Kwame Anthony Appiah on Philosophy, Toleration, and Identity

I think Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the wisest people in the world. In this interview with the Chronicle, he touches on many hot button topics in what seem to me highly sensible ways.

On tolerance in the university:

I would like to be at a university where we can talk to each other across differences of politics and religion and national origin and sexuality and all the things that sometimes divide us. That is something that a liberal education is likely to encourage.

Of course, if you have a bad experience in the course of your liberal education, you may want to hide away in the community that makes you happy. But if we do it right, we should make these attitudes attractive. That’s not because I’m a relativist. Some of the attitudes that we need to be engaged with are wrong, whether they’re about facts or norms. But as a social matter, we are a diverse society. This was the central presupposition of Rawls’s theory of justice: We have to accept that we live in a society which has a diversity of what he called “reasonable conceptions of the good life.” Being willing to live side by side with people isn’t the same as thinking that they’re right.

When my very devout Muslim uncle had us over for meals at Eid, he was indifferent to the question of whether our Christianity or his Islam was correct. When his children came to us for Christmas, we didn’t think, “You can’t talk to these people. They’re wrong about Jesus.” Intellectuals find it hard to combine thinking it’s very important that something is true with being perfectly happy to hang out with people who don’t believe it. But that’s an important human skill because diversity isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

On trigger warnings:

In an inevitably plural society, one of the things a person growing up needs to acquire is skin thickness. So I don’t think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself for a happy life. . . . At the beginning of most of my classes, I tell students that if someone says something that upsets you, assume they didn’t mean to. . . .

So while we need to create a welcoming atmosphere in the classroom — not because that’s our job, but because it’s necessary in order to do our job — these supposedly protective measures have not really helped. They’ve made a lot of people unwilling to raise questions because they don’t know whether they’ll be punished in some way or ostracized.

On free speech and the US first amendment:

My attitude to giving the government the power to regulate speech is not that there aren’t imaginable circumstances in which, all things considered, it might be good to do. It’s just that, if you give governments that power, overwhelmingly, they will use it in bad cases. That’s the history. . . .

Any regime has costs as well as benefits. You can harm someone by using certain words. I don’t deny that. But the question is whether giving the state the power to decide which words those are. That’s not something I’m inclined to be optimistic about. When I was eight, my father was carted off to prison in Ghana by the president without being tried for anything because of things he said. So I don’t like giving governments the power to lock people up for things they’ve said.

Appiah has spent years answering ethics questions sent in by readers of the New York Times Magazine, things like "can I ban my obnoxious brother-in-law from Thanksgiving dinner?" What use was his philosophical training in answering those questions?

It turns out that there’s a bunch of tools that I have because I can ask questions in a systematic way. Taking them in chronological order, there’s a Confucius question — which is, what are the relationships? What duties arise out of the relationships? There’s an Aristotle question: What would a virtuous person do? There’s a Kantian question: What are the rights and duties? And there’s a Millian utilitarian question: What are the consequences for human welfare? If you answer those questions, you’ve often focused on all the relevant stuff.

And on the question of what discipline he thinks he practices, since he has published in philosophy, African studies, race relations, history, and more:

I think of myself as an intellectual, as someone who wants to understand things.

What a remarkable man.

The Persistent Fantasy of Rural Escape

I spent some time staring at this awful thing, wondering why it struck such a chord in me. It isn't because it's stupid. It's because it is *timelessly* stupid. It's just the contemporary white nationalist version of one of our most ancient dreams.

In the 1960s and 1970s we had the hippie version. I grew up with songs like this:

Baby I'll be there to take your hand
Baby I'll be there to share the land
that they'll be giving away
when we all live together.

(Who are "they"? And why are they giving away land?)

But it goes much farther back than that.

Marie Antoinette, queen of France, spent many hours playing at being a shepherdess, and she had a whole fake village built where she could act out her fantasies.

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1836

Pastoral poetry that evokes the simples pleasures of rural life is one of our oldest literary traditions; the earliest known examples are written in Sumerian.

Here is a famous example by Christopher Marlowe:

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

It seems that the high-pressure life of an old royal court, full of politics and intrigue that might end with a knife in your back, encouraged the fantasy that shepherds had a better kind of life.

But it's all nonsense. Simple rural life is hard even for people who grew up with it, and it is almost impossible for those who did not. I have a friend who actually spent some time on a hippie commune, and she once said to me, "You know, there are reasons why we all left."

Lots of reasons. The work is hard and unrelenting, with many chores that must be done every single day. The amusements are limited. And the politics of the average commune, while perhaps not as bloody as those of a Renaissance court, can be quite awful. The communes that still endure in our time all have very strict policies about who can join, along with probationary periods and the like, and they still have high turnover.

These days only about 2% of Israelis live on a Kibbutz, and some of these are actually more like gated communities than farming communes.

But when people feel under great social or economic stress, or feel that their beliefs are at odds with those of the majority, or believe that their societies have grown wicked and decadent, these fantasies keep coming up over and over.

Searching for images to put in this post I found all sorts of dumb claims about communal life "going mainstream" in the 2020s. Like this: "Today, it’s not uncommon to see people switching to solar power, growing their own food, or building off-grid Earthships" Unless you consider 0.01 percent "not uncommon," this is utter nonsense. 

But what is indeed not uncommon is fantasizing about it.

