Closest I can offer is Homer and Sylla’s History of Interest Rates, but it only touches on them briefly at the end of 800 pages on lending across the rest of human history, but that does seem to address your later point. Further recommendations in good finance history are Jim Grant’s biography of Walter Bagehot and Lords of Finance (ignore the awful title, the book is a brilliant tour of the mechanics of pre-Breton Woods currencies and the tangled relationship with gold).
"the stock is valued by the market, and an EFT with higher fees would just be valued less to compensate"
There are a limited number for every theme or niche, so there probably isn't much competition between ETFs in the same field to either lower fees, or have a valuation that fairly accounts for them. I.e. there's only a few 2 or 3x levered oil ETFs, there's only like two Russell 3000 ETFs, etc. So it may not necessarily be true that an ETF with higher fees would be valued less- you may not have many alternatives in that niche
Yes. In order to compensate for a higher fee, an ETF or index fund would need to have a higher change in value to break even compared to one with a low fee.
There just aren't that many ETFs. Many sector ETFs and other specialty products are the easiest realistic way to gain exposure to a specific thing, so they charge for the privilege. Other broader etfs do have different expense ratios but this is generally just arbitrary. See
I think what you're missing is that ETFs are not priced by market action like other stocks. An ETF can be said to have a 'correct' price that you can compute by looking at changes in its underlying components, and the ETF provider has mechanisms to ensure that that price is the price you buy or sell it at.
Once you buy it, the fees do matter, because they will determine exactly how the underlying stocks contribute to the growth of the ETF. If an ETF had zero fees, and all of its constituent stocks doubled, you would more or less expect the ETF to exactly double as well. If it has a fee, then you would expect that to detract from the growth accordingly. But that has no relevance to the price you pay at purchase.
Consider two ETFs tracking the same index, but with different fees, and the difference in fees priced into the market price in the manner you propose. At this point, an arbitrageur can buy the higher-fee / lower-priced ETF in creation-unit quantities to exchange the ETF for the underlying securities. This mechanism puts a practical limit on to what extent two substantially identical ETFs in the same market can differ in fees (and a practical limit on the fees chargeable by an ETF that holds highly liquid securities).
What you're missing is that they don't track the index, they track "index minus fees". If an ETF charges (say) 1%, then over 10 years, the basket of the ETF will go from 1 basket of the index to 0.9 baskets of the index as the ETF provider takes money out, and the arbitrage is around the value of the basket.
What you're missing is there are people ("Authorised Participants") who can take a block of ETF shares and redeem them for the underlying assets, and vice versa. They can make money doing this whenever the price drifts away from the underlying assets, and doing it moves the price back, so an ETF will always trade at value of its assets. The ETF management fee then reduces the *size* of the fund (because some people decide not to use it if the fee is too high) rather then the *price* of individual shares.
(This mechanism is also more tax efficient then traditional mutual funds, at least in the US)
"Closed-end" funds that don't have this mechanism indeed work as you suggest: the share price reflects a combination of the assets, the fees, and evaluations of the fund manager's stock picking ability (these fund are usually actively managed).
Another thing you might have been missing (which is to say, another small tweak to how ETFs work that would probably make your intuition right) is that when you're long an ETF you pay a fee to it's manager, but when you're short an ETF you don't get paid that fee. Therefore there is not a profitable arbitrage in which you buy VOO and sell SPY, collecting more fees than you pay ~risk-free, ultimately driving SPY out of business. Instead, the movement of capital from SPY to VOO relies on the collective action of investors, which is more gradual than the action of professional arbitrageurs.
Your basic intuition, "shouldn't that just be priced in?", is right in very many cases and you were right to look for some specific quirk that prevents it from holding in this case.
I don't know, but I recommend "The Lions of Al-Rassan" by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's a novel set in Al-Rassan, a thinly veiled fantasy equivalent of al-Andalus. Kay has written a whole series of novels featuring lots of violence, sex, and political intrigue, set in a fantasy equivalent of the Mediterranean after the fall of Rome (Sarantium = Byzantium, Rhodias = Rome, etc.).
Fun little side-note, but Guy Gavriel Kay was the author who helped Christopher Tolkien finish the "Silmarillion" after JRR Tolkien passed away (including when they basically had to write a whole chapter, "Ruin of Doriath", because Tolkien had left them little to work with).
I've been reading a ton of post-Roman to pre-modern history for my work on my fantasy strategy game. Mughals, Rome, Persia, and a bunch of other stuff including the Caliphates. Mostly been looking Rashidun so far but I looked into the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates also. Slowing marching forward in time. Let me dig up my notes for the top tier "normie friendly" recommendations people gave me. Probably have something tomorrow.
Reinhart Dozy's Histoire des Musalman’s d’Espagne, translated obviously, is one of the foundational works in the genre although I'm sure there has been some change since 1863.
This may not be what you're looking for, but Washington Irving wrote an excellent history of the END of the caliphate in Spain, Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada.
(His book of romantic legends about Cordoba is even better: Tales of the Alhambra. And his surprisingly sympathetic account of early Muslim history, Mahomet and His Successors, is best of all, but, of course, furthest away from the topic you asked about.)
