A few days ago I posted about the new book, Seshat History of the Axial Age. I am at a point in my life where I am averse to purchasing physical books. Even after multiple waves of purging I have too many of those. That being said, the Seshat project is only putting Seshat History of the Axial Age in physical form to maximize funds getting to the Sesha project.
So I got Seshat History of the Axial Age mostly to support the project. Many readers of this weblog are very interested in Seshat and fellow travelers are trying to do. I encourage everyone who can support the project. Twenty years ago Peter Turchin had an audacious vision. Many people were highly skeptical of the possibilities, and I think Peter and his colleagues have come very far indeed.
The Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle. Capitalism is better than the alternatives. But mistakes will be made.
Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. I am a believer in the robustness of religion as a cultural phenomenon. But adaptation needs to occur for a different equilibrium. In the short-run, all the prognostications in the 2000s that “God is back” were simply wrong. On the contrary, we’re going through more, not less, secularization.
My only comment on the British election is that from the perspective of the Right it seems like electorally we’ll see good times in the near future. For various reasons, the Left can’t seem to engage in rational internal self-regulation.
Local adaptation fuels cryptic speciation in terrestrial annelids.
An evolution-based method of epistasis measurement: theory and application to influenza.
Scientific Evidence for the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Effective potential reveals evolutionary trajectories in complex fitness landscapes.
The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?
I got Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland due to the blurb from Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of The Reformation: A History. I’ve read books of this sort before and the problem that always crops up is necessity versus sufficiency. Convinced Christians are often already convinced by the necessity of Christianity for all good things.
My copy of Seshat just arrived.
“Capitalism is better than the alternatives. But mistakes will be made.”
Capitalism is like evolution. Mistakes will be made, a but they will be liquidated in short order.
“10 Years Ago, DNA Tests Were The Future Of Medicine. ” – the author seems to believe that the FDA policies have buried this expectation, rather than the problems with properly powering GWAS studies (or properly accounting for the flukes of the underpowered datasets) combined with the advent of the nutrigenomics / vitamin genomics fraudsters whose business model of peddling diets and supplements on the “basis” of “DNA tests” attracted the regulators’ attention?
Does the author also believe that the statement is false after all?
u can ask him on twitter. was not my impression from the piece.
Justinianic Plague.
The abstract says: “Although demographic, economic, and political changes continued between the 6th and 8th centuries, the evidence does not support the now commonplace claim that the Justinianic Plague was a primary causal factor of them.”
That is not what I thought that Kyle Harper was arguing. The horsemen do not ride alone. It wasn’t just the plague, there was also war. Justinian’s attempt to conquer Italy. And famine, caused by adverse climate cycles.
As I wrote before, continuity and change are the stuff of historical analysis. The is plenty of continuity. But, there is also change. And the overall direction from the middle of the 6th through the middle of the 8th for both the Byzantine Empire and the remnants of the Western Empire is downward. By the end of the period, they are depopulated, poor, and husks of their former selves.
I know that Patrick Wyman sometimes reads this blog. I hope he looks at that paper and comments on it.
I tried to post the link on Patrick’s Facebook page.
“Capitalism is better than the alternatives. But mistakes will be made.”
In my opinion there is not one Capitalism, like there is not just one option for a planned economy or one Feudal system, which was the same everywhere 900 years ago.
Also, the nature of Capitalism will be always close to the political system which protects it.
Some people, especially in the United States, seem to believe that any kind of regulation and intervention by the state is “Socialism” or the end of the free market and free business, but it is not.
At its heart the problem of the modern American Capitalism is not about small businesses, property rights or freedom, but all about Financial Institutions, banks and Investment fonds, the Federal Reserve and the stock market.
This is out of control and the money “printed” by the banks and gathered by the funds is much too big and volatile to let it uncontrolled. When the Glass-Steagall act was revoked by Bill Clinton, this was the breach in the dike which let to the chaos we see today.
Not that I want a Gold standard, which is as bad, but the banks in the new digital economy should and could play a much smaller role in the economy and society.
Instead they expanded the money hardcore Capitalism to all aspects of society, corrupted and twisted everything, made everything a commodity.
Even the corrupted Cultural Marxists on their payroll measure everything in money, every aspect of life and society.
