Special Events

10 years married as of today.  2.5 years together before then.  It's impressive how two people can grow together over 10 years.   In honor of the anniversary, I'll share with my readers the song we've had as "our song" for a few years now.

Not gonna be blogging today.

My daughter is 9yo tomorrow.  And she's participating in her first gymnastics meet ever, out of town.
So we drove up the 4.5 hours today with all 4 kids (incl. 19 day old Hume), and will be driving back on Sunday.
Not gonna be blogging much this whole weekend in fact.

QoTM

Arnold Kling, explaining his new blog:

Suppose we look at writing on issues where people tend to hold strong opinions that fit with their ideology. Such writing can

(a) attempt to open the minds of people on the opposite side as the author
(b) attempt to open minds of people on the same side as the author
(c) attempt to close minds of people on the same side as the author

So, think about it. Wouldn’t you classify most op-eds and blog posts as (c)? Isn’t that sort of pathetic? 

My goal is to avoid (c). I will try to keep the posts here free of put-downs, snark, cheap shots, straw-man arguments, and taking the least charitable interpretation of what others say. So, if what you most enjoyed about my past blogging efforts were the put-downs, be prepared for disappointment with this incarnation.

Social Science News oTY

The top 8 predictive factors (that I know) impacting a person's quality of life (across many dimensions) are (in order, as I understand it):

1. Location (country/state/etc. -- see here for instance)
2. Patience
3. Self-Efficacy
4. Social/Emotional Intelligence
5. IQ
6. (roughly tied with 5) Conscientiousness
7. Resilience
8. Optimism

So far, the impact of 1 and the impact of 5 are very well known.  To a significant extent, the HBD-o-sphere is a discussion of the relevance of #5.  

Social Science news of the Year:  Someone (GMU Ph.D.) found a good/reliable way to measure #6 across populations, rather than in individual interviews.  The ability to measure 2 relevant variables, rather than 1 should be enormous.

FWIW, I don't think this will lend any support to the anti-HBD-ists.    It should instead make the case much more robust, and somewhat less susceptible to bias-claims that this is just high-IQ people saying that IQ is important to feel better about themselves (this as a high IQ person).  

Dinner

Dinner:
Turkey: 21 lbs
Pork loin with aretae yam stuffing.
Greens
Black Eyed Peas
Corn shrimp chowder
Blueberry cornbread muffins
Jalapeño bacon cream cheese wraps
Cranberry sauce
Green Beans with almonds in butter
Honeyed Yams.
Jello salad.
Pull apart rolls.

Dessert:
Cheesecake
Lemon meringue pie
Black Berry pie
Pumpkin Pie
Sweet Potato pie
Ice Cream.

Most of it was excellent.

The 8yo cooked the pumpkin pie.
The 16 yo did the muffins.
A friend cooked the rolls.
Sister in law did the turkey minus the lifting
Wife + me have sore feet.

PoTD

Blunt Object on Unintended Consequences , with lots of links, including my favorite, to Eric Crampton.  Takeaway:  We are actually, measurably, substantially less safe while traveling because of the TSA, and we have a higher percentage of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome babies because of the teetotaler advice given pregnant women.

Thanksgiving

For happiness and general well being, the top of the list of what you can impact includes exercise, meditation, gratitude, meaningful work, and friends.

Thanksgiving is the American holiday in which we focus on gratitude, and invite our family/friends over for dinner after a long day of work in the kitchen.   A walk after dinner gives us 4/5 points on happiness.

Happy Thanksgiving.  I gotta cook.

PoTD

Isegoria finds alexander boot on bicycles.

QoTD

When a white guy says "War on _______", it always turns out to be "War on blacks".  -- some white guy (mid conversation)

I've even heard some Sailerite supporters defend the war on drugs on these grounds. 

Exercise VIII

I switched gyms.  My old trainer's boss didn't like my icewater, so I've switched to a new guy.


