Open Thread, 05/14/2017

I’ve been working on some issues related to the website. Of most relevance for readers, https:// formatting should now no longer be broken. Also, please mention it if you get a 503 in the comments. Some people probably still get them, but they should be rare (I can track hourly hits, and there hasn’t been a systemwide drop in traffic since April 22nd; basically I have a script running which pings the site for 503s and reboots Varnish if it gets them).

I also know that the MySQL database locks up sometimes. There is a script to restart it but looks like it can take at least one minute. I had one that ran more consistently but it doesn’t seem to be working.

There has only been one update on my newsletter, but if the site goes down it’s probably best just to sign up for that if you care (when it goes down for a while people email me, which is fine, but responding to emails can get tedious).

When people ask me about textbooks on population genetics, I can rattle off many because I own many and have a sense of all of them. In contrast, for evolution the only text I have is Futumya’s. Does anyone have experience with the Ridley or Bergstrom and Dugatkin texts?

Science is by its nature subject to silos. That’s unfortunate, but it’s true. Evolutionary geneticists don’t really know too much more about paleontology than the average person. I have a pretty good grasp of what’s going on human population genomics, and perhaps mammalian population genomics, but outside of that not so much.

Speaking of Lee Dugatkin, his new book, How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) is out. I don’t have time to read it now, but as I have said he’s a good writer.

As some of you may know I’m taking a one week sabbatical from social media (I’ll be back on Thursday), which consists of Twitter and Facebook.(also, I’m not missing it to be honest). That means that there are things that need to be said which need an outlet. So I put up a post on Henry Wallace over at Secular Right. An op-ed in The New York Times by Wallace’s grandson hailing is grandfather’s prophetic prediction of American fascism doesn’t mention that he was notorious for not understanding the threat of Communism in his time (and literally being deceived by Potemkin villages in 1944). Also, Brown Pundits might make a comeback as a group blog soon.

If you subscribe to my total content RSS feed I do try and push stuff on other blogs/publications into that.

I may start writing again outside of the purviews of this weblog. But, I think more and more it is critical to control your own means of production. Much of the web-only content at high profile sites like The New Republic from the 2000s is not accessible because of reconstitutions of their archives.

And of course, relying on Twitter or YouTube as sole distribution channels has problems. Twitter as a solo-play is I think probably not going to work. I think it could work if they kept their ambitions and aims in check, but the combination of the public stock markets and the egos of their executives means that they’ll swing for the fences. Probably they will get acquired in the next 5 years, after which who knows what the new owners will do? Just because the name Twitter will be around in 2030 doesn’t mean you’ll recognize it (go check out MySpace some time).

As far YouTube is concerned, I think for now YouTube’s content is safe, but people who are trying to make a living off it have been whipsawed by changes in policies in advertising revenues. Diversification is key.

Over at Secular Right Dain has a post up, Anti-SJW Sentiment in China. The full article is fascinating, The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult. I will say that amoral atomization often gives way to moral revivals, so don’t expect China’s John Galt moment to last too long.

A note on comments. I notice that some people say things like “I don’t want to presume….” That’s good. One of the most annoying things about having a blog with a reasonable amount of content is that socially deficient individuals think they can start drawing conclusions about your life or situation from what you make visible. For most of this blog’s history I actually hid much of my non-blog life. When my daughter was born and I wanted to talk about her genetics obviously I had to put a bit more into the public. But it’s always good not to infer too much about people who you read. They tell you on a need-to-know basis unless their lives are their brand (here’s an example, an anonymous regular commenter once left comments talking about aspects of my personal life I’d rather not have in comments; this person remains carefully anonymous themselves. This is the kind of shit I never forget and why I have some contempt for many, though not all, commenters).

A problem as a person who is not liberal on the internet that I encounter is “lib-splaining.” Basically, since I am not liberal and they are liberal (or to the Left of center for Europeans), the prior assumption is that they can explain to me how evolution, genetics, Islam, or many aspects of history work. If they are not stupid, they immediately realize the error of their ways, though the Dunning-Kruger effect is something I confront in that the duller the person the more difficult it is to explain to them that I’m not as ignorant as they might think (this is one of the things that annoys me about Twitter).

A major dynamic that many people of any ideology seem to have is a narrowness of view that occludes many major patterns for me. One problem is that few people know much history beyond a narrow subset of regions or periods. For the stereotypical conservative one might encounter assertions such as “America is the greatest nation in the history of the world” (what does that even mean?). The reasons offered for this tend to be…well, problematic. E.g., America is always on the side of freedom. Arguably, even if tendentiously, this was not even true of the Founding! (the revolutionary side was diverse, I would suggest that the New England partisans were people who we moderns would easily identify with, but the grandees of the Tidewater less so).