This is an excerpt from a sermon of the Irish mathematician and theologian George Salmon. It appears to have been delivered in 1849. The full text is available on Google Books under the title, “The Propriety of Prayer for Temporal Blessings: A Sermon.” The excerpt appears at page 37 of the Google Books edition.
“I may appeal to many controversies of the present day which it would seem much more easy to bring to the test of experience, and yet on which we may find intelligent men forming very opposite opinions. For example,—whether the distresses of this country have arisen in spite of, or in consequence of, free trade; whether homeopathic pilules or wet sheets be sovereign remedies; whether there be a connexion between the characters of men and the shape of their heads; whether the brain adopts the principle of the division of labor, and whether it be possible to assign the places of the several bits of brain which have undertaken the discharge of each of the mental functions; whether men can see with their eyes only, or sometimes also with the pits of their stomachs; whether it is possible for a clairvoyant at Bolton to discern the doings of Sir John Franklin at the North Pole.”
I read along this enumeration of examples and I recognize them as a variety of now-quaint empirical controversies of the period. And then I hit the part about a controversy over whether people sometimes see with their stomachs. What on Earth is this referring to? How could anyone ever have been even tempted to believe that he was seeing with his stomach? I haven’t been able to find the reference to this nineteenth century controversy on Google. Does anyone have any idea what it was?
I mean, that would make the phrase coherent, but it would hardly seem to fit with the other elements of the list, which involved more concrete phenomena. He’s using the list as examples of putative natural phenomena that it’s hard to develop dispositive tests for, such that informed people come to opposite conclusions.
To me, the remark reads as a deliberately jokey/insulting way of getting at the idea of going with your gut--like, he's deliberately trying to frame "knowing something by gut instinct" in a way that makes it sound ridiculous, for comedic value. I'll grant you it doesn't fit super well with the other examples, but it's natural to be a little less careful about whether what you're saying is a perfect example of the serious point you were making if, at that precise moment, you're trying to be funny.
Eventually the idea of the navel as a third eye, serving as a visual transducer to the stomach as the eyes do to that portion of the brain responsible for sight, fell out of fashion, and it became popular to debunk the entire concept by saying "Your eyes were bigger than your stomach".
Sorry, couldn't resist.
But seriously, was "seeing with the stomach" a euphemism for going with one's gut instincts instead of that which we literally saw? If so, the debate over left-brain/right-brain perception continues, and is valid.
But if the stomach was truly considered by some to "see" (in a purely visual sense), it does seem silly now. ("OK, it's my turn to hide; close your stomach and count to 10!") What things do we presently debate that will seem silly to people 150 - 200 years in the future?
I'm hoping that AI Superintelligence will be one of those things. Perhaps, 200 years in the future, we will have some scientific understanding of the physical properties and limits of intelligence and that will show that the concerns over superintelligence risk were invalid.
Or maybe we will all have been turned into paperclips. It could go either way.
I mean, there's an open question right now about just how much of the atmosphere will be turned into CO2 by the runaway processes of capitalism. Obviously not as dramatic as the paperclips, but a result of the same process of partially aligned value maximizers with greater power than any individual human. (In this case, we do obviously benefit from many of the paperclips and other things that are produced, though we're not totally happy about the byproduct.)
It's become clear in recent years that the gut microbiota massively influences just about everything that humans do, including understanding. If he meant "see" in that sense, then he was very far ahead of his time.
THANK YOU for finding this. I really appreciate it. I’m not Irish and have certainly heard the phrase used now and then. It may be falling into archaism and I would guess that infeequncy of use is more due to time rather than place. But I can’t rule out that it was particularly common in Irish English at the time.
Congratulations on tracking that down, it really does shed light on the reference!
Talking about animal magnetism and Mesmerism and directing the magnetic influence by gestures and touch, there is the case of "Stroker" Greatrakes, who did faith healing by touch through what was not yet at the time called 'animal magnetism':
"Valentine Greatrakes (14 February 1628 – 28 November 1682), also known as "Greatorex" or "The Stroker", was an Irish faith healer who toured England in 1666, claiming to cure people by the laying on of hands."
For those who don't want to find it, the main reference is accounts of people seeing without their eyes. One passage:
"We have seen her (a young lady of Grenoble, in a state of somnabulism) select from a packet of more than thirty letters, that one amonst them which had been directed to her. She read on the dial-plate and through the glass, the hour indicated by a watch; we have seen her write several letter; correct, on reading them over, the mistakes she had made; and recopy one of the letter word for word. During all these operations, a screen of thick pasteboard entirely intercepted every visual ray which could possibly have reached her eyes. The same phenomena took place at the soles of her feet, and at the pit of the stomach."
In another case they talk about a women who has seizures and reported the following:
"She referred to her stomach all the sensations of sight, heraing, and smell, which were then no longer produced by the usual organs"
Reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" about a man who reads in a book about how you can learn to see using your skin instead of just your eyes by using yogic practices. He practices the techniques and advances far enough that he can see through thin barriers (because yogic powers, that's why). He uses this power to cheat at poker by seeing through the cards to the ink on the other side. Once he gets bored at this he decides to make it his life purpose to cheat casinos out of their money with his trick and donate all his winnings to charity. Weird (but fun) story: the fact that Dahl had any of this in mind would indicate that at some point there was the pop culture idea that you could see using other organs besides the eyes, if you had enough mystic woo.
