Month: April 2017

Modernity is not magic with Muslims

Posted on by Razib Khan

There are many reasons I have become very skeptical of the media over the years. Though I do not subscribe to the conspiracy theory paradigms, it is obvious that the mainstream media often combines fidelity to precise narratives with a lack of detailed knowledge about the topics they are covering. In other words, they’re stenographers with an agenda. When you don’t know the topic they are expositing upon they can seem quite persuasive. But when you do know the topic they are addressing the emperor can be revealed to be naked. Naturally this warrants concern in most people who observe this, as if they are catching errors in the matrix.*

One area that this problem crops often for me is in regards to media coverage of Islam and and the Middle East. Most reporters don’t seem to really know much about their beat in a deep sense, so they are superficially taking in facts and putting them through coarse interpretative filters.

To name names, David Kirkpatrick covers the Middle East for The New York Times. I read his stuff, and he is not a bad journalist, but he clearly has no deep familiarity with the history of the Middle East or the details of Islam. His work is like a pop-tart; sweet, temporarily filling, but long on a sugar-rush and short on filling substance. For example, he can talk about a contrast between peaceful Sufis and Islamist militants Libya, without knowing that Sufi orders were often militant organizations, and that Libyan independence after World War II was spearheaded by a militant Sufi order. (I know this, so I’m passing this on to you!)

But readers of The New York Times “know” that Sufis are peaceful. So for prose contrast it makes sense that Kirkpatrick would bring that up. Never mind that this is so reductive to be useless in terms of getting people a better picture of reality.

In the interests of adding context, let me add something to the story about FGM in Michigan which is prominent in the news today. A Dr. Jumana Nagarwala is accused of practicing FGM on young girls. Though it is not emphasized in the American media (because it wouldn’t mean much), it seems she is from the Dawoodi Bohra of Ismailis. In India the Bohra community is well known, as it is a very distinct group from the majority of Muslims, who are Sunni, and even most Shia. Its origins seem to be among the mercantile castes of the Gujarat coast, who were converted to a particular Ismaili sect of Shia Islam.

I have some “book learning” about this sect under my belt because I read Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras about 15 years ago on the recommendation of my friend Aziz Poonawalla, who is a member of this community. Mullahs on the Mainframe was topical in the post-9/11 era because it seemed to depict a community which was both modern and religiously orthodox and observant, with fewer tensions being a minority in the West than other groups of Muslims. I don’t want to rehash that line of argument too much; descriptively it is correct that Daudi Bohras are a well behaved minority who attain success, combined with adherence to traditional beliefs and practices (Daudi Bohras, like many conservative Islamists, tend to “look” obviously Muslim because of matters of grooming and dress).

But another aspect of the Daudi Bohra community is that it is one of the few in South Asia that practices FGM. I don’t know or care about the prevalence, extent, or origin of the practice among the Bohra. When I saw the doctor’s name, which seemed South Asian, I immediately suspected she was from the community (the type of headscarf seemed familiar too).

The point of this post is not to demonize the Daudi Bohra community; the vast majority of the world’s Muslims who engage in FGM are not Daudi Bohra. The Shafi school of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence is the big offender in terms of numbers. Indonesian Sunnis are Shafi, so that nation often praised for its tolerant version of Islam has a very high proportion of FGM. Rather, it is to point out that the neat narrative frameworks we prefer are often not descriptively correct nor predictively useful. Since 9/11 rather than a more complex and nuanced view of Islam it seems that opinion leaders have been converging upon the idea that the religion is either with the angels or the devils, rather than a man-made thing which occupies the area in the middle.

The reliance on theories and heuristics which appeal to our sensibilities as right and true misleads in many ways. The arc of history bends toward justice, but the path is winding. The Protestant Reformation was rooted in the more literate and well off classes, and aimed to rid corruption from the Christian church. In the process it unleashed horrible intolerance, cultural genocide, and conflicts which resulted in tens of millions of deaths. Not taking a view on the Reformation as a whole, it is clear that its consequences are not so simply integrated into the Whig version of history when taken in full.

