The Scientist's Nightmare

I dreamed that I submitted a workplan for an upcoming project and received the comment that we should be employing Advanced Super Techniques (AST). Then there was a call about the project in which I was again urged to use Advanced Super Techniques. I pretended to know what this meant and made what I hoped were some appropriate remarks about what we might learn using AST, meanwhile frantically googling to find out what it meant; but my screen filled up with a solid block of random letters and symbols.

Then I somehow heard about an expert in AST and went to consult him. His lab was in an old brick factory building. When I entered the building I discovered that the lower floors had been made into artists' spaces, studios with a shop in the center. Everyone looked at me strangely. The geometry of the building was an Escherian impossibility and I was completely lost, but I pretended to know where I was going and fumbled my way around, getting increasingly hostile looks. I eventually made my way up a mad staircase to the Fourth Floor, where I pushed open a door and entered a forest of trees growing in complete darkness. Feeling like I was finally getting somewhere I pulled out my phone, turned on the flashlight, and entered the forest, where I saw strange instrumets and old smartphones hanging from wires around the trees. Then I woke.

T.M. Lurhman on the Anthropology of Faith

American anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann's whole career has been about trying to refine the notion of "belief." In her studies of British Wiccans, American evangelicals, and others, she has shown that people's statements about what they "believe" vary dramatically from day to day and situation to situation. What is core to religion, in her view, is experience, and belief is often secondary or even irrelevent to religion.

For as long as it has existed, anthropology has been partly about describing other societies and partly about critiquing the anthropologist's own society. Consider Tacitus using the supposed marital fidelity of German tribesmen to attack the morals of Rome, or Margaret Meade using Samoan practices to question the sexual repression of the early twentieth-century west. In this fascinating essay, Luhrmann asks how that works when it comes to religion. We often see anthropologists praising the child-rearing practices of those they study with the idea that westerners should copy them, but not so much when it comes to religion. Published anthropological studies almost all take a view that might be called methodological atheism, that is, one simply does not get into whether religious beliefs are true or false, or good or bad. 

Yet god is the most radically other of radical otherness. One might think that exploring this otherness might be the greatest challenge any anthropologist could bring to the everyday expectations of the world back home. Why have we not done so?

A group of anthropologists sometimes called "ontological" have indeed done this to some extent:  

The ontological turn might seem to be the place anthropologists have risen to this challenge of confronting radical otherness. The early ontological writings certainly seemed as if they would. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Morten Pederson, and Martin Holbraad wrote fiery texts about the ways that most anthropologists examined the belief commitments of people like those in Amazonia, Cuba, and Siberia. These ontologists argued that most anthropologists treated such beliefs with scorn.

They argued that most anthropological observers presumed that such beliefs must be wrong, or that we needed to provide an account of why people held false understandings—and that view, the ontologists argued, was driven by deep-seated colonialist impulses or a kind of scientific imperialism. The point of the ontological turn was to insist that we should abandon these presumptions and decolonize anthropological thought. Willerslev and Suhr quote Viveiros de Castro: “Anthropologists must allow that ‘visions’ are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision” (2011: 133).

But these ontological anthropologists have not brought back observations from these local worlds in order to reimagine their own. One strongly doubts that Viveiros de Castro himself believes that women can become jaguars (to borrow the famous example). Neither Martin Holbraad nor Morten Pedersen has argued for an ontological understanding of his own world that seems different from the one he held before setting out to do fieldwork. Instead, in the recent (and admirably clear) summary of their position, they both appear to have pulled back from the claim that these other beliefs are veridical accounts of reality. To the extent that Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) accept these non-European belief commitments (the woman became a jaguar), they simply insist that these beliefs are veridical to others—and that, as James Laidlaw (2012) so articulately points out, leads us not into ontological confrontation but into epistemological relativism, the position that anthropologists have always held.

The anthropologists who are interested in how westerners might be changed by the encounter with others often focus on their own experience in a radically individual way:    

Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr make a different intellectual move. They focus on moments that are intellectually inexplicable from within an anthropologist’s secular worldview, and yet common in the lives of many fieldworkers.

Willerslev and Suhr draw from these moments a disciplinary epistemology of uncertainty and openness. They take the lesson that these events are the way that anthropological insights are made—that it is the shock of such moments that leads people trained into a certain worldview to break open into a different way of seeing. Anthropology grows, they say, with the ability to doubt what one knows, and through doubt, to change what one imagines. “This personal commitment to existential transformation of the self is as essential to the anthropological project as it was to Socrates” (73)

But since Luhrmann's study is focused on experience rather than belief, she sees the question differently:

To my mind, the powerful insight that arises out of the encounter with an alien god—alien to the anthropologist, that is—is that the purpose of life itself can be imagined differently as a result. We secular observers focus on the concept of “god” as a claim to a kind of stuffness— a real immateriality, a nature beyond ordinary nature (a supernature); perhaps, as George Eliot put it, the sound on the other side of silence. We often miss the important social fact that those of faith also take god to be radically other, too, and as a result, are often more committed to moral purpose than to supernatural reality. As an observer of the faithful, I want to point out that the most fundamental observation about faith is not that divine stuff exists, but that moral purpose in the face of uncertainty will change the world as we know it.