We are calibrating me vs. his very different machines.  Substantially different pulldown motion, substantially different chest press motion.  Little different leg press motion.  Have to calibrate before ice-experimentation.

Last week, I visited the new place, talked with the owner/trainer a lot, and rather unexpectedly tried some exercises:
Pulldown -- over 3 minutes @ 110lbs
Leg Press -- over 3 minutes @ 340lbs

Chest Press -- not quite 3 minutes @ 110lbs

Then, a couple days later, I went to my old superslow place for my last session.
Pulldown:  1:20-ish @ 175 -- way weak.
Chest press:  1:00-ish @ 175 -- way weak.
Leg press:  ??? @ 320 -- again, less than before.

I was simply not recovered after 2 days of rest.  That's near half what I would expect.
I did try icing while exercising.  There was some value there.  I placed the feet on icepacks while doing pulldown.  I placed the icepacks between hands and bar while doing chest press.   And I placed icepacks on handlebars while doing leg press.  Potential value, but couldn't tell due to lack of having recovered.

Then the next day, had a baby.   Didn't post on exercise

Yesterday, I went back to the new place:

Pulldown -- 2'45"  @ 130lbs
Leg Press -- well over 3 minutes @ 400lbs
Chest Press -- near 2 minutes @ 115lbs -- seems too low.  Odd motion

Leg Press 2 (closer seat, targetting glutes) -- somewhat over 3 minutes @ 200lbs. 

It's interesting how little excess heat I had.  I had some heat-related (normal for me) dizziness (maybe the wrong word) after leg press.  After Chest Press, I was sweating lightly, but that was handled quickly via my trainer's home-brew (nutritionally balanced) protein powder + cold water = protein shake.  After the 2nd leg press, I got my standard overheated one-ear sounds-like-underwater, but only for 20 seconds.  One conical paper cup of cold water cleared that up.  

I'm wondering if the thing that seriously overheats the muscles in my old routine is the 10-20 second end-point, wherein I'm pushing with everything, and the weights are going the wrong way.   I haven't yet done that seriously at the new place.  

QoTD

Tim Harford, talking about something else entirely:

There are those who believe that some things, such as healthcare or the road network, are just too important to leave in the hands of the market. And there are those who believe that some things, such as food or petrol, are just too important to leave in the hands of government.

PoTD

Sonic Charmer forgets his snarky humor persona, and says what he really thinks.

Defining rights

Rights: those areas of action in which others have an obligation to not interfere.

Rights are a purely social concept, and a specific way of ordering a society.  If an individual has a right to act, then they have some sort of (at least moral) claim upon everyone else (since the only actual actors in the world are persons, I don't bother to mention groups) to NOT interfere with that action.  And it doesn't matter how much one or a million of them dislike your gay mexican nazi float in the parade.  Too damn bad.  They have an obligation to not interfere.

Interesting that when one constitutes rights as a moral obligation to be left alone by others that one cannot have conflicting rights.  And positive rights are incoherent.  And the "unless you interfere with the rights of others" falls out by accident.

The question:  do humans have rights (a moral claim not to be interfered with in at least some areas) or not?  Not is a legitimate answer...but I know of no other political theory to oppose total government than rights-based theories.

Now...there are disputes about rights...which individual rights do persons have?  Almost universally, they begin with life, liberty, fruits of one's labors, property*, self defense, freedom of conscience.  Usually religion, speech, congregation, association are also listed explicitly. Lack of  freedom of religion, lack of free speech, lack of self-defense are all known to, if infringed, allow all other rights to fail as well.  Strong rights to property (claim against governments and others from stealing it, claim against others from preventing you from transfering property to mutual benefit) appears to be the greatest known path to prosperity (for nations) yet discovered.


* please no sophomoric nonsense about property, life as guarantees rather than non-interference claims.

The political decisions, in order

Question #1, phrased several ways:
What realm of decisions is entirely left to the individual?  What rights does he/she have beyond the claim of the state?  What may a state not legitimately interfere with, in an individual's decisions?  What range of motion is an individual entitled to independent of the state, or the approval of his/her neighbors?  Or is there no such area, and is the state a totalitarian state?