Ultimately we need to rush less quickly toward our preferred conclusions, which align neatly with our prior models. Rather, we need to explore the sideways and what we think are certainly dead-ends, because sometimes those dead-ends will open up startling new landscapes (by the way, I think the “rationalist” community is much better at this than the general thinking public, though that’s not saying much).

* When I was in grad school an acquaintance mentioned this in relation to Jonah Lehrer before his exposure. Lehrer was persuasive whenever he was talking about a topic he wasn’t familiar with, but was clearly out of his depth whenever it approached something he was familiar with.

The origin of organismic gangs

Posted on by Razib Khan

When W. D. Hamilton was a student he expressed an interest in exploring the problem of altruism in an evolutionary context. His struggles in getting anyone interested in the issue and supporting his study of the topic is extensively detailed in Narrow Roads of Gene Land. But he persevered and for his efforts he came up with the framework of inclusive fitness (John Maynard Smith’s term was kin selection). To a great extent it was a revolutionary model, formalizing what he been roughly understood verbally.

But could inclusive fitness explain the social structure we see around us? Hamilton attempted to extend the framework to humans in the 1970s, but that was not particularly fruitful. Other dynamics which emerged on the scene drew more from game theory. Again, John Maynard Smith loomed large, but Robert Trivers also introduced reciprocal altruism into the lexicon. These sorts of processes were much favored by thinkers such as Richard Dawkins because they are simple elementary strategies and relations that are tractable, and can be programmed dand simulated (or analytically explored).

Other researchers have different ideas and appeal to alternative traditions. David Sloan Wilson, along with E. O. Wilson, have been trying to revive models predicated on higher levels of organization. Though often termed “group selection,” the first Wilson correctly labels it “multi-level selection theory.” Though I am willing to agree that the pendulum swung too far in favor of individual level game theory and inclusive fitness in the last few decades, I do find David Sloan Wilson’s triumphalism a bit much (though his books are worth reading, and I think this is a personality issue with David, as he engages in the same triumphalism with economists).

A lot of work still needs to be done to explain social organization and behavior, even in social insects! With that, two preprints in biorxiv caught my attention.

First, Co-evolution of dispersal with behaviour favours social polymorphism. In it the authors model a system where there are dispersing individuals and sessile individuals, and show that cooperative behavior and the sessile morph and selfish behavior and the dispersing morph can persist as two alternative strategies. The paper makes the assumption that the sets of behaviors are caused by different genes which are linked, and show that low recombination is necessary to maintain the linkage. This does not seem genetically realistic.

The second paper is of a broader purview, Stags, hawks, and doves: Social evolution theory and individual variation in cooperation:

One of the triumphs of evolutionary biology is the discovery of robust mechanisms that promote the evolution of cooperative behaviors even when those behaviors reduce the fertility or survival of cooperators. Though these mechanisms, kin selection, reciprocity, and nonlinear payoffs to cooperation, have been extensively studied separately, investigating their joint effect on the evolution of cooperation has been more difficult. Moreover, how these mechanisms shape variation in cooperation is not well known. Such variation is crucial for understanding the evolution of behavioral syndromes and animal personality. Here, I use the tools of kin selection theory and evolutionary game theory to build a framework that integrates these mechanisms for pairwise social interactions. Using relatedness as a measure of the strength of kin selection, responsiveness as a measure of reciprocity, and synergy as a measure of payoff nonlinearity, I show how different combinations of these three parameters produce directional selection for or against cooperation or variation in levels of cooperation via balancing or diversifying selection. Moreover, each of these outcomes maps uniquely to one of four classic games from evolutionary game theory, which means that modulating relatedness, responsiveness, and synergy effectively transforms the payoff matrix from one the evolutionary game to another. Assuming that cooperation exacts a fertility cost on cooperators and provides a fertility benefit to social partners, a prisoner’s dilemma game and directional selection against cooperation occur when relatedness and responsiveness are low and synergy is not too positive. Enough positive synergy in these conditions generates a stag-hunt game and diversifying selection. High levels of relatedness or responsiveness turn cooperation from a fitness cost into a fitness benefit, which produces a mutualism game and directional selection for cooperation when synergy is not too negative. Sufficiently negative synergy in this case creates a hawk-dove game and balancing selection for cooperation. I extend the results with relatedness and synergy to larger social groups and show that how group size changes the effect of relatedness and synergy on selection for cooperation depends on how the per capita benefit of cooperation changes with group size. Together, these results provide a general framework with which to generate comparative predictions that can be tested using quantitative genetic techniques and experimental techniques that manipulate investment in cooperation. These predictions will help us understand both interspecific variation in cooperation as well as within-population and within-group variation in cooperation related to behavioral syndromes.