My Species

even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening waters
grows tender, grows tender and sweet

patience I think,
my species,

keep testing the spiny leaves,

the spiny heart

– Jane Hirshfield

Is AI getting funny?

 

Gemini 3's response to the prompt, "create a novel and clever and funny Venn diagram." Via Ethan Mollick.

What to Strive For

Socrates:

Some things I have said of which I am not altogether confident. But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know—that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

Plato, Meno, Benjamin Jowett translation 

Freddie deBoer against Identifying with your Disability

Cranky leftist Freddie deBoer has had enough of identitarian liberalism. From a piece titled The New York Times Attempts to Bully Elderly People Into the Disability-as-an-Identity Worldview:

I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes

Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”

Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.

Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. . . .

What’s infuriating is that the disability-as-identity movement now demands not only recognition but participation. It doesn’t merely want a world that accommodates impairments; it wants people to embrace their impairments as the core of who they are, to reorganize their sense of self around deficit, to declare disability a positive good rather than an unfortunate reality that any reasonable society would want to minimize. So we get this bizarre spectacle in which experts scold older adults for not calling themselves disabled, as though the great social failing is insufficient uptake of a label. When you tell people that disability is a proud identity, that it confers membership in a community, that it’s a site of resistance and empowerment, you create a perverse incentive structure: you reward pathology and make recovery, adaptation, or improvement look like betrayal. You create cultures where people compete for diagnostic prestige and moral authority through the performance of malady. You make suffering existentially sticky. The NYT wants you to believe the problem is that older Americans “don’t want to look disabled.” Is that really the problem for that 84-year-old in chronic pain who can barely walk? I think her problem is that she’s in chronic pain and can barely walk, and “identifying as disabled” won’t make the slightest fucking difference in her life. Meanwhile, our problem is that we’ve built an intellectual ecosystem in which more and more people want exactly that, a label, because being disabled has been reframed as a kind of sacred political laurel. . . .

Because behind all of the airy rhetoric about community and identity is a simple material reality: disability is bad. Disability is physically bad, emotionally bad, financially bad. It reduces freedom. It causes pain. It limits horizons. That doesn’t mean people who are disabled are lesser or that their lives lack dignity or value, obviously. It means that which afflicts them actually afflicts them. My controversial, offensive belief is that disability disables! But the new orthodoxy insists that saying so is taboo. The Times piece rattles through endless quotes about how older people need to feel empowered to call themselves disabled, yet never once confronts the obvious possibility that they don’t want to because they don’t want their lives defined by deficit. They want to soldier on, insist they’re that fine, preserve some continuity of self. Is that denial? Sometimes, sure. More often, I suspect, it’s a vestige of self-respect, a refusal to surrender one’s entire identity to the slow attrition of age and disease.

Recall that deBoer has suffered all his life from serious mental illness, but so far as I know has never once publicly used that as an excuse. He has certainly never tried to build his identity around it; on the contrary he has striven for a rational consistency in his positions. He spent years decrying the way wokeness was dividing the left and forcing people into extreme positions, thereby weakening the whole movement. Like everyone else who has ever thought about the problem, he understands that if people on the left want to move America in their direction, they must act together, as citizens.

Winter Solstice 2025

It has been a dark year for many of us, but we can hope the the growing light will shine on better times.

Hell

I just finished listening to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), which I liked a lot. I noted with interest that although James Joyce was considered a very radical writer and a founder of modernism, he based his aesthetic theory on his reading of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Real revolution always draws on tradition. 

Joyce was raised Catholic and attended Jesuit schools but eventually underwent a sort of religious crisis and left the church. His alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, does the same in Portrait of the Artist. Joyce focuses much of the crisis on an annual weeklong retreat the older schoolboys went on to spend seven days thinking about nothing but faith. One day was devoted to the Virgin, one to Angels, etc. And one day to the Last Things: death, judgment, hell, and heaven. Joyce gives us a sermon preached by one of the priests on the horrors of hell that fills several pages of text. A sample:

Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. . . .

—The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. . . .

—But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property that it preserves that which it burns and though it rages with incredible intensity it rages for ever.

This is fiction, but all of this is, as Joyce tells us, taken from actual medieval and Renaissance theologians. The church really taught that this was the fate of all who died in mortal sin, so not just serial killers but anyone who masturbated or indulged in anger.

And this is where Christianity lost me. I want no part of a God who punishes. I know that these days there is much talk of hell as just being bad because you are deprived of God's presence or what have you. But I'm not having that, either; if God can fix us, he should, and if he can't he should let us disappear from the world.

The spirit of vengeance is contrary to everything I regard as holy, and I hate it.

Education and Ideological Variance

Interesting British finding about how people vary within the left or right by education. In this poll, economic views vary across the horizontal line, while social views vary vertically. Leftists broadly agree about economics, but vary a lot on social issues; more educated leftists are generally more socially liberal than less-educated leftists.

Among conservatives (the blue dots across the top), there is much agreement about social issues. The variance is mainly about economic issues, with more educated rightists having more conservative economic views.

In this poll many less educated Brits of the left and right are in the upper left political quadrant, socially conservative and economically liberal. But there is no strong party representing that position because party leaders are drawn from the college educated, who are in the lower left or upper right quadrant.

Via Tom Harwood on Twitter/X.