Question #2, strictly after question 1:
Given the constrants from question 1 about what the state is prohibited from doing...Under what conditions (much fewer than what is allowed under #1) shall we allow the individuals who man the apparatus of the state to use violence to force other individuals to do what they want?

Question #3: strictly after question 2:
Inside of the bounds of question #2, what activities do we want the state to be involved in?

Question #4:  strictly after question 3:
Who should make decisions about what the state should do, given that the state ought to be involved?

Other PoTD

Among Kent's best writings ever (that I've read):  Super-Hate.  RTWT.

PoTD

Financial Times paywall article (free with reg) discusses the Fetish for Manufacturing:

Manufacturing fetishism – the idea that manufacturing is the central economic activity and everything else is somehow subordinate – is deeply ingrained in human thinking.... 

[But, w]hen you look at the value chain of manufactured goods we consume today, you quickly appreciate how small a proportion of the value of output is represented by the processes of manufacturing and assembly. Most of what you pay reflects the style of the suit, the design of the iPhone, the precision of the assembly of the aircraft engine, the painstaking pharmaceutical research, the quality assurance that tells you products really are what they claim to be.

Meta: Immigration Arguments

If one were to approach immigration rationally (I know, huge stretch), there's really a very short sequence of questions that need asked.  Since what to do is fundamentally an ethics question, we should address it in a sane empirical ethical framework:

1. Are we properly operating on an individual analysis?
2. Do we buy in to the USA foundational notion of individual rights against group wishes?
3. What is the proper moral tradeoff in rich citizen benefit against poor non-citizen benefit.?
4. What is the actual benefit to the non-citizen trying to immigrate?
5. What is the actual harm or benefit to the citizen from the non-citizen trying to immigrate?
6. Since 4 is so high, can we do anything to make 5 have greater benefit or less harm?.

Bryan Caplan recently got some engagement from the more intellectual anti-immigration forces, and started attempting to discuss the actual set of questions.  Bryan, being Bryan, doesn't even ask questions 1 or 2, because he can't imagine someone so crazy as to not answer those correctly in an ethical discussion.  And then he asked, very simply, question #3.  

Actually, he asked question 3 in a way that a philosophical ethical intuitionist trained by Michael Huemer would.  Summarizing:  

I'm not interested in the easy cases:  Shooting non-citizens for fun seems clearly outside the acceptable.  Letting a non-citizen baby live at the cost of an extra second delay on the subway seems obviously acceptable. So give me some border cases.  For the ethical experiment, it doesn't have to be plausible at all...we just need to know what kind of tradeoffs are legitimate, and which aren't.  Doing this by finding examples slightly inside the line and examples slightly outside the line would be among the best ways of identifying said line.  I probably should have used Dumbledore and his wand as a prop here, so as to not confuse people with plausibility arguments.

In the comments, there have been very few real attempts to answer the question.

I see 3 potential reasons to not address the question:

1. Hard Question.  People are very comfortable with extreme, blanket statements about all sorts of topics, but when you get to specifics, the blanket statements get harder, and it becomes clear that there's all sorts of trickiness.  Most folks aren't prepared to claim that pushing fat citizen Hans onto the track to save 5 non-citizens is a bad trade, while pushing him to save 20 non-citizens is a good trade.  That level of moral detail is not clear, and so folks prefer to retreat to bland generalisms which ignore the important, difficult tradeoffs.  
2. Idiocy.  Folks don't realize that any sane ethical approach to immigration requires answering this question.  
3. Strategic Evasion.  To address this question rationally is not a win for the anti-immigrationists.  Because a frank discussion of this question won't turn out well for them, either by making them look bad, or by calling out the real moral rights-obligation we have even to non-citizens, they are strategically avoiding the question.  Further, addressing this directly in any way would perhaps impact the revenue stream of folks who make money from being aggressively anti-immigration.  