Financial Capitalism now controls society and its individuals in an unprecedent way and approaches a totalitarian control by using and abusing all kinds of ideological offset pieces to do the kind of social engineering they like to see prevail for the Oligarchys very own interests.
Even the big multinational Corporations are, if not in the hands of a founder, proprietor, just part of the money game.
In fact, the era of smart, hard working business men, doing their business like they want and see fit for society, like in Fordism, is, with some exceptions, practically dead.
A lot of the large corporations and financial institutions don’t work more efficiently than state agentures, but a few profit from too many and these large corporate institutions exert more control on the state, than vice versa.
And thats all a problem. If I am talking against Capitalism, I always mean this systemic issue of American style Capitalism, not free markets in general or entrepreneurship.
This is helpful, efficient and innovative, but it needs control and a proper financial and political framework, what it doesnt have right now.
I wonder if Trump will ever take the Glass-Steagall act issue more serious again.
But like with Israel, or even worse, he might think that even if he would survive that decision politically, he might not be alive for long to see it active.
The big banks in the US can’t go back to before 1999, because the digital age should have been their end, instead they used their political influence for a perverted expansion. They are now so powerful and overblown, they dont want to implode obviously.
If someone from Goldman-Sachs has something to tell, thats always fun…
Don’t think I’ve seen this mentioned before here, but I think readers of this blog would be interested in the exhibit of the Homo naledi and Australopithecus sediba fossils on display until March 22nd at the Perot Museum in Dallas. These are the fossils Lee Berger found in the past decade. It bills itself as “the first and likely only time these two specimens will ever leave South Africa”–not sure the degree this is hyped marketing copy, but I can’t find any mention of a subsequent exhibition.
Re: Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back.
So, I have a broader definition of religion — a set of common beliefs and practices, etc. By that definition, millennials are even more religious than earlier generations.
Their religion happens to be a new one — wokeism. Its a syncretic mixture of neo-pagan earth worship (with its own version of dietary restrictions) and post-modern caste hierarchies of purity.
I’m Gen X and my kids are Gen Z and I see them fed this set of beliefs in school and even synagogue. Reform Judaism (I’m sure mainstream Protestantism is in the same boat) lacks any connection to its nominal religion. I’m a Soviet born ex-atheist and I had no clue how bad it got until I sat through the speeches of my eldest’s “confirmation” classmates. Most of these involved the strong belief that God had strong feelings in support of the social justice agendas of that year — gun control, transgender bathrooms, etc. It was eye opening.
@Eric: Its the same with Catholicism. All major Western religions preach Cultural Marxism before their own dogmas with some exceptions without nothing would be left, for which the PC mob calls them still Fascist.
Those which are more conservative Catholics here are part of groups which are like sects within the church and choose carefully to which priest and community they go. They are the only ones with more children.
In the mainstream churches you only see old women and some Catholic immigrants.
If I compare the lectures from the 80s, even though that was after WW2, the council of the 60s and the big Cultural Marxist impact, the difference is still remarkable.
Behind the Iron Curtain many became atheists, but societally they were in many respects much more conservative. And those which kept their religion even more so with some exceptions, like German Lutherans, which became the most CM infiltrated Christian religion of all in Europe.
The Iron Curtain was protecting the East from degeneracies CM and Capitalism developed together in the West. Its funny how some people from the West think some customs and attitudes in the East are “Communist” or just Eastern, when in fact their own ancestors thought and acted the same!
They just “forgot” it as the 2nd generation after the turn in the 1960s.
Most “Liberal Christians” are almost as bad as straight Cultural Marxist, just their focus is different. But religion, especially the Liberal kind, is no protection from the degeneracies at all, rather it became a Gateway for the propaganda on moderate conservative people. Like you said, the children.
My confirmation teachings were still much more conservative-political than they are now. Too much for me then even, while today I rather think about what Liberal propaganda my children have to face. Wont be “too conservative” for sure.
I got Dominion but haven’t read it yet. Audible is apparently letting people infinetly return books for a credit now even if you’ve already read the book, as long as you purchased it in the last year. Free books!
Also read “A Warning” by Anonymous and “In the Closet of the Vatican.”