Law-Abiding Immigrants

Abstract of a new paper:

We provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants' incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born Whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their US-born counterparts.

Just one study, but all the data I have seen confirms this. 

Links 19 December 2025

Roman rock crystal ring, c. 100 AD

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

More on Roman concrete, based on the study of a building site at Pompeii. (News story, technical article)

A claim that in 2024, the EU earned more from fines on American tech companies than by taxing European tech firms. (Twitter/X)

Nate Silver on the Democratic counterpart of the Tea Party, Heather Cox Richardsonism.

Growth matters: Alex Tabarrok on what economic growth has meant for the people of India.

Lovely painted tomb from the 3rd century AD found in Turkey.

American refrigerators are bigger, better, much more affordable, and only slightly less durable than 40 years ago. (Blog post, summary on Twitter/X)

The main reason home ownership has declined for Americans 25-34 is that fewer of them are married.

An appreciation of P.J. O'Rourke. Like this writer, I usually found him interesting and entertaining even when I disagreed wtih him. (Everybody will disagree with something he wrote, since he started as a hippie Marxist and ended up a cranky old libertarian. The constant was a deep suspicion of The Man.)

When ICE says they are arresting "the worst of the worst," they are lying.

Hollis Robbins says that nobody cares about the quality of university teaching, and if they did, we would have no way to measure it.

Following the Black nationalist playbook, J.D. Vance wonders if the Biden administration encouraged the importation of fentanyl to kill MAGA people. (Twitter/X) And a longer version, "JD Vance is the White Kendi."

Neolithic dog sacrifice found in a Swedish bog.

Update on Haitian gangs (report, summary on Twitter/X)

Sixteenth-century gallows and several mass graves found in Grenoble, France. A reminder that executed criminals were not buried in consecrated ground, which is one reason why places of execution had such strong uncanny associations.

Detailed study of data from Taiwan (where pets have to be registered) finds that pets do not replace babies; in fact, acquiring a dog makes it more likely that a couple will have a child. I have observed this in my suburban neighborhood of Maryland: most of the young or youngish couples I see walking a dog have a baby within two years.

Sec. Kennedy announces a $1 billion program to install gyms in airports. By one calculcation, that would be enough money to save more than 800,000 lives if it were spent vis USAID. (Twitter/X)

More snow drawings made by walking on frozen lakes.

Most big IT projects still fail, despite people trying to solve this problem for 50 years. The author says AI won't help because it trains on past experience and our past experience is terrible.

Study finds that you will have better luck persuading those who disagree with you by talking about what you hate rather than what you support.

Studying the lost upper floors of Pompeii, with speculation that some villas had tall towers. (English summary, Italian press announcement. From this I learned that in Italian, "super rich" is super ricchi.)

Study finds that Orcas and dolphins cooperate to hunt salmon off Canada's west coast. (NY Times, scientific paper, Guardian)

Introduction to the work of Luigi Pirandello, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 but is now mostly forgotten. Pirandello seems to have become a Fascist because he found the people of his time weak and pathetic.

They're still fighting about whether moderate drinking is good for your heart. My rule of thumb is that is they can't even agree on the direction of the effect, it can't be very big. (NY Times – kudos to their reporter for thinking to call up John Ioannidis; AHA Statement)

Summary of a paper which found that aesthetic considerations drive a lot of Nimbyism. (Twitter/X) Everyone who has followed this blog knows that to me, aesthetics is the key to a lot of housing and other land-use issues.

A claim that a Russian submarine was disabled while in port by an attack by Ukrainian underwater drones. (Twitter/X)

The Generation of Men that Hit the Diversity Wall

On the whole, white men are doing great in America; our unemployment rate is about 3.5% and we have the highest salaries and the most wealth.

But when it comes to a certain set of elite jobs, the number of white men really has declined. If you look, for example, at the staff writers for top publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, there are many fewer white men. Ok, that's fairness. But the changes didn't happen at the top; they happened at the bottom. According to Jacob Savage, that meant that one generation of young white men suddenly found themselves shut out of a bunch of jobs:

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a “reckoning.” The New York Times solemnly promised “sweeping” reforms—on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised. The Washington Post declared it would become “the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.” CNN pledged a “sustained commitment” to race coverage, while Bon Appétit confessed that “our mastheads have been far too white for far too long” and that the magazine had “tokenize[d] many BIPOC staffers and contributors.” NPR went further still, declaring that diversity was nothing less than its “North Star.”

These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions. . . .

In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

And at the bottom of the ladder:

Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men. Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men (in 2025, coincident with certain political shifts, the Post’s intern class had seven white guys—numbers not seen since way back in 2014). In 2018 The New York Times replaced its summer internship with a year-long fellowship. Just 10 percent of the nearly 220 fellows have been white men.

In Academia, where professors often teach into their 80s and turnover is thus very low, schools have  to work even harder to achieve diversity:

Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).

According to Savage, it's even worse in Hollywood.

This is just math; if institutions want to shift the racial and gender makeup of their staffs, without firing a bunch of senior white guys, they must shift their hiring of junior staffers strongly toward minorities and women. Which means that young white guys get shut out.

And then they get angry and vote for Donald Trump.

