The Cold Calculus of Hiking

For part of the trip, I couldn’t decide which was the tougher scramble: Crowsnest Mountain or Mount Sparrowhawk. That debate was conclusively squashed in the crux of Crowsnest: picture a gully a few metres wide but a good dozen meters tall, filled with loose scree that makes grinding up the channel a slog, and sprinkle in a few upclimbs just to further piss you off. Those two metal chains did indeed make the near-cliff at the top of the gully easier to exit, but there was an awkward section between them with few good footholds. The angle of the rock strata was down-slope, too, which I noted would make that section extremely dangerous when wet.

I didn’t know the half of how treacherous it could get.

===

Weather reports in the mountains are like the Pirate Code. The mountains themselves cause weather and redirect the wind, and tend to be more prone to moisture and wind than the surrounding valleys, making forecasting difficult. I ruled out hiking in Lake Louise or Banff due to 50% chances of rain, but I thought Crowsnest Pass had a 0% chance of rain that day, which didn’t offer much room for a weather surprise. I later learned I’d misread the report and there was a 20% chance in the afternoon, but at worst I’d just have been more slightly more alert to the weather. I would have been on alert anyway, as the high winds of the Crowsnest Pass only make weather surprises more likely. Reading the conditions while on the hike is far more reliable, for obvious reasons, but when scrambling a mountain you spend most of your time with half the sky blocked by said mountain. As unreliable as they can be, weather reports are still vital.

Alas, the forecasts were wrong even before we stepped out of the vehicle. Webcams from the Crowsnest Pass region showed smoke-free skies the previous day, another plus over Lake Louise/Banff, but we arrived to find quite a bit of smoke in the air. To understand why that’s annoying, consider the view when there isn’t much smoke about.

A teeny bit of the view from the top of Mount Sparrowhawk. Click for a bigger version.

This is a small slice of what you see from the top of Mount Sparrowhawk. That long “lake” on the left is actually the Spray Lakes Reservoir, while the stubby one is Goat Pond. There’s a bit of Mount Lougheed in shadow, and dead behind it are The Rimwall (7km away), the Three Sisters (10km), Mount Rundle (25km), and Cascade Mountain (38km). All of those are beneath you! There may only be two mountains higher than Sparrowhawk visible here, Bonnet Peak and Mount Temple, and the closest of them is 70km away. That’s not my record for mountainspotting, but you get the point: clear air on a mountain top earns you spectacular views of distant scenery.

The view from the final ascent of Crowsnest Mountain.

Smoky air is more like this. The pretty boomerang is the Seven Sisters (2km away), the sun-kissed mountains are Allison Peak and Mount Ward (7km), and that black mass behind the Seven Sisters is part of the High Rock Range (no more than 15km). It doesn’t have the same impact, right?

It was a lot more alarming, though. This shot was taken above those chains, about 200m short of the summit, and the more I looked at it the more worried I got. The biggest tell for rain is dark tendrils coming down from puffy Cumulus clouds, because that’s precisely what you’re looking at. All that smoke in the air led to deep dark cloud shadows and poor visibility, though, blocking my view. I had to rely on more qualitative tells, which fell outside the frame of this shot: really tall Cumulus clouds and “smearing” that blurs normally sharp boundaries. Overall, I figured there was maybe a 30% chance the haze was hiding rain. On the other hand, those clouds had been building for hours and slowly marching towards us from the North. Shortly before taking this shot, I called an audible: we should turn back. The risk side of the equation outbalanced the reward, even though the flag was waving at us from the summit. There was no way I wanted to be caught between those chains in the rain. We were all hungry and tired from the grind, so I recommended a quick break for food and photos before we retreated.

Shortly after taking this shot, I saw a lightning bolt over Allison Peak.

As we raced back down, I first saw the first clear signs of dark tendrils rapidly coming at us from the High Rock Range, as well as an ominous white “fog.” The rest of the group were pressuring me to find shelter immediately; I agreed and had a place in mind, but it was past those chains. Maybe five minutes before reaching the pair, the wave of rain hit. It really brought down the temperature, and made it tough to navigate through wet sunglasses. There wasn’t much lightning, thankfully, but we couldn’t be more exposed. I almost led us into another gully to the West of the chains, but caught sight of a cairn and was able to steer us true. I was shouting directions to the rest of group as they descended down, as by this time the wind had really picked up. The white fog chose that moment to reveal it was actually pea-sized hail. Fortunately, I saw a ray of hope: there was a bright spot behind Allison Peak, where the sun appeared to be shining through the clouds. This nastiness would pass shortly, and if only briefly we’d have a window of better weather.