On the other hand, I'm not sure why any specific person didn't actually address it.  

Video oTD

Robot hand.  Here.  Ignore the article, find the video.  HT:  Paul Hsieh.

QoT Month?

Tyler Cowen:

[T]he case for epistemic humility remains worthy of your attention.

New baby

Hume Burnett. Born 11:19 on 11/11

The new election model

Having read Anarchangel, Borepatch and a few others on the topic, I have an new electoral perspective.

Roughly the only interesting factor in modern American presidential elections is how much enthusiasm (read turnout) the republican candidate can generate.   

This failed for Obama '08, when we had an ahistoric youth and black vote, and Clinton '92 when Perot split the vote, and appears to work for the rest of the elections since '84.

FWIW, this lends support to my Republicans could have won with a more libertarian platform.  But it fails to support that this would have been the best way to win.  

The libertarians finally did it?

Libertarians take several issues around liberty very seriously:

• State effective monopoly on schooling
• The massively regulated insurance-based medical system that existed before and after obamacare, before and after romneycare
• Big companies lobbying to protect themselves from poor foreigners and smaller businesses
• Corporate Welfare (auto and bank bailouts that Bush started)
• The revolving door between large corporations and government officials 
• Over-aggressive licensing
• The cost of regulation in general
• The war on drugs
• Interventionist foreign wars
• Allowing peaceful immigration

It's a shame that neither major party gives a crap about ANY of the above issues.  Quoting Sonic Charmer: 

I’m reading that Gary Johnson got 0.9% in Ohio and the O-R margin was 0.2%. Hey libertarians, how’s that big 5% threshold effort workin’ out for you? Nice going. The ambitious long-term plan appears to be right on track.

Apparently it's going perfectly.  The fact that the Republican party doesn't care about any of the issues important to libertarians cost them Ohio?  How sad for them.

True, False or Incoherent?

Human Females share more DNA with Chimpanzee Females than with human males?

Race issues

How many people in the world find the following two statements both obviously true, and think anyone who denies either of them is hiding from reality, in order to maintain their preferred narrative:

1. There are huge racial differences in average IQ, and large gender differences in IQ standard deviation.  And IQ matters a lot (It's one of the top 5 factors, but not the top factor, that predict's a person's life).  This undisputable fact of reality accounts for a lot of bullshit discrimination claims by statistically incompetent folks on the left.
2. There is massive pre-rational discrimination that occurs at a subconscious level in many people, that is visible in interacting with them, which comprises the reality of a lot of discrimination claims that are reflexively dismissed by a lot of observationally biased folks on the right.  

I've been a statistical-differences in IQ kind of guy since before the Bell Curve was published.  I went to a no-discrimination-in-either-direction technical school in '90.  This is obvious, basic, boring stuff.  

I've been a discrimination-huh? kind of guy for most of my life.  Never saw it in CA, because I never lived anywhere where there were any minorities...and the 1% who were minorities were often my friends.  Moved to Russia...saw it directly and overtly.  Moved to Houston...saw it never.  Married a black woman from Houston.  She'd never seen racism in her life.  She thought it was a myth Jesse Jackson dreamed up in order to con some folks.  Then we moved back to CA...wife saw racism in folks faces a little bit.  I didn't.  Moved to Austin...she saw it again a little bit.  I didn't.  Spent 6 months in rural North Carolina.  Saw none of it.  Moved to Chicago.  In excess of 80% of the people there are viscerally racist. They see you, their faces change based on your race.  True of the whites, true of the blacks, all of 'em.  Nice areas, poor areas, doesn't matter.  The entire midwest has a completely toxic approach to race that simply doesn't occur in healthy cities like Houston.  I understand this is also true of many of the big Eastern Cities (DC, New York, Boston), but I can't vouch for that personally.  But when you see the racism on people's faces...and you know that faces react before the information hits the conscious mind...it's kinda hard to ignore the reality of aggressive racism.