There is no way to shift from a workplace dominated by white men to a diverse workplace without hurting somebody; this is especially true in a stagnant industry like magazine publication or higher education, where the overall number of jobs is static or shrinking. You may think, who cares, we need to achieve greater equality, and if a few thousand white men don't get professorships or plum jobs in journalism, that's a price we have to pay. But, again, since there was no mass firing of older white men, that means the price was actually paid only by a younger generation. And anyone who thinks that wouldn't turn those men against DEI and toward a hard-edged conservatism is living in la la land.

For most Americans, DEI has made no difference whatsoever. But in certain fields where jobs are scarce, it has radically reshaped the hiring landscape, and we are going to be dealing with the political ramifications of that for a long time.

The History of Cats

A big fight has been brewing for years over the history of the domestic cat. One branch asserted that house cats are domesticated version of the North African wildcat (Felis lybica lybica), that they were domesticated in Egypt, and that they spread from there to Europe in Roman times.

But in late years several cat skeletons have been identified in Neolithic sites in Turkey and southeastern Europe, including one on Cyprus dated to 7,500 BC. Another study found that cats from Turkey migrated into Europe with the first farmers.

Now a major genetic study finds that all of those early European and Turkish cats were wild, and that all the house cats in Europe from Roman times onward descend from Egyptian cats.

Which raises interesting questions about the cats found on European Neolithic sites. Presumably they hung around human habitations to eat the rats and mice drawn there to feast on human food stores, and presumably humans tolerated them. So how domesticated were they? Were they like the raccoons that raid my trash, who are not especially afraid of me but are thoroughly wild, or were they tamer? At least one of those Neolithic cats was deliberately buried; was it a wild animal sacrifie, or was someone doing honor to an esteemed friend?

One interesting detail is that some of those Neolithic cats may have had some DNA from Egyptian cats; did that make them a little tamer?

The process of domestication remains one of the mysteries of the human past.

Rob Reiner Had It All

If you think it would be great to be rich, famous and successful, well, maybe. Or maybe you will end up being stabbed to death by your own son like Rob Reiner.

If you think it would be great to be born rich and handsome and never have to struggle, well, maybe. Or maybe you, like Nick Reiner, will drift into the life of a homeless drug addict by the time you are 15 and then end up murdering your parents with a knife at 32.

Fate cannot give you happiness. Money cannot give you happiness. Fame cannot give you happiness.

Only you can do that.

You do not have problems because of evil billionaires or immigrants or the Elite or the woke mob or the Illuminati. You have problems because everyone has problems. You struggle because life is a struggle. If you think money would fix your problems, consider the Reiners. If you think you just need a break, well, Nick Reiner got plenty of breaks. 

If your heart is sick, no amount of money will cure you. If your mind is sick, success will not fix you.

If mind is healthy and your heart is full of love, then you will thrive.

Does Involuntary Hospitalization Help the Mentally Ill?

As concern about violence committed by the mentally ill has grown, so has the number of Americans who are involuntairly committed for mental care. Does that help? Abstract of a new paper:

The involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing a mental health crisis is a widespread practice, as common in the US as incarceration in state and federal prisons and 2.4 times as common as death from cancer. The intent of involuntary hospitalization is to prevent individuals from harming themselves or others through incapacitation, stabilization and medical treatment over a short period of time. Does involuntary hospitalization achieve its goals? We leverage quasi-random assignment of the evaluating physician and administrative data from Allegheny County, Pennsylvania to estimate the causal effects of involuntary hospitalization on harm to self (proxied by death by suicide or overdose) and harm to others (proxied by violent crime charges). For individuals whom some physicians would hospitalize but others would not, we find that hospitalization nearly doubles the probability of being charged with a violent crime and more than doubles the probability of dying by suicide or overdose in the three months after evaluation. We provide evidence of housing and earnings disruptions as potential mechanisms. Our results suggest that on the margin, the system we study is not achieving the intended effects of the policy.

I know nothing about the authors, and obviously this is a topic that many people approach with strong prior views. But I think a lot of data shows that stabilizing mentally ill people and then releasing them is often unhelpful. Here's a good line:

Resource constraints, such as under-resourced and porous follow-up services, can make for detrimental experiences.

Many of these folks are leading rough lives; in this study, 60% of those being tracked used an emergency room at some point in the following year. These mentally ill, often homeless people make up about 1.5% of those covered by Medicaid but use 25% of the budget. This is why programs that just give people housing often save money; if we are spending $50,000 a year on someone's health care, then getting them off the streets can be a money-saving strategy. But, of course, those programs work best when they focus on people most likely to benefit, that is, the least messed-up. For the far gone, there isn't much we can do, and after repeated overdoses, head injuries, frostbite, and so on they will mostly likely be dead in a few years.

Aztec Art

The Aztecs were in many ways monstrous, but they certainly had style. Above, famous chest ornament.

Statue of a spider monkey wearing the regalia of the wind god.

Fragment of wall painting from Cacaxtla, showing a frog and a maize plant.

Feathered Serpent pendant, carved from a conch shell. Now in the Met.

Facial ornament in the shape of an eagle's head.

Bell in the shape of a human head.

The Coyolxauhqui Stone, which depicts the dismemberment of the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother, the sun/war god Huitzilopochtli. Supposedly a sort of threat by the Aztecs to potential enemies, since Huitzilopochtli was their particular patron.

Eagle Warrior, ceramic statue found in Mexico City

The massive hunk of carved basalt called the Tizoc Stone.