Faith is about seeing the world as it is and experiencing it—to some extent—as the world as it should be. Faith is about having trust that the world is good, safe, and beautiful. The blunt fact that these commitments are held in a world that is often brutal and unfair tells us that faith is hard and requires effort. Belief in a just, fair, good world is not some kind of mistake, not a deluded misconception that observers need to explain, but the fundamental point of the faith commitment—regardless of the supernatural nature of the divine. Faith is about holding certain commitments front and center in your understanding of reality even when the empirical facts seem to contradict them. That is why faith takes work and why faith changes the faithful. It is also why the encounter with the radical otherness of divinity should be central to anthropology, because it encourages the anthropologist to imagine how his or her own world and own life could be fundamentally different. . . .

The anthropological problem with god is that we treat the belief in the supernatural stuff as the heart of the matter. It is not. Far more central is the concept of radical otherness and its concomitant commitment that a sense of moral purpose can change the world as it is into the world as it should be whether anything empirical about that world changes at all.

Luhrmann, along with Weston La Barre, changed my own view of religion. I used to be a naive young atheist who always wanted to ask, "how can anyone believe that?" Now I see belief as a secondary phenomenon, something that arises from a commitment to a certain way of living and a strong desire to see meaning in the world, and I no longer wonder how smart people can immerse themeselves in it.

But I also find that I personally can't get away from belief. The problem, for me, with church services and the like is that people are always referencing beliefs that I don't share. Even a phrase like "Jesus said" launches me into questions about what we actually know about Jesus. I have met atheists who love divine music, but at least when it is sung in English I always get caught up in the theology. I am by nature an overthinking intellectual whose musings about divinity always start from facts, like those two trillion galaxies I like to reference. Regardless of what I feel, I can never shove the facts as we know them from the center of my mind long enough to experience the world in any other way.

Links 22 November 2024

Louis Fratino, Laughing Gull, 2021

The Aztecs once sacrificed 42 children in an attempt to appease the rain god and end a drought.

Wonderful Etruscan sarcophagi seized from looters.

More exit polls, showing the shift of various groups of men vs. 2020:

Non-white non-college men: Trump +21
White non-college men: Trump +9
Non-white college men: Trump +9
White college men: Harris +2

Some largely Asian precincts in major cities shifted 15-30% toward Trump; "The injustice of being labeled as privileged, selfish, cheaters, overrepresented, white adjacent, and resource hoarders hurt very deeply."

Trump beat Harris among pre-trail detainees at the Cook County Jail.

Interview with author John Green about his crusade to make the world "suck less."

Saber-tooth kitten mummy found in Siberia, 35,000 years old.

SpaceX has has recently launched 17 rockets in 31 days, bringing their total to 114 so far in 2024. They are dominating the launch industry.

The history and modern business of olive oil, with a focus on the bogus organic cachet of "extra virgin," actually a product of modern industrial methods.

Possible explanation for the "Wow signal" of 1977, no aliens involved. Original paper here.

Cass Sunstein on what is exactly involved in making the government more efficient.

More work on estimating the number of deaths in the US Civil War, with a best guess of 698,000. (NY Times, original paper)

If all the big art shows only display works by supposedly marginalized artists, who is marginalized? "There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting."

Medieval mass grave found in Leicester, England. One minute video here.

Interesting review of Jordan Peterson's new book on the Bible, mainly asking the question of whether Peterson's faith in a therapeutic, symbolicized God can really protect us from nihilism.

Scott Siskind reveals which art works in his quiz are human vs. AI.

Codes and secret secretaries in Renaissance Venice.

The Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) figures out that one of its most famous UFOs, known as GOFAST because it appeared to be skimming the sea surface at fantastic speed, was not actually going very fast. Using the advanced technology known as trigonometry they worked out that it was at an altitude of 13,000 feet and traveling at a perfectly normal speed.

Former Republican Senator Ben Sasse was hired to be President of the University of Florida on a 5-year, $10 million contract, but left after 17 months. According to the NY Times, the biggest issue was that the Board of Trustees is obsessed with raising the school's US News & World Report rankings, and Sasse didn't care. When the school slipped from 5 to 6 among public universities, the board demanded to know what he was going to do about it, he said, "nothing," and out he went. This local Florida story agrees that the rankings issue was important but also cites financial scandals and personality conflicts with the head of the board. It strikes me that many conservatives are feeling like they left higher education to liberals for too long and now want to increase their involvement, but that can mean very different things, from withdrawing into "classical education" to a business-style, "results oriented" push like we have seen at Texas A&M, Florida, and (for a while) Virginia.

The Leonidas microwave weapon is intended to nullify the threat of small, cheap drones; basically it uses a precise EMP to disable electronics, so it would in theory work on autonomous drones. It is designed to be modular and easily updated to keep up with any countermeasures. Now being tested by US forces in Syria. Ad from the manufacturer, 18-minute video, article from Army Technology.

First video of a western tank (Leopard 2A4) knocking out a Russian tank in combat.

Video of Russia's IRBM strike on Ukraine: Twitter/X, YouTube.

The Last of Fall

Went out walking today under darkening gray clouds, with snow in the forecast for tonight. But still some Fall color left.

The Perils of Diversity

From the abstract to a new, paywalled paper titled The Misery of Diversity:

Evolutionary accounts assert that while diversity may lower subjective well-being (SWB) by creating an evolutionary mismatch between evolved psychological tendencies and the current social environment, human societies can adapt to diversity via intergroup contact under appropriate conditions. Exploiting a novel natural experiment in history, we examine the impact of the social environment, captured by population diversity, on SWB. We find that diversity lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB. Diversity-induced deteriorations in the quality of the macrosocial environment, captured by reduced social cohesion, retarded state capacity, and increased inequality in economic opportunities, emerge as mechanisms explaining our findings. The analysis of first- and second-generation immigrants in Europe and the USA reveals that the misery of home country diversity persists even after neutralizing the role of the social environment. However, these effects diminish among the second generation, suggesting that long-term improvements in the social environment can alleviate the burden of diversity.

