Maggie's Farm

Dan Kahan of Yale Law School discusses Cultural Cognition and the Challenge of Science Communication.

His lecture is basically about confirmation bias, which he discusses in terms of "cultural cognition."

While he acknowledges that at least some of what he terms "cultural" is in fact psychological (eg a person's fearfulness or curiosity about life) rather than groupthink, it is still an interesting approach to opinion formation.

I get the sense that he thinks people should believe what the experts say. I also think he has a slight case of Asperger's, which makes listening to him an interesting experience. As a Maggie's person, my tendency is to be skeptical about what experts say (which places me in his hierarchical, individualistic categories).

Well, I suppose that, to be up to date, I should say "Working with those to whom one is or becomes attracted."

Guys used to have affairs with their secretaries. Today, there are no secretaries, and women are working in every field from the military to police forces to trading floors. When it was a Man's World, there was less temptation.

It is no surprise that people form attractions and attachments with co-workers - after all, most people spend more time with co-workers than with their spouse and family. Some emotional connection is inevitable.

I won't even bother asking whether you have had this happen to you, because it is universal and frequent. (Years ago, a co-worker of mine told me that he only wanted assistants who were ugly or old, so he would not be distracted.)

My question for our readers, if they wish to be open about this topic, is this:

How do you deal with it when you feel turned on by, attracted to, or in love or lust with a co-worker?

Volokh says yes: The “Rules of English”

And he offers this compelling example.

With all due respect to the Bible and to Shakespeare, I say that it is obviously acceptable in casual and conversational English, and in poetic English, but not in formal English, and the same goes for run-on sentences.

The SAT was designed to produce a more egalitarian, less elitist American college student, yet few are ever really happy with it. I tend to view it roughly as an IQ test, but one which conflates the upper end to eliminate the upper outliers (it's not fair to the others to be too good).

From Steve Sailer's Asians, aptitude, and achievement: a positive sum reform proposal (h/t AVI):

...once the Ivy Leagues started trying to find the most promising non-upper class kids from the rest of the country, they needed something more objective about individuals than just grades. Another issue is that high school grades have certain inherent shortcomings. The future Nobelist in physics might not care about his social studies class and thus wind up with a lower overall GPA than the well-adjusted grind. Plus, grades have a ceiling. Even an A+ in physics doesn't really tell you that much. Moreover, lots of future successes are alienated in high school. Some people who get all As in high school might not have the upside to continue to do so in college. Incentives toward grade inflation at the high school are built in. And so forth ...

When one's kids get their own places, they tend not to have a lot of space. Few kids move out into 5000 square foot houses or apartments with giant closets and storage rooms. For both practical and sentimental reasons, their stuff tends to hang around, collecting dust and taking up potentially-usable space.

Even when you love them to death, at some point you want their stuff out. Baby birds have to fly. They will accumulate their own mountains of stuff, in time, and the cycle of stuff will repeat.

I remember when my Mom advised me to empty my old bedroom of anything I wanted to keep before it disappeared. I thought that sounded very cold at the time, but I now realize that it wasn't. They had done their job, and done it very well indeed at considerable sacrifice.

My old bedroom was destined to become a guest room - and a room where the grandkids could stay to visit. However, to this day it has a large ceiling to floor bookshelf with my old books on it.

America contains lots of cultures and subcultures.

In Yankeeland, men never seem to want to retire. It's a point of masculine pride in a part of the country where work and masculine pride and vigor have traditionally been equated.

Our tradition has always been a little suspicious of, and uncomfortable with, leisure. Perhaps "ambivalent" is the right word. People with Yankeeland roots tend to find some work to do when they find spare time on their hands. Idleness is a sin, and "relaxation" is not in the lexicon. I am not saying that this is right or wrong - it's just a cultural thing hereabouts.

Furthermore, Yankee women tend not to like having an idle guy around her domain.