I don’t fully understand “seeing” with the stomach. On the other hand we do feel with it - butterflies in the stomach, knot in the stomach. We don’t feel with our mind. Lots and people who believe we can upload our brain (and thus personality) forget that.
You don't understand "seeing with the stomach" because it is fake. People see with eyes, but their were claims in the first half of the 19th century that through animal magnetism people were able to read letters and such through their stomachs.
It's possible that the phenomenon he is referring to is dermo-optical perception (I vaguely remembered the concept but had to Google to find out the exact term):
That is, that certain people have a psychic ability to 'see' with organs other than the eyes (usually the fingers/hands by placing them on objects and 'reading' their history):
"Dermo-optical perception (DOP) — also known as dermal vision, dermo-optics, eyeless sight, eyeless vision, skin vision, skin reading, finger vision, paroptic vision, para-optic perception, cutaneous perception, digital sight, and bio-introscopy — is a term that is used in parapsychological literature to denote the alleged capability to perceive colors, differences in brightness, and/or formed images through the skin (without using the eyes, as distinct from blindsight), especially upon touching with the fingertips.
Typically, people who claim to have dermo-optical perception claim to be able to see using the skin of their fingers or hands. People who claim to have DOP often demonstrate it by reading while blindfolded. The effect has not been demonstrated scientifically."
It might be that Salmon is poking fun at the idea by using 'the pit of the stomach' rather than 'the hands'. Or there might be some confusion with psychometry as well, the claimed ability to 'read' the history of an object by touch:
There's a phenomenon called Riddoch's Syndrome where people who have no detectable activity in their retina or optic nerves, being able to distinguish the shapes of large objects without touching them and making judgement as to colors of the objects — but either they or the objects had to be moving.
Of course there's that experiment where a fellow implanted a dense set of electrodes under the derma his back. He connected them to a device with Internet access to a site that was continuously displaying weather maps. And he came to "see" the developing weather patterns in his mind.
From a book entitled: _Dream Land and Ghost Land: Visits and Wanderings There in the Nineteenth Century_, By Edwin Paxton Hood, published 1851. From a chapter entitled "Seeing with the Stomach"...
"There is another remarkable phenomenon to which a few words may be devoted. Persons who read in a state of somnambulism, it is know, read from the pit of the stomach. Dr. Kerner says, 'I gave Mrs. Hauffe two pieces of paper, carefully folded, on one of which I had secretly written, 'There is a God," and on the other, 'There is no God.' I put them into her left hand, when she was apparently awake, and asked her if she felt any difference between the. After a pause, she returned to me the first, and said, 'This gives me a sensation, and the other feels like a void." I repeated the experiment four times and always with the same result...'"
Paxton then recounts other similar experiments done while people were hypnotized (assuming sonambulism equates to hypnotism and not just sleep walking).
Interesting. This must be where we get the term "gut feeling".
It reminds me of an ethnography I read in college where an Amazonian shaman informant explained to the anthropologist author how he could tell whether a plant was harmless, poisonous, or had psychotropic properties by holding it close to his stomach.
The pdf of my book "Evidence-based software engineering based on the publicly available data" was released under a creative commons license. I investigated the possibility of producing a paper version, but the extensive use of color and the A4 size made it look difficult.
Somebody has taken the trouble to produce a paperback version and make it available on Amazon at a reasonable price. I bought a copy, it looks fantastic and feels good in the hand to read.
FaceApp morph of all Democratic Senators ("what if John Hickenlooper was a cannibal") and all Republican Senators ("what if Bob Katter was the smuggest individual on the planet") is *extremely* evocative of Paul Fussell's chart distinguishing upper-middle from prole that Scott posted in his book review. Once you get past that they made the faces eerie and demonic.
Man watching Shoe become a Bernie bro was quite amusing. Something fun to offset feeling bad every time he lost. She wasn't exactly right wing before but kinda.
There's definitely a strong resemblance to that image, but the median Republican senator doesn't look prole to me; he looks like the president of the yacht club.
Still, "Republican face" and "Democrat face" are definitely a thing, and somewhat orthogonal to class-based physiognomy, which is also a thing. Could it be a testosterone thing? A thicker jaw immediately makes you look 50% more Republican.
One of the things I noticed in the US, when I lived there, was that there are conservative and liberal voices. Particularly on radio. You could tell 90% of the time, a callers politics, by the timbre of the voice. Deeper = more conservative.
"The archetype of a red-faced, angry, pompous, jingoistic, and stereotypically British right-wing male has been in present in popular culture since the mid-20th century, with the character Colonel Blimp first appearing in 1934, in newspaper cartoons and in the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1948"
So not prole, middle-class, but not college-professional type middle class.
"Colonel Blimp is a British cartoon character by cartoonist David Low, first drawn for Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard in April 1934. Blimp is pompous, irascible, jingoistic, and stereotypically British, identifiable by his walrus moustache and the interjection "Gad, Sir!"
Low claimed that he developed the character after overhearing two military men in a Turkish bath declare that cavalry officers should be entitled to wear their spurs inside tanks. The character was named after the barrage balloon, which was known as a blimp."
How did that Democrat end up so definitively white male, when 1/3 of the Democratic senators are women, and 6 are non-white? And how did the Democrat end up so much toothier than the Republican when the same number of them seem to be showing teeth in their official photos?