I haven’t dug into the formal models in the methods sections of either preprint, so I won’t say much more. But, I will offer that as someone who has long been interested in this field there is a surfeit and not enough data to test the models. It is time for someone ambitious to figure out how to make these areas more empirically testable.

The revenge of the cavemen

Posted on by Razib Khan

In 2012 I wrote Post-Neolithic revenge of the foragers. There were two proximate rationales for my thoughts at the time. First, I thought Peter Bellwood’s thesis of agricultural based demographic expansions in First Farmers was being vindicated in the broadest sketch, but there were many countervailing details. Second, there were already suggestions that genetic data was not indicative of a final victory of farmers by pastoralists.

There were several immediate issues that came to mind in the non-genetic domain. Bellwood argued that agriculture shape the distribution of modern language families, but the spread of Turkic and Finnic peoples seem likely to have been post-agricultural, and not based on farming. Both these groups were arguably nomadic, one pastoralist, and the other engaging in mixed use lifestyles which were reminiscent of classic hunting and gathering. And, there has been anthropological evidence that though pure hunter-gatherers, such as indigenous Australians, do not take to cultivation easily, they quickly transition to pastoralism. In other words, the skills and mores which are common among hunter-gatherers can translate rapidly once domesticate based nomadism spreads.

The Turks, or the Saami with their reindeer, are evidence of this transition, and its success. It seems plausible that the same was the case with Indo-Europeans, and that is what I thought at the time.

Now we have more data from ancient DNA. It does seem there was a “resurgence” of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry as time passed, with Neolithic farmers exhibiting a more indigenous genetic profile in Europe. Additionally, the arrival of Indo-European steppe ancestry brought another dollop of “hunter-gatherer” ancestry from beyond the fringes of Europe proper.

So what story can we tell of the transition between the Late Neolithic (LN) and the Early Bronze Age (ENA) in Europe? First, the proto-Indo-Europeans were people from the fringes and boundaries. Their genetics indicate some sort of influence from the Near East, likely via the Maykop people. But their roots were also deep in eastern Europe, from the local hunter-gatherers who had affinities with Siberians to their east and European hunter-gatherers to their west. From from this synthesis emerged something special, a warlike group of mobile pastoralists who quickly swept the field.

This reminds me of something from Peter Turchin’s book, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. Populations on the borders or frontiers of ethno-cultural (and possibly political) zones may exhibit more group cohesion than those from “core” areas. The Indo-Europeans were a border folk. They may also take to cultural innovations more quickly, in The Making of a Christian Aristocracy it is clear that switching to the new religion occurred faster among elites in outlying regions than in the core.

A second issue, which is not proven, but may be possible, is that once the Indo-Europeans moved into the North European plain, they allied with residual hunter-gatherer populations. A classic enemy-is-my-enemy proposition. This would likely result in a higher proportions of Pleistocene ancestry in later generations due to assimilation.

The moral of the story is that often there is no final victory in the war. Human history is full of reversals.

The reality of cultural hitchhiking

Posted on by Razib Khan

The figure to the left is from a paper, The mountains of giants: an anthropometric survey of male youths in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which attempts to explain why the people from the uplands of the western Balkans are so tall. Anyone who has watched high level basketball, or perused old physical anthropology textbooks, knows that average heights in the Dinaric Alps are quite high in comparison to the rest of Europe, matched only in the region around Scandinavia. The Dutch of late have been the world champions in height, and explanations such as recent selection and their high consumption of dairy products have been given. In this paper the authors point out that the people who live in the Dinaric uplands are not a population which consumes a inordinately high protein diet, at least in relation to their neighbors.

