decreases racism.

On the other hand there has been a measurable decline in both sexism and racism over the past 70 years, so these things can change. Maybe measures that fail in the short term have some effect on a time scale of generations. Or maybe the changes are being driven by forces that have little to do with moralist hectoring.

The Antietam Battlefield with Two Children

I took my two younger children to Antietam today. Ben, 13, has just started getting interested in military history, and Clara just likes to go out and do things, so she happily came along. We went to the visitor's center to watch their 25-minute video, which is quite good, and then visited what to me are the three most evocative parts of the battlefield: the bloody cornfield, the sunken lane, and Burnside Bridge. The bloody cornfield is where the first phase of the battle was fought, a 2½-hour slaughter during which a man was killed or wounded every second. It's still a cornfield, and I've always wondered what they do with the corn they harvest there.

At the sunken lane. The Confederates used this as a ready-made trench, but as I've explained before it is actually a terrible place to defend, and it ended up becoming a trap for hundreds of the men who defended it.

Ben is ready to repel attackers, and Clara is already dead.

They practice contemplative poses.

Up in the observation tower. The views weren't great, because it was a gray, gray day, but it was still fun.

Notice this pigeon happily nesting in among the anti-pigeon spikes.

Confederate's-eye view of Burnside Bridge; an old photo because today it was covered with scaffolding. I explained to Ben that it was defended by Georgians and attacked by New Yorkers. He said,

So it was like, Georgians: "Y'all goan die." New Yorkers: "Fuggetaboutit."

Ice cream at Nutter's in Sharpsburg, an essential part of any trip to Antietam.

Clowning in the National Cemetery. They had a copy of the Gettysburg Address posted on a wall, and we read it aloud together, taking turns. As we walked away Ben said, "It was cool that we did that."