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.

Khaybar

Khaybar is an oasis in northwestern Saudi Arabia, about 150 kilometres (95 mi) north of Medina. It has been inhabited for thousands of years.

Khaybar is well known among Muslims because it appears in the Koran. A town there mainly occupied by Jews was attacked by Muhammad and his followers in 628 AD, an event traditionally called the Battle of Khaybar. Above is a depiction of the battle from a medieval Persian manuscript.

Various online sources, including wikipedia, say that legends about the Jews of Khaybar endured for a thousand years. Some stories said they retreated into the desert and waged a long-term struggle against Islam from a hidden fortress. According, again, to less-than-perfect online sources, some medieval Christian crusaders tried to contact these Jewish tribes as possible allies.

Online material about Khaybar falls mostly into two categories: posts by those interested in Islamic history, and posts from volcanologists. This part of the Arabian peninsula has been volcanically active for most of the past 2 million years, leaving a vast landscape of cinder cones, lava fields, and the like. The last volcanic eruption was in the 7th century AD. The hills on which the various forts and settlements around the oasis sit are all volcanic features, and until recent times one of the region's exports was grinding stones made from the local basalt.

According to local tour guides, some of the old stone houses that appear in tourist photos were occupied into the 1970s. When, one assumes, oil money allowed the residents to move to air-conditioned digs in Riyadh.

Khaybar made the news this week because of a major publication from French archaeologists who have been exploring the site for years (news story, original article). They call themselves the Khaybar Longue Durée Archaeological Project, with the acronym AFALULA-RCU-CNRS. They say that have documented a Bronze Age town at a site called al-Natah dating to around 2400 to 1500 BC.

Plan of the settlement. Notice that this town is walled on only one side. That is because the walls actually extended around the whole oasis, running a distance of 14.5 km and surrounding an area of 1100 hectares. There is even a term for this kind of site, the Walled Oasis, and this article mentions two others in this part of Arabia. Obviously that water was very much worth protecting, especially considering that there were only about 500 people living in this town.

Reconstruction. Our archaeologists write:

The nucleated dwellings were constructed following a standard plan and were connected by small streets. By comparison with neighboring oasis centers, we suggest that Northwestern Arabia during the Bronze Age−largely dominated by pastoral nomadic groups and already integrated into long-distance trade networks−was dotted with interconnected monumental walled oases centered around small fortified towns. 

The ratio between the large size of the walled area and the small town raises lots of questions. The archaeologists say there may have been Bronze Age camps within the walled area, although they can't be certain of this. What we should probably imagine is that each oasis belonged to a tribe most of whose members were nomadic, with the walled oasis as their refuge in times of drought or war. 

What a fascinating glimpse of a very different world.

Links 1 November 2024

Moche Vessel in the Form of a Toucan, Peru, 100 BC to 500 AD

New theory about the origin of the wheel and axle points to copper mines in the Carpathian Mountains. (original paper, news story)

Every year NFL players eat around 80,000 Uncrustables (frozen crustless peanut butter & jelly sandwiches). (NY Times)

Where are the 7 million men "missing" from the work force? Many of them are disabled, or claim to be.

Sabine Hossenfelder on a new paper describing shapes that tile the plane or fill 3-dimensional space but have rounded corners and curved edges, 6-minute video.

Anti-tourism protests in Spain.

The rise and decline of the secretary. Via Marginal Revolution. I am old enough to have had bosses who had secretaries, but not to have ever had one myself. For about a year in the early 90s I had a boss whose only career goal seemed to be to get her own secretary, which she never achieved.

Keeping Alberta rat free.

Renaissance books with pop-ups.

Remarkable hoard of coins dating to the Norman conquest of England – half showing Harold, half William the Conqueror, mostly dating to 1066-1068 – has been purchased via the Portable Antiquities Scheme and will go on display in the British Museum.

Heterodox Academy tracks ideological attacks on academics from both the left and the right, and they say right now attacks from the right greatly outnumber those from the left, a reversal of the situation in 2020.

And Heterodox Academy on Indiana's new "Open Inquiry" law, supposed to prevent indoctrination of students by their professors. They object to it for the same reason I objected to Florida's similar law, because there is no way for professors to know what statements might get them into trouble. Vague laws are bad laws. HA goes into this topic at greater depth in this piece on a proposed Federal bill, which they like much better than the Indiana and Florida laws. I am happy to have finally stumbled on some serious discussion of these issues.

On Twitter/X, Josh Marshall says that all the Trump operatives under 30 came out of 4chan and got their tone from online troll culture.

The planning and construction of Poundbury, (then) Prince Charles' dream of an old-fashioned English town, which now has 4,100 inhabitants. (20-minute video)

Interesting new Bronze Age hoard in Scotland.