First Snowfall

Out in the predawn woods with Kidu this morning, watching him gambol in the still falling snow and marveling at the silent beauty of the world. There were no footprints but those of a few deer and a lone fox, no sounds but our footfalls and a gentle breeze. Wonderful. No pictures of Kidu because he never stood still, even once. I noticed that while I had trouble staying on the trail, he did not; four inches of snow did not interfere with his sniffing out where he and I had walked a hundred times before. Nor did it keep him from finding sticks that had sunk under the drifts.

And now with the sun out, a different kind of beauty.

The Snartemo Sword

The Snartemo Sword was excavated from a Norwegian tomb in 1933. The burial dates to about 550 AD. Besides the sword, the tomb contained other weapons, tools, and a Roman glass cup.

The sword is unique; no others so fine survive from Scandinavia in that period, and the gold decorative plates contain unique elements. According to the Kulturhistorisk Museum in Oslo,

We find mythological figures connected to Odin and the ruling ideology of the time. The ring on the hilt likely symbolizes an oath between the chieftain and his loyal men. 

The sword also had an interesting history in the twentieth century. The sword has a band of swastikas, which, for some reason, are not shown in any photograph at the museum web site. This caught the interest of the Nazis, and they sent men to appropriate it and bring it back to Berlin. But it had been hidden in a cave during the German invasion, and it remained hidden. The museum offered to make the Germans a replica to take back with them, and they agreed, so it was made; in the museum, the real sword and the fake are sometimes displayed side by side.

Links 12 December 2025

Oviraptor fossil from North Dakota, recently auctioned at Christie's

Two more chapters of The Voice from the Darkness are up at Royal Road.

Scott Siskind on the "vibecession": why do people feel so poor when economists insist we are richer than ever?

Claire Lehmann demolishes the argument that public hangings deter crime; historical evidence shows that all forms of violence track each other, so cultures that revel in brutal punishments will have more violent crime.

Joel Mokyr's Nobel Prize lecture, on what led to technological innovation in the past and whether those conditions still exist. He says they do, so innovation will continue. He identifies conflict between nations and populism as the two biggest threats to future growth. All three prize speeches are at the link but Mokyr's is the first 30 minutes.

Major ceremonial site of the Neolithic to Bronze Age discovered near Dijon in France. In French, but Google translate is good at French.

Major French study finds (like all other major studies) that the Covid vaccine greatly reduced mortality during the pandemic.

Politico: "How Chiropractors Became the Backbone of MAHA"

Ozy Brennan: "Sometimes you have a problem, and you observe that other people don’t have this problem. The natural conclusion is that they have some kind of special skill or technique that they used to solve the problem. But, in reality, often people aren’t better than you at solving problems. They just never had the problem in the first place." Via Scott Siskind's monthly links post.

The Victorian Cult of Mourning, 13-minute video from the Victoria & Albert.

Reddit occasionally sends me links to popular posts, and the latest was titled "Should we be worried about this too?"  I didn't click on it; no subject matter could make it a more perfect summation of the current mood.

Fascinating analysis of how Nick Fuentes was algorithmically boosted on Twitter/X, possibly by foreign actors. (Twitter/X)

A claim that ads created entirely by AI get 19% more clicks than ads created by human ad designers or humans using AI assistance.

Interesting interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who wants to use ranked choice voting to end gerrymandering. In theory, sure, but how many Marylanders could even name eight people in Congress? How can you expect them to pick eight candidates? And what about states with dozens of representatives? I suppose you can set up multi-member districts, but we have some of those in Maryland (for the state senate) and that seems to allow even more creative gerrymandering.

Rubio makes a true conservative move, announces that the State Department is returning to Times New Roman after the Biden administration's woke experiment with a sans serif font. (NY Times)

Tyler Cowen attacks Australia's new law limiting the access of under-16s to many internet sites, including YouTube.

On the subject of writers knowing things, interesting obsevation about Joseph Conrad, who had read "every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians' memoirs." Via Tyler Cowen.

Fabulous summary of an episode of Candace Owens' podcast. (Twitter/X)

Noah Smith, Europe is Under Siege, with thoughts on why MAGA has no interest in defending Europe as it is.

Cremieux on Japanese birth rates: "In the future, you'll have to explain to your kids that anime was an art form made by an extinct race of serene beings that excelled at art and manufacturing and always took pride in their work. And then they just decided to disappear."

A note that one of the biggest AI conferences has for 25 years offered both a Best Paper Award and a Test of Time Award for work that still looks great ten years later. There is zero overlap between the two categories. (Twitter/X) Predicting the future is hard.

Clamart is another Parisian suburb the has been redeveloped according to new urbanist principles, lovely and dense at the same time. (Twitter/X, article) The mottos is, "dare to ask people what they want." (You will find that it is NOT modernism.)

The moon in medieval art and thought.

Interview with a guy who wants a public social media platform so this important space isn't all controlled by corporations. Seems to me he just wants to be the one who decides what can be posted.

British archaeologists claim that their 400,000-year-old evidence of humans making fire is the oldest in the world. Maybe, but there is still a raging debate over whether Home erectus controlled fire a million years ago.

The Russian MOD is claiming a successful attack by ground drones on a Ukrainian position. (Twitter/X) And from the Ukrainian side, what they claim is the first case of one of their ground drones destroying a Russian armored vehicle.