Rather, they suggest that the height of the people who reside in the Dinarics is due to a genetic factor. There is now good genomic evidence that selection accounts for at least some of the difference in height between Northern and Southern Europeans. That is, seems that there have been divergent pressures in these two locales, their genetic differences due to historical demography aside.

The exception to this north-south gradient is obviously in the Dinarics. Another way in which the Dinarics are exception is that it has the highest frequency of Y chromosomal haplgroup I. The other mode of haplogroup I is in Scandinavia. I1 is common among people who live in Sweden, while I2 among the peoples of the western Balkans. I has an interesting history because the vast majority of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer males in Europe belong to this haplogroup. It is very rare outside of Europe. This is in contrast to the other major European haplogroups, which are found outside of Europe at appreciable frequencies.

It is likely that I is indicative of a lineage with roots in Europe which go back to the late Pleistocene period after Last Glacial Maximum ~20,000 years ago. As the world warmed ~10,000 years ago small populations of hunter-gatherers rapidly expanded from their refuges and either most of the males were I, or in the drift process on the edge of the wave of advance I became very common. It is plausible that in terms of alleles which account for variation in height these hunter-gatherers were enriched for those conferring larger size. Cold weather populations tend to be larger. Additionally, they probably consumed a relatively diversified but high protein diet, allowing for greater median size than among farmers at the Malthusian carrying capacity.

But, there has been a lot of selection over the past 10,000 years, and I am skeptical that this correlation between I and height in Europe is anything but a coincidence. Rather, the phylogeny which I exhibits brings me to another issue which I think is not often highlighted: I1 in particular may have “hitchhiked” with the exogenous lineages such as R1b and R1a in early Indo-European society.

That is, in the patrilineal descent groups expanding across the landscape and monopolizing access to resources and mates, the non-invasive I somehow integrated themselves into the broader cultural complex, and partook in the plenty. Like R1b and R1a it exhibits a rake-like topology which suggests rapid recent expansion.

This would not be exceptional. The modern Russian state’s origins are in the polities created by Keivan Rus, who were famously Scandinavian. Rurik was by origin a Swede, and his dynasty eventually came to encompass most of the eastern Slavic peoples, and rule over the Russian people and state until the 17th century. Because there were so any descendants of this dynasty it was possible to adduce its Y chromosomal haplogroup, N1c1. The kicker is that this is clearly a Finnic lineage, with the most recent evidence being that it is a remnant of a recent migration out of Siberia to the west. The implication here is that the direct male lineage of Rurik were assimilated into the Scandinavian culture and power structure, and were possibly chieftains of Finnic tribes somewhere along the Baltic littoral.

Another example is the House of Wessex. Alfred the Great is arguably the first true king of England. Here are the names of some of the earlier monarchs of the House of Wessex, Ceawlin, Cynric, and Cynegils. Even someone without a background in historical linguistics may be curious about whether these are Anglo-Saxons, and there is a line of thinking that perhaps the forebears of Alfred were British warlords, who “went Saxon,” in a fashion analogous to Gallo-Roman aristocrats who assimilated to Frankish-Germanic norms and forms in the 6th and 7th centuries in the Merovingian domains.

Overall what you see in the genetic data are many things, but rarely a straightforward story. Just as genes can impact culture (e.g., lactase persistence), so culture impacts the distribution of genes. Just as human polities are coalitions, so genetic lineages themselves in their distribution and evolutionary history exhibit fingerprints of these past socio-political events and ideas.

The coming reign of the Baby Boomer gerontocracy

Posted on by Razib Khan

From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life is one of my favorite books. It’s one of those works whose breadth and depth is such that I would recommend it to anyone. Jacques Barzun began writing this work when he was 84, and it was published in his 93rd year. Born in 1907 Barzun saw the full efflorescence of 20th century Western culture across much of its span firsthand. When people say that when you age you gain wisdom, surely in the domain of scholarship Barzun’s production in the last few decades of his life would qualify.

But not everyone is Jacques Barzun. If you read Intelligence: All That Matters or peruse some of Eliott Tucker-Drob’s work you will know that cognitive function declines with age beyond your twenties. Different subcomponents may decline at different rates. And, they decline differently in different people (e.g., some people may develop dementia, so their faculties will decline far faster at an earlier age). But, by and large any gains in experience or wisdom are going to be balanced against declines in raw analytic ability, as well as the slow entropic loss of information.