But that was only the first half of the treachery.

===

I have a reputation for being impervious to cold. But I’ll let you in on a secret: there’s nothing special about my body. I was that kid who had to come indoors after ten minutes in the cold, and eventually it pissed me off enough to try to find workarounds like how to dress in layers. That was so effective, I wound up ditching my winter coat in favor of a thin raincoat I’d layer over one or two sweaters and a shirt. I could easily adjust for the conditions, or swap out layers as they got wet. And it was cheaper than a proper coat! Nowadays, my standard hiking clothing is a thin exercise T for moisture wicking, a beat-up puffy fleece sweater for insulation, and said raincoat for wind protection. For the lower half, I wear convertible pants as shorts for the outer layer, with some thick tights for insulation and a pair of thick wool socks for either feet or hands.

My record for remaining comfortable in a T-shirt and shorts is 0 Celsius. But I managed that while snow-shoeing in a dense forest on a sunny day; there was no wind to accelerate the loss of heat, the sun was warming my skin, and the physical exertion was just able to compensate for what I was losing to the surrounding atmosphere. When you’re a cardio junkie with the resting heart rate of an athlete, “keep moving to stay warm” is easy advice to follow. It’s one reason why I rarely throw an extra layer on when I stop for a snack, because I know that any chill I get will be gone fifteen minutes after we move again. Conversely, if I threw on the layer I’d overheat at roughly the same time and be forced to stop and change.

So when I snapped that photo on Crowsnest Mountain, I was wearing only my wicking layer and shorts. By the time we reached the chains, what little body heat I’d earned from that exercise was canceled out by my wicking layer dutifully using the rain to rip heat from me. I instinctively stuck to the back of the pack, thanks to years of experience, but that also meant I had to sit tight while the rest of the group descended the chains one-by-one. I could feel my core temperature dropping.

Alas, the layer system has flaws. If there’s only a drizzle, throwing on just the rain coat may temporarily keep you dry, but as moisture accumulates the coat will cling to your skin and suck the heat out of you. The sweater usually fares better in the short term, but offers no protection from the wind and will eventually get wet enough to suck heat even faster. Combining both will overheat you and build up sweat, which again sucks the heat out. I’d wanted to try out a new coat aimed at this middle space, and intended to use it as my insulating layer in case things went sideways; instead, I forgot the coat at home. Everyone else had all their layers on, so my only option was the rain coat destined to cool me down.

And there was no place to run. I could try to work up some heat by marching up and down the mountain, but that would increase my exposure to a lightning strike. To my left and right were cliffs, and the descent would be slow, methodical, and destined to generate little heat. Chilling down isn’t just dangerous because it slows your movement or causes shivering, it also saps your brain power. You become less observant and make more mistakes, which could prove fatal when descending slippery rock. The rest of the group was also counting on my experience to lead them back down the mountain, so I had to stay sharp. And the cooler I got, the longer it would take to warm back up.

I was faced with a difficult decision: I could launch down the chains ASAP, or I could pause to throw on my rain coat and tights. The former sacrificed some cognition and increased the risk of an accident, while the latter allowed the rain more time to wet down my footholds and increased the anxiety of the group below. I let the hail bounce off my helmet for a few seconds as I weighed each option, and cursed my rotten luck.

A puny hail storm that I’d have shrugged off below treeline had just put me in one of the most dangerous situations I’d faced.

===

I reached for my coat. It felt wonderful to be protected from the wind. Unfortunately, trying to pull my tights over my pants and hiking sandals cost me a fair bit of time, and I could hear shouted inquiries from below when I finally reached for that first chain. I debated what to do about my gloves. They were intended to protect your hands while belaying, but had proven useful for scrambling. Now, they were waterlogged and cooling off my hands. I decided to leave them on anyway, as the rain was slacking off and they’d help me on the chain.