One of my "jobs" on the web is to point out that both #1 and #2 above are major factors influencing the world.  If my commentariat is busy proclaiming that #1 explains everything, or even enough...I become more aggressively pro #2.  It's a major part of how decisions get made  When folks pop up on the blog arguing against #1, then I point out, with as large a hammer as necessary, that #1 is among the best known things in social science.  It's up there with the fact that rationing always creates (a) lines with larger time costs than the $ savings, and (b) scalpers.

Since I don't suffer from a groupist perspective, I don't have any real compulsion to agree with anyone on one topic just because I agree with them on another topic.  Indeed, I consider it (to some extent) my duty (it's an inherited trait, my dad does this too) to point out that anyone considering a single-sided view of a problem is probably handicapping themselves by about 30 IQ points in their capability to understand the problem.   Tyler Cowen, much less aggressively:  "As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you're telling a good vs. evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more."

So .... to answer a question posed (implicitly) by Meh: "Why do you hew so strongly to the Leftist side on race issues?"  Because the commentators on the site are all rightists, and as far as I can tell from the comments, they're missing half the actual story, mostly because it doesn't fit their narrative.  When Mel, one of my favorite strongly leftist anarchists, used to comment, I would respond to her with Race/Gender/IQ reality discussions.  

Election stuff

• Scott Sumner suggesting you vote libertarian.

  If I lived in Ohio and God told me I’d have the deciding vote between the top two candidates in this election, I’d vote for Johnson.

• Randy Barnett, libertarian genius (One of the smartest guys I've ever met calls Barnett one of the smartest guys he ever met), arguing against the libertarians.

  while I am as libertarian today as I was [when the party was founded], I have come to believe that the Libertarian Party was a mistake."

• Eric Horow, arguing for Obama.

  If Obama wins this year there’s almost no chance that Obama or Romney will win the 2016 election. But if Romney wins there’s better than a 50% chance that Obama or Romney will win the 2016 election.

• Foseti arguing against voting from the reactionary right.  Jason Brennan chimes in from the libertarian left.  Neither with as quotable a statement, but each as important as the others.

Me?  I don't vote.  Actively opposed to voting since '93 ('92, I was young, stupid, and voted for Perot.  Forgive my youthful indiscretion).  Encouraging the lesser of two evils seems ... evil.  If I were to change my mind, I'd be there with Scott Sumner.   think Randy Barnett has it wrong for 3 reasons.  

1. I don't find this election any more or less momentous than any since I started paying attention in '84.  
2. The biggest difference the libertarians can make is not from inside the party.  The biggest difference will be when the libertarians beat the margin of victory in a state.  At that point, both of the major parties have to turn to capture the voters.  The second biggest difference would be anti-libertarian matching funds.
3. The third issue is that Randy is looking short term.  To get change, you need both radicals outside the gates, and reformers inside.  Without the radicals, the reformers get nowhere.  

Linky

• Katja @ OvercomingBias on mate selection.  She could answer her question with PUA/status theory.  And she rightly states that only the several sigma should have problems.
• Conservative wunderkind-blogger Tino on where the Conservatives are having trouble [link updated].  Tino's always smart, and usually right.
• The Gorgomons put up a post on polling, which has been troubling me for a while.  Seems strongly opposed to science.  "How do I get the result I expect?"  Do any of my readers understand this stuff in such a way that it would make sense to take seriously?  UPDATE:  Or you could just read Borepatch, who wrote a treatise on the topic.  

Libertarian thought on the election

David Friedman is very carefully well-thought here.  I'm not in the same place, but I'm not far from where he is.

Exercise #8

Further note:
Today,  18 hours after un-iced exercise,  I feel as physically recovered as I did 3 days after my iced double super slow.  The double exertion really kicked my behind.  I wasn't even mentally up to par on the first day after my double workout.