Yes, all of the rumors about Trump are true and all of the rumors about the Catholic Church are false…the reality is 10x worse!
Obs, u need to a get blog.
Erik, that seems like a very singularly Soviet ex-atheist monotheist thing to say! Soviet atheist in a certain kind of authoritarian modernist rationalism that suspects in religion a kind of atavism menacing good social order. Monotheist in seeing in every kind of secular movement in society a reversion to a morally corrupt and chaotic and alien pagan Rome or Babylon…
(Not that my own social background doesn’t have its own frames and biases! Think your definition of religion overbroad tho.)
Pat Wyman has said he’s going to comment on the Justinianic Plague paper and what’s wrong with it. I wish Kyle Harper was on Twitter to do the reply directly.
@Matt
I left the Soviet Union too young to be completely brainwashed. I was a rationalist but not in the Sam Harris mold. To my view, religion was a collection of harmless folk rituals. I had no problem participating in these rituals.
This changed when I had my kids – I realized that I needed certainty in a chaotic world. I consciously drifted to my ancestral religion and was granted relief.
I have since adopted a very rationalist embrace of religion. This approach can be summarized as follows:
1. Humans have evolved to positively need religion (the Need)
2. Extant religions constitute local stability equilibrium where the Need is balanced with the religions’s ability to allow its adherents to procreate themselves in the exogenous environment (cf Shakers).
3. Since the environment is changing, religion has to change to maintain it’s equilibrium. Sometimes they split (Judaism to Christianity to Islam). Most new religions collapse. 20th century Communism and Nazism fall into this category. The Need is constant, however.
4. Since I’m human, I have the Need and have sought out a religion to satisfy it. I do find that I can maintain a “render unto” duality between the material and spiritual worlds.
Can just agree with you again, religion should be the spiritual help to master the difficulties of life. The problem is that religions are based on old ideas and concepts, of which large parts are thought of “immortal” and largely unchangeable. So from a certain point on, the old concept is too outdated to be adapted to the new needs from a purely rational perspective. Then a new religion or sect can emerge, to fulfil the needs and doing the task to its believers better than the old belief system. But obviously, even if a religion became outdated, even harmful to its followers, the belief system in itself is not rational and won’t make place or change itself without pressure. This becomes always a fight at some point and its not as if the truth or efficiency will automatically prevail. If an emperor decided what’s right and he was in a position to do so, his decision was that of a millions, a whole civilisation, probably even mankind on the long run.
How can you communicate your children a belief system of which you know, really know, that at least parts of it are simply wrong, even harmful for them and society as whole? I mean with a religion, you buy the whole package, not just the parts you deem right, that’s the problem. You can be selective, eclectic, but if you raise them in a religious community, in the name of a specific denomination, your children will be influenced by others, in ways you probably don’t approve – like everywhere else too of course, but that was your decision to bring them into that circles, which makes a difference.
I’m having the same problem basically, and its a hard decision to make, because where do children get some basic roots, moral and decent peers in a postmodern urban environment, if not in a religious community? It became so bad in Western societies, that the requirements became low and the compromises huge.
@Obs
My advice is to expose your children to religion. Seems like you are Catholic, if you are in the US — I find that most Catholics have internalized the duality naturally.
Emphasize Mark 12:17 and teach them about the infinity of the divine and that it is impossible for humans to understand.
PS – shorter posts make it easier to respond… 🙂
I live in Europe. Even at young age you can see children which need a religious anquor more than others. The stories, the hope.
From what I could observe becoming fully secular and urban is oftentimes alright in the first generation. Like I had a conservative Catholic education and I was appalled by the low moral standards of my peers from a completely secular background.
The first generation(s) have still the traditional and moral reference. They found a family, care for the truth and have moral standards even if they “don’t believe any longer”.
But all to often the second-third generations are easy prey for cultural Marxist ideas or blunt Egoismus on the Capitalist Casino world.
The secular parents have just a much harder job to raise their children by their own standards and can’t reproduce the environment they were raised in.
That’s a huge dilemma which many dont even realise, but a fourth generation is no issue anyway. The rural and half-religious do fine at first glance, its the “fully secular” which are the most exposed. They are easy prey for propaganda, being seduced by a corrupting system.