Somewhere on this site I discuss a paper about a corporation that had 4-6 person offices all over the world; the researchers found that people were happier and more productive when the office was all male or all female. All the studies I have ever seen find that most people are happiest around others like themselves and want to live that way most of the time.

Not that this is the whole story; after all, if immigrants had been happy in their home countries they presumably would never have left. Village life has its own miseries, and people have been leaving their birth villages for the big city for about 5,000 years now. As I have said many times, I personally prefer mixed-sex gatherings to all male ones, although I am finding that men over 50 are less obnoxious in groups than they were when we were younger.

But, anyway, when you are pondering why our vast wealth and long lives have not made us happy, you have to consider the price we pay for having to live and work with people who feel to us like strangers.

(That can apply to distinctions other than ethnicity and sex; I mean, think about how miserable every presidential election makes tens of millions of Americans on the losing side.)

There are also very basic problems with extending the village mentality to a nation. While it might be possible for a country like Norway to maintain ethnic unity, the US has been multi-ethnic and multi-cultural from its beginnings. It was probably Indians in the southeast who first divided North Americans into Red, Black and White, in the early 1700s, and we have been diverse ever since. Attempts to achieve ethnic purity in the US therefore all amount to Apartheid. While I'm on the subject, ethnic unity in many European states was achieved by some combination of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation. Our desire to live among others like us, while understandable and extremely ancient, always has a dark side that we need to monitor.

When one group has most of the money and power, their desire to hang out with each other can also amount to a severe barrier for others; it was for this reason that the men's clubs that used to be so important in the US (Elks, Kiwanis, etc.) were forced to admit women. (Is that part of why they have declined?)

When I write about immigration to the US, I always acknowledge that there are costs. It is simply true that having to deal with people who feel alien "lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB." Many European ethno-nationalists also write about the bad effects this has on immigrants, torn away from what these writers see as their native homes and cultures, and this paper seems to support the notion that immigrants suffer from their status.

But I think the benefits are worth it. I think the US is more vibrant, more productive, and more interesting with millions of immigrants than it would be without them. Immigration also makes the cost of our aging population more sustainable; take away the contributions of recent immigrants and Social Security would already be bankrupt. I also think that in the US it would have always been hard for blacks to achieve equality in a country that was 85% white than it will be in a more diverse situation.

And I think we are much better off with women in public life, doubling our reservoir of talent and energy.

Sometimes when I read liberals going on about the wonders of diversity I cringe and think about the huge literature showing that diversity makes many of us unhappy. But when I consider that we are stuck with diversity, I think that maybe celebrating what we have is the way to go.

A Scythian Queen

Skeleton of a Scythian queen excavated from the Chertomlyk barrow, near Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine. From the excavation report by Vasily A. Prokhorov, 1881.

Headdress and ornaments of a priestess Demeter, found in the tomb. Date is c. 425 BC.

Silver rhyton found in the same barrow.

Hegel, History, and the Future

From Michael Sugrue's excellent lecture on Hegel's philosophy of history:

The big concern of the nineteenth century is history. Utopian socialists, people like Comte and Fourier, are people who are essentially interested in ending history. They said that previous centuries, previous societies, previous governments, the way they have treated human beings, have all be a scandal, a disgrace. We have now gotten to an enlightened state of consciousness where we can create a new society, where we can abolish that earlier society and have true human relations and a truly human world. Marx's philosophy is shot through with the idea that the industrial revolution makes possible a new epoch in human history, which is fundamentally different from all the other phases of human history.

Hegel saw himself as representing a key moment in human history, when the whole evolutionary process became aware of itself. His philosophy represented, therefore, a radical break, prehaps the very culmination of history, one might say the end of history. And people have been announcing the end of history ever since. Sugrue lists a bunch, including post-modernists and deconstructionists and so on who believed they had understood something about western thought that everyone had missed before, that texts actually have no meanings or communication is actually impossible or what have you:

Modern intellectual trends and practices are, with varying degrees of comprehension, the heirs of Hegel's end of history argument, that something fundamentally new and important is happening to us right now that makes us fundamentally different from all the other generations who have been stuck and enchained in earlier traditions. But this is nothing new; we have been doing this since Hegel. All of these crypto end of history arguments are homage to Hegel, homage to the idea that even if human history can no longer be seen as a necessary progression toward the final state of human existence, there is something fundamentally different about us that allows us to recognize that fact. The idea that we have fundamentally turned a corner sounds like it is new and exciting and it thrills undergraduates when you tell them stuff like that, but my point is that it is at least 150 years old.

My question is this: is the modernist belief in radical change dead? Have we stopped imagining that we have the power to enter an entirely different mode of human existence, when everything will be better? Are there any thinkers who see their ideas as marking a radical break with everything that came before?

The only contemporary school I can think of that fits this pattern is the AI guys with their "singularity." But nobody can agree on whether that will be good for us or terrible, so that seems a bit different. Thoughts?

Links 15 November 2024

Henri Matisse, illustration for Henri de Montherlant’s

Pasiphaé, Chant de Minos, 1944.

The other day I went looking for information on Maya cosmology, and one of the first pages that came up was this old blog post that focuses on casting a Maya horoscope for Princess Diana.

American higher education is getting cheaper (Marginal Revolution).