Role of concussion/mTBI in culture: maybe some human behaviors which are sometimes thought of as learned or modeled, actually originated as a response to mild traumatic brain injury? I'm thinking specifically of some models of "masculinity" but also general ideas of mental wellness.
Over a decade ago I had basically an undiagnosed mTBI. It delivered a very unexpected plus: I was no longer emotionally oversensitive. All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better. The downside: several years of forgetting words, disappearing thoughts, misspeaking, getting lost, headaches, difficulty writing, loss of sensitivity to others' feelings when it might matter, balance problems, etc.
The speech bit especially was very trying. But the emotional upside was profound.
Since then I have begun to wonder if humanity is actually optimized for receiving very mild brain injury. Just enough of a bonk on the head that that tremendous oversensitiveness goes away. Perhaps evolutionarily, if males were more likely to get blows to the head, maybe the uncommunicative, unfeeling man with occasional rage derives from mTBI symptoms, and entered culture as a recognition of the way "men are," being the way men become after they are hit in the head often enough, generally as boys.
And now that we are much more careful physically, we get far fewer concussions in general, and that extra layer of emotional sensitivity is not removed, leading to all kinds of mental health problems (for some people) but also requiring skill sets which really are new across large populations - because before about 100 years ago, people in general would have largely lacked the sensitiveness to use those skills. Especially people who did a lot of heavy work leading to head injuries.
Of course for some people there is no upside to a concussion. But I think considering groups of people, especially for the "stereotypes of masculinity" part, there's explanatory power.
It seems pretty darn unlikely to me that the cogs of evolutionary biology turned in such a way as to require an ideal amount of brain damage for optimal functioning. Why wouldn't evolution just optimize for concussion resiliency? Are you sure that the concussion was causal in your emotional improvements? People more often have emotional dysregulation following a traumatic brain injury due to higher level structures controlling emotional inhibition being damaged.
There's a general phenomenon of the optimal amount of stressors for biological systems being small, but nonzero. "Hormesis" is the name.
Without thinking too hard about it, the intuitive story I tell myself is that when stressors can't easily be eliminated through evolution (or it's too costly below some level), other optimisations evolution is doing take place in the context of that small amount of the stressor remaining and thus become reliant on it to some extent. It's a local optimum, not a global one, and moving the stressor toward a more global optimum might decrease fitness until other parameters have time to be optimised in the new, low-stressor context.
E.g. if evolution was optimising for emotionality in the context of some hard-to-avoid stressor dulling the emotions, it would set the level a little higher than the optimum so that in the context of the stressor it would come out about right.
Hormesis is a favorite word of mine. Understanding hormetic stress and the associated dose-response curve is certainly useful. I don't see it as evolutionary laziness or energy conservation so much as a mechanism for biological systems to adapt to their unique environment. The issue with the hormesis argument in the context of brain injury is that we know very clearly that brain injury is associated with greater emotional distress rather than less. The higher level brain structures are the least insulated and thus the most vulnerable to damage. I don't see any mechanism whereby damaging higher level brain structures improves emotional regulation.
It's pretty common for organisms that undergo a certain amount of environmental damage to eventually develop processes that only work well if they do in fact undergo that environmental damage. The obvious example is trees whose seeds only germinate in fires, but the way the human immune system becomes allergic if it doesn't receive enough early childhood practice fighting actual invaders seems relevant.
> All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better
Are you sure that this was concussion-related? I've had a similar transformation without any head knocks, and I attribute it just to age, maturity and fatherhood.
Day-of, I didn’t realize what it would lead to, I just felt oddly undisturbed by dynamics that had been upsetting only the day before. The abruptness made me notice the difference. Maybe the difference it made was positive for me because I was much too far over to the wrong side of compassionateness.
I think humans are pretty well adapted for concussion resilience, I don’t know how much better it can get. But it’s not that good, we still get concussed. If all or nearly all people sustained at least one mild concussion, over time that would constitute an evolutionary pressure. People who had any compassion left after getting hit in the head might have been the ones with too much to start with. They might outcompete others in that landscape.
And it wouldn’t have to be extreme blows to the head. Successive smaller impacts can ding a person for sure. It’s the type of thing we might not have historical records of medically, it would have to be estimated from child abuse records and child labor accidents.
Thinking that widespread concussion could have an impact on culture is one thing. The added theory that maybe lack of getting hit upside the head is actually a big problem - that’s definitely harder to prove and yes, might be totally wrong.
The idea that maybe now society is less concussed than we’ve ever been, so we have to develop some new skill sets, that I can buy into.
Apparently getting a stroke makes you enlightened.
My personal guess would be that damage to certain parts of the brain (amygdala?) makes you more chill, and damage to others makes you less chill, but we only ever hear about the first because it's surprising.
Thanks for posting this - I should be able to watch it later - but I think you’re right about the brain region affecting whether it goes the more chill or the less chill direction (or some of both).
It seems more likely to me that you simply got a bit lucky. You were fairly high in neuroticism, maybe with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder which was significantly hindering your life. If you'll indulge a very mechanical analogy: a TBI is like hitting a rotary ball bearing with a hammer; you'll get a few flats on the balls where they impacted one of the races so the whole thing will be a BIT more clunky, but it can also knock loose a ball that was binding up on one of the races and free it to spin again. (And, indeed, hitting a seized-up ball-bearing with a hammer is occasionally useful in repair in spite of the immediate damage from it.)