@Razib: I really wonder which effect on attitudes the parents attitude has statistically. Like “non-religious from a religious family” vs “non-non”.
I think that will hold statistically for a lot of parameters.
On some respects this group might show the best tendencies in some respects, but its short lived, only one to two generations. That’s the problem, you need a religion or ideology to keep it stable with immaterial values like truth, decency and family.
You come from no completely secular background as well, after all. I did measure political ideas by the truth-right standards with which I judged my religious teachings too. A lot of completely secular people dont just lack the belief, but the struggle, the conflict and intellectual confrontatiom with absolute moral standards. This influences how you children see the World and its hard to transmit other than exposing the own children to religious teachings, especially when they are still young. Dont you agree?
@Erik, it would be pretty arrogant for me to tell you that I know better than you the reasons why you believe one thing or another (so I won’t), but I would note that kind of story does seem to have a lot in common with the post Soviet Eastern European religious resurgence in general. That seems to be (among other elements that I don’t want to negate or question the sincerity of) much about this a story of:
“Society has underlying religious impulses, so these should be channeled towards socially beneficial traditional monotheist religions that support the nation, lest they embrace radical political and social movements that threaten the stability of the nation-state”.
I do really think that different humans and societies really can have more or less of “The Need” (using your term) – I suspect our host has less or none of “The Need” compared to most? – and real declines or rises are often real. It’s not so much the case of finding the best religion to manage it to avoid it being taken advantage of by social forces and that when we see apparent decline of religion we would generally expect it to be met by a concomitant rise in other, generally worse, beliefs that serve to meet underlying drives. (I do respect the sort of ideas that actual religions tend to *leverage* similar underlying cognitive frameworks and features, that Razib has mentioned in the past, though.)
@Matt 🙂
– Maybe I have some cultural initial conditions as the EE religious resurgence, but I seriously doubt it. I came to the States when I was nine and did not start to become religious until I was 32. Also, I’m mildly antagonistic towards EE nationalism.
– The Need can be satisfied by sets of moral standards which are much broader than monotheistic religion (after all, elemental paganism worked quite well for millennia). A god or gods are not necessary — witness Buddhism and Communism. “American Civic Philosophy” can satisfy the Need to some extent — at least it did for me until I had my first born.
– I think that individuals have different thresholds and environmental circumstances that may decrease or increase which philosophies satisfy the Need. Like I said, for me the threshold was having a child. That seems to be common — I just had a conversation last week with a friend who is an American born religion-hostile rationalist (“Why aren’t there dinosaurs in the Bible?”). He just had his first child in his early 50s and having problems dealing with randomness and fragility of life.
– As for our host, hopefully he will chime in. However, given that he is vocal about his own background and history (and my own arrogance in assuming 🙂 ), I’m guessing it is a combination of factors. 1) Traditional religious upbringing (you don’t have to be pious – just be informed); 2) American Civic Philosophy (common among those of us who immigrated during the Reagan era) and/or 3) high individual threshold.
Spoiler alert: this link is not about religion or parenting or human evolution or big data history. Rather it is about how rural poverty can strangle economic development, in particular, in China. To be especially provocative on this blog, in response to the age old question*, “Nature vs. Nurture”, it produces strong evidence for Nurture.
TL;DR; Without something like Head Start on a truly massive scale, China, beyond its urban coast, may never be able to modernize successfully. Rather it may look worse than any non-Southerner’s nightmare version of rural Mississippi (or perhaps the movie Deliverance).
*And admittedly dumb, as phrased above, but then, the point is to be provocative in the phrasing, not informative. It’s all about the clicks, baby!
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry:
CORRESPONDENCE 10 December 2019
Instead of ‘supremacy’ use ‘quantum advantage’
Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Leonie Mueck & Divya M. Persaud
We take issue with the use of ‘supremacy’ when referring to quantum computers that can out-calculate even the fastest supercomputers (F. Arute et al. Nature 574, 505–510; 2019). We consider it irresponsible to override the historical context of this descriptor, which risks sustaining divisions in race, gender and class. We call for the community to use ‘quantum advantage’ instead.
The community claims that quantum supremacy is a technical term with a specified meaning. However, any technical justification for this descriptor could get swamped as it enters the public arena after the intense media coverage of the past few months.
In our view, ‘supremacy’ has overtones of violence, neocolonialism and racism through its association with ‘white supremacy’. Inherently violent language has crept into other branches of science as well — in human and robotic spaceflight, for example, terms such as ‘conquest’, ‘colonization’ and ‘settlement’ evoke the terra nullius arguments of settler colonialism and must be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.
Instead, quantum computing should be an open arena and an inspiration for a new generation of scientists.
Nature 576, 213 (2019)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03781-0–https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03781-0
Brett: If you see Patricks comment, please link it.
Razib: If Brett links Patrick’s comment, please include it in the next open thread.
Agree with you about obs. OTOH, at least the author name goes before the comment on this blog.
Ignore my previous comment about Patrick. He put a bunch of comments on his Twitter page. I just never look at twitter.
https://twitter.com/patrick_wyman?lang=en
He doesn’t like the paper and thinks they mischaracterized Harper’s argument. I made a similar comment to his #9.
On the pinboard, I see “What does it mean to be genetically Jewish? | Life and style | The Guardian” trying to explain a recent genetic testing scandal in Israel by interviewing two experts, neither of whom, unfortunately, seems to have a clue what’s going on. Perhaps willfully so. Because as always, a political scandal in Israel means that all sides with an ex to grind are spreading disinformation.
In actuality, they are NOT using autosomal genetic ancestry tests. And they are NOT using mtDNA either.
They are, on rare occasions, using relatedness tests. It’s limited to situations where one family member has a perfect paper trail of belonging but another relative can’t get the right papers. By proving the exact relation between the two, the religious court extends recognition to the incompletely documented member (all they need to prove, really, is that there was no adoption in the family).
This testing means NOTHING for the thorny question about relation between DNA and ethnicity. It’s more in the category of court-ordered paternity tests, which have been around for ages in all civilized nations without ever causing anyone’s righteous indignation. But Israel is facing its third election in less than a year, and its political kingmaker is a party (Yisrael Beitenu) representing the ex-Soviet Jews and their grievances, and so the misinformation about the alleged “DNA discrimination” refuses to die.
@Erik – fair enough! The possible parallels seemed worth a comment but maybe it’s just a chance resemblance.
@marcel, it is an interesting article. I’m not totally sure about the numbers they are talking about and the representativeness though.
China’s about 40% rural, 60% urban in 2020. Assume the “poor rural areas” they talk about are not the whole 40%, but about 20-30% of the total population or less. (Employment in agriculture about 20% of total for China as proxy for rural agricultural worker?) How much of a problem is it for the nation then if these areas had about a 90 IQ (e.g. “half kids under 90”)? How representative are the areas they talk about of rural and then rural of the whole population or whole population of young people? (At some point in the linked video, I think there is a suggestion that rural China has 70% of China’s babies, but the TFR urban:rural ratio was about 1.4 in 2008 and stable since 1990, and age structure not too much different so would suggest something more like 50% of China’s babies.)
It seems like if you do have these large gaps, and there is an early critical period after which they’re fixed, shouldn’t they have shown up in other ways during huge urbanization of China from 1980->present?
Certainly though, if you do have significant rural:urban gaps due to nutrition etc of this sort, it probably makes China more smoothly fit the sort of IQ and household income/GDP plots, though still somewhat of an outlier. That’s obviously good for such models, although there are obviously still *huge* remaining residuals.
Rural:Urban gap at 2/3 SD also looks plausible based on Thai as similarly wealthy country though? Thai overtaken now, until recently wealthier.
On more analogous backwards regions, what about Sicily, Romania, Ukraine, in Europe?
They need to find something a hell of a lot better than Head Start. All the academic gains seem to wash out by third grade.
Rural / Urban divide in Chinese education:
I may be projecting a bit from the US experience, but the key figure here is that only 56% of the kids live with their parents as a result of the latter’s migration to find work. My anecdotal experience in the US is that the main driver of educational performance is parental involvement.
Also, the story is relatively less about the kids than it is about their woke savior (typical of sciencemag.org news stories).