A four-and-a-half-year-old article that puts them into perspective.
It’s always sadly amusing when you see a headline about “hottest|dryest|whateverist X in recorded history” when we haven’t been keeping records very long, and people rely on their own living memory to judge current events, when a few decades is meaningless in the geological context of climate.
Thoughts from Diana Fleischman on the upcoming replacement of (some) women by artificial ones who won’t abuse men:
Men high in conscientiousness, who are sensitive to social disapproval but who nonetheless have difficulty reading subtle social cues, could make good husbands for women. These men are unlikely to want to take the risk of approaching women. As substitutes like sex robots and virtual companions become better and cheaper, they will monopolize the attention of such men.
Think of an introverted engineer with Asperger’s syndrome who wasn’t sure how to broach a conversation with a woman back in 2015 and definitely isn’t sure how to do that in today’s climate. In 10 years he could have a beautiful robot companion (indeed, he could have one that could emulate the experience of having sex with dozens of different women) that has a lower barrier to entry than the mating market and that keeps him satisfied enough to remain a happy bachelor. Some woman misses out on a conscientious guy with a good income who might not know exactly how to respond when she says “nothing’s wrong,” but will definitely keep the cars tuned up to get the kids to their mathematics championships. The world might miss out on his sons and daughters and their analytical approaches to some of the world’s problems.
The kinds of men described above, who have difficulty reading social signals but who are nonetheless strongly sexually motivated, have a characteristic that means they’ll be less put off by sex robots than the average person: resistance to perceiving the uncanny valley. “The uncanny valley” is the way that representations that fall just short of looking like humans often look “creepy.” Anthropomorphized robots are more relatable and trustworthy than machine-like robots. It’s also difficult to imagine that many people would want to have sex with a conglomeration of gears and wheels.
My view is that the uncanny valley is something analogous to Capgras delusion, a psychological disorder that causes sufferers to believe that someone they know has been taken over by an imposter, often inhuman. According to VS Ramachandran, there are two aspects to recognizing faces: the identification of the external familiar representation and the “internal” validation – the warm emotion that goes along with it. In the uncanny valley, you recognize a robot as humanlike, but it’s missing the facial movement or some other characteristic that gives you a warm feeling of recognition. Many men won’t experience the uncanny valley, especially with regards to sex robots. These men are going to be the early adopters. Men are worse at identifying faces than women and are far more likely to have prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.
Sex is weird. Sex is gross and awkward. Natural selection addressed this issue by causing arousal to attenuate the human disgust response. It’s worth noting that men have a much lower baseline sexual disgust than women, and that sexual excitement further reduces disgust sensitivity in men. In a classic paper by Dan Ariely, aroused men had much more positive attitudes about all kinds of unusual sexual acts. Sexually aroused men were more likely to say that it would be fun to watch a woman urinating or that they could imagine getting sexually excited by contact with an animal). 3-D pornography of video game or cartoon characters that might be creepy in a nonsexual context are popular genres. The most direct evidence that men won’t be put off by uncanny vulvas is from a paper that laments the “unabashed sexualization of female-gendered robots” in comments on YouTube videos of robots. Bawdy comments on gynoids – “you’ll have to replace it monthly due to semen corrosion,” for example – were more frequent than comments expressing unease.
Easy to understand why gender feminists hate this.
[Update a few minutes later]
And here’s an interesting question:
Men have much greater variance of reproductive success than women. Sometimes they get cues that they have nothing to lose you have everything to gain from taking risks through violence, sexual or otherwise. This is one reason that pornography decreases the rate of sexual assault. When men get cues that women are interested in them, even if those women are mere representations, their evolved psychology leads them to less risky ways of attempting to achieve reproductive success. How many teenaged boys would be able to build up the resentment to commit mass shootings or suicide if they had a beautiful sex robot at home?
Far fewer, I’m guessing. But of course the gender feminists will claim it’s their fault they’re not getting laid and they have no one to blame but themselves.
…”in a hostile environment.” Some thoughts from Judith Curry:
Ralph Keeling behaved with honesty and dignity by publicly admitting these errors and thanking Nic Lewis.
Such behavior shouldn’t be news, however; it is how all scientists should behave, always.
Imagine how the course of climate science and the public debate on climate change would be different if Michael Mann would have behaved in a similar way in response to McIntyre and McKitrick’s identification of problems with the hockey stick analysis.
I don’t think he’s capable of it.
By quickly admitting mistakes and giving credit where due, Ralph Keeling has done something unusual and laudatory in the field of climate science. If all climate scientists behaved this way, there would be no ‘hostile environment.’