Review of what sounds like an interesting book on medieval Christian mysticism.

Tweet compiling a bunch of articles complaining that Halloween isn't as fun as it used to be, stretching back to 1903.

Short history of the origins of civilization. Mentioning this mainly because it starts with an argument that agriculture appeared around the world in the Neolithic because changes in the earth's tilt and orbit led to greater seasonality, that is, bigger differences between summer and winter. I'm not convinced, but it is intriguing. Also notes that large-scale food storage, perhaps a response to seasonality, preceded agriculture. Then goes on to say stuff I think is wrong, like that farming made our health worse; it may have made disease worse, by raising our population density, but the other changes attributed here to poor diet could equally be caused by self-domestication.

From a new paper outlining the history of nepotism in European intellectual life, by tracing father-son pairs: "Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable." Via Marginal Revolution.

British study finds that children born during British sugar rationing in the 1950s had lower rates of diabetes and hypertension as adults.

Turning AI loose on a large collection of Renaissance astronomy books. Interesting idea but I don't think they really learned much.

Global culture watch: Afro-French NBA star Victor Wembenyama dresses up for American Halloween in a costume based on a Miyazaki movie.

Detailed NY Times write-up of the battle in Mali in which the Wagner Group lost 46 mercenaries, including the man behind the popular Grey Zone Telegram channel. Basically, they got cocky and were lured into a trap by Taureg rebels.

Ronald Reagan on Immigration

"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German or a Turk or a Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American."

Video here. 

As I have said, I am willing to debate the practicalities of immigration, what number and what sort of people we should accept, but fundamentally I love this about my country.

A Note on American Careerism

Surveys lately have found that many Americans don't want to be promoted. It's a hard thing to measure, since nobody tracks how many people were offered promotion but turned it down, but I have seen several different results showing that around half of people would refuse promotion if they were offered it. We also had a couple of accidential experiments done when companies tried to bribe people to come back to the office: 

Take Dell, whose executives thought they came up with an ingenious plan to get everyone back into the office. If employees didn't come in at least three days a week, the company announced in February, they would be ineligible for a promotion. The response from Dell's workforce was a collective shrug. Months after the directive, nearly half of employees were still remote, apparently happy to remain in their current roles as long as they could keep working from home. It was a clear sign that in 2024, promotions just aren't the incentive they used to be.

I'm certainly in that situation; I never had any interest in further promotion once I became a principal investigator, that is, the lead scientist on my projects. When I have accepted management roles it was basically because there wasn't anyone else to do them. I tried for a couple of years to refuse raises – because in my business the more money you make, the less time you have to do technical work and the more you have to focus on management – but my boss waived off my objections, because she was worried that if we had a slowdown somebody would look around, see that this Bedell guy had been denied raises two years in a row, and decide to lay me off first. 

But the desire to climb the corporate ladder isn't exactly ancient:

The original work ethic in America — the Protestant one, espoused by the likes of Benjamin Franklin — dates from a time when most Americans were self-employed as farmers and artisans. It was rooted in a rugged individualism that was skeptical of authority and hierarchies, fitting for a country founded on the idea of freedom from tyranny.

That became a problem when the Industrial Revolution arrived. Companies exploded in size, and more and more Americans found themselves working for someone else. In 1820, 80% of the workforce was self-employed. By 1870, that share had shrunk to 33%. By 1940, it was 20%.

"The moral vision of American society had been based upon the image of the independent, self-employed person," writes Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School who has studied the history of work. "Many social critics feared that people would be less likely to work hard under the wage system and, even worse, that something in their very natures might change." America was facing an identity crisis.

The solution was to forge a whole new work ethic.

That is, the ethic of climbing the ladder. Which is also, of course, related to the decline in hereditary class distinctions and the rise of meritocracy, and to the growth of  huge bureaucracies like those in the Federal and state governments and mega-corporations.

None of the articles I have seen mention this, but I have to think that our ever-growing wealth also plays a role. In our society people like nurses and archaeologists can lead quite nice lives, with houses and yards and the internet and hundreds of tv channels. If you feel financially ok, why seek out a more stressful job?

Like millions of my contemporaries, I think medium chill is the happiest kind of life.

Susannah Clarke and the Strangeness of Creation

One thing all the world's cultures agree on is that the best poets are crazy. In many languages, the words for inspiration and madness are the same, or at least closely related. To be highly creative requires being in some sense different from other people, and our experience shows that being different in that sense often correlates with being different in many other senses as well.

In the NY Times this week, Alexandra Alter has a very interesting profile of Susannah Clarke. Clarke gets my vote for the most creative fantasy writer of the 21st century, and, yep, she's pretty crazy.