US officials have pushed Qatar to expel the leaders of Hamas, with the argument that since they won't engage seriously with cease fire proposals, there doesn't seem to be much point in keeping them around. According to news reports, Qatar has agreed to toss them. This happened before the US election.

Raw exit poll data comparing how people voted to how much attention they pay to political news (Twitter/X):

-a great deal: harris +8
-a lot: harris +5
-a moderate amount: trump +1
-a little: trump +8
-none at all: trump +15

Tambalacoque (Sideroxylon grandiflorum) trees are not completely dependent on dodo birds and are in no danger of going extinct. Kicking myself for ever believing this when the truth was on wikipedia.

Summary of the career of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber: "David’s recurrent rallying cry as both a scholar and an activist was: It does not have to be this way." Unfortunately, I think that if you want a wealthy, technologically sophisticated civilization it really does have to be this way.

The NY Times reports on the 470,000 people who fled the Syrian civil war to Lebanon and are now fleeing Lebanon back to Syria. More Syrians would be returning if the Assad regime hadn't threatened to jail everyone who ever opposed them.

Neanderthal inbreeding; DNA of the 42,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton known as Thorin shows evidence of severe inbreeding, as if his people had been living for thousands of years in a small, isolated group. This might be an important part of the the history of our genus; was the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens caused in part by wider marriage networks? David Reich discussed Neanderthal inbreeding in the interview I linked to here.

Tyler Cowen against tarriffs.

Kevin Drum on a new study that says tax cuts for the rich don't help economic growth but do make the rich richer.

Smog in Pakistan is so bad you can see it from space. This week schools and "unessential" businesses in Karachi and Lahore were closed to reduce the health risk.

Meanwhile, in America: Megan Fox Announces Fourth Pregnancy with Grungy Nude Photo Shoot.

Zvi, a rationalist figure who is in many matters a pretty strict libertarian, has turned against sports gambling: "ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors." As someone who lightly follows basketball and soccer I am regularly shocked by the ubiquity of gambling talk and gambling ads.

The quest to make glass ever stonger, 23-minute video from Veritasium.

Evidence that a supernova 2.6 million year ago may have caused the mass extinction at the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary. (Scientific paper, news story) That's when the Megalodons died.

Manifesto for a future, moderate Democratic Party from Matt Yglesias on Twitter/X.

Speculation that cuneiform writing was influenced by design elements that appear on cylinder seals as far back as 4400 BC.

Police break up a cock-fighting "ring" in rural Virginia; names of the arrested are all Hispanic. You will be glad to learn that "All 80 chickens are currently being housed and cared for at the Stafford County Animal Shelter and are scheduled to be seen by a vet. The Stafford County Animal Shelter is currently exploring long-term solutions for their future."

Congress continues to hold hearings on UFO sitings and alleged government cover-ups.

Sam Harris election post-mortem, blames much of the Democratic defeat on identity politics. His main worry for the future is the culture of lies and the loss of faith in the media and other institutions.

I was just thinking that I hadn't heard much about Alaska lately. So when a video from Economics Explained popped up in my feed, I listened to it. I learned that oil production in Alaska has been declining since the 1980s and is now half of Oklahoma's. Payments from the state's wealth fund don't come close to covering the state's extra cost of living, so people are leaving and the population is falling.

Poaching and game laws in 19th-century England.

Kevin Drum has the data on how much drug use has declined among American teenagers

More on the fall in US drug overdose deaths.

The fake bear attacks on cars scam.

"Pearls of Wisdom" from Kevin Drum, 66 things he thinks are true and important.

East London in the 70s and 80s, cool photo collection.

The restoration of Bernini's Baldacchino in the Vatican.

Tyler Cowen interviews Neal Stephenson.

Roberto Bolaño, "2666"

What is literature, and how should we relate to it?

What is life, and how should we relate to it?

Are these the same question, or not? 

Your first response if probably that of course life and fiction are different, but Roberto Bolaño wants you to think a little harder. After all, most of what happens in the world is a long way from you and involves nobody that you know. Consider, for example, the murders of women that took place in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in the 1990s. There were hundreds. Some of these crimes turned out to have been committed by husbands or lovers, and a few were women who had been mixed up with drug trafficking. But from early on there were rumors of a serial killer, or a series of copycat killers, or perhaps a conspiracy of wealthy men who raped and killed with impunity because they had bribed the police to look away. But whoever did it, at least 200 women seem to have been raped and murdered by strangers, their bodies dumped in the desert, without anyone ever being punished for the crime.

To you, in your comfortable house, what is the meaning of this story? Presumably you cannot do anything about it, any more than you could if it had happened entirely within the pages of a novel. You can only think, and feel; the only place your knowledge of these events could make any change to the world would be within your own head. And maybe a fictional story about the murders of women in an imaginary Mexican city called Santa Teresa might cause the same change in your head as news accounts might, or perhaps an even greater change.

2666, published a year after Bolaño's death in 2003, is a monstrous, perplexing, intentionally incomplete, intentionally chaotic 900-page book that got famous partly because many readers felt it had something urgent to say but none of them could agree on what that something might be. My own take is that Bolaño's main subject was fiction itself: how it is related to reality, and how our minds understand or do not understand the difference between the two. I would not recommend this book, unless you are both captivated by fiction and enjoy thinking about how it works; some of the most glowing reviews of the book come from novelists like Jonathan Lethem. I found it amazing and I will be thinking about it for a long time.

