Paul Graham examines Political Correctness.

The most extreme of the things you can’t say would be very shocking to most readers. If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible. We would seem depraved to them. So we should expect that someone who similarly violated our taboos would seem depraved to us.

The most entertaining thing about technically-oriented people is that they can blow through a social paradigm without hardly noticing it.

In fact, finding the outer limits is very, very hard. Popular controversialists just go for the low hanging fruit. To really solve the problem would take years of introspection. You have to untangle your ideas from the ideas of your time, and that’s so hard that few people in history have even come close. Isaac Newton, smart as he was, wasted years on theological controversies.

This in turn reveals a ‘default educated east coast belief’: that theology is a waste of time for a smart person like Isaac Newton. (Don’t get him started on Thomas Aquinas, I guess.)  In every century other than this one, most intelligent educated people would characterize that as the best use of his time – and brain.

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I recently asked readers for their “tricks of the trade,” and was amazed by the response. It seems every profession is rich with clever little occupational secrets.

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As if there were cats that weren’t weird.

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And lately it seems to work both ways. If you think carbon is dangerous (more on this later) but there’s no cause for concern over giving Kalid Shiekh Mohammed a civilian trial, you must possess some keen insight, perhaps some X-ray vision, that gives you wisdom beyond the three dimensions and the earthly domain.

If, on the other hand, you just call things as they are — taxes hurt the economy, if you execute the bad guy he won’t kill any more little kids, cities with magnanimous social programs have teeming masses of homeless because if I was homeless I’d head down there too, maybe kids have attention deficit problems because they aren’t getting their asses whipped anymore — then you’re more mundane. You have demonstrated no irony, therefore you haven’t demonstrated this keen extra-dimensional insight. Therefore you must not have it, therefore you must be something of a dimwit. And far more horrifyingly still, you’re a little bit on the boring side.

It’s not a drive toward left-wing politics; if it was, it would be far less dangerous because it would capture the fascination only of those who are enamored of left-wing politics. This phenomenon has a deep impact on people who don’t give a rat’s ass about politics. It’s a mistaken realization of what intellectual wherewithal really is. It is an excessive fascination with where above-average intelligence might take a thought, with an inadequate understanding of how exactly that works.

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A flying-car company which has struggled for 15 years to win acceptance for its radical gyrocopter/aeroplane technology may have finally broken through into the mainstream. It was announced this week that Carter Aviation technologies – aspiring designer of the CarterCopter Personal Air Vehicle – has partnered with successful military robot maker AAI.

Salon does a debunking. No, really.

Yet, like many people who acquire mega-celebrity, the vampire has developed an eating disorder. Read the books. Watch the movies. You’ll see vampires who manage nightclubs, build computer databases, work as private investigators, go to prep school, lobby Congress, chat with humans, live near humans, have sex with humans, and pine over humans, but the one thing you won’t see them do is suck the blood of humans.

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In October, we wrote about how, just as Rupert Murdoch and crew look to put up paywalls for online content, the operators of the London Evening Standard were going in the other direction and making their physical paper free. So, how’s that been working out? mowgs alerts us to the news that the paper has doubled its circulation in just a month. Not bad. But what’s more interesting is that it’s also slashed its distribution costs massively. It used to cost about 30p, and now it’s just 4p per paper.

Those media outlets who figure out the new business model will be with us yet, those that don’t are in the dumpster. It’s just that simple.

The most amusing aspect is that those media outlets that cling most tightly to espousing socialism in their editorial positions — and, increasingly, in their news sections — are the ones most desperately trying to find ways to charge their readers for stuff that their readers are just not willing to pay for. Perhaps in historical terms it will be a sad thing to see the New York Times and the Washington Post go the way of the New York Herald and the Washington Star, but I for one won’t be crying.

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To believe the truth is not the same thing as having a correct opinion – indeed the two have almost nothing to do with one another. And this is a great difficulty – for most of the things that we think of ourselves as believing – we in fact only hold as opinions. What a man believes, in the way the word is used in the New Testament, is not seen or heard in the syllogisms he is willing to confess, but rather in how he lives his life.

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It does seem to bring out the creativity in people.

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You know that book “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus”? Well, here’s a prime example of that.

Now that’s comedy.

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In 1965 the two nations were equal in wealth. Four decades later, their standing was dramatically different. What accounts for the difference?