Clarke burst onto the scene with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), which sold 4 million copies and was widely proclaimed a truly great work of fantasy. I was ambivalent. On the one hand, it is full of wonders; one of my favorite bits describes ancient fairy roads that still run across northern England, now mostly abandoned and choked with trees and brush, never mentioned by the people who live nearby. The British tradition includes many stories about people who join fairy balls and don't return for a century; Clarke describes such a ball, conveying both the beauty of it and the unspeakable weariness of a party that never ends. I devoured these details, and transcribed half a dozen passages into my commonplace book. On the other hand, I disliked the plot and found one of the two main characters (Norrell) to be one of the most irritating people in the history of fiction. So I didn't love it like many others did, but I did recognize it as a remarkable achievement.

From the moment it appeared there were rumors that Clarke was working on a sequel, but somehow it never emerged. Most fans only learned years later what had happened:

Not long after the novel’s release, Clarke and her husband were having dinner with friends near their home in Derbyshire, England. In the middle of the meal, she felt nauseated and wobbly, got up from the table, and collapsed.

In the years that followed, she struggled to write. Her symptoms — migraines, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and fogginess — made working for sustained periods impossible. She wrote scattered fragments that never cohered; sometimes she couldn’t finish a single sentence. At a low point, she was bed-bound and mired in depression.

Clarke stopped thinking of herself as a writer.

“It became a problem of just not believing that I could write anymore. I just didn’t think it was possible,” said Clarke, who was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “I just thought of myself as this ill woman.”

Clarke eventually recovered enough to write seriously again, but she abandoned her first world and wrote something completely different instead. Piranesi (2020) is the story of a man trapped in a labyrinth with no end. Part of what traps him is the weak state of his own memory, his inability to recall who he used to be and how he became what he is. I loved it, read it straight through from beginning to end. But when you think about it, the story transparently springs from Clarke's experience with her mysterious illness, and Alter confirms this:

The philosophical puzzle at the story’s center reflected some of Clarke’s preoccupations: The narrator, Piranesi, lives largely alone with seabirds and stone figures, but instead of feeling lost or lonely, he sees the halls as a place of infinite wonders.

Clarke had nearly finished the novel before she saw the parallels between the fictional labyrinth and her illness.

“I was subliminally aware that I was writing about someone in a fairly isolated position, but who was able to find a huge amount of meaning in that,” she said.

Which is an amazing example of making lemonade from lemons. It also connects back to what may the second oldest trope about art, that it has roots in pain and suffering: the sadness of life is the joy of art. If Susannah Clarke's illness birthed Piranesi, doesn't that raise the question of whether her suffering was ultimately a bad thing?

Should artists have to suffer so the rest of us can read books like Piranesi, or enjoy paintings like the ones Van Gogh did in Arles?

But I want to get even broader than that. Alter finds that Clarke seems to be recovering from her illness, but she remains a strange person:

In her lap she held a stuffed pig, with a stuffed fox nestled beside her; both creatures play a role in “The Wood at Midwinter.” She likes to hold her stuffed animals when she’s working, to help her think, and as a talisman “to ward off, I don’t know what, something or other.”

“Some people do things as a child, and then when they grow up, they put off childish things,” she said. “I’m not very good at that.”

Glancing down at the pig, she added, “I don’t really see the point of growing up.”

Which gets us back to where we started. What if it is true that to be a great artist one must be crazy, or at least strange? 

Or, to get more personal, have I generally failed as a fantasy writer because I am simply too sane, too happy, too rooted in this world?

Clarke's troubles don't seem to have broken her spirit, and she is forging ahead with new plans:

Along with the new novel set in the world of “Strange and Norrell,” Clarke is also working on another book, set partly during the Industrial Revolution in 1840s Bradford, where she lived as a child. Clarke described it as an “anti-horror” novel, with a fantastical premise that reflects her belief that something sublime is hidden within the mundane.

Clarke is still drawn to the idea of magic. For her, magic isn’t something otherworldly and distant, it’s “the idea of something elemental, something transcendent” that exists all around us.

“I feel very strongly that if you could see the world as it really is, if you could get further beyond your ego and the sorts of ways in which we trap ourselves, if you could just see the world beyond, every moment would be miraculous,” she said.

She’s come to believe that the limitations imposed by her illness haven’t made her any less of a writer. She’s a different writer now, but no less ambitious or inventive.

“Somebody said to me, pray the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to, and I think it’s the same for writing: Write the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to,” Clarke said. “I’ve only ever had any success by doing my own weird thing, following the path that’s in front of me.”

Links 25 October 2024

David Roberts, A Persian Water Wheel in Egypt, 1842

Review of Richard Dawkins' new, very speculative book, The Genetic Book of the Dead.