The first section of 2666 gives us four professors who are all experts on a German writer who signs his books Benno von Archimboldi. These academics are obsessed with Archimboldi: they read and reread his books, go to conferences where they present papers about his books, argue with other academics who have different interpretations of the books. They would love to know more about Archimboldi but cannot find out anything about him beyond his birth date, 1920, and the fact that he fought in World War II. So they waste their time traveling to yet more conferences and sleeping with each other. Let me tell you, I would rather read the manual for my old dishwasher than a novel about professors having affairs, so I found this part tough going, and if I had not been intrigued by what I had read about the book I would have stopped. It's all a big tease anyway, because we learn next to nothing about Archimboldi's books. Why are people fascinated by him? What is the source of his power over them? We are never told, so the bare fact of this obsession looms in front of us, confronting us with the question of how it is that people can care so much about stories.

Because of a rumor that Archimboldi has been seen there, three of the professors fly off to a city in northern Mexico called Santa Teresa, obviously modeled on Ciudad Juárez. Nothing happens there, but we are introduced to the city that is one of the main characters in the book. Once we finally get rid of the amorous professors, we hang around Santa Teresa with a different professor and his daughter, another section I didn't enjoy very much. But then we meet an African American reporter named Fate who gets sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match between an obscure Mexican fighter and a seasoned pro from el Norte. Here you see Bolaño's astonishing writing skill on display. He can give you an American black man from a younger generation, pitch perfect voice, believable thoughts, really a great character. 

Then comes the longest section of the book, about the killings. Much of this is written in a dry, factual, police report style. Bodies are found, described, identified or not, a killer charged or not. It goes on for 400 pages, building a sick momentum of bland horror. Then in the midst of one of these endless crime reports we come on a gem of beautiful writing about sunset in the desert, or a wonderful little vignette about the family life of a victim. Considered as a general potrait of human existence, it is horrifying and a little too convincing.

In the last section we finally meet Archimboldi himself. After a glimpse at his childhood we follow him through his war years and into his postwar career as a writer. Still, though, we learn nothing about his books, although by this time it is clear why: if you want to know what sort of writing can fascinate people the way Archimboldi's is supposed to, just consider the book you are reading.

On his way from New York to Santa Teresa, our reporter Fate stops off in Detroit to interview a man who was once in the leadership of the Black Panthers. This is a side project of Fate's, nothing to do with the newspaper he works for, and it is just as it is irrelevent to the rest of this novel. But with Bolaño the answers are as likely to be in an eddy as in the main current. We listen as the old man gives a sort of sermon that carries us far away from the grimy world of working class Detroit:

He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last 15 years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for 40 or 50 years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80 . . . might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn't know whether what he's staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they're dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave.

It's perfectly in the character of the old man, but also perfectly Bolaño, and that is a trick very few writers can manage.

Like I said, I don't really recommend this book, unless you feel like immersing yourself in 900 pages of speculation about how a star is like a wave is like a corpse by the side of a road in the Mexican desert is like a mediocare professor's adoration of his favorite writer is like a bombed out city is like a story that goes on for 900 pages without resolving a single thing.

Avocados, Giant Ground Sloths, and the Machine of Popular Science

You may have heard that avocados evolved to be eaten by giant ground sloths. After all, most nutrient-rich fruits exist to get seeds deposited in a pile of poop, and what animal could be swallowing and pooping out the huge seeds of avocados? The idea that this might have been giant ground sloths goes back to a biologist named Dan Jansen in a paper published in 1982, but Jansen only offered it as a suggestion in a study mainly about other things, and he did not defend or analyze it. Then a popular science author named Connie Barlow found that obscure paper and put the notion in a book called The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms (2002).  From there it spread across the the whole landscape of popular science: Atlas Obscura, Smithsonian, etc.

But is it true? According to this this video from people who call themselves Sci Sho (transcript here), it is not. These people claim that 1) we have a lot of data about what ground sloths ate, from analysis of their bones and vast quantities of fossilized poop – some giant ground sloths slept in caves, and they pooped on the megafaunal scale – and it mostly points to leaves and grass, not fruit; and 2) avocados seeds used to be much smaller, 1-2 centimeters instead of the 5-6 centimeters of modern varieties, and that the seeds grew large thanks to domestication by humans. But they cite no sources and don't really radiate reliability.

So I started searching to see what I could find out. One thing I learned very quickly was that the ideas in that video are spreading, so you can get a lot of results if you search for the Myth of Ground Sloths and Avocados. 

But once something gets dubbed a "Myth" in this kind of discourse, you should start to suspect that it might have some kind of truth in it. So we must look deeper.

Somebody on Reddit who calls himself 7LeagueBoots says this:

Just regarding the avocado/giant sloth connection, there is a lot of misinformation embedded in that. There are a lot of different kinds of wild avocados, some with very large seeds, some with seeds about the size of an olive. They're reproducing just fine in the wild right now without any giant sloths running about. The fruit portion of these wild avocados is eaten by a wide range of animals, including bears in South America, birds all across their range, squirrels, and many more. The fact that these wild avocados, including those with large seeds, still persist places a very large question to the oft cited presumption that the were depended on giant sloths that have been extinct for around 11,000 years at this point. The research papers I've read on this subject say that it's a possibility that the trees were dependent on the giant sloths, but they all fail to address the elephant in the room. I worked in Ecuador for a while tracking Andean Spectacled Bears and one of their favorite foods was these wild avocados.

So he basically agrees with Sci Sho, although he says wild avocados have a diversity of seed sizes. But one of the responses to that post, from somebody called Bromelia_and_Bismuth, still comes down hard for ground sloths.

