Arestovich’s class today is on semantic trees. My father taught me about semantics when I was four, and we played building semantic trees together. This is giving me mega feels.

It turns out that some of my posts don’t get any comments because WordPress sticks them in drafts. I’ll be publishing the ones that are not outdated little by little.

One thing we can do for ourselves that would be enormously beneficial is to learn to switch off the analogy-making machine in our heads.

A simple example. People miss crucial symptoms that could get them diagnosed early because they don’t perceive them as symptoms. They only notice the symptoms they observed or heard of before. Nothing outside of their experience registers.

This doesn’t mean that some analogies can’t be useful. But it’s a great idea to accept that there are many things in the world that are unlike anything we have experienced.

Year 1898 was a very painful time for Latin America. It was the year when everything changed. Spain went away for good, and the US made it known that it would dominate the hemisphere from now on.

The fear and the humiliation that Latin Americans experienced in 1898 (and every year since then) gave birth to contrarianism. What is the US associated with the most? Democracy and capitalism. To many people this meant that Latin America had to be against both to continue existing as something other than a US backwater. Almost immediately after the devastating blow of 1898, Latin American philosophers, scholars and artists began to argue that democracy and capitalism were for primitive, stupid people incapable of any intellectual or artistic achievements.

Latín America spent the next 100+ years trying to cling desperately to socialism and authoritarianism. It still wasn’t spared an ounce of the US’s meddling or overbearance, of course. Contrarianism can’t effect a separation because it draws you inexorably towards the very thing you try to flee.

For everybody else, the twentieth century ended in 1991. For Latin America, it goes on. The pouting against the US is still the favorite pastime and its costs are still high. These things go both ways, though. Latin America got its revenge by making its victim cult fashionable everywhere in the West.

Narcissists cause few psychological problems to themselves, being happy to deny the truth about their disorder forever and assume the world is to blame for everything that goes wrong for them. It’s the husbands, wives, children and colleagues of narcissists that seek therapy in their thousands—literally—because of the suffering inflicted on them by the narcissists in their lives.

Sophie Hannah, Kind of Cruel

Wait, Boris Johnson is trying to come back as a Prime Minister? I mean, great, I love him, but what was the point of all this brouhaha of the past couple of weeks, then? Is the UK turning into Argentina?

This is absolutely shameful and deeply counterproductive:

American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.

https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Organic_Social

I don’t know if people on here are aware but my husband is a quantitative analyst working in the area of statistical research in the field of genetics. They are looking for genetic causes of cancer, trying to come up with early interventions. If there’s a kind of work that we all want to continue unimpeded, it’s that. Is there anybody on here who hasn’t lost somebody to cancer? Anybody who is not terrified of the very word?

This is high-level research. It doesn’t live in the world of political correctness because political correctness isn’t science. In genetics research, genes are real, racial categories are real, biological sex is real. There’s a reality outside of our imagination, and it doesn’t care about our fads or whims.

What a shame this all is, my friends. What a bloody shame.

And there’s more:

“And Galton was an out-and-out racist, in public and private, throughout his life. Pearson was a horror, a racist and antisemite.”

When institutions celebrate the likes of Galton and Pearson, it “sends a clear [chilling] message to people who we should be going out of our way to include in science”, Rutherford says. Having better representation is important not just for diversity and equity, but because it encourages better science. “That seems like a no-brainer.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03253-y

I’m sure Galton was an unpleasant person. Despicable, even. But his contribution to science and to the things that have an unparalleled importance to all of us is such that not an army of politically correct holders of the only true beliefs can compensate. An inability to separate a scientist’s or artist’s work from his personal characteristics is a mark of undeveloped brains that are forever stuck in the early childhood stage of socialization. And these are the primitive, undisciplined brains we are allowing to thwart our scientific advances.

In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.

Sam Quinones, Dreamland

Few turns of phrase annoy me more than “amplify voices.” Every time I hear it, I imagine a pinch-lipped, desiccated spinster lecturing people monotonously and obnoxiously.

A friend told me that he’s not given to envy (and it’s true, he’s really not) but he feels intensely envious when I start talking about whatever my new favorite book is. He says it’s as if I had the luxury of falling intensely in love every month without any heartbreak, parting or loss.