An interesting comparison.

Link is just for attribution; complete item is reproduced below–it’s short.

One day, the father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the express purpose of showing him how poor people live.

They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family.

On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, “How was the trip?”

“It was great, Dad.”

“Did you see how poor people live?” the father asked.

“Oh yeah,” said the son.

“So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?” asked the father.

The son answered: “I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon.

“We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight.

“We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We buy our food, but they grow theirs.

“We have walls around our property to protect us, they have friends to protect them.”

Then his son added, “Thanks Dad for showing me how poor we are.”

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I suspect that being tired means you have less energy to worry. But that’s just me.

Bear in mind that this is the New York Times so you really need to confirm this with another source.

Megan McArdle takes a look at the personal finance evangelist.

On a fine summer day at the end of August, I paid $220 for front-row seats on the floor of a minor-league hockey rink in Detroit, just to hear Ramsey talk for five hours. The ostensible topic: getting your financial life in order. Afterward, my fiancé, who grew up in the Bible Belt, called me to ask what I’d thought.

“I think I just attended my first prayer meeting,” I told him.

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General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism.

You can have a genius IQ and still be an idiot, in the original Greek sense of the term.

Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively.

Michael Savage may be right that liberalism is a mental disorder.

The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong.

That certainly matches what you see in the newspapers.

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… I noted some of the uncanny parallels between George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover: Both were president during a time of economic crisis; both presided over vast expansions of government that helped cause the crisis or at least make it worse than it might have been otherwise; finally both were (inaccurately) portrayed by their political opponents as dogmatic free market advocates, when in fact both were highly statist. After leaving the presidency, Bush is unconsciously imitating Hoover in yet another way — by rhetorically supporting free markets and criticizing the even more interventionist policies of his Democratic successor (which in both cases built on the expansions of government initiated by the Republicans who preceded them).

The only good things I can say about George W Bush is that he wasn’t as bad as his dad and he was better than the alternative. Damning with faint praise? I’m good with that.

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There are advantage to universal standards. The most important is economies of scale–once you learn the standard, it applies everywhere. But the disadvantages are subtle and usually much greater than the advantages.

I don’t want standard of health care, one standard of what’s “best.” Everyone is different and what is best for me may not be best for you. More importantly, what is best is unknowable to a committee of experts. Not hard to know. Not difficult to discover. Unknowable. What age should a women have a mammogram is not a question that has an answer. There are many answers. One reason is that women are different. A more important reason is that our knowledge evolves. What is thought to be “best” (wait until 40) may turn out to be different (wait till 50). But even more importantly, when power is centralized, the very idea of “best” no longer applies. The incentives aren’t there. When there is one standard set by the political process, the experts’ incentives on whatever committee determines the universal standard are inevitably going to be politicized. So give me “inefficient” competition among standards. Let different standards vie for attention.

This is just a spontaneous observation in response to the apparent rampant historical ignorance about the holiday of Thanksgiving. There seems to be a general belief that Thanksgiving was a once-in-a-century lucky thought on the part of the Pilgrims that arose from their unique conditions.

NOPE.

Thanksgiving was a celebration of the traditional harvest festival, Martinmas, that had been going on in England since it became Christian. Being Dissenters, the Pilgrims wouldn’t have use such a ‘Popish’ term as the traditional one, but they would celebrate the feast nevertheless, just as modern atheists will wish you ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than the more offensive ‘Merry Christmas’ but they’ll still say something. Remember that this took place in 1621, prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar by the English over a century later, and what they would consider November 11 (Martinmas) we would consider November 21, which is right around the current politically-determined date for Thanksgiving.

Just in case you were wondering.

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We have the technology.

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And the place hasn’t changed all that much from then to now.

Steve Sailer decides to kibitz the discussion between Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell.

I would suggest that the reason Gladwell is choosing to make a big deal over Pinker calling BS on Gladwell’s assertion that performance as an NFL quarterback “can’t be predicted” is because Malcolm realizes this minor issue is characteristic of his entire career.

Well, yeah.

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Good. Cleansing the Republican party of RINOs is just as important as beating Democrats. You can’t do any heavy lifting when the floor you’re standing on is rotten.