So I decided to look into avocado domestication. This very techincal paper on the avocado genome says that modern avocados are hybrids of three distinct wild "races" that were domesticated separately, and have been selectively bred so they bring out the desirable characteristics of each wild ancestor. And this:

The avocado is heterodichogamous, with 2 flowering types: A and B. Type A trees are female (receptive to pollen) in the morning of the first day and shed pollen as males in the afternoon of the following day. In contrast, type B trees are female in the afternoon of the first day and male in the morning of the next day.

This is presumably to limit self-fertilization, but, wow. Genderfluid trees.

Anyway.

This 2009 article on domestication says, "The large size of the avocado fruit appears to have developed before humans arrived in Mesoamerica, and then changed little in size or shape under human influence." Which seems to be a direct refutation of the claims made by Sci Sho. And on the subject of the three landraces, a term of art new to me, "Fruit size does not help differentiate between domestic and wild avocados due to the variation in fruit size caused by environmental factors and individual tree traits." This is important because the oldest archaeological evidence of avocado consumption by humans comes from mountain caves, so the small size of the seeds in that environment may tell us nothing about the size of ancient avocados in the tropical lowlands.

The data on ground sloth diet has a similar problem, because the surviving coprolites are found in mountainous areas with caves, and they only tell us what ground sloths ate in that environment. We don't have any data on what ground sloths ate in the tropical lowlands where most  avocado trees grew. Tropical forests are just a terrible environment for the preservation of anything.

So far as I can tell, this remains an open question. Avocado fruit are nutrient rich, so just about any herbivore could have eaten them. The fact that wild avocados of recent times survive without ground sloths seems to show that the dependence was not absolute, but it does not rule out ground sloths as key transmission vectors or co-evolution between them. After all there is no real "wild" place left in Central America, and all the forests have been shaped to one degree or another by humans; just as acai palms are a wild species that in practice mainly grows around old human settlements, wild, large-seeded avocados may in practice grow mainly where humans have encouraged them.

There is neither fact nor myth here, just an ongoing struggle to understand.

Which brings me to my real point, the perilous state of popular science writing. To get attention, the science press is constantly proclaiming that things are true when they are at best iffy, revolutionary when they may be decades old, "myths" when they still might be true. Sometimes much of the fault resides with the scientists themselves, who exaggerate their findings. But in this case the scientists are blameless. All Dan Jansen did was wonder what used to eat tropical fruit and suggest that somebody should investigate the possibility of ground sloths, which was a great idea. It might be true. But we don't know, and I hurl foul oaths and imprecations at anyone who says otherwise, and no I don't care what you have to do to get clicks. Tell the truth as best you can or shut up.

The World Grows

Part I: The Earth

The oldest known world map, Babylonian, 6th century BC. The text says this is a copy of a much older map, possibly 9th century BC. Babylon is at the center, surrounded by nine kingdoms, then the "Bitter River."

Reconstruction of the world map of Anaximander (c. 610-546 BC), based on much later texts.

Nineteenth-century reconstruction of the world map of Eratosthenes (c. 276-194 BC), showing the geographic knowledge of the Hellenistic Greeks.

World map drawn at Constantinople c. 1300 AD, based on the work of Ptolemy, c. 150 AD.

Reconstruction Al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana, drawn for Roger of Sicily in 1154 AD. North is at the bottom.

Da Ming Hunyi Tu, the Amalgamated Map of the Ming Empire, c. 1400 AD. China makes up half of this world.

The Fra Mauro Map, c. 1456.

Cantino Planisphere, 1502: The two halves of the globe are united.

Hendrik Hondius, Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrographica Tabula, 1630

Our planet from space.

Part II: the Cosmos

Egyptian, from The Book of the Dead of Nestanebetisheru, c. 950 BC.

Cosmos of the ancient Hebrews, from here.

Page from the Codex Fejervary-Mayer illustrating a key principle of Maya cosmology, often called the Quincunx, that is, the Five: the Maya world was made up of four cardinal directions and a central point around which everything revolves. The altar in a temple represented that central point. Each direction had its own suite of deities, and there was also a god for each level of heaven and each level of the underworld; counts varied for how many levels there were but went as high as 13.

The geocentric cosmos of Aristotle and Ptolemy, as drawn in 1524.

The heliocentric cosmos, from Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

In 1755, Immanuel Kant theorized that the visible stars were all in a cluster he dubbed an "island universe," and that the clouds known as nebulae were other island universes a vast distance away. In 1785 astronomer William Herschel drew this map of our island universe, the Milky Way.

By the late 1800s telescopes had grown powerful enough to resolve details in nearby galaxies; this is an 1899 photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy. But many astronomers remained unconvinced that these were really other galaxies as large as our own. In 1917, Heber Doust Curtis observed what he took to be a nova within the Great Andromeda Nebula. Searching through old photographs, he found 11 more novae. He calculated that these novae were about 10 magnitudes fainter than those within the Milky Way. As a result, he was able to come up with a distance estimate of 150,000 parsecs to Andromeda. In the 1920s Edwin Hubble used stars known as Cepheid Variables to refine this estimate to be about 275,000 parsecs, or 900,000 light years.

The Hubble Deep Field, to my mind the most important photograph ever taken. Based on Hubble data, astronomers calculated that there were 500 billion galaxies in the observable universe; that number has since been revised upward to around 2 trillion.