Here's a link at The American: Entitled to Leisure? The growing length of retirement for men in part reflects a decline in the number of years spent working. Is this a good thing? One quote:

That men age 20 now devote only two-thirds rather than 90 percent of their remaining lifetimes to paid work will be regarded by many readers as a sign of progress. But would we be better off if such men “caught up” to women by devoting only half of their remaining lifetime to paid work? Or would it be better if instead women caught up to men by devoting two-thirds of their remaining lifetimes to paid work? From the standpoint of financing entitlements, the answer is clear. But whether that answer maximizes social welfare will be a topic of heated discussion in the months and years ahead.

The 92-year old who bags my wine says he keeps working so he can pick up chicks. He goes for the lonely 80 year-olds.

Roger Kimball on G. K. Chesterton: master of rejuvenation - On the vitality of the Jolly Journalist's work. A quote:

Chesterton’s success would have been hard to predict. He was the opposite of precocious. He didn’t learn to read until his ninth year (but after that he was unstoppable). His performance at lower school was lackluster. One schoolmaster exclaimed in exasperation that “if we could open your head we should not find any brain but only a lump of white fat.” Chesterton began to blossom at St. Paul’s (whose notable alumni include Milton, Pepys, and Judge Jeffries), where he met and befriended E. C. Bentley, the creator of the Clerihew, a form Chesterton would have been proud to invent.

After St. Paul’s, Chesterton first contemplated a career in art. For a couple of years, he dabbled in classes at the Slade while also attending lectures in English, French, and Latin at University College, London. He took no degree. And art turned out to be an entrée, an avocation, not an end. He went on to entertain friends with his drawings. But his main revelation concerned criticism. Years later, Chesterton recalled that, “having failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I had discovered the easiest of all professions; which I have pursued ever since.”

His wife was phobic about sex. That is probably why he got so fat.

Among the people we tend to dine with, nobody ever orders a dessert.

I am one to enjoy good stinky cheeses with a sliced pear after a dinner, or maybe a tiny bowl of fruit with some creme fraiche, but if nobody is ordering anything except coffee, you hate to be the only one still greedily munching.

Dessert seems to have become a special treat in America, only for special occasions. Nobody wants to act like, or look like, a pig at the trough.

How about you?

From Paul's Obama and Our 9/11 Trauma:

Within days of the attacks, a friend coolly informed me, "the people in the Twin Towers deserved it." Still reeling from that shock, I almost lost it when another friend admiringly compared bin Laden to George Washington. Soon thereafter, a well-known academic in my circle complained that the sudden outpouring of patriotism made her sick.

This utter madness, which I thought would be confined to the fringe, rapidly spread to every corner of elite society. The more we learned about the savagery of the Islamist world, the more our moral and cultural superiors turned their wrath on us, instead of the enemy.

As headlines blared the almost surrealistic brutality of Al Qaeda, Senator Patty Murray told a group of high school honor students that Osama bin Laden was popular in poor countries because he paid for day care centers. "We haven't done that," Murray said. "How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?"

From Wemyss' Broken Britain in the NER:

...the sentimental idea that the intellectual differences between children are not real - or that they are real, but too upsetting to acknowledge - has taken hold of the popular imagination, whereas once such nonsense could only have been believed by a sociologist.

My son went to one of the comprehensives that replaced academically selective grammar schools. He is now studying law at university. Since he was likely to be correct about which of his peers would have passed and failed the eleven-plus had it still existed, I asked him if any of the likely failures had gone on to do surprisingly well under the comprehensive system.

Not one. I then asked if any of those whom he would have expected to pass the eleven-plus had gone on to do less well than he would have expected.

Several.

And then of course there is the question of the content of the education, even for those who “do well”. My son would be quick to acknowledge that he is an academic success but that he knows virtually nothing of British or European literature prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, he knows little of British or European history, even including the twentieth century. He knows nothing of the Bible, or the Christian tradition. Luckily, he is genuinely intelligent, and has a magpie-like gift for intellectual theft, seeing much of an idea from even the tiniest stolen morsel.

Read the whole thing. It's about "enforced compassion" and egalitarian ideology.