List of the best posts from rationalist Robin Hanson's years of blogging.

The folks planning to build a new town called Esmerelda in wine country 90 minutes north of San Francisco; they say they are inspired by the nineteenth-century Chataqua movement. Summary on Twitter/X.

New nasal spray vaccines for flu and Covid are performing better than injections in current trials.

More development proposed along DC's Anacostia waterfront; I have had a small part in transforming this area from urban wasteland to thriving community.

Good NY Times article on why Roman concrete has proved so durable. One of the theories discussed is the same one I linked to last year, that the nodules of lime in the mix make the resulting concrete self-healing, and so the presence of those undissolved lumps was intentional. But there are other theories, including some that focus on chemical reactions involving volcanic ash.

Kevin Drum looks into Elon Musks' compaints about environmental regulators.

It is possible to die from being impaled by a swordfish.

Production of Shakespeare's plays is declining in America. But is that really news, or is it more remarkable that in an environment generally hostile to European history, and particularly hostile to some of Shakespeare's themes, there were still 40 professional productions of his plays over the past year?

Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to the people who designed AI systems for understanding protein folding and devising new proteins with a desired shape. (Press Release, New York Times, 12-minute video)

Ben Pentreath sells his old country house in Dorset, with the amazing garden I have featured here several times over the years, and moves to a historic house in Orkney with "so much potential." Farewell tea at his old house here.

Sabine Hossenfelder takes a look at computer scientist Stephen Wolfram's attempt to create a "theory of everything" using hypergraphs, finds it intriguing, 10-minute video.

Lidar mapping of two medieval cities in Uzbekistan. Both on mountaintops, because central Asia was a dangerous place back then.

A small but lavishly decorated house uncovered in Pompeii. To me one of the most important things we learn from Pompeii is how brightly colored the ancient world was, not just temples and villas but streetcorner restaurants and ordinary homes.

Paul Bloom says you should only believe findings in social science when they contradict the ideology of the people doing or publishing the study.

Investigating the fruit in Renaissance paintings, with an eye toward recovering lost or nearly lost varieties.

The essay as a work of architecture, which needs an impressive entrance to draw you in.

Scott Siskind at the Progress Studies Conference.

Kevin Drum is puzzled by the conflicting stories about shoplifting in the US. How bad a problem is it? and is it getting worse or better?

Michael Horowitz in Foreign Affairs: "One report suggests the [Iranian] strike [on Israel] cost about $80 million to launch but $1 billion to defend against. A wealthy country and its allies could afford that sort of expense a few times—but maybe not 20 times, 30 times, or 100 times." Twitter/X

Some Data on the Satisfaction of Trans Teenagers

Via Kevin Drum, here's a fairly large study of teenagers who received "gender affirming" care and mostly felt good about it; of 220 subjects, only 9 expressed regret.

Which is interesting, and this looks like a pretty good study. But:

The sample in the present work was unique in a few ways that are notable for interpretation of these results. Most showed signs of their transgender identity by 4 years of age. On average, they socially transitioned at age 6.7 years, and most were fairly binary in their gender identities and gender expressions throughout childhood. Early-identifying youth who are especially insistent about their identities are also more likely to socially transition in childhood and identify as transgender or continue to show gender dysphoria in adolescence and early adulthood.

Right. This study says nothing about the strange recent surge in "sudden onset gender dysphoria", those teenagers who suddenly have doubts about their genders as puberty kicks in, and who have remarkable levels of other mental health problems. It also only concerns strict gender switchers and says nothing about the non-binary or the gender-fluid.

I mention this partly because I keep meeting older liberals who think they are pro-trans but whose model only concerns people like the subjects of this study, those who have identified strongly since childhood with the gender that doesn't match their biology. When I say to them, ok, but that's not what most trans discourse is about these days, now we have people who think they can change their minds about their genders at any point and should be able to switch back and forth whenever they feel like it, they often react by saying, "That's not trans!"

As I have said here several times, I try not to care about what other adults do; none of my business, really, and I am perfectly willing to be respectful to anyone who is respectful to me. And I don't have any real issues with the kind of children covered by this study. But that doesn't mean there are no questions to ask about the trans movement as currently constructed, particulary on the subject of teenagers with mental health issues, quite a few of whom have sued the people who, as they now see it, responded to their adolescent mental health crises by encouraging them to transition.

But my real beef with trans activists is their habit of insisting "you should think X," to which my response is always, "no." What I think is nobody else's business, and I refuse to engage with anyone who says otherwise.

October

So here I am in Catonsville, watching two weeks of absolutely perfect weather pass by while I wait for the permit to start six weeks of fieldwork that will now stretch into mid December and possibly into January, when we will shiver and curse that we were stuck inside now. Sigh.

Turtle meeting.