Exercise #7

Summary:

Good news:

• Still getting huge wins on weight and time-under-load on chest press, leg press.
• Consulted with McGuff, learned some stuff.
• More ideas

Bad news:

1. I don't understand how to do the compound row, and am not getting clear gains.
2. Gym owner at current gym prohibited current protocol of using ice-water
3. I tried an alternate protocol for cooling because of prohibition, and it didn't work 
4. I'm sick.  
5. I need nutrition help around HIT weightlifting

Details:

Chest press:
Last week:  160lbs @ 1:30
This week: 170lbs @ 1:45
And it felt easier.

My normal results when not icing are on the order of same weight, +10sec, or +4lbs @ slightly lower time.

Leg press: (setting: knees @ ears -- closer than my 5 foot tall trainer sits)
Last week: 300lbs @ 1:30
This week: 315lbs @ 2:00


Compound Row: (I don't have the settings right on this exercise).
Last week:  170lbs @ 1:30

This week:  170lbs @ 1:20 -- I didn't feel like I was done.  With appropriate adjustment, I felt like I had 1:45 to 2:00, but that's not what we measured.

Assorted other:

The superslow Gym owner prohibited my icing hands and feet.  I am now very likely to switch gyms.

I had a phone consult with McGuff.  He's pretty darn smart, thinks well.

Among other topics (saftey, mechanism, etc.), my consult with McGuff resulted in his informing me of how cardiac surgeons induce mild hypothermia in patients to prevent heart attack.  Cooling the veins running back to the heart from the limbs is highly reliable at preventing heart attack via induction of hypothermia.  So, I tried it for my muscle-cooling.  Interesting factoid, that I think Dr. Pat posted earlier:  Muscular contractions are enabled by enzymes/proteins.  Those proteins are polymorphic (there's some other medical term), and they change shape based on temperature.  Ideal shape for muscular contraction appears to be between 99.5 and 102 (F).  At 98.6 they don't work as well, and at very low temperatures or above 102/103, they barely work at all.  So, we have a mechanism, and a reason: Heat death of cells/body sucks, so you have to evolve in failure of the muscles at some heat threshold.
 
In any case, the new protocol didn't work as quickly as I needed it to.  4 iced gel-packs placed 2 in the armpits, 1 in groin, and one on carotid didn't drop my temperature anywhere like what icewater on hands and feet did.  After 1 minute of attempt, I started wiggling, trying other stuff (feet sitting on icepacks, hands holding icepacks).  After 3 minutes of attempted cooling using ice-packs, I gave up, still not cooled at the same level as 2 minutes of hand/foot icewater.  Unclear why.  I have an assignment to study the vein locations, see if I can better target them.  Alternately, the question of drinking ice-water next week is also in play.

Trying the 2nd round of exercises, I failed.  I was able to move the compound row machine @ 170, but unable to do a full rep.

The fact that I'm ill (cold/flu/something) probably didn't help.  However, I did come home after superslow + lunch, and sleep for 2-3 hours.

Also, I'm running into serious nutrition failure in the weightlifting side of things.  After 3 solid very-HIT exercises, I am shaking.  I'm inclined to believe that I need to do somethign to better manage my blood sugar for my 8 minutes of very hard exercise.  I'd love it if someone reading was smarter than me on the topic (not hard).

Finally, while I'm dancing around the bleeding edge of exercise technique, I'm now becoming interested in what I can do to even further extend the craziness.  Turns out that both myself and one of the other Agile coaches at work have a background in hypnosis.  I worked as a hypnotist for a while in California (before they regulated it), while her background is from Great Britain.  I'm inclined to believe that in a zero-impact, all-strength, no-power workout system like superslow, one could profitably use hypnosis to improve things, as superslow is primarily a level of mental effort that folks don't want to do.  This could potentially get even deeper inroads than my current protocol (I failed psychologically at the end of my 2nd leg press last week...I may have had 5-10 seconds of effort left, but my mind didn't have the strength to push that hard).  I might try to include this soon.