I suspect TBIs are very similar to ECT in this way. ECT seems to simulate a minimally-destructive TBI; minor temporary amnesia, etc., but all the firmly-embedded brain patterns get shaken up and are able to reform (potentially into a better equilibrium.)
prediction: if this theory is true then otherwise similar men from areas with similar levels of athletism but different sports of choice will have different levels of mental health.
that is, we would expecta a pro football player and a pro basketball player to be similar psychologically, but if the football players were systmatically more stable, this would support your theory.
I agree - I think it might be really hard to sort this geographically now, because so many sports are so widespread, but yes, I think there would be a correlation.
Unless the ones that matter are the concussions in childhood, in which case it would matter what sports men played as children/youth.
I think you would expect there to be an optimal amount of traumatic brain injury, and you would expect the average modern person to be below it, and the average professional football player to be above it. Not clear who would be close to the evolutionary optimum.
TBI's more frequently involve increased emotional instability because they tend to occur in ways that damage the forebrain or washboard the limbic system. You got lucky.
It’s possible I’m looking at this sideways, and society in general is generally more concussed due to automobile travel now, not less, and that that is influencing the increase in mental health diagnoses. So yes.
TBI's have increased because we've gotten better at reducing the impact of accidents and injuries, especially motor vehicle and military related, from something that would cause death to something that causes head injury. There's also more awareness leading to more diagnosis.
Motor vehicle accident induced TBI's have a common front to back, coup contrecoup, pattern that typically leads to reduced executive function and emotional instability. This does the opposite of the effects you report in yourself. I'm not denying your personal experience, but I think you should consider that your case isn't typical and the side-effect you report is fortunate.
I'm in no place to diagnose you from a brief description online, but your quick and dirty summary suggests a temporal lobe injury. Just understand that when people suffer brain injuries, this is not the only way it happens.
I had a couple of bad concussions as a kid, and that list of symptoms - callousness included - all seem like tings that have affected me.... Really makes on think how much of what we consider our very selves is caused by external forces
I started this train of thought trying to understand why “talk” therapies work - some people are able to intentionally “let go” and others find it much harder. I began to wonder if some people were able to fall back on “beneficial callousness” in ways that others were not. Then I began to wonder why some had that beneficial callousness and others did not or couldn’t use it.
I think some of the “just get over it”- type mental health advice derived from eras where people probably did get more TBIs, and “just get over it” might be more directly stated as “why does this still bother you,” ie, haven’t you had your concussions yet. Which also matches the association of being unable to get over something, with being inexperienced or naive (un-concussed.) It’s probably not the only mechanism but I think it’s going on.
I had a similar experience with a mild TBI, though mine was very mild (I never lost consciousness, though I was somewhat woozy for an hour). I also think I became less emotionally sensitive, less neurotic, etc. though I never had problems with memory, word finding difficulties, etc.
Hard to distinguish from just growing up / puberty.
I think there’s a possibility that it’s a widespread experience. But yes, we don’t usually track these medically or statistically and I think we are discouraged from tracking ourselves emotionally to the extent that the before-and-after would be revealed in data. Maybe there’s a huge longitudinal data set somewhere that a study could be made with, where we already have lots of baselines and then several thousand could agree to symptom tracking and journaling. Then some number of them would probably get sub clinical TBI (and a smaller number mTBI, etc) and the after effects of sub-clinical TBI might be visible.
Would you consider the Russian people more culpable for ignoring the atrocities in Ukraine, given that the information is available to anyone interested, internet censorship or not, compared to, say, German people in WWII, who generally had no idea about the death camps, only about their Jewish neighbors suddenly disappearing from the neighborhood?
Or, say, compared to the American people not knowing much about several massacres in Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq (e.g. the Haditha massacre)? Or, in an increasingly controversial order, to some of the actions of the IDF in the occupied territories.
I would like to explicitly exclude things like encouraging the local forces to commit atrocities by giving them financial or military aid, since it gets very murky in a hurry. So, no Sabra & Shatila, no actions by US-financed militias, no actions by Luhansk/Donetsk forces, etc. Probably not worth going further back in time and looking into British actions in SA, or Belgian in Congo.
I'm asking because Germans are brought up to feel collective guilt for the WWII atrocities and for not having done anything to stop it, and it seems to work well so far, though the effects are slowly fading, as the last the death camp survivors pass away. On the other hand, Russians and other allied soldiers (but especially the Russians) committed rape and often crimes against civilians during the liberation of Europe, but it is never a big topic of discussion... not even in Germany. And it is not just winners vs losers, since the Japanese people, nominally the losers, don't feel remorse for whatever Japanese forces did in China, even though it was on par with what Germans did in Europe.
The vast majority of Americans seem to have no trouble ignoring our atrocities in the Middle East, the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict. I don't think the availability of information matters much. Cultural and historical conditions seem to matter far more.
"the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict"
Quantitatively or qualitatively, or both? I can believe numerically more people may have been involved over the many years of Iraq and Afghanistan, but was there much deliberate rape, torture and execution of civilians?