Thought from Magyar's Birds, one of Ukraine's top drone units: "The essential skill in this war is camouflage. You must be able to hide everything: bunkers, equipment, and exposed parts of your body. You need to be highly proficient if you want to survive." The same unit says they are killing 100 Russians a day.

Video of a Russian motorcyclist who got stuck in the tangle of fiber optic drone cables near the front.

Matt Yglesias on the (Non) Purpose of Higher Education

Matt Yglesias nails the problem with the public debate over American universities: we don't know what they're for. When we fight about, say, police forces, we at least agree on what a police force is for: to promote a safe and orderly community. We still fight about them, but at least those fights are anchored in a common view of what we're trying to achieve.

Many of our debates about academia go nowhere because we have no such agreement on what universities are supposed to accomplish. In particular, we do not know what a university education should be. Here Yglesias responds to the Atlantic article I linked last week on the soaring number of students with "disabilities":

Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to.

This lack of any sense of mission explains why so many education debates are empty. Yglesias:

As another example, I’ve seen a lot of conservatives crowing about the success of Southern universities in attracting more students away from the Northeast because the “frats and football” package has obviously more right-wing vibes than the Ivy League.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But the underlying dynamic here of schools competing for students on the basis of catering to teenagers’ whims actually just replicates a lot of stuff that conservatives claim not to like about higher education. Are these schools going to crack down on grade inflation? Make kids study worthwhile stuff instead of puppetry? The University of Alabama lazy river and water slide seem fun, but are they a good use of our student loan dollars?

Another good example concerns "grade inflation." If universities just exist to help people get jobs, and good grades help them get jobs, why not give everyone doing the basic work an A? If you think an A should be a signal of some kind of excellence, why do you think that? And what purpose does it serve? I have never personally given an A to a student I didn't think deserved it, but I would be hard-pressed to articulate a coherent defense of my policy. I just think that's how things should be.

There is no reason why universities can't pursue several goals at once: preparing students for careers, helping the most ambitious expand their minds, supporting research, providing a safe place for young people to mature. But the lack of any vision of what "education" means leaves universities adrift on the currents of culture and politics, vulnerable to every sort of political attack from either the right or the left.

AI and Political Persuasion

Abstract of a new article in Science:

Many fear that we are on the precipice of unprecedented manipulation by large language models (LLMs), but techniques driving their persuasiveness are poorly understood. In the initial “pretrained” phase, LLMs may exhibit flawed reasoning. Their power unlocks during vital “posttraining,” when developers refine pretrained LLMs to sharpen their reasoning and align with users’ needs. Posttraining also enables LLMs to maintain logical, sophisticated conversations. Hackenburg et al. examined which techniques made diverse, conversational LLMs most persuasive across 707 British political issues (see the Perspective by Argyle). LLMs were most persuasive after posttraining, especially when prompted to use facts and evidence (information) to argue. However, information-dense LLMs produced the most inaccurate claims, raising concerns about the spread of misinformation during rollouts.

This seems alarming but also promising. If people are willing to be persuaded by AI, and AI works best by loading its arguments with factual claims, that's awesome, but only if the facts are real facts. If we could force LLMs to be honest, this might be great for the world.

Sam Kriss on AI Writing

Wonderful essay at the NY Times. Excerpts:

I remember encountering a particularly telling example [of overfitting] shortly after ChatGPT launched. One of the tasks I gave the machine was to write a screenplay for a classic episode of “The Simpsons.” I wanted to see if it could be funny; it could not. (Still can’t.) So I specified: I wanted an extremely funny episode of “The Simpsons,” with lots of jokes. It did not deliver jokes. Instead, its screenplay consisted of the Simpsons tickling one another. First Homer tickles Bart, and Bart laughs, and then Bart tickles Lisa, and Lisa laughs, and then Lisa tickles Marge.

It’s not hard to work out what probably happened here. Somewhere in its web of associations, the machine had made a connection: Jokes are what make people laugh, tickling makes people laugh, therefore talking about tickling is the equivalent of telling a joke. That was an early model; they don’t do this anymore. But the same basic structure governs essentially everything they write.

On AI word choice:

A.I.s do not have the same vocabulary as humans. There are words they use a lot more than we do. If you ask any A.I. to write a science-fiction story for you, it has an uncanny habit of naming the protagonist Elara Voss. Male characters are, more often than not, called Kael. There are now hundreds of self-published books on Amazon featuring Elara Voss or Elena Voss; before 2023, there was not a single one. What most people have noticed, though, is “delve.”

A.I.s really do like the verb “delve.” This one is mathematically measurable: Researchers have looked at which words started appearing more frequently in abstracts on PubMed, a database of papers in the biomedical sciences, ever since we turned over a good chunk of all writing to the machines.  . . .  According to the data, post-ChatGPT papers lean more on words like “underscore,” “highlight” and “showcase” than pre-ChatGPT papers do. There have been multiple studies like this, and they’ve found that A.I.s like gesturing at complexity (“intricate” and “tapestry” have surged since 2022), as well as precision and speed: “swift,” “meticulous,” “adept.” But “delve” — in particular the conjugation “delves” — is an extreme case. In 2022, the word appeared in roughly one in every 10,000 abstracts collected in PubMed. By 2024, usage had shot up by 2,700 percent.