Links 8 November 2024

Giovanni Stanchi, "Fruits on a Table." Seventeenth-century watermelons
(lower right) looked a lot different from ours.

Does dark energy radiate from black holes? Beats me. If anyone has seen a good explanation of this theory I would appreciate a link.

Singapore's "Pan Pacific Orchard," the latest plant-covered skyscraper. (My Modern Met, Dezeen)

Thread on Twitter/X listing 50 ways the world is getting better: weather forecasting; improvements in treating cataracts, cystic fibrosis, and snake venom; better drilling making geothermal energy affordable; extreme poverty falling worldwide; less violence is US schools; etc.

This week's music is "Lord Franklin" (aka "Lady Franklin's Lament"), sung by Sinead O'Connor.

A tiny Polish radio station's experiment with using all AI hosts and interviewees made people really angry. (NY Times, Kevin Drum)

Kevin Drum on water fluoridation. There is some evidence of harm.

Emily Oster's data-driven parenting advice.

Review of a new biography of the Brothers Grimm.

Political theorist Richard Tuck and the problem of how to balance human rights with democracy.

Review of a bunch of books on fertility. Notes that the main cause of fertility decline is not fewer people having children, a number that has hardly budged. What is different is the number of children parents choose to have. The demographers I follow on Twitter/X understand this and much of their attention is focused on why people stop having children after one or two. It is commonly observed that the "norm of the two-child family" dooms a nation to population decline, because of that unchanging number who have none, so what nations need to sustain their populations is more big families.

Anti-Trump libertarians are in mourning and worried that their movement is dead: "The modern libertarian movement spent most of its history attuned to the threat of socialism; it has failed to adapt to the autocratic threat from the American right. . . . For practical purposes we’re just liberals now."

Burial of a Merovingian noble woman with amazing glass beads.

Trump won big in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of NYC (Twitter/X)

Kevin Drum notes the remarkable decline of medical inflation; it wasn't that long ago that medical inflation seemed to promise a future budget catastrophe.

Why Trump Won

Vibes. In a modern democracy, you don't really need to know anything about the policies being pushed by the parties to guess who will win. All you need is the vibe. When the vibe is bad, the incumbents almost always lose. We got our first black president because the vibe was so grim in post-Iraq, financially collapsing America. Right now the vibe in the US is horrible. Of course the people in the out party are often grouchy, but left-wing Americans have also been miserable under Biden; I have all year been seeing complaints from liberals about how young people will never own homes because private equity is buying them all up etc.

This is true around the world. Matt Yglesias:

The most important context for this race – what broadly distinguishes the family of takes you should pay attention to from those you should dismiss – is what's happening internationally. The UK conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right coalition lost its first post-Covid election in Australia. The incumbent coalition is Germany is hideously unpopular.

Yglesias missed the fall of the Law and Justice Party in Poland, which some liberals were afraid had rigged the system to keep themselves in power forever; turns out their hold on power was not strong enough to survive a post-Covid election.

In a country where 80 percent or more of people always vote for their party and the other 20 percent aren't paying much attention to politics, I think the global bad vibe is sufficient to explain the Republican victory.

Trump's hold on the Republican party is a separate issue, but once he was nominated it would have been hard for him to lose.

Inflation. Every pollster who asked Americans about their top issue found the economy either first or second, and inflation was by far the biggest economic concern. Americans hate inflation. This bout of inflation was not that bad by 1970s standards, but it was worst in food, which is the thing that people worry about the most. Plus we got higher gas prices because of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and then interest rates were raised to fight inflation, which made houses and cars more expensive. 

Let me make a note here on what "inflation" means to people. The economists I follow have been pointing out for six months that inflation is easing and is now down to around 2%. But this mistakes what people upset about "inflation" are talking about. To them it means high prices. So long as prices don't come down, they complain about inflation, even if the prices have been at the same high level for months. 

It took me years of pondering polls about crime and divorce to figure this out. I wondered why, all through the 90s and 00s, Americans kept saying that crime and divorce were "increasing" when they were really going down. It eventually dawned on me that people responded to that question as being about the level of those things, not their rate of change. They meant, "crime and divorce are too high." Once I figured this out I switched my scorn to the pollsters who insisted on asking the question this way.

We got this bout of inflation, across most of the world, because of Covid-related supply disruptions and governments pumping big money into the economy to keep the pandemic from causing a depression. In retrospect, maybe they pumped out too much money, but both Trump and Biden did this, and Congress went along; this was a thoroughly bipartisan error. But of course the incumbents paid the price.

Immigration. Millions of Americans think we have too many immigrants, and in historical terms we do have a lot. The percentage of the foreign born in the population is at a post-World War II high. Most of the people who worry about this are solid Republicans anyway, but not all of them; Trump seems to have gotten a record share of the Hispanic vote, partly because of his anti-immigrant position. It's old news that recent immigrants often oppose more immigration. Besides the level of immigration and complaints about refugees, the sense that we simply don't have control of our borders (we don't) feeds a sense that this is somehow out of control.

Liberal Foibles. I am a proud liberal and a lifelong Democrat, but even I am sick of diversity talk. Enough already. When the National Science Foundation demands that applicants for grants in physics show how their projects will promote diversity in science – they do – things have gotten out of hand. And if liberals don't stop it with the "educational excellence is just a code for racism" talk they will drive all the ambitious Asians out of the Democratic party. 