Wiki says 25,000 to 100,000 since 1999 - not all would be Russian killings. So your 15% is too high. In actual numbers it’s estimated that about 1 million died in Iraq since 2003.
That's an important correction, but it's also worth clarifying that your numbers there aren't directly comparable either. We need to distinguish the two types of blame here. There's an important moral difference between deaths that we directly caused, and those that would not have happened if he hadn't invaded. That is: we're far more morally culpable for deaths due to US troops (collateral damage, deliberate murder/rape, etc.) than for deaths due to intra-Iraq sectarian violence unleashed by taking down Saddam.
In either case the deaths were (in some sense) caused by the US, but the second category isn't parallel to the deaths in Chechnya as I understand it.
I was going to add that not all were attributable to the US, however the figures for Chechnya I quoted from wiki were not all attributable to Russia either. I accept the correction in general thoiugh.
American troops killed *1 million* Iraqis? That's...I mean, if you're going to exaggerate, I guess you might as well do it by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Why not be bold?
I don't believe it was the *policy* of the US military to commit atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Officially, Americans were supposed to be winning hearts and minds. However, there certainly were atrocities, like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Graib, and individuals like Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who reportedly would shoot at Iraqi civilians for fun.
Well, it is probably not an official policy of Russia to massacre civilians. Though they seem to do it a lot and on a large scale, with balaclavas and what not. But the US military, not just rogue individuals, is not without blame, either:
When there is a military force in an occupied or invaded country, atrocities are the default. There is too much of a power differential, and too little goodwill in either direction, between soldier and enemy civilian.
Strict discipline and training can reduce the impact. I suspect the US military puts more emphasis on this than the Russian military, and also that the US military is just more disciplined, period. Nevertheless, it seems impossible to me that any amount of training could improve the relationship between soldiers and an occupied population to, say, how cops and black people in the US feel about each other right now.
You have been spending too much time watching CNN and not enough actually in black neighborhoods[1], if you think your last simple sentence bears any close resemblance to the truth on the ground.
Black people appreciate cops even more than suburban whites -- because they actually live where crime is a serious concern. That's one good reason blacks often serve *as* police officers. (For example, the current racial makeup of the LAPD is 30% white, 50% Hispanic, 9% black, 8% Asian.)
Blacks know very well how important the cop's job is, and they can see it making a diference in their actual lives much more than a young white person at a nice college in a safe town participating in her first march for racial justice.
It is also nevertheless also true that blacks are picked out for police surveillance and inquiry at much higher rates than non-blacks, and that can piss them off even when they get the reason for it. So the relationship is definitely fraught, and complicated. But it in no way resembles the trivial black-and-white (so to speak) cartoon that pundits on the tube offer for entertainment purposes.
------------
[1] Yes, I've personally lived in a neighborhood that was majority working-class black.
Rape? Probably not. Torture and execution? The military obviously claims they didn't do these things deliberately, but there was and continues to be so goddamned much of it that I simply don't believe them.
I’d add that American involvement in Vietnam to Iraq has drawn enormous public opposition and protests, so I wouldn’t say Americans have no problem ignoring those atrocities. Sure it’s legal to protest in the US but Russia is no Soviet Union or China either, I expected more visible opposition despite the circumstances
> the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict
Christ, they only invaded two months ago, and directly killed probably ~10,000 civilians so far. So ~5,000 per month... and ~$63 billion in property damage in just one month.
Shared beliefs and cultural assumptions can make either atrocities or human rights more or less likely, but no individual is responsible for the crimes of another, nor should he/she be expected to feel guilt for another’s actions. I would avoid the expectation of collective remorse, or the assignment of collective blame to individuals not involved in the action.
No. Christ was right when he said “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” We live in a world with governments but the government isn’t us. “We the people” is a nice aspiration for the government, not a moral albatross for the populace to carry.
Does that rule only apply to states, or also to other organizations? I.e. may one blamelessly render unto Nestlé what is theirs even if doing so supports atrocities? How about choosing to support fledgling states, such as the Islamic State a few years back – completely blameless?
Closest I can offer is Homer and Sylla’s History of Interest Rates, but it only touches on them briefly at the end of 800 pages on lending across the rest of human history, but that does seem to address your later point. Further recommendations in good finance history are Jim Grant’s biography of Walter Bagehot and Lords of Finance (ignore the awful title, the book is a brilliant tour of the mechanics of pre-Breton Woods currencies and the tangled relationship with gold).
"the stock is valued by the market, and an EFT with higher fees would just be valued less to compensate"
There are a limited number for every theme or niche, so there probably isn't much competition between ETFs in the same field to either lower fees, or have a valuation that fairly accounts for them. I.e. there's only a few 2 or 3x levered oil ETFs, there's only like two Russell 3000 ETFs, etc. So it may not necessarily be true that an ETF with higher fees would be valued less- you may not have many alternatives in that niche
Yes. In order to compensate for a higher fee, an ETF or index fund would need to have a higher change in value to break even compared to one with a low fee.
There just aren't that many ETFs. Many sector ETFs and other specialty products are the easiest realistic way to gain exposure to a specific thing, so they charge for the privilege. Other broader etfs do have different expense ratios but this is generally just arbitrary. See
https://www.inspiretofire.com/voo-vs-spy-head-to-head-comparison/ for a comparison of VOO and SPY, which track the same index and have extremely similar returns, but SPY's ratio is 300% VOO's.