Amazing. I suppose I am the odd human here, because I like to write. I would never use an AI to write for me, because for me choosing my own words is the point.

But it certainly is fascinating that without anybody intending it ChatBots have all ended up sharing the same tics and word choices.

Social Media, Big Tobacco, Freedom, and Happiness

The latest wave of attacks on social media have come in the form of comparing it to tobacco addiction and recommending the same remedy: making it much more expensive.

This is Utah governor Spencer Cox, speaking to Ezra Klein:

The social graphs that they use, which know us better than we know ourselves, that allow us, as you so eloquently stated and better than I could, to understand what makes us emotional and what keeps our eyeballs on there — so that when a kid is somehow, even if they don’t want to be, on TikTok at 3 a.m., just going from video to video, and they’ve given up their free will — that is unbelievably dangerous.

When tobacco companies addicted us, we figured out a way out of that. When opioid companies did that to us — we’re figuring our way out of that. And I’m just here to say that I believe these tech companies, with trillion-dollar market caps combined, are doing the same thing — the same thing that tobacco companies did, the same thing that the opioid companies did. And I think we have a moral responsibility to stand up, to hold them accountable and to take back our free will.

Klein himself has been saying that the next really popular presidential candidate may be somebody who takes on the social media companies:

And I think that, at some point, you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling. They are going to run not against Facebook or Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up. They’re going to run against all of it — that society and modernity and politics shouldn’t feel like this.

And some of that will be banning phones in schools. It’ll have a dimension that is policy. But some of it is going to be absolutely radiating a disgust for what it is doing to us and to ourselves. I mean, your book has a lot of this in it. I think that political space is weirdly open, but it seems very clear to me somebody is going to grab it.

Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss has been talking about introducing some kind of social media "sin tax."

I am of two minds about this.

I do agree that in some sense social media is a problem; at a minimum, it consumes a ton of our attention while not making us any happier or better off in any other way I can think of. But on the other hand, people now have many options for amusing or informing themselves, and social media is what millions of us choose. Isn't that what freedom means?

To me, this isn't just about social media. What if it is true that, given real freedom, many or even most people will make lousy choices? Where does that leave us?

Could it be that we are unhappy and frustrated, despite our great wealth and freedom, because we spend our time and money on things that make us worse off?

If so, what can we do about it?

Consider marriage. A good marriage always shows up in surveys as providing a huge boost for happiness, more than all the money in the world. But marriage rates are now falling, and the reason most sociologists give is that we just don't feel like we have to do it any more. Are we paying a tax in happiness for exercising that freedom? On the other hand, lots of people entered or stayed in bad marriages because they felt they had to, and that is miserable. Where is the balance point between the freedom that allows us to escape abusive relationships and the freedom that leaves us adrift and alone?

Sometimes, looking around America, I imagine a vast movement back toward restrictive social norms, backed up with strong social sanctions. But then I think about what Americans are like, and I feel certain that we would fight like hell against any really powerful neo-Victorianism. So I think we are basically stuck with our freedom, and the costs we pay for it.

Why Americans Feel Poor: Because $300,000 is Not Enough???

Some completely crazy claims flying around Twitter about how much money it takes to live decently in America.

First there was the $140,000/year is the real poverty line nonsense, launched by Mike Green based on some dubious arithmetic. Noah Smith has a bunch of similar claims at the link.

But it only gets worse from there. Goldman Sachs recently said that 40% of those making $300,000 a year are living paycheck to paycheck. Which inspired this insane tweet:

A lot of people don't understand this, but it's 100% true, depending on where you live.

From 300k to 1mm, the precarity is the same as being poor - paycheck to paycheck. It's just that the numbers are bigger.

- Most people in the aspirational class live in more expensive cities where the hobbies are costlier. Rich people in Texas enjoy backyard barbecues and drive F150s, but in Greenwich, you need a Range Rover, and in Hong Kong, you need bottle service every Friday just to fit in.

- It's expensive having rich friends. Nothing is worse than seeing a billionaire grab the wine list at dinner, because they never expect to pay the tab.

- If you're in the aspirational class, and trying to keep up, when someone invites you to their house in the Hamptons or on their plane, you have to reciprocate.

- You always think that next year's bonus will be bigger. So it'll be easier to save $10 in the future than it is to worry about $1 today.

The lesson is this: if your "aspirations" require you to spend every penny your earn, you will always feel financially stressed no matter how big your salary.

Aspirational spending isn't limited to the rich; it's why many poor people buy name brand products (detergent, soap, cereal) rather than the store brand, and why many Americans of all classes drive cars they can't afford.

If you don't want to feel stressed about money, live within your means.

After the Fall

My latest fiction project is a genre fantasy novel set in my old gaming world. I have been creating adventures in this world since 1982, so I know a huge amount about it, and I think that shows in the richness of the setting. I have plans for this to become a series, and I had already written about 50 pages of the second volume before I got distracted by my audiobook project.

For me the story is about people born in hard times who refuse to surrender to them. While many around them fall into despair or actively go over to the dark side, our characters keep fighting for the world they love. In writing this I had in mind people from history who have lived through disastrous eras: Europeans in the 1930s, watching the content drift into tyranny and world war; Romans as the borders crumbled to the barbarians; Chinese of the Tang dynasty as their empire fell apart. Or how some people feel about our own time.

The book is also an experiment in a new way of thinking about magic that I derived from ancient Chinese shamanism, hints of which made it into early Daoist texts. (I wrote about my discovery of this material here.) From the blurb I wrote so literary agents could ignore it:

The story is set in the lands around the Middle Sea a generation after the collapse of a great empire, a cataclysmic event known as the Fall. In the aftermath of an event that destroyed many cities, killed millions, and (it seems) removed magic from the world, some people have given up hope, worshipping dark gods while they wait for the end. Others, including our characters, are determined to fight on as the world collapses around them. The key characters include: Bernicia Reliquay, sister of the young Viscount of Calyxia; the Viscount, Mercutio Reliquay; various of their friends; two soldiers, one a native of Calyxia and one from a desert land far to the south; a monkish wanderer searching for lost magic; and two teenage girls who join a band of wandering performers. The city of Calyxia is also a sort of character, divided by a rubble wall between a human city and another overrun by monsters.

I will be posting this as a web serial on Royal Road. The first two chapters are up, and you can peruse them here. The book has 55 chapters in its current format, and I will be posting them in groups of two or three over the next six months.

This is still a sort of beta text, so comments are welcome.

Indians, Backwoods Rebels, and the American Revolution

Most successful revolutions are made by coalitions. It is rare for any one group to be able to overthrow the existing order, so you often have groups joined in revolution who have only one thing in common: hatred of the current regime. The Iranian revolution, for example, included not just religious fundamentalists but liberals, socialists, communists, and some regional groups who hated rule from Tehran. Which is why there is often so much strife among the winners after the revolution succeeds.

The American Revolution was no exception. Our national narrative mainly focuses on east coast elites who saw British rule as tyrannous and complained about violations of their rights. Many of these people were plugged into political debates going on in Britain, and some in Britain supported their cause.

But there was at least one more important group in the rebel coalition: backwoods farmers who were mainly mad that the British were, as they saw it, supporting Indians against them. Notice the vast area marked Lands Reserved for the Indians in the map at the top, made in 1767 for British General Thomas Gage.

I'm reading Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America (2023), which narrates North American history from a Native point of view. It's is a pretty good book despite some overblown rhetoric about how people have ignored the Indian part in hitorical events. (Almost all of Blackhawk's sources are books by white men.) Anyway Blackhawk has an excellent section on events on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1765-1766, which presaged the revolution in many ways. 

This is right after the Seven Years War and then Pontiac's War had led to great violence all along the Appalachian frontier, and many settlers were mad about that. The British plan for controlling this violence was to rebuild the situation that had existed before war broke out in 1754, which included guaranteeing Indians their rights to land and trading with them extensively. The goods that British traders carried west included guns and ammunition.

It was this last that triggered the revolt of the "Black Boys" along the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers. They began stopping the caravans of merchants heading west and searching them for weapons. Sometimes they just seized any weapons they found, but other times they seized or burned all the other goods as well. In March, 1765, six of their number were arrested by the British and imprisoned in Fort Loudoun. Several hundred Black Boys then besieged the fort, demanding the release of their comrades. The British tried to negotiate with them, but one of their leaders, James Smith, threatened to kill everyone in the fort if the men were not released. Eventually they captured some British scouts and forced the British to make an exchange of prisoners. 

These border ruffians kept up their violence right down to 1776, whereupon many of them joined the Revolution. Black Boy leader James Smith was elected to the special assembly that wrote Pennsylvania's new, post-independence constitution.

As I have written here before, I do not believe that questions around slavery had any part in the American Revolution. But questions around Indians absolutely did. Some of the most ardent revolutionaries mainly wanted to get the British out of the way so they could seize more Indian land and respond with unlimited violence to any threat of danger from Indians. Of course the Revolutionary coalition also included men like Benjiman Franklin and John Adams who wanted to respect Indian rights, but Indian-hating backwoodsmen made up a good part of the fighting force.

Antietam Iron Works

Took a fun trip to Antietam today, first the iron works and then the battlefield. This is the Antietam furnace as it was rebuilt around 1845. It was probably established in the 1760s and it was used down to about 1880. However, the history of the iron industry in this region is an almost unbelievable tangle of competing ventures, rapid failures, furnaces that kept the same name even after they had been moved several miles, and so on; the pages about this site at both wikipedia and the C&O Canal Trust are wrong. (E.g., it was never called the Frederick Forge.) We spent a lot of time trying to sort this out when we worked up there in 2008-2010, but I would say we were still only about 80 percent certain we had it right.

View into one of the furnaces. In a furnace like this, the iron ore and charcoal were stacked in alternating layers, and when the charcoal burned the molten iron drained out the bottom of the stack and pooled in molds.

View down into a furnace from above.

Sample of the ore kept at the site. The iron ore along the Potomac River here was noted by one of the first European settlers, Finnish/Swedish frontiersman and Indian trader Israel Friend, and the first mining was in a spot called Friend's Ore Bank. The ore was not of high quality but it was plentiful, and it was easy to dig it out of the river bluffs and load into onto boats for transport.

Moss on a retaining wall.

Across the road from the furnace is a complex of mill foundations. These included the mill where waterpower was used to crush the ore before it was loaded into the furnace.

The nearby Antietam Aqueduct, which carried the C&O Canal across Antietam Creek.

A place I never get tired of.