Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Uncategorized

The Imaginary Amendment

by Leave a Comment

Last election season as morally and emotionally exhausting for many.

I thought it was pretty funny.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the whole thing was that in the space of about one year, the notion of purely open borders or even more to the point, the notion that the whole planet had a right to live within the boundaries of the United States of America became a frequent implication of talking points on the right and left.

I was even more intrigued by Bernie Sanders’ claim that such an idea was ludicrous. Steve Sailer recounts it here:

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States….

Ezra Klein: But it would make…

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me…

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer—you’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.

The article cited above is pretty good. In it, the idea “that American citizens should get no say in who gets to move to America because huddled masses of non-Americans possess civil rights to immigrate” is called the “zeroth amendment.” It’s a clever name.

I mean, it may turn out that groups who wish to freely associate are wrong to exclude anybody ever, but few college safe space groups wish to be as open to outsiders as members of such groups wish for American borders to be.

Science “Disproves” the Bible Again

by Leave a Comment

In a goofy clickbait article, Ian Johnston claims that (btw, it’s helpful to use webarchive to link articles like this so that they don’t get ad revenue):

Independent Article very bad.PNG

The argument goes:

  1. The Bible reported that the Israelites were supposed to annihilate the Canaanites.
  2.  If true, “the Canaanites could not have directly contributed genetically to present-day populations.”
  3. Canaanite DNA has been in the Lebanese population.
  4. Therefore, the Bible is false.

Hilariously, the author points out that:

While the Bible says they were wiped out by the Israelites under Joshua in the land of Canaan, later passages suggest there were at least a few survivors. Some Biblical scholars have argued the passages are hyperbole, but the genetic research would appear to indicate the slaughter was much less extensive than described.

“The text uses hyperbole…but science says that the text is exaggerating.”

Religious people of all stripes will stop hating scientists or their goofy popularizers in famous online blogs when they stop being disingenuous blobs. I have nothing against disingenuous blobs. It’s an honest living, after all. I’m merely pointing out that others do.

As an aside, the Biblical text explicitly acknowledges that the Canaanites were not destroyed or driven out, implying without scholarly citation, that the Biblical authors engaged in hyperbole:

Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Acco, or the inhabitants of Sidon or of Ahlab or of Achzib or of Helbah or of Aphik or of Rehob, so the Asherites lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land, for they did not drive them out.
(Judges 1:31-32 ESV)

Concluding Thought

The article has some cool information about the discovery of Phoenician DNA among the Lebanese. What is curious to me is that I’ve been under the impression that the Levant was full of the descendants of the Phoenicians for nearly a decade.

Human Sex Differences

by 2 Comments

Last night at a Bible study the question of sex differences came up. Specifically, we discussed whether there were traits/virtues that were either feminine or masculine in the Bible.

The consensus was yes, but upon being asked to give specifics, only my wife and I named anything other than the special bond of motherhood.

I named courage in battle as a prototypical masculine trait. She named a quiet and gentle spirit as a feminine trait I don’t think anybody thought what we said was accurate. But for clarity, from a Biblical point of view, the virtues in Scripture are for every person and from a philosophical point of view, justice, courage, temperance, and prudence and for both sexes as well. But with that background, the question is this, does the Bible praise certain traits as particularly masculine/feminine (despite their being virtues for all)? And does the Bible condemn certain traits in one sex more than another? Those two questions, if the Bible does either or both of those things, might yield a picture of what traits/virtues/vices are masculine and feminine. With respect to having a quiet spirit, while 1 Peter 3:1-4 extols this traits with respect to a wife’s relationship to her husband, the Bible portrays it as a general virtue for all humanity in Psalm 131 and in 1 Peter 2, Peter attributes a quiet spirit to Jesus.

I started to wonder, how might one find traits that were, on average more feminine and on average more masculine. I think it would look something like this:

  1. Same-Sex Admiration/Aversion
    1. Ask members of both sexes what they admire in same-sex friends, role models, co-workers, politicians, etc. You’ll have to define the traits to ensure, as much as possible, that the traits are seen in the same way. It may also be possible to use questions using trait behavior from other valid constructs.
    2. Ask members of both sexes a similar question but with respect to aversion, mockery, avoidance, etc.
    3. Have members of each sex take personality inventories.
    4. Compare the results cross-culturally to determine which traits are most likely culturally conditioned and which are not.
  2. Opposite Sex Attraction/Aversion
    1. Ask members of both sexes what they find attractive in an opposite-sex mate. Control for the difference between short term attraction and long term attraction.
    2. Ask members of both sexes what they find repulsive in the opposite sex.
    3. Also ask what is admirable in the opposite sex friends, co-workers, leaders, and politicians without reference to sexual attraction.
    4. Compare the results cross-culturally to determine which traits are most likely culturally conditions and which are not.

In doing this I think you could get a feel for what traits, on average, are more likely to be instantiated in each sex (they cluster male or female) and which traits are considered admirable in each sex. But you may also get a feel for what is virtuous in a man or woman as well as what is blameworthy. At least with respect to social credit and attraction.

Any thoughts on this? I’m purely in the friend zone when it comes to psychometricians.

It’s Everybody’s Job

by Leave a Comment

I try to stay off Twitter except for brief times I’ll allow myself to play on it a few days in a row. The temptation to troll is too great for me and the medium has become less fun as people only tend to interact with you if you’re famous or to humiliate you. But I do follw a few feeds as a part of my morning reading. Geoffrey Miller, author of Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior and The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature is an entertaining and informative part of that ritual. A few days weeks back he produced this tweet:

Monday morning, and we all go back to work. We do different jobs, but they’re all really the same job: protect and nurture Civilization. pic.twitter.com/kWVXZOaVBF

— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) May 15, 2017

Over all I agree with this. The bigger question is whether or not our minds are tailored to think on such a grand scale. I think we’re probably not, but if we think on a local, interpersonal scale, we consequently build civilization. Also, from the intellectual framework Miller uses, it’s hard to say why one value (civilization vs individual hedonic pursuit) is objectively better than another. Suicide bombers and Elon Musk are both behaving, as one might put it, as they’ve been selected to. From the point of view of most people, the version of civilization without suicide bombers is best. And indeed, from the point of view of the suicide bombers, so is their vision of civilization (a world in which they’ve been atomized is the world they’ve chosen). Both visions seems self-evident to those who choose them. What then?

From a Christian point of view, seeking the good of civilization, even as an outsider is an imperative:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29:5-7 ESV)

In other words, the imperatives of Genesis 1-2 apply not only to one’s personal pursuit of the good life, but also to the pursuit of civilization over barbarism. While one’s own welfare might be the ultimate goal (the Israelite’s own welfare is the rhetorical hook in the passage), the penultimate goal is the maintenance of civilization itself, even if one finds elements of that culture objectionable.

Science fact of the day: No such thing as healthy obesity

by Leave a Comment

While I have my questions about the BMI scale and its ability to predict health for those with low body-fat percentages, it has proven a remarkable predictor of health in the general population (low body-fat people are rare in the United States, after all).

Anyway, in a study published in 2016, the authors concluded that:

Low aerobic fitness in late adolescence is associated with an increased risk of early death. Furthermore, the risk of early death was higher in fit obese individuals than in unfit normal-weight individuals.

Now, this study doesn’t distinguish between “fit obese” individuals who are obese because of muscle mass above average and individuals with a high body fat percentage who happen to be good at aerobics.

 

 

Good Charlotte Was Right: A Science Fact of the Day

by 1 Comment

I haven’t done a science fact of the day lately. Work is time consuming. Don’t forget, science facts of the day are my thoughts on and descriptions of what scientists say. In other words, it’s a fact that some scientists have said it. What I write is not necessarily a fact of nature nor something I even take to be the case.

In an article at Big Think, an author describes this analysis of online dating data.

Here are some pieces of the original article:

We examine the impact of a user’s weight on his or her outcomes by means of the body mass index (BMI), which is a height adjusted measure of weight.18 Figure 5.5 shows that for both men and women there is an “ideal” BMI at which success peaks, but the level of the ideal BMI differs strongly across genders. The optimal BMI for men is about 27. According to the American Heart Association, a man with such a BMI is slightly overweight. For women, on the other hand, the optimal BMI is about 17, which is considered underweight and corresponds to the figure of a supermodel. A woman with such a BMI receives about 77% more first contact e-mails than a woman with a BMI of 25.

This is expected. Men with a slightly higher BMI probably have more muscle mass. And women whose BMI was so low in 2005 and prior (when the study was done) probably ran a lot.

Income strongly affects the success of men, as measured by the number of first contact e-mails received.

This makes sense. Dating with your self-interest in mind for women includes the well being of any children or potential children.  It would be stupid to not care about income and it’s not shallow for women to do so. A lot of people bristle at the fact that the silly song said “girls like cars and money” but the song writer was just observing facts. In a similarly “shallow” way, men prefered that women look attractive. But again, if the invisible hand of biology is operating, then men will probably be more interested in women they perceive (for good or bad reasons) to be fertile and potentially good mothers.

Anyway, the article interested me because I am asked by a lot of young men for dating advice. I usually tell them: seek first God’s kingdom (virtue is more important than marriage) but then make more money and get more muscles. The empirical data generally back up these observations. Another case in point would be the extremely annoying body builder at my old gym. Women would be repulsed by him at first (he’s too huge). But he’d mention, “My lambo” and suddenly the girl would end her work out and follow him around for his. My wife and I observed this well over a dozen times over the three years we went to the gym.* Now, I mentioned the “invisible hand of biology,” and this is real. But the fact is that relationships are more than biology, they just aren’t less than biology. Romance can transcend biology but you cannot subtract biology from it.

Here’s the song I mentioned:

 

*Incidentally, he tried flirting with her while she was doing deadlift. She simply said something terse like, “I’m working out.”