This is not an inconsequential matter. Our governing class is quite old. The average age in Congress may be 55 to 60, but it is almost certainly true that more senior members with more power and authority are older. The president of the United States is 70 years old. If you look at the plots in these figures by 70 there has been a notable drop in intelligence by this age, though again, it may vary from person to person.

But most important in light of these figures is that the Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment, and many of its members are quite old, an anticipate serving until they are quite old if they are younger. In the mid-1970s justice William O. Douglas had a stroke and was basically not mentally competent to serve. Because of this fact, and Douglas’ reluctance to retire his fellow justices basically did not take his vote into account. Three of the justices today are over the age of 70, with Clarence Thomas nearing that age, and two are over the age of 80.

When it comes to Congress, or even the President, there seems to be some sort of institutional support as well as the larger collective vote in the case of Congress, which might buffer the cognitive impact of a gerontocracy. But aside from law clerks Supreme Court justices have to rely on their own individual mental capacities.

The Mormon Church has a gerontocracy among its we openleadership. Even my most devout friends in the church sometimes found it amusing how old their leadership was, and how quickly they died in succession due to the seniority principle. But The Supreme Court is not the leadership of a relatively small church. It impacts our whole nation. This sort of gerontocracy is no laughing matter.

Will we openly speak of the age issue? I doubt it. Today the Baby Boomers are between the ages of 53 an 71. They are coming into their own as a cohort into the highest reaches of the gerontocracy. If there is any generation with the grace and humility to step aside for the greater good, it will not be this generation.

$150,000 only gets you so far….

Posted on by Razib Khan

The above salary range seems accurate. I know newly minted PhDs in computer science may “only” get in the low $100,000 range at Google. So a salary in the mid six-figure range is totally reasonable with a few years of experience.
Recently a friend who is an engineer at Google in Mountain View got a transfer to Boulder, where they bought a house. He’d been trying to buy in Mountain View for a while…but that just wasn’t happening. Boulder isn’t cheap, with 178% the national average in cost of living. But it’s nothing compared to Mountain View, where the average housing cost is 7.5 times the national average.

What’s striking to me is the high variation in cost of living in American urban areas:

Overall cost of living
San Francisco272
New York City180
Seattle177
Boston170
Los Angeles166
San Diego166
Portland140
Denver128
Miami123
Austin117
Chicago111
Minneapolis109
Houston102
Atlanta102
Raleigh102
Philadelphia100
Phoenix99
New Orleans96
Dallas95
Baltimore90
Pittsburgh88
Cincinnati86
St. Louis85
Des Moines83
Memphis74
Detroit73

This website is wicked popular in Boston

Posted on by Razib Khan
Traffic Feb 1 2017 to Apr 1 2017, top 10 cities
GNXP.COMGNXP.NOFE.ME
New YorkBoston
LondonNew York
SydneyLondon
Los AngelesLos Angeles
MelbourneChicago
MadridWashington
TorontoSan Francisco
ChicagoSeattle
WashingtonToronto
BrisbaneDallas

Weird pattern in terms of top cities that read this new version of GNXP. I’m comparing to the old blog over the same time…most of that is search engine traffic, so it’s not totally representative. The Australian overrepresentation is strange to me but it may be some Australian focused blog posts were promoted on some site down under. As search engine traffic increases on this website I’m assuming New York will be taking the top slot….

Fisherianism in the genomic era

Posted on by Razib Khan

There are many things about R. A. Fisher that one could say. Professionally he was one of the founders of evolutionary genetics and statistics, and arguably the second greatest evolutionary biologist after Charles Darwin. With his work in the first few decades of the 20th century he reconciled the quantitative evolutionary framework of the school of biometry with mechanistic genetics, and formalized evolutionary theory in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection.

He was also an asshole. This is clear in the major biography of him, R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist. It was written by his daughter.  But The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century also seems to indicate he was a dick. And W. D. Hamilton’s Narrow Roads of Gene Land portrays Fisher has rather cold and distant, despite the fact that Hamilton idolized him.