Harris. I despised her in 2020, was utterly baffled that Biden put her on his ticket, and I still despise her. One complaint: as Attorney General of California she did absolutely nothing to reign in prosecutors – in fact she waived off every single complaint of prosecutorial misconduct she ever saw, and never disciplined anyone – then when the George Floyd thing erupted she tried to pretend that she had always been for police reform. Because she knew she was weak on that issue she tried to shore up her leftist credentials by issuing a bunch of really dumb statements about economics and publicly defending school busing, one of the worst government mistakes of my lifetime. She had to drop out before the primaries even started. Bleah. For me the one silver lining of this debacle is that she won't be our first female president.

You also have to think that being black and female cost her at least a couple of million votes.

So if you want any reason for the Republican onslaught, other than the vibe, then the chain of Democratic failures goes: Biden puts Harris on his ticket; Biden tries to run for a second term depite his declining mental state; it takes so long for his friends to persuade him to withdraw that there is no time for primaries, leaving Harris the only practical option; she is a weak candidate.

Trump's Pevious Term. I saw over and over again that when Democrats tried to warn about bad things Trump would do if reelected, lukewarm Trump people (e.g., Trump-skeptical Republicans) would say, "Did he do that last time?" And mostly he didn't. I share the concern that all the organizing MAGA folks have been doing to surround Trump with more extreme people might have an effect, but I do have to admit that until he challenged his election loss Trump was a mediocre president who did a lot less damage than Bush II.

Human Nature. If you want a negative lesson from this election, it would be that most people are selfish, insufficiently moral, generally unthoughtful, and don't give a damn about people not like themselves. The average Trump voter didn't care about his bursting closet of scandals, his rancid rhetoric, or his constant lying, because the price of eggs was too high. 

Millions of people, of course, support Trump because of his amorality and viciousness. Some of them are just amoral and vicious themselves and admire Trump because he has the balls to act the way they would like to. Others feel deeply threatened by something about the modern world (atheism, globalization, immigration) and see Trump as somebody who will fight against the dark forces they fear.

But I think viciousness is a minority position; much more common are people who just don't care. Trump captured the vicious faction, riled up folks upset about immigration and globalization, and got control of the Republican Party. Given party loyalty and the importance of vibes in determining who wins elections, winning nationally was only a matter of time for him.

Democracy is Not All that Beloved. Talking about threats to democracy seems, so far as I can tell, to have no effect on voters. It doesn't seem that the American system has many real fans. What people mainly want is a good economy and to be left alone. If a dictator gave them that, millions wouldn't care about losing their votes. Plus, in the US both parties have been accusing the other of being anti-democratic for so long (since the 1930s, anyway) that most voters just tune out all that talk.

What people would do if there was a real coup, I have no idea, but I am not convinced that the outrage would be all that great.

Another way to think about this is to note how many people believe it just doesn't matter who wins elections. I know smart people who are convinced it's all a sham anyway because nothing ever changes – these are mostly socialists – but the sentiment that politics doesn't matter seems very widespread. Consider, as just one datum, how many people don't bother to vote.

Nobody Cares about the Rest of the World. Trump's avowed desire to stop aiding Ukraine probably cost him about a thousand votes, and his utter scorn for most of the world's inhabitants even less.

Don't Over Interpet. After every election a buzzing swarm of political writers run in circles waving their arms, shouting about how everything has changed. I don't think anything much has changed in America since 2012. In that year Obama beat a much tougher Republican than Trump because the economy was booming and the vibe was positive. The vibe had soured by 2016, enabling Trump to barely beat a widely hated Democrat. The vibe was still bad in 2020, enabling a Democrat about whom most voters thought nothing at all to beat Trump. The vibe is still terrible, enabling Trump to beat another unloved Democrat. 

Remains to be seen what kind of four years we are in for, but in terms of deeper meaning to this election, there is none.

Election Afternoon 2024

Gorgeous day in Catonsville, headed for a near-record high. 

Perfect for walking the oblivious dog past the oblivious trees and flowers.

Volunteer chrysanthemum that popped up in the front steps. I'm going to try to transplant to the garden it once it is done blooming.

Interesting observation from Scott Siskind: 

Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum, or the bloody knives of Tenochtitlan, so they will remember us. That which other ages would relegate to a tasteful coronation or mercifully quick coup, we extend into an eighteen-month festival of madness.

Which reminds me of something I wrote about Carthaginian baby sacrifice:

The Carthaginians were not inhuman. They loved their children, and in our sparse sources we can glimpse the struggles they went through, their lapses, the years when times were good and the required sacrifices were forgotten. But then would come the disaster: a plague, a war, a terrible fire. The cry would go up that the Gods were angry, and parents would feel the sick sense of dread and impending loss. Who knows what motivated the ones who volunteered their babies? Perhaps they had already lost other children to disease, or their home towns had just been sacked and half their families snuffed out. Others faced the holy lottery, all of life in a concentrated moment: the worst fear, followed by either the most terrible loss or the greatest relief. They gambled with what they held dearest, and sometimes they lost. But don't we all? And doesn't the Carthaginians' acknowledgment of life's terror make their religion, in a sense, more honest than the sweet reason of modern Christianity, or the cool compassion of the Unitarians?

Sometimes, as I have said, I get the sense that humans are capable of only a certain amount of happiness. When things seem on the verge of getting too good, some of us feel compelled to insist that they are actually terrible and then blow the whole thing up.

I mean, have you ever wondered why people won't believe in the moon landings despite millions of pages of evidence? I think their imaginations just can't encompass something so amazing. If they believed that humans had walked on the moon they might have to believe that we – we as we are, not we after some world-wrenching revolution – are capable of making life really good.

I think we are.