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In pre-industrial times, ‘of full age’ was considered 14 for males and 12 for females; a number of kings came out of regency at that age. Can you imagine the country being run by a 14-year-old? (I know it seems like that at times, but I’m serious.)

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Residents of a small Italian town where 8,000 people have the same surname have won a legal fight to use their nicknames, which can descend into the derogatory, on official documents.

How refreshingly medieval. Reputedly the Chinese only have 400 surnames for several billion people; I wonder how they do it?

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From its first publication in 1975, Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology has stirred disputes over his claim that ethics is rooted in human biology. Our deepest intuitions of right and wrong, he asserted on the first page of the book, are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved by natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural and social environment. In 1998, Wilson’s book Consilience renewed the controversy as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments. Human nature is not a product of genes alone or of culture alone, Wilson insisted. Rather, human nature is constituted by “the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction rather than another, and thus connect the genes to culture” (164). The biology of the moral sentiments would be the study of the “epigenetic rules” of moral experience as shaped by the complex interaction of genetic propensities and cultural learning. Wilson has often used Edward Westermarck’s theory of the incest taboo as a good example of this.

Steve Sailer looks at Mad Men and its times.

The real sex mismatch happened with the sexual revolution in the later 1960s, when a flood of Baby Boom babes born from 1946 onward came on the mating market and immediately set about stealing prosperous husbands away from their wives.

Men, in the view of social commentators such as James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Groucho Marx, and W.C. Fields, were relentlessly oppressed by women, who refused to sleep with them without a legally binding promise of lifetime support and fidelity.

The contemporary notion that women rose up as one to wrest from men the privilege of bringing home the bacon is one of the more curious myths in folklore.

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Look at what people learn in the classroom.  Look at what people do on the job.  How much of a connection do you see?

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Queen Himiko is a popular character in Japanese history. She was apparently able to wield great power in the Yamatai Kingdom from around the end of the second century. Legends handed down from the time describe her as “being skilled with magic”.

Japanese revere her as a heroic Boadicea-type figure who unified the kingdom after years of fighting with rival tribes, before her death around 248AD.

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Bear in mind that this is from the New York Times, so any connection to reality is purely speculative.

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No, this isn’t from The Onion. I double-checked.

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

Jerry Pournelle takes a long look.

Are all Muslims enemies of everyone not part of the House of Submission to Islam?

But it all depends on how you define “Muslim” and even more importantly, how the Muslim scholars who define Islam define Muslim; and there the question is not so silly. The Koran is explicit on the subject: all true Muslims must make war on the unbelievers and force them either to convert or to pay tribute. There can be truce in that war, but never peace. This is the nature of Islam. In other words, if you are not at war with the unbelievers you are not a Muslim, and thus the answer to our first question is “yes.” Perhaps it is not a silly question at all.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Seth Godin is always worth reading.

How much of time, staffing and money does your organization spend on creating incredible experiences (vs. avoiding bad outcomes)?

At the hospital, it’s probably 5% on the upside (the doctor who puts in the stitches, say) and 95% on the downside (all the avoidance of infection or lawsuits, records to keep, forms to sign). Most of the people you interact with in a hospital aren’t there to help you get what you came for (to get better) they’re there to help you avoid getting worse.

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Muslims are the new Communists, in almost every sense.

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The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Well, there it is.

Steve Sailer asks the question that every American ought to be asking.

If he survives, the Ft. Hood shooter will of course be charged with murder, but it’s reasonable to inquire whether treason should also be charged. After all, for a major in the U.S. Army, trained at taxpayer expense in the use of weapons, to shoot 40 unarmed comrades-in-arms would seem like a reasonable example of waging war on the United States.

On the other hand, with Jane Fonda still walking around free, one has to wonder whether treason is an obsolescent concept in American law.

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Dude, if a lion jumps on the hood of my car, I ain’t gonna be smilin’.

Gotta love Australians.

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Apparently this guy has has never been to Washington. We all know where it goes.

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I am not making this up.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is a very wise man.

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

The greatest obstacle to calm, rational, evidence-based thinking about human nature, is human nature. Pessimism doesn’t come easily. You have to struggle your way towards it.

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But you knew that.

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Some of these I like a lot; some are really silly. But it’s worth thinking about.

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This must have all happened after I left in 1980.

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Of course. All it needs is an oscillation overthruster and you’re there.