I find it to be a sad state of affairs when a scientist admitting mistakes gets more kudos than the scientist actually finding the mistakes. But given the state of climate science, I guess finding mistakes seems to be a more common story than a publishing scientist actually admitting to mistakes.
Sadly, yes.
An interesting story on a provocative, but necessary web site.
Camille Paglia says it’s time for a new map. As always, a fascinating interview with La Camille.
A long but interesting dive into why young people aren’t getting it on. Among other things, it confirms my long-standing suspicion that ubiquitous porn is making for a lot of terrible and painful sex for women, because too many men think that what is depicted is normal, or expected. And the sad thing is that many women apparently just accept that as the way it is. Anyway, modern dating sounds awful, in part thanks to #MeToo, particularly on campus.
No, the phrase is not racist, but objecting to it is. Great trolling of the SJWs.
Related: The coming implosion after the victory of “diversity.”
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a hundred years since the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 that saw an end to the Great War. Sadly, too few are taught the impact that it had on our history because, due to the abysmal state of both lower and higher education, few are taught any meaningful history, other than how America invented slavery and what a terrible country it is. But it set the stage for the continued bloodshed and genocide in the twentieth century, and its affect on nations and borders continues to reverberate, particularly in the Middle East.
[Late-afternoon update]
The guns of November:
In sum, the war to end all war itself has not yet ended, and perhaps never will. That it was the wrong war to fight, and fought at the wrong time, is in retrospect clear. A strong Europe consisting of loosely allied but independent nation-states — the original, professed ideal of the European Union, but since drastically perverted — would have been vastly preferable to the destruction and chaos that followed. Instead, it fell to America to tilt the balance of power in 1918, then refight the war in 1941, and finally administer the nearest thing to a global peace the Western world had seen since the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
How long that peace will last is anybody’s guess. For the sad truth of human history is that peace is the aberration and war the natural state of mankind.
Sadly, yes. The biggest flaw of the leftist philosophy is its denial of human nature and the crooked timber from which humanity is hewn. Like liberty, peace requires eternal vigilance. And the notion that we will be able to prevent war off the planet is also hopelessly naive.
[Monday-morning update]
How WW I created big government in America:
…the most profound transformation wrought in America by the Great War was in the nature of government itself. Woodrow Wilson came to the presidency in 1913 as the prince of the Progressives, and he at once began to assemble the scaffolding of a new administrative state through the Federal Reserve Act. His efforts were aided by constitutional amendments to secure the levy of a national income tax, to institute the popular election of U.S. senators, and to impose a national prohibition on alcohol. Entrance into the Great War widened the scope of administrative control, justifying the creation of a Fuel Administration, a Food Administration, a War Labor Policies Board, a War Industries Board, and a Shipping Board, which created an Emergency Fleet Corporation to build dry docks and piers, commandeer privately owned vessels, and even seize enemy ships. That control reached even into the schools: In Philadelphia, the School Mobilization Committee organized 1,300 public and parochial schoolboys as farm workers. The war, complained Randolph Bourne, licensed the Progressive state to become “what in peacetime it has vainly struggled to become — the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s businesses and attitudes and opinions.”
The armistice and the debacle of the League of Nations stemmed the onrush of Wilsonian Progressivism but only until a new crisis loomed in the Great Depression, when the Wilsonian banner was taken up again by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR had served in Wilson’s cabinet during the Great War, and his response to the crisis of the Depression was to treat “the task as we would treat the emergency of war.” The administrative state has marched to that beat ever since.
Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst presidents we had — a racist tyrant who hated the Constitution. And emblematic of his political historically terrible party, which continues to be terrible.
[Update a while later]
Lileks reviews an old movie:
The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: he’s Mussolini.
Unsurprising, given that Mussolini was held in quite high regard by the American Left (including Roosevelt) in the thirties.
[Late-morning update on the official, but not actual Veterans’ Day]
Occasional commenter, and editor and designer of my book Bill Simon reminds me that the photo of the poppies is one that he took over a decade ago. Which means that it’s not the red poppies in Europe described by the poem, but California golden poppies.
Can African-Americans with no ties to Jamaica dress up as Bob Marley?
In case you’re tempted to not click, it’s Lileks.
[Update a few minutes later]
A couple weeks ago in DC, I met a Danish space lawyer whose middle name is Marley. Based on her appearance, though, I’m pretty sure she’s not related.
It’s the political correctness, stupid.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Math professors at UCLA must pay obeisance to political correctness to get tenure.