I wrapped the first chain once around my dominant arm, to maximize friction, and began carefully inch-worming down the line. I shouted back commentary as I descended the chain. Dangling off the end, I probed the very top of the awkward section. I found an unappetizing mixture of mud-like rock dust and slick footholds. By this time the hail had stopped and the rain was dwindling. The distant bright patch wasn’t the Sun breaking through the clouds, but it was still a rain-free oasis of thin cloud rapidly advancing on us. I called down to the group: I was going to wait between the chains for fifteen minutes, to give the rock some time to dry.

The rain faded away. The damp rain coat slowly sucked away my heat. I kept up a conversation with the rest of the group, unseen below. It soothed their nerves. It soothed my nerves. And it helped me assess my cognitive abilities. The others had made it down safely. They weren’t in the place I’d called a shelter, but they had sheltered and could wait. I meditated over the awkward few metres of rock below me. I hadn’t realized how narrow the walls were on the ascent. I could use that.

I grabbed the end of the chain again and probed. There was a teeny bit less moisture, but more importantly I could see my first few steps. My core temperature was cool but OK. I paused for a bit, contemplating, then called down: I was descending the tricky section.

I’ve never been interested in climbing, but I used to boulder a fair bit and had absorbed a few tricks. When faced with a chimney just wide enough for their bodies, climbers wedge themselves sideways and used friction to overcome missing footholds. The vertical rock was much less likely to be wet than the horizontal footholds, though the friction is strong enough that any wetness didn’t matter. I keep typing “footholds” instead of “handholds” because climbing is really about your feet. Your hands are there to help steady you against the wall and help distribute the pressure a bit, but to a first approximation climbing is just standing in places no sane person should.

Carefully, I tried to examine the rock for a potential foothold. I slowly probed with a foot until it touched potentially-friendly rock. I looked where it landed. I scraped around a bit, to clear off any water or mud-dust, and assess what sort of friction I could get out of the rock. I braced against the sides of the little canyon. I eased myself onto the foothold, not fully trusting it. When I was confident, I did the entire process again. And again.

Three metres down, I noticed the little canyon was getting wider. Bracing against the side was increasingly less viable, yet I was still a good two metres from the chain. A small wave of panic passed over me. I looked up and down the length of the mini canyon, debating if I should head back up or continue on. With a deep breath, I had a look down for my next foothold.

Then I blinked and was standing next to the chain. I’m not sure why I don’t remember those next few metres; I had successfully fought back that brief bit of panic, and while I was cold I still felt mentally sharp. Maybe I was so focused on the rhythm of easing myself down that I lost track of time? Whatever the case, I announced I was at the second chain and eagerly grabbed it. Thus began another rhythm: release dominant arm, awkwardly slide it down the chain, grip, release the other hand and slide it to meet, look for a place for one foot, look for a place for the other foot, repeat. Within a few minutes, I could see the rest of the group huddled below. Alas, it felt like forever until I was next to them; had someone moved the footholds I used to get up this section? It wasn’t a big deal given my body temperature, so I ambled down like I was pondering chess moves.

I checked in with the group, this time face-to-face. They were in much the same shape as I was, chilled but unharmed and calm. They had blasted through the awkward section without trouble, as they’d been too busy concentrating to let fear overwhelm them. I gave some pointers on how they should descend the rest of the gully, as scree made it terribly easy to send rocks flying into any person below. I took my time to grab a quick snack and readjust my gear, deliberately letting them get well below me. I could descend scree a lot faster than they could, though I kicked up a lot of rocks in the process. As started down I grumpily noted they weren’t sticking to my plan, but they had enough distance between them to be safe.

We reconnected at the base of the gully. The danger level was rising again: the trail split into multiple similar-looking paths, the bright horizon had again been replaced with dark shadows moving in our direction, yet we had one more down-climb left to do. This wasn’t over yet.

===

Just kidding, it pretty much was. That second rain burst was shorter and less intense than the first, with no hail and barely any lightning. It finished before we hit the second down-climb, and that section of rock was surprisingly dry. The rest of the group did try to pick the wrong trail, but after a bit of shouting and wild gesturing on my part I got us all back on what I remembered as the proper track. And my memories proved true.

As we made the final descent down steep scree to the safety of the trees below, the clouds parted and that smell you get from a freshly watered forest wafted up to us. The Seven Sisters were bathed in a beautiful light, the greenery was lusher than we remembered. I tried to rain on things a bit by pointing out that there was a chance the creek we needed to cross had become bigger, but it was unchanged from earlier.

We spent the hike back to the vehicle debating which mountain to try next week.

The Silent Army

Last week, the department was saying this:

[Health and Human Services] Secretary Alex Azar claimed migrant parents who have been separated from their kids under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy should be able to easily locate their children, countering reports about difficulties families have faced. “There is no reason why any parent would not know where their child is located,” Azar testified at a Senate Finance Committee hearing this morning. Azar said he could locate “any child” in his department’s care “within seconds“ through an online government database.

Thursday, less than a week after they were ordered to reunite children with their families, the department was now reporting this:

Trump administration health chief Alex Azar said Thursday that no immigrant children separated from their parents have been reunited with their families in federal custody — yet — to comply with looming court order deadlines to do so. But Azar said the U.S. Health and Human Services Department will comply with the first of those deadlines to take children in HHS custody and place them with parents who are in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement next Tuesday.

Azar said there are somewhat fewer than 3,000 kids who were separated from their parents when they jointly tried to illegally cross the border with Mexico. That is much higher than the 2,047 children that HHS recently said were in its custody. Azar said the new number is higher because a judge has required HHS to reunite all separated children, including ones taken from parents before the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy took effect in May.

The story remained the same Friday morning, then changed again.

Just days ahead of a deadline, the Trump administration said it may need more time to reunite some of the immigrant families it separated. […] “If we’re not aware of where the parent is, I can’t commit to saying that reunification will occur before the deadline. … We’re still determining what the situation is there,” [Justice Department attorney Sarah Fabian] said, “and whether those are situations where reunifications may not be able to occur within the time frame.”

After the hearing, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said it was troubling that officials still can’t provide precise statistics about families they separated. “It was clear today that the government has not even been able to match all the children with parents,” he said. “That is extremely troubling.”

Things are so bad, this government department is trying to redefine what “reunite” means. Emphasis mine.

“The secretary told us on a conference call that they do not have any intention to reunify these children with their parents. They are going to call it good if they could find anyone else to serve as a foster parent or might have some familial relationship,” [Washington state Governor Jay] Inslee told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes late Friday, when he asked about a June 29 meeting mentioned in a letter addressed to officials on Friday.

“Perhaps we should not be surprised. This whole indignant and traumatic episode was based in inhumanity at the beginning, it was based on deceit in middle, and now it’s based on incompetence. These people have no idea what they are dong — I’ve seen coat check windows operate with a better system.”

[Read more…]

A Little Racist Butterfly

Researchers have noted that, for decades, prison sentences have been just ever-so-slightly more harsh for black people than white people.

As a whole, these findings undermine the so-called ‘‘no discrimination thesis’’ which contends that once adequate controls for other factors, especially legal factors (i.e., criminal history and severity of current offense), are controlled unwarranted racial disparity disappears. In contrast to the no discrimination thesis, the current research found that independent of other measured factors, on average African-Americans were sentenced more harshly than whites. The observed differences between whites and African Americans generally were small, suggesting that discrimination in the sentencing stage is not the primary cause of the overrepresentation of African-Americans in U.S. correctional facilities.

Mitchell, Ojmarrh. “A meta-analysis of race and sentencing research: Explaining the inconsistencies.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 21.4 (2005): 439-466.

Not as widely noted: incarceration sorta behaves like a contagious disease. [Read more…]

The Call Is From Inside The House

White supremacists face a problem: if they openly stated what they believed, people would recoil in horror, yet if they don’t state what they believe how will they know where their friends are? The obvious solution is to use coded language, which at minimum will fly over the heads of normies and at maximum get parroted by them out of ignorance. So what sort of codes do white supremacists use?

“14 Words” is a reference to the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The slogan was coined by David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group known as The Order (Lane died in prison in 2007). … Because of its widespread popularity, white supremacists reference this slogan constantly, in its full form as well as in abbreviated versions such as “14 Words”, “Fourteen Words,” or simply the number “14.”

Trump’s been infamous for repeating white supremacist language, which isn’t surprising if his rumoured reading habits are true, but this has emboldened his supporters to break out the codewords. Both Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter have been caught spreading the “fourteen words” signal.

Coulter’s “14!” was overwhelmingly answered with “88,” a reference to another one of [David] Lane’s white supremacist terms. It stems from his “88 Precepts,” a list of statements on what he calls “natural law.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 88 is often used among neo-Nazis, because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet and 88 stands for “Heil Hitler.”