Notwithstanding his unpleasant personality, R. A. Fisher seems to have been a veritable mentat in his early years. Much of his thinking crystallized in the first few decades of the 20th century, when genetics was a new science and mathematical methods were being brought to bear on a host of topics. It would be decades until DNA was understood to be the substrate of heredity. Instead of deriving from molecular first principles which were simply not known in that day, Fisher and his colleagues constructed a theoretical formal edifice which drew upon patterns of inheritance that were evident in lineages of organisms that they could observe around them (Fisher had a mouse colony which he utilized now and then to vent his anger by crushing mice with his bare hands). Upon that observational scaffold they placed a sturdy superstructure of mathematical formality. That edifice has been surprisingly robust down to the present day.

One of Fisher’s frameworks which still gives insight is the geometric model of the distribution of fitness of mutations. If an organism is near its optimum of fitness, than large jumps in any direction will reduce its fitness. In contrast, small jumps have some probability of getting closer to the optimum of fitness. In plainer language, mutations of large effect are bad, and mutations of small effect are not as bad.

A new paper in PNAS loops back to this framework, Determining the factors driving selective effects of new nonsynonymous mutations:

Our study addresses two fundamental questions regarding the effect of random mutations on fitness: First, do fitness effects differ between species when controlling for demographic effects? Second, what are the responsible biological factors? We show that amino acid-changing mutations in humans are, on average, more deleterious than mutations in Drosophila. We demonstrate that the only theoretical model that is fully consistent with our results is Fisher’s geometrical model. This result indicates that species complexity, as well as distance of the population to the fitness optimum, modulated by long-term population size, are the key drivers of the fitness effects of new amino acid mutations. Other factors, like protein stability and mutational robustness, do not play a dominant role.

In the title of the paper itself is something that would have been alien to Fisher’s understanding when he formulated his geometric model: the term “nonsynonymous” to refer to mutations which change the amino acid corresponding to the triplet codon. The paper is understandably larded with terminology from the post-DNA and post-genomic era, and yet comes to the conclusion that a nearly blind statistical geneticist from about a century ago correctly adduced the nature of mutation’s affects on fitness in organisms.

The authors focused on two primary species which different histories, but well characterized in the evolutionary genomic literature: humans and Drosophila. The models they tested are as follows:

 

Basically they checked the empirical distribution of the site frequency spectra (SFS) of the nonsynonymous variants against expected outcomes based on particular details of demographics, which were inferred from synonymous variation. Drosophila have effective population sizes orders of magnitude larger than humans, so if that is not taken into account, then the results will be off. There are also a bunch of simulations in the paper to check for robustness of their results, and they also caveat the conclusion with admissions that other models besides the Fisherian one may play some role in their focal species, and more in other taxa. A lot of this strikes me as accruing through the review process, and I don’t have the time to replicate all the details to confirm their results, though I hope some of the reviewers did so (again, I suspect that the reviewers were demanding some of these checks, so they definitely should have in my opinion).

In the Fisherian model more complex organisms are more fine-tuned due topleiotropy and other such dynamics. So new mutations are more likely to deviate away from the optimum. This is the major finding that they confirmed. What does “complex” mean? The Drosophila genome is less than 10% of the human genome’s size, but the migratory locust has twice as large a genome as humans, while wheat has a sequence more than five times as large. But organism to organism, it does seem that Drosophila has less complexity than humans. And they checked with other organisms besides their two focal ones…though the genomes there are not as complete presumably.

As I indicated above, the authors believe they’ve checked for factors such as background selection, which may confound selection coefficients on specific mutations. The paper is interesting as much for the fact that it illustrates how powerful analytic techniques developed in a pre-DNA era were. Some of the models above are mechanistic, and require a certain understanding of the nature of molecular processes. And yet they don’t seem as predictive as a more abstract framework!

