Knowledge is not value-free
This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something.
I think knowledge of many languages […]
Linguistic diversity = poverty
In yesterday’s link dump I expressed some dismissive attitudes toward the idea that loss of linguistic diversity, or more precisely the extinction of rare languages, was a major tragedy. Concretely, many languages are going extinct today as the older generation of last native speakers is dying. This is an issue that is embedded in a […]
“The Inheritors”
I just purchased a copy of William Golding’s The Inheritors. Golding is famous for writing Lord of the Flies, a work of literature of such influence that it has made the transition into our everyday lexicon. But I just listened to a podcast of an interview with a biographer of the great author, and it […]
India’s life expectancy gap
Poking around some data sets, I randomly stumbled onto to this factoid:
According to World Bank estimates India’s life expectancy is now below that of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal’s! Now, I am aware that these data and analyses are somewhat an art, and that there’s a lot of subterfuge (hello Greece!). Additionally, it does seem strange […]
To catch a predator: familial DNA
I already blogged this general issue, but the ‘grim sleeper’ murderer was caught because of a match of old samples with those of us his son. If I had to bet money I think this sort of result (California and Colorado are the two American states which have a system in place to allow for […]
Diplomacy among the aliens
One of the structural difficulties with any systematic study of civilizations is that the sample size of the category is rather small, as is clear in the few attempts to examine their progression (see Arnold Toynbee). Additionally, there’s always the problem with how one generates a typology for something as fluid as civilization. Where does antiquity […]
Sometimes it just tastes good Felix
The more you know, the better it tastes:
People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative. It’s the same thing that’s going on in the wine world….
I agree that the “story” or our […]
British multiculturalism in action
Family of ‘Harry Potter’ actress charged with threatening to kill her over boyfriend:
The strict Muslim father and brother of “Harry Potter” actress Afshan Azad have been charged with threatening to kill her because she has a boyfriend.
Azad, 22, fled the suburban English home she shared with her father, Abdul, 54, mother, Nilofar, and three brothers […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good 4th for those who live in the States.
Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast? I’m not surprised that John Hawks has serious reservations about the population history of the model in the paper I reviewed below.
Epigenetics and the Importance of a Nurturing Society. I don’t mind the normatively directed focus on […]
Porn and moral panic
Social conservative blogger Rod Dreher points me to this interview of a Left-wing sociologist on the malevolent influence of pornography on modern relationships. She has a book out, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality. Her conclusion:
To turn this around there needs to be a massive public health awareness campaign. Unless people begin to understand […]
The two cycles
I’m reading Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East. The book basically outlines the international state system in the ancient Near East which fostered diplomatic relationships between the monarchies of the period. It is noted that this state system and diplomatic culture did not make it through the chaos which marks […]
The two cycles
I’m reading Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East. The book basically outlines the international state system in the ancient Near East which fostered diplomatic relationships between the monarchies of the period. It is noted that this state system and diplomatic culture did not make it through the chaos which marks […]
Why educated women are having children
Matt Yglesias has posted some charts showing that
1) Childlessness among women is becoming more common
2) The variation of this state by education is disappearing
Here’s the chart which illustrates the second phenomenon:
I think the reason this may be occurring is a dilution of the sample bias of women who have higher education in relation to the […]
Amerindians of Brazil more numerous than you think
A few months ago I was thinking a fair amount about the Neandertals. One issue which became more stark to me due to that particular finding, that a few percent of the human genome seems to have derived from Neandertal populations, is the reality that genetic distinctiveness can persist long after cultural coherency is no […]
You have no privacy, deal with it
The Washington Post’s blogger-journalist Dave Weigel has a post up where he preemptively apologizes for stuff he posted on an “off-the-record” e-list,. Extracts are going to be published by a gossip site. Journalists are the tip of the iceberg; privacy is fast becoming a total fiction, remember that. We’re slowly drifting toward David Brin’s model […]
The future of fertility; more kids please
After my post yesterday on Bryan Caplan’s argument for having more children, I was curious as to what the public perceptions of the ideal number of children was in the General Social Survey. There’s a variable with large N’s which is already in there: CHLDIDEL. It asks:
What do you think is the ideal number of […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
I won the 3 Quarks Daily Science Prize. ‘Top quark’. Heh. “I” = Ed Yong. ‘nuf said.
Brown-eyed men perceived to be more dominant. Dienekes offers up a more banal explanation, that the disjunction between blue vs. brown-eyed males in dominance perception has to do with a correlation that’s a holdover from past population differences which […]
To be fruitful and multiply
Over at The Wall Street Journal Bryan Caplan has an op-ed, The Breeders’ Cup: Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think. Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children. Much of the op-ed focuses on behavior […]
Cuckoldry more common in past generations
We have some data that in fact older generations were more sexually promiscuous, contrary to the moral panic perpetually ascendant. As a follow up to my previous post, there is some scholarship which suggests that misattributed paternity rates have been declining. Recent decline in nonpaternity rates: a cross-temporal meta-analysis:
Nonpaternity (i.e., discrepant biological versus social fatherhood) […]
The returns on homogeneity
A few days ago on Twitter I wondered if economists had calculated the costs of the world having a diversity of languages, instead of one language. The logic is that unintelligibility naturally throws up barriers to communication, and the flow of ideas and labor. This is one reason why the European Union necessarily has less […]