For liberals the problem tends to crop up when they are speaking cross-culturally. It usually turns out that these people only know a shallow sketch of even Western history, and no non-Western history, so they don’t have any basis to make any comparisons. Part of this is the abomination which is post-colonial theory, which has replaced the need for facts with a broad-overarching Manichean vision of the world.

One place I wish everyone would start out with is to study the history of China. There are several reasons why this is important. First, much of the human past is a history of China. One can not understand the history of the world without the history of China. One can not understand Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, without understanding China. Second, one can not understanding today’s China without understanding the China of the past, and one can not understand the 21st century without understanding China.

I will make some concrete recommendations. In sequence of order chronologically, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties, China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, and China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing. I think all these books are both scholarly, and accessible to the lay audience. The Han dynasty surveys usually distill what you need to know from the earlier periods (and the Shang dynasty is really the purview of archeology and not history).

Some of you may want a gentler introduction. John Keay’s China: A History would fit the bill. But please don’t stop at Keay. It is more a primer, and won’t give you much depth. John King Fairbanks’ China: A New History is good for depth, but it focuses way too much on recent events. I have a soft spot for A History of Chinese Civilization by Jaques Gernet, but it’s not that easy to always find a copy that is not priced outrageously (I read it as an undergrad via a library copy).

It is hard to ignore when one reads Chinese history that there are both clear similarities and obvious differences in relation to the West. For example, the analogy between the Kangxi Emperor and Marcus Aurelius jumps out at you, despite 1,500 years of space and the geographical-cultural chasm (one could argue that Marcus Aurelius is a bit idealized, while we know a great deal about the Kangxi Emperor from documents). A contrast is the role of religion in Chinese history. Though religion is important, the dominant recurring theme of subjugation of religious passions and concerns to that of public order and life was a revelation to Enlightenment intellectuals, who saw in China a “better way.”

Which brings me to a thought, would readers be interested in a “book club” format? I’ve had friends do this before on their blogs, and it’s worked out. But we’d need enough buy in. I’d put up a post once a week, perhaps every Sunday, and others would jump in.

Accumulation And Functional Architecture Of Deleterious Genetic Variants During The Extinction Of Wrangel Island Mammoths. If this was going to happen, it was going to happen to this population.

Blatant hypocrisy: Milo Yiannopouos now part of demonstration to cancel a graduation speaker. The fundamental issue, which I alluded to earlier this week, is that it may not be that the center can hold. Once the far Left began utilizing tools of speech suppression, which has been the norm throughout human history, it wasn’t going to be limited to them. Old fashioned liberals, generally older white men, are exactly correct about what will happen. It doesn’t matter, because norm-based group are so segregated the campus Left won’t back down and put away the ticking time bombs it’s been blackmailing the administration of universities with. Perhaps they know that everyone is going to jump off the cliff together, but it doesn’t matter.

Inferring Genetic Interactions From Comparative Fitness Data. There were some. Interactions that is.

One may have noticed that I’ve switched over to linking to biorxiv more and more. I also am forgetting to say “preprint” instead of “paper.” I think this presages a shift toward post-publication review. The future is finally almost here.

Phenotypic heterogeneity promotes adaptive evolution.

Also, Scireader seems back up.

This is the week you should be reading the Bell Beaker blog.

Coalescent theory. Do you know what it is? If not, you probably should if you are interested in population genetics.

A friend asked about the politics of people who read me. It’s pretty diverse. With a sample size of 426 you see the breakdown. I assumed that most of the “neither Left nor Right” would be libertarian. But that’s not true at all; only 1/3 of those are libertarian.  The rest are all over the place. On social issues the readers tilt more toward the moderate Left, while on economic issues toward the moderate Right (though less strongly on economic issues).

No big surprises.

One of the worst things about Austin is that people talk about how they love goat cheese in public. Not cool.

Anyone want to guess how many “sessions” on Google Analytics I’ve had over the past 15 years? I have a good idea from some of the sites I’ve contributed too (blog only, I don’t count The New York Times).

‘Will & Grace’ Revival Could Be Extended. They called it the “end of creativity.”

The whole culture of “playdates” is really weird. Does it exist outside of the middle to upper middle class? Why do kids need adult supervision when playing?

Am I the only one who thinks that the Engineers in the Alien series are very similar to Pak Protectors?