Citation: Christian D. Huber, Bernard Y. Kim, Clare D. Marsden, and Kirk E. Lohmueller, Determining the factors driving selective effects of new nonsynonymous mutations PNAS 2017 ; published ahead of print April 11, 2017, doi:10.1073/pnas.1619508114

Coffee is not measured by its price

Posted on by Razib Khan

An interesting piece on a $1 coffee joint, Has Coffee Gotten Too Fancy?:

Mr. Konecny’s ambitions for Yes Plz go beyond selling a high-quality cup of coffee at that magic price point, though he knows that it sends a powerful message. What he wants to do is shift the very nature of coffee culture. He has no patience for what he calls the “culinary burlesque” of pour-over bars, with their solemn baristas and potted succulents. “It’s dress-up,” he said.
Those settings and presentations, he said, send the wrong message: that good coffee must also be expensive and fetishized.

I drink a lot of coffee. At work I’m known to drink 40 or 60 ounces in a day. I also like specialty coffees, dating back to when I lived in Portland and patronized the Stumptown on Belmont.

As someone who drinks black coffee I like the idea of a no frills establishment. But I also feel the piece’s opposition between cheap good coffee and expensive faux-good coffee is a bit much. In How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom elaborates on something that we know intuitively: it is not always the sensory aspect of how something makes you feel, but also the intellectual aspect of what something is in a more contextual and broad sense. I would pay a lot for legitimate Falernian wine without even knowing what it tastes like. To drink like Cicero would be enough.

Yes, sometimes you want the $1 coffee. But sometimes you want the burlesque experience.

Living as Loki, friendship before Ragnarok

Posted on by Razib Khan

In Norse mythology Loki is a trickster frost giant who also plays a god. His relationship to the Aesir is complicated, but at the end of days when the world is nearing its final hours he is fated to stand against his erstwhile companions. I do not know much about the Marvel comics adaptation of Loki, though I have seen the films, and this element of alternating between good and evil is evident onscreen.

Does the fact that Loki is destined to stand against Odin negate all their experiences together? Is the full measure of a life the final act? I don’t think so.

Today we live in an age when he center is not holding. Politics and public life are polarizing. Apocalyptic language is in the air. Barack Obama was a socialist, a Communist, a Muslim. Now Donald J. Trump is the worst, thing, ever. And so on. There are two teams, and if you do not choose a team, you have lost the game before it is played. My pessimism about the possibility for a reinvigoration of a broadly liberal democratic order are for another post.

Recently my friend Heather Mac Donald wrote about her experience with protesters at Claremont McKenna. Her description of the student body’s hysterics are almost anodyne in how predictable they behaved. Rather, I was struck by how much invective Heather directed toward the silent faculty:

…Those professors also maintain that to challenge that claim of ubiquitous bigotry is to engage in “hate speech,” and that such speech is tantamount to a physical assault on minorities and females. As such, it can rightly be suppressed and punished. To those faculty, I am indeed a fascist, and a white supremacist, with the attendant loss of communication rights.

Of course not all faculty have abandoned classical liberal ideals. Nicholas Christakis and Alice Dreger are by any definition progressive liberals, but also adhere stridently to ideals of freedom of thought and speech. But both have been subject to abuse and personal attacks. They clearly fight on not because they are assured of victory, but because they believe in the justness of their cause.

Many of my liberal friends express some exasperation that I identify as conservative. But the fact of the matter is that the far Left writes off much of this country, and many of my friends, and arguably me, as a white supremacist and a fascist. Ours are not thoughts worth having in the eyes of the heirs of repressive tolerance. My liberal friends, being broad minded an of a tolerant bent, do not have sympathy with repression of thought. But at the end of the days when sides are taken what side will they choose?

I think here of an academic who is jaded and contemptuous of the infantile antics of the campus Left. He is worried that their provocations will result in the academy being targeted by the political Right. He does not relish conflict. Like me, he wants to be left alone to explore the topics which interest him. We share a mutual interest in evolutionary genetics. But, when and if the fight comes he does admit he must march with his colleagues, no matter how loony, and defend his side.

We both wish the world were not this polarized. But what we wish is not always what is. But until Ragnarok we can continue to drink beer and fight our battles shoulder to shoulder as friends. Neither of us want the Ragnarok of this liberal democratic republic to come, and I still hope it doesn’t. But we both understand that on that day we’ll be on different sides. And I’m OK with that. Life is not perfect, we do the best we can.

Addendum: Cool trailer: