Italian bravery

The Italians are very strange. They have not fought a war well or bravely in at least 400 years, but individually they often retain more of the old virtus or pride in manly excellence than any other Europeans. So Quattrocchi told his Islamist tormentors "I'll show you how an Italian dies," ensuring that he would not suffer an ignominious beheading by short blade. And in Germany in World War 2, Janet Flanner describes a similar instance:

Below the Gestapo office was a small sub-basement cell where, the Klingelputz prisoners said, the Gestapo had hung other prisoners six at a time by crowding them a row, standing them on stools, dropping nooses around their necks from an overhead bar, and then kicking the stools out from beneath their feet. One Italian became a legend by kicking his stool loose himself and shouting, as his final strangled words, "Viva l'Italia! Viva la liberta!"

How is Italy often so inspiring at the level of individual men and, once for a century or so, at the level of cities, but so pathetic as a nation? They are getting on to 140 years of governing themselves, more or less, but only recently have had any success, in the implausible form of Berlusconi. It would take most Western nations 140 years to decline to the point where Berlusconi would be welcomed for his good governance.

Not that I am inciting anti-Italian bigotry; I am a quarter Italian, have met my Italian relatives, love Italy, and admire ancient Rome without wanting Italy to be Roman. Even so, it is a remarkably incompetent nation-state.

These Terrible Replays of War

World War 2 video games have always bothered me. Not ludicrous games like Castle Wolfenstein 3D or any of the other Nazis-as-demons fantasies, but highly detailed games like Call of Duty and even Squad Leader felt like an exploitation of appalling pain and horrifying bravery. Then again I thought perhaps I should think of them as celebrations of that bravery, though it still seemed a frivolous way to do it. Reporting World War 2: Part Two American Journalism 1944-1946 has a short article by James Agee of The Nation, titled "These Terrible Records of War," in which he praises two newsreels about Iwo Jima, but goes on to say something that felt just like what I had incoherently tried to work out:

Very uneasily, I am beginning to believe that, for all that may be said in favor of our seeing these terrible records of war, we have no business seeing this sort of experience except through our presence and participation.... Since I am reviewing and in ways recommending that others see one of the best and most terrible of war films [the Paramount Iwo Jima newsreel], I cannot avoid mentioning my perplexity.... If at an incurable distance from participation, hopelessly incapable of reactions adequate to the event, we watch men killing each other, we may be quite as profoundly degrading ourselves and, in the process, betraying and separating ourselves the farther from those we are trying to identify ourselves with; none the less because we tell ourselves sincerely that we sit in comfort and watch carnage in order to nurture our patriotism, our conscience, our understanding, and our sympathies.

The newsreel after all would then be followed by some comedy or melodrama. And if that is a problem, surely playing out the war's worst battles hundreds of times is far more of a problem.

Since he recommended it, I looked it up. The corny newsreel voice and music add a very unfortunate silliness to it, though it is still interesting to see that with its tank-slit view, aerial views, frequent lack of music, and tanker intercom recordings it anticipates the modern style of war reporting. At other times the old-timey style increased the sense of distance so it was hard to remember these men really were killing and dying, but the sight of dead soldiers did prompt the familiar helpless confusion of conscience. I wonder how often civilians' hatred of the enemy is an attempt to feel something, anything simple and complete in such confusion.

Story in the headline

Some headlines give away the entire story just by existing. For instance, Perfectionist Who Felt Ugly Hanged Herself. For a newspaper to put such a headline on a story about a perfectionist who really was ugly would violate one of the laws of news, which is not to offend against sentimentality. Since the suicide was a woman, you also know she will be young and pretty, because it another law of news is that, apart from a rare murderess, only young, pretty women are news; the rest are statistics.

So never mind that by far the more common cases, in order, are a sad, ugly middle-aged man whose perfectionism, depression, and loneliness culminate in suicide, the same in a young man, and a distant third, the same in a young woman. Well, ugly is too much--more accurately average-to-homely, as most of us are, after all. None of those stories is news: no one wants to be reminded of so much bleak sadness or see the pictures. This young woman's story yields the warmly sentimental form of sadness now denominated "tragedy" and vocalized tsk-tsk and "Oh poor girl!" There is also the primal satisfaction of looking at a pretty young woman, enjoyed by both sexes and all ages.

This is also why 99% of nationally reported kidnappings of adults are of good looking young women. I have seen people put it down to racism, since the skew is similarly white, but if it is racism it is a very oblique kind resulting from the ludicrous value present day America puts on blonde hair. (Razib has demonstrated that in the early to mid 20th century, when America was much more racist, brunettes were favored, so blonde favoritism is not simply related to racism.)

Reporters are a pretty disgusting crew. Kind of a pity they are now our moral, political, and cultural arbiters.

Jewish Israeli Neo-Nazis?

What very strange twists human nature takes! It is frustrating that the article does not have more details; something exceptionally odd must have been going on with those stupidly vicious young men.

OMG OED

Nitheful: Envious, malicious, wicked; as a noun, such a person. From nithe, malice, an ancient Germanic word that can also be a verb meaning to hate or be envious of someone. Also nithe-grim: grim, cruel, savage; and nithe-iwork: an evil deed. All of these words are severely obsolete (pre-1400) but it is so sad. Some nitheful person nithing these words their power did this nithe-iwork.

What could be a better comment on the Book of Revelation than this quotation from 1350?

By þe mouþe as a lyoun bitokneþ þe manaces of þe proude Men & of þe niþeful

þ is the thorn (the OED uses a more handsome form that looks like the wynn, but it does not render well in blogspot) and ð is the eth, whose name I always have to look up. Both are "th" so it transliterates, "By the mouth as a lion betokens the menaces of proud and nitheful men." Presumably it is a reference to the description of the beast with seven heads in Rev. 13:2, "And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority."

Another marvelous phrase, though I am not sure how it translates:

þar beð naddren and snaken...þe tereð and freteð þo euele swiken, þe niðfule and þe prude.
There are adders and snakes...he tears and devours when evil men, the nitheful and the proud, deceive.

swike is to deceive, betray, ensnare. The -e ending makes the adjectives plural and the -en ending on swike makes it plural subjunctive. The -eð verb ending is the familiar "-eth" of ye olde English. The translations of þe and þo are probably wrong, because there are several forms that can look like those and some can work together for a different meaning. Maybe some scholar of Old English searching for naddren and snaken will comment someday.

Fun with words: the OED sayeth,

The OE. demonstrative and definite article was thus inflected:

SING.	MASC.	FEM.	NEUT.	PLURAL.
Nom.	se, laterþe	sío, séo, later þío, þíu	þæt	þá
Acc.	þone, þæne	þá	þæt	þá
Dat.	þm,þám	þre	þm,þám	þm,þám
Gen.	þæs	þre	þæs	þára (þra)
Instr.	þý, þon		þý, þon

Imagine, you used to have to buy books to find out this sort of thing. I think I even have a Celtic grammar somewhere for just such a use. How clumsy compared to google.

Best sentence ever

"With parturiencie for greater births, if a malevolent time disobstetricate not their enixibility." From Sir Thomas Urquhart's ; or, the discovery of a most exquisite jewel in 1652. The OED is so much fun. "Disobstetricate" and "enixibility" are nonce-words; enixability is made up from the Latin word for giving birth.

Good health by law

Activists amuck.

600 lb of crazy

Story. Picture.

Politicians

Dalrymple on politicians.

Personality variation

Some evolutionary modeling of the development of personality variation. It is along only one axis, trust, but the researchers mention previous experiments with variance in aggression.

This is your brain on activism

CNN has an excellent example of activism-damaged thinking. The summary is that some labcoated killjoy has "discovered" that higher prices decrease demand. He shows that, unsurprisingly, decreased demand for alcohol means less drinking and less drinking means fewer people drink themselves to death (crashes not included). I suppose it is nice to see basic supply and demand demonstrated, but of course the lablord wants the interpretation to be that taxes should be raised through the roof to decrease drinking deaths. Characteristic errors of someone whose brain is warped by long years of activism:

• Ignoring diminishing returns. The tax increases were quite large: 37% in the first case and 90% in the second, but returns diminish rapidly, from -29% to -11% after the second increase. Since the second tax increase was more than twice the first one, but had less than half the effect, sin taxes look very inefficient for controlling behavior.
• Making a mountain out of a mole hill. The effect was small in absolute terms, -23 deaths/year after the first increase, then -21 after the second. The first change was, at the time, about 0.006% of the population. The second was about 0.003%. These are paltry numbers to generate national news with, let alone set policy.
  
• Treating open systems as closed. Even Alaska is easy enough to leave for another state. Someone who is drinking to the point of cirrhosis has dedicated his life to it. What fraction of that 20-40 / year had simply moved?
• Making broad policy recommendations from a narrow study. What happened to deaths due to other drugs? Alcohol is dangerous compared to pot, but it is baby formula compared to meth. Meth and several other dangerous drugs are very cheap, and if, as is likely, a large proportion of the people who die of drinking are already marginal or actually on the street, the illegality and nastiness of meth would little discourage them from shifting from more-expensive 40s to meth, as a supplement or replacement.
  
• Treating human behavior as static. By dropping car accidents and other violent deaths, the study potentially hides offsetting increases in those. For instance, when activists got Washington to increase the drinking age to 21 but Idaho had not yet changed, there was a long dangerous period when the seven miles of highway between WSU and U Idaho had a horrific rate of accidents. Of course what had happened was that WSU students had acquired the new habit of getting drunk in Idaho, and then driving back to WSU. In this case, if higher taxes shift the proportion of drinking that is done in bars, the accident rate could easily change.
• Not thinking their argument through to its logical conclusion. If preventing 23 deaths / year justifies higher taxes, why not just ration alcohol directly? If you have to present little ration coupons torn from your We-Luv-U HHS ration book whenever you want a drink, you will certainly have a hard time drinking too much. I am giving the doctoroid the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he would agree that disallowing even moderate drinking would be wrong.
• Not applying similar cost-benefit and risk analysis elsewhere. How many people die in skiing accidents in Alaska each year? Snowboarding is even more dangerous; how about taxes to encourage everyone to snowboard hardly ever, ski little, and mostly go sledding on low hills. How many people on Alaskan cruises eat their final lobster tail and expire of some cardiovascular disaster? If we only taxed people in proportion to the extra pounds they carried, we could save so very many lives. Many activisits like this Dr. Little Tin God do think such taxes should be applied, at least to ugly things like fat (I have not seen one attack dangerous sports yet), but if they were to say up front all of the things they wish to tax, ban, ration, and control, they would get no hearing. Parceling out their toxic worldview one narrow study at a time helps them hide their ambition.
• Treating their fellow men as children. Honestly, even if taxing drink by five cents a bottle would save 500 people a year, it would give me no reason to support the tax. All men die in time, but it is the exceptional privilege of Americans and a few other peoples in recent times to live in a complex and civilized society and yet also live as free men. A degree in epidemiology, as this doctor has, grants no authority to act as father to other men.
• Implicitly treating a minor good as the highest good. In this case the minor good is longevity. The activist must treat it implicitly as the highest good because a system of ethics that prizes longevity above all other goods is manifestly disgusting, and contrary to all other forms of morality, whether ancient-heroic, existentialist, Judaeo-Christian, or any other. To live only to keep living at any cost is to be enslaved by the fear of a death that is coming for you no matter how you live.
  

When did the early deaths of those who choose poorly in life become satisfactory justification for binding free men by degrees? You should not have to be a libertarian--I am not one--to be sickened by the abandonment of freedom whenever a clipboard is waved at it.

Descending to personalities

I've never really understood why descending to personalities meant beginning to hurl insults. Personality testing is certainly rich in potential insults; it's hard to make someone who scores very low on agreeableness and conscientiousness sound appealing. I suppose he might make an excellent highwayman.

Here is a little more detail, from a professor of psychology at UO, on the general acceptance of the Big 5 model:

McCrae and Costa’s (1985a,b,c; 1987) findings, like the cross-instrument convergence described above, show that the factor-analytic results from the lexical tradition converge surprisingly well with those from the questionnaire tradition. This convergence has led to a dramatic change in the acceptance of the five factors in the field. With regard to their empirical status, the findings accumulated since the mid-1980s show that the five factors replicate across different types of subjects, raters, and data sources, in both dictionary based and questionnaire-based studies. Indeed, even more skeptical reviewers were led to conclude that “Agreement among these descriptive studies with respect to what are the appropriate dimensions is impressive” (Revelle, 1987, p. 437; see also Briggs, 1989; McAdams, 1992; Pervin, 1994). The finding that it doesn’t matter whether Conscientiousness is measured with trait adjectives, short phrases, or questionnaire items suggests that the Big Five dimensions have the same conceptual status as other personality constructs. For example, Loehlin et al. (1998) found that all five factors show substantial and about equal heritabilities, regardless of whether they are measured with questionnaires or with adjective scales derived from the lexical approach.

Of course, the fact that Freudianism is still mucking up psychology (the quoted author even refers positively to Freud's concept of love) suggests that psychological consensus is not all that one might want.

Hoping, for the moment, that psychology isn't lost in fantasy again, there is that interesting remark about heritability. According to wikipedia, twin studies have shown these per-trait heritabilities:

Openness: 57%
Extraversion: 54%
Conscientiousness: 49%
Neuroticism: 48%
Agreeableness: 42%

Those are about as heritable as IQ. Obviously these all leave a great deal of room for environmental effects. Parents, at least traditional parents who care enough about their children to exercise authority, spend a lot of effort on controlling the environmental factors. I haven't known many people who sent their children to private schools, so this is only anecdotal, but controlling their children's environment had a substantial part in the decision. If, say, 57% of openness is heritable, and the remainder is split among school environment, neighborhood interactions, church, randomly acquired friends, and TV, then little of a child's personality conditioning can even be influenced strongly, let alone controlled, by parenting as such. By comparison, it's easy to see that marrying well vastly outweighs striving for a perfect environment. It also provides a good measure for determining what it means to marry well: good personality traits are irreplaceable and durable assets to give children, while good looks fade and money has a habit of getting lost and found across generations.

It's also interesting to think what might happen if the five factors are really capable of being inherited separately. (With S for stability instead of N:) A woman with a high A, high E, low C, low S, middle O married to a man with a middle A, low E, middle C, high S, and high O could produce, ab ovo, a middle A, low E, low C, low S, high O child who might be impulsively inquisitive and likeable past some reserve, but whose emotional stability was very likely to be disturbed in any social interaction, few of which would be sought out. Such a child might seem like an alien to both parents, with the mother baffled by seeming social retardation and the father astonished that a fellow bookworm could be so explosive and impulsive; the resulting adult might still be something as valuable as a high-energy academic like a field biologist. Coming up all trumps could be just as unsettling, as I think might have happened in my family, if it's the case that a middle A, low E, high C, high S, high O and a high A, middle E, middle C, low S, middle O yielded my youngest brother who is high A, middle-high E, high C, high S, high O, so that he gives the impression of having recently arrived from a more than usually holy and scholastic monastery.

Of course all of that takes a naive view of heritability (in reality these traits, if they have a genetic component, are spread across many genes with varying influence) and for the sake of argument disregards environment. Still it's interesting to think about the broad outlines of a personality being assembled from a mixture of parental elements, the way it's customary to talk about a child having his father's nose and his mother's eyes.

Personality

The idea of a personality test has so many attractions. The results contain the vagueness and flattery of a horoscope without the obvious pseudoscience of astrology. You get to find out that you are a completely excellent kind of person and that other people are freaks. The Myers-Briggs test is a classic of that kind of personality test.

Even so, it would be very interesting if there were statistically significant personality combinations. It certainly conforms to everyday experience that there would be a limited range of broad personality groups. That sort of impression is frequently wrong, so it's important that large-scale personality characteristics, like a tendency to religiosity, are about as heritable as IQ, with r=.5 if I remember correctly. If personality is heritable and, so to speak, a mental phenotype, then it's not a priori ridiculous to look for phenotypic groupings analogous to the phenotypic groupings of outward appearance.

According to John Derbyshire (and wikipedia) psychological consensus is that the Big 5 or some similar model gets close to capturing personality variation and grouping parsimoniously. It makes no assertions in itself about whether the five axes correspond to five, or any other number, of physical brain arrangements, though that would be the most interesting discovery of all. Whether there is a physical correspondence or not, eHarmony tries to cash in on the model by matching personality types. I don't remember whether they mention the basis for their testing at any point, but the model is clearly Big 5.

Anyway, Derbyshire mentioned the Big 5 again today so I took the most official looking version of the test, which has the advantage of being part of a scientific survey. Reading the results gives a somewhat unreal sensation, like hearing myself on the phone. On the other hand, it is a short test, and as a friend who took it found, coming at a small subset of the questions from an unexpected angle can produce surprising results. I would like to see how the reliability of this short version in subsequent re-testing compares to the full version.

Update: so I took it again, just to see. I didn't try to do it at all differently, but got quite a bit of variation. Results: E 7 vs 10; A 90 vs 76; C 93 vs 66 (!); ES 31 vs 38; O 99 vs 99. I think those percentiles change as more people take the test, but that's what they were when I got the results. That change in conscientiousness is startling. When my friend re-took the test, his C score changed even more sharply, from 2 to 83. He made a good point, doubting whether the questions adequately capture the traits described by C, since there are no questions about civic or religious conscientiousness and questions about work predominate. On his second test he admittedly was trying a different way of handling close calls, but the original 2 does not describe him at all. He did find that his E, ES, and O scores were pretty stable, as mine were. Even so, the instability of the results is disappointing. Oh well, back to oneiromancy.