With that background, you can imagine why my eyebrows shot up when Salty Current shared this link.

This is an actual story on an official government website with a 14-word headline starting with “we must secure”. This is not an accident. There are actual Nazis-who-call-themselves-Nazis at DHS.

That press release looks quite different from other White House press releases. It’s not connected to any action by the White House, and even when compared to fact sheets it’s lacking any paragraphs to give proper context. Posted on the 15th of February, it consists of 13 bullet points broken by 1 non-bulleted paragraph. It has a twin, also released on the 15th and also asking to “secure the nation,” consisting of a one-sentence opening paragraph followed by 15 bullet points.

That first release has an odd paragraph (emphasis mine):

The increase in claims filed is not associated with an increase in meritorious claims. As of FY 17, the asylum grant rate for defensive applications in immigration court is approximately 30%. On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.

Chris Hayes points to this as a potential explanation:

Interviews to assess credible fear are conducted almost immediately after an asylum request is made, often at the border or in detention facilities by immigration agents or asylum officers, and most applicants easily clear that hurdle. Between July and September of 2016, U.S. asylum officers accepted nearly 88 percent of the claims of credible fear, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data.

While that and the non-14 bullet points are enough to calm his fears, they aren’t enough for me. Read back through the first press release, and you’ll see it loves giving two-digit numbers in percentages. Yet when handed the figure of “88 percent,” it dropped the percentage mark.

The popularity of “14 words” is both a blessing and a curse; it makes it easy for white supremacists to see their allies, but it’s also easily spotted by other people. If those press releases contained exactly 14 bullet points, there wouldn’t be any plausible deniability that a code was involved. A logical way to keep up the code, then, would be to dance around it a bit; throw out a lot of 13’s and 15’s instead, and have the normies tie themselves in knots debating if there’s a code there at all. After all, what are the odds that someone who uses white supremacist language, shows sympathy to white supremacists, and might have a white supremacist as their father, would go on to surround themselves with white supremacists or people sympathetic to their cause?

For white supremacists, however, there is no debate. All that confusion helps them get the word out that they’re not alone, that there are many other people sympathetic to their cause, and that some of those supporters hold the highest offices in the US of A. It’s a message to stay strong and keep the faith.

A Worthy Challenge

I’ve been grinding my gears a bit. The topics in my queue are pretty heavy, and desperately need some levity to balance them out. Unfortunately, the lightest things I can blog about aren’t ready or appropriate for the blog. So I’m at a loss for what to write about.

Thankfully, Nate Hevenstone has come to my rescue. In a series of three posts, he lays out a bit of history behind “intelligence” …

What’s interesting is that the test was not designed to measure intelligence. It was actually designed to find out which children needed extra help in school, because of what Binet called “developmental delay”. It was Terman, in his revision, that changed the Binet-Simon Test from a means of discovering children who need help to a means of classifying humans into “intelligence categories”.

… and starts explaining why “stupid” is an ableist slur, something he continues in the second and then expands to other words …

Ultimately, “stupid” is a word that can easily be replaced with so many other words. It’s one of those words where, even if you remove the fact that it’s an ableist slur, it’s entirely superfluous. It serves no purpose since it really doesn’t elucidate… well… anything.

… and finally offers some alternatives in the third, and issues a challenge.

For just one month, stop using “stupid”, “moron”, “idiot”, “dense”, “crazy”, “insane”, and similar words, and stop using the diagnostic names of actual conditions (“deaf”, “dumb”, “blind”, “autistic”, “schizophrenic”, “sociopathic”, “bi-polar”, etc) as slurs, as well.

I’m game! In fact, I’ve done this before: for years now, I’ve challenged myself not to assume people’s pronouns. I was pretty hardcore about this at first, insisting on “they” unless I could track down a place where the person in question flagged their pronouns. They only time I found it annoying was when discussing abortion, but the benefits of inclusive language more than outweigh any discomfort. I also enjoyed the challenge, English really loves to mix gender and pregnancy.

In fact, I might be a little too game. After some searching, I can only find myself using “stupid” either in Proof of God, which I stopped writing in 2013, or buried at the end of a repost from Sinmantyx that dates from 2015. While I have used intelligence as an insult, you can also find me acknowledging that’s not cool.

Ah well, there’s no harm in being extra mindful, and it’s a good excuse to up my pronoun challenge. Are you gonna join in, too?

Dispatches from “Enlightenment Now:” Intellectuals

One of the blog posts I’m working on demands that I give Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now an in-depth skim, and it’s dredging up all sorts of secondary things. I might as well take advantage of that, and spread the misery around.

For instance, are we sure Pinker isn’t a secret far-Right plant?

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bienpensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class — the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin, 2018. pg. 43.

His hatred for “intellectuals” is astonishing, especially since the blurb for Enlightenment Now calls him one. Isn’t the whole thesis of the book that we should all become more enlightened, more intellectual? And yet it contains an endless parade of scorn for those who are known for their intelligence.

At various times Western intellectuals have also sung the praises of Ho Chi Minh, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim II-sung, Pol Pot, Julius Nyerere, Omar Torrijos, Slobodan Milogevié, and Hugo Chavez.

Why should intellectuals and artists, of all people, kiss up to murderous dictators? One might think that intellectuals would be the first to deconstruct the pretexts of power, and artists to expand the scope of human compassion. (Thankfully, many have done just that.) One explanation, offered by the economist Thomas Sowell and the sociologist Paul Hollander, is professional narcissism. Intellectuals and artists may feel unappreciated in liberal democracies, which allow their citizens to tend to their own needs in markets and civic organizations. Dictators implement theories from the top down, assigning a role to intellectuals that they feel is commensurate with their worth. But tyrannophilia is also fed by a Nietzschean disdain for the common man, who annoyingly prefers schlock to fine art and culture, and by an admiration of the superman who transcends the messy compromises of democracy and heroically implements a vision of the good society.

pg. 451

Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism, its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers. They can literally be seen from space. A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant. Other matched pairs with an experimental group and a control group lead to the same conclusion: West and East Germany when they were divided by the Iron Curtain; Botswana versus Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe; Chile versus Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro — the latter a once-wealthy, oil-rich country now suffering from widespread hunger and a critical shortage of medical care.

pg. 95

This evidence-based take on the Enlightenment project reveals that it was not a naive hope. The Enlightenment has worked — perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble — a reason to live.

pg. 11

In 2016, a majority of Americans named terrorism as the most important issue facing the country, said they were worried that they or a family member would be a victim, and identified ISIS as a threat to the existence or survival of the United States. The fear has addled not just ordinary citizens trying to get a pollster off the phone but public intellectuals, especially cultural pessimists perennially hungry for signs that Western civilization is (as always) on the verge of collapse.

pg. 196

Intellectual culture should strive to counteract our cognitive biases, but all too often it reinforces them.

pg. 53

(The myth, still popular among leftist intellectuals, that IQ doesn’t exist or cannot be reliably measured was refuted decades ago.)

pg. 248

I used to think that Trumpism was pure id, an upwelling of tribalism and authoritarianism from the dark recesses of the psyche. But madmen in authority distill their frenzy from academic scribblers of a few years back, and the phrase “intellectual roots of Trumpism” is not oxymoronic. Trump was endorsed in the 2016 election by 136 “Scholars and Writers for America” in a manifesto called “Statement of Unity.” Some are connected to the Claremont Institute, a think tank that has been called “the academic home of Trumpism.” And Trump has been closely advised by two men, Stephen Bannon and Michael Anton, who are reputed to be widely read and who consider themselves serious intellectuals. Anyone who wants to go beyond personality in understanding authoritarian populism must appreciate the two ideologies behind them, both of them militantly opposed to Enlightenment humanism and each influenced, in different ways, by Nietzsche. One is fascist, the other reactionary — not in the common left-wing sense of “anyone who is more conservative than me,” but in their original, technical senses.

pg. 452

Pinker is apparently unaware of the right-wing think tank machine, which props up shady characters as “intellectuals” in order to advance the interests of wealthy donors. Those 136 “scholars and writers” include Newt Gingrich and Peter Thiel, FYI. The organizer of the manifesto is F.H. Buckley, a member of the Heartland Institute, and said Institute is notorious for promoting climate change denial. Steve Bannon may consider himself an intellectual, but belief is not the same as reality, and Michael Anton is arguably more ridiculous.

I know, I know, you could argue that Pinker’s focusing just on the “literary intellectuals” as per C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures.” Sorry, that’s not plausible. Notice the lack of any qualifiers for some of these quotes, as well; Pinker is including a significant majority of all intellectuals in his tirades, at minimum.

[feels a tap on his shoulder]

Er, uh what-

What makes one person more intellectually able than another? Can the entire distribution of human intelligence be accounted for by just one general factor? Is intelligence supported by a single neural system? Here, we provide a perspective on human intelligence that takes into account how general abilities or ‘‘factors’’ reflect the functional organization of the brain. By comparing factor models of individual differences in performance with factor models of brain functional organization, we demonstrate that different components of intelligence have their analogs in distinct brain networks. Using simulations based on neuroimaging data, we show that the higher-order factor ‘‘g’’ is accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple networks. Finally, we confirm the independence of these components of intelligence by dissociating them using questionnaire variables. We propose that intelligence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity.

Hampshire, Adam, et al. “Fractionating human intelligence.” Neuron 76.6 (2012): 1225-1237.

Whoa whoa whoa, what’s a study that refutes the idea of a single-factor measure of intelligence doing here?! Shoo! Go away, you’re off topic!

[hears something scamper away]

That’s better.

Howard Gardner’s brilliant conception of individual competence has changed the face of education in the twenty-three years since the publication of his classic work, Frames of Mind. Since then thousands of educators, parents, and researchers have explored the practical implications and applications of Multiple Intelligences theory–the powerful notion that there are separate human capacities, ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in self-understanding. The first decade of research on MI theory and practice was reported in the 1993 edition of Multiple Intelligences. This new edition covers all developments since then and stands as the most thorough and up-to-date account of MI available anywhere. Completely revised throughout, it features new material on global applications and on MI in the workplace, an assessment of MI practice in the current conservative educational climate, new evidence about brain functioning, and much more.

Gardner, Howard E. Multiple intelligences: New horizons in theory and practice. Basic books, 2008.

THAT’S IT!! I’m ending this blog post right now!

Back to Basics

A friend asked for an explainer on Bayesian statistics, and I instinctively reached for Yudkowsky’s only to find this at the top:

This page has now been obsoleted by a vastly improved guide to Bayes’s Theorem, the Arbital Guide to Bayes’s Rule. Please read that instead. Seriously. I mean it.

You can see why once you’ve clicked the link; it asks for your prior experience, then tailors the explanation appropriately. There’s also some good diagrams, and it tries to explain the same concept multiple ways to hammer the point home. Their bit on p-values is on-point, too.

Speaking of stats, I’ve also been drawn back into a course on probability I started years ago. MIT OpenCourseware has a lot of cool offerings, but this entry on probability has been worth my attention. While E.T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory still has my favourite treatment of the subject, the video lectures are easier to parse and proceed at a faster clip.

Sam Harris “Corrects” the Record

Whelp, less than thirty-eight hours after my blog post Sam Harris finally deleted that old video. However, spotting that made me realise I’d missed his explanation for why he edited the episode. That was probably by design, the description to the podcast episode drops no hint that it’s there.

As before, I’ve done some light editing, but also included time-stamps so you can check my work.

[3:17] Just a little housekeeping for today’s episode. A few episodes back, I presented audio from an event I did with Christian Picciolini in Dallas, and that was a fun event, I enjoyed speaking with Christian a lot […]

[3:51] But unfortunately, in that podcast, Christian said a few things that don’t seem to have been strictly true, and as the weeks have passed and that podcast has continued streaming I’ve heard from two people who consider his remarks to have been unfairly damaging to their reputations. This is a problem that I am quite sensitive to, given what gets done to me, by my critics. Somewhat ironically, Christian seems to rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center for much of his information, but this is an organization, as many of you know, which is undergoing a full moral and intellectual self-immolation. In fact, Christian is confused enough about the stature of that organization that he retweeted an article from the SPLC website wherein I am described as a racist recruiter for the alt-right. […]

We’re barely a minute in, and Harris has badly distorted the record. One of Picciolini’s tweets references the Southern Poverty Law Center, true, but he also cites tweets by David Duke, The Daily Stormer, Wikipedia (and before you start, I checked the citations and it’s legit), Joe Rogan, YouTube recordings of Molyneux, and his experiences talking to families with Molyneux-obsessed members. Yet that one reference to the SPLC somehow translates into “much of his information?”

Harris also misrepresents that SPLC article. They didn’t declare him to be a recruiter, self-declared members of the alt-Right said that Sam Harris helped lead them to the alt-Right.

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