In a word, no.
I think what you're missing is that ETFs are not priced by market action like other stocks. An ETF can be said to have a 'correct' price that you can compute by looking at changes in its underlying components, and the ETF provider has mechanisms to ensure that that price is the price you buy or sell it at.
Once you buy it, the fees do matter, because they will determine exactly how the underlying stocks contribute to the growth of the ETF. If an ETF had zero fees, and all of its constituent stocks doubled, you would more or less expect the ETF to exactly double as well. If it has a fee, then you would expect that to detract from the growth accordingly. But that has no relevance to the price you pay at purchase.
Consider two ETFs tracking the same index, but with different fees, and the difference in fees priced into the market price in the manner you propose. At this point, an arbitrageur can buy the higher-fee / lower-priced ETF in creation-unit quantities to exchange the ETF for the underlying securities. This mechanism puts a practical limit on to what extent two substantially identical ETFs in the same market can differ in fees (and a practical limit on the fees chargeable by an ETF that holds highly liquid securities).
What you're missing is that they don't track the index, they track "index minus fees". If an ETF charges (say) 1%, then over 10 years, the basket of the ETF will go from 1 basket of the index to 0.9 baskets of the index as the ETF provider takes money out, and the arbitrage is around the value of the basket.
NAV
Some funds trade at that value strictly. No way to arbitrage on the fee.
Some funds trade above or below their NAV. Fees could play a role in the price here.
What you're missing is there are people ("Authorised Participants") who can take a block of ETF shares and redeem them for the underlying assets, and vice versa. They can make money doing this whenever the price drifts away from the underlying assets, and doing it moves the price back, so an ETF will always trade at value of its assets. The ETF management fee then reduces the *size* of the fund (because some people decide not to use it if the fee is too high) rather then the *price* of individual shares.
(This mechanism is also more tax efficient then traditional mutual funds, at least in the US)
"Closed-end" funds that don't have this mechanism indeed work as you suggest: the share price reflects a combination of the assets, the fees, and evaluations of the fund manager's stock picking ability (these fund are usually actively managed).
Another thing you might have been missing (which is to say, another small tweak to how ETFs work that would probably make your intuition right) is that when you're long an ETF you pay a fee to it's manager, but when you're short an ETF you don't get paid that fee. Therefore there is not a profitable arbitrage in which you buy VOO and sell SPY, collecting more fees than you pay ~risk-free, ultimately driving SPY out of business. Instead, the movement of capital from SPY to VOO relies on the collective action of investors, which is more gradual than the action of professional arbitrageurs.
Your basic intuition, "shouldn't that just be priced in?", is right in very many cases and you were right to look for some specific quirk that prevents it from holding in this case.
Best popular history of the caliphate in Spain?
I don't know, but I recommend "The Lions of Al-Rassan" by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's a novel set in Al-Rassan, a thinly veiled fantasy equivalent of al-Andalus. Kay has written a whole series of novels featuring lots of violence, sex, and political intrigue, set in a fantasy equivalent of the Mediterranean after the fall of Rome (Sarantium = Byzantium, Rhodias = Rome, etc.).
I'll second the recommendation
I'll third that recommendation.
Fun little side-note, but Guy Gavriel Kay was the author who helped Christopher Tolkien finish the "Silmarillion" after JRR Tolkien passed away (including when they basically had to write a whole chapter, "Ruin of Doriath", because Tolkien had left them little to work with).
I've been reading a ton of post-Roman to pre-modern history for my work on my fantasy strategy game. Mughals, Rome, Persia, and a bunch of other stuff including the Caliphates. Mostly been looking Rashidun so far but I looked into the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates also. Slowing marching forward in time. Let me dig up my notes for the top tier "normie friendly" recommendations people gave me. Probably have something tomorrow.
https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Islam-Routledge-Editions-International-ebook/dp/B08YGXQCXB/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1650894648&refinements=p_27%3AReinhart+Dozy&s=books&sr=1-1
Reinhart Dozy's Histoire des Musalman’s d’Espagne, translated obviously, is one of the foundational works in the genre although I'm sure there has been some change since 1863.
This may not be what you're looking for, but Washington Irving wrote an excellent history of the END of the caliphate in Spain, Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada.
(His book of romantic legends about Cordoba is even better: Tales of the Alhambra. And his surprisingly sympathetic account of early Muslim history, Mahomet and His Successors, is best of all, but, of course, furthest away from the topic you asked about.)
This is an excerpt from a sermon of the Irish mathematician and theologian George Salmon. It appears to have been delivered in 1849. The full text is available on Google Books under the title, “The Propriety of Prayer for Temporal Blessings: A Sermon.” The excerpt appears at page 37 of the Google Books edition.
“I may appeal to many controversies of the present day which it would seem much more easy to bring to the test of experience, and yet on which we may find intelligent men forming very opposite opinions. For example,—whether the distresses of this country have arisen in spite of, or in consequence of, free trade; whether homeopathic pilules or wet sheets be sovereign remedies; whether there be a connexion between the characters of men and the shape of their heads; whether the brain adopts the principle of the division of labor, and whether it be possible to assign the places of the several bits of brain which have undertaken the discharge of each of the mental functions; whether men can see with their eyes only, or sometimes also with the pits of their stomachs; whether it is possible for a clairvoyant at Bolton to discern the doings of Sir John Franklin at the North Pole.”
I read along this enumeration of examples and I recognize them as a variety of now-quaint empirical controversies of the period. And then I hit the part about a controversy over whether people sometimes see with their stomachs. What on Earth is this referring to? How could anyone ever have been even tempted to believe that he was seeing with his stomach? I haven’t been able to find the reference to this nineteenth century controversy on Google. Does anyone have any idea what it was?
I’ll make a guess. Could ‘see’ be used with meaning ‘understand’?
So is he asking if a ‘gut feeling’, an intuition, could be as valuable as rational analysis of what is right before your eyes at times?
Is ‘Spideysense’ a thing?
I mean, that would make the phrase coherent, but it would hardly seem to fit with the other elements of the list, which involved more concrete phenomena. He’s using the list as examples of putative natural phenomena that it’s hard to develop dispositive tests for, such that informed people come to opposite conclusions.
One of the things he brings up is clairvoyants - is there some old theory of psychic powers that relies on the pit of your stomach?
To me, the remark reads as a deliberately jokey/insulting way of getting at the idea of going with your gut--like, he's deliberately trying to frame "knowing something by gut instinct" in a way that makes it sound ridiculous, for comedic value. I'll grant you it doesn't fit super well with the other examples, but it's natural to be a little less careful about whether what you're saying is a perfect example of the serious point you were making if, at that precise moment, you're trying to be funny.
Eventually the idea of the navel as a third eye, serving as a visual transducer to the stomach as the eyes do to that portion of the brain responsible for sight, fell out of fashion, and it became popular to debunk the entire concept by saying "Your eyes were bigger than your stomach".
Sorry, couldn't resist.
But seriously, was "seeing with the stomach" a euphemism for going with one's gut instincts instead of that which we literally saw? If so, the debate over left-brain/right-brain perception continues, and is valid.
But if the stomach was truly considered by some to "see" (in a purely visual sense), it does seem silly now. ("OK, it's my turn to hide; close your stomach and count to 10!") What things do we presently debate that will seem silly to people 150 - 200 years in the future?
I'm hoping that AI Superintelligence will be one of those things. Perhaps, 200 years in the future, we will have some scientific understanding of the physical properties and limits of intelligence and that will show that the concerns over superintelligence risk were invalid.
Or maybe we will all have been turned into paperclips. It could go either way.
The paperclips idea doesn’t need a n AI. Just a runaway process generally assumed to be nanotechnology.
I mean, specifically, a paperclip maximiser, not a grey goo generator.
But the paperclip maximiser doesn't need to be AGI either. Just a runaway process. Anyway neither are likely.
No one mentioned AGI, but a technical process that outsmarts humans whenever we try to turn it off sounds like a misaligned AI to me.
I mean, there's an open question right now about just how much of the atmosphere will be turned into CO2 by the runaway processes of capitalism. Obviously not as dramatic as the paperclips, but a result of the same process of partially aligned value maximizers with greater power than any individual human. (In this case, we do obviously benefit from many of the paperclips and other things that are produced, though we're not totally happy about the byproduct.)
It's become clear in recent years that the gut microbiota massively influences just about everything that humans do, including understanding. If he meant "see" in that sense, then he was very far ahead of his time.
He literally means seeing from the pit of your stomach. For some cases of people supposedly able to do this you can read starting on page 218 in this edition of the Dublin Review in an article about animal magnetism: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Dublin_Review/4vsLAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1
Also, is the phrase "pit of your stomach" mainly just used in Ireland?
THANK YOU for finding this. I really appreciate it. I’m not Irish and have certainly heard the phrase used now and then. It may be falling into archaism and I would guess that infeequncy of use is more due to time rather than place. But I can’t rule out that it was particularly common in Irish English at the time.
Congratulations on tracking that down, it really does shed light on the reference!
Talking about animal magnetism and Mesmerism and directing the magnetic influence by gestures and touch, there is the case of "Stroker" Greatrakes, who did faith healing by touch through what was not yet at the time called 'animal magnetism':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_Greatrakes
"Valentine Greatrakes (14 February 1628 – 28 November 1682), also known as "Greatorex" or "The Stroker", was an Irish faith healer who toured England in 1666, claiming to cure people by the laying on of hands."
For those who don't want to find it, the main reference is accounts of people seeing without their eyes. One passage:
"We have seen her (a young lady of Grenoble, in a state of somnabulism) select from a packet of more than thirty letters, that one amonst them which had been directed to her. She read on the dial-plate and through the glass, the hour indicated by a watch; we have seen her write several letter; correct, on reading them over, the mistakes she had made; and recopy one of the letter word for word. During all these operations, a screen of thick pasteboard entirely intercepted every visual ray which could possibly have reached her eyes. The same phenomena took place at the soles of her feet, and at the pit of the stomach."
In another case they talk about a women who has seizures and reported the following:
"She referred to her stomach all the sensations of sight, heraing, and smell, which were then no longer produced by the usual organs"
Reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" about a man who reads in a book about how you can learn to see using your skin instead of just your eyes by using yogic practices. He practices the techniques and advances far enough that he can see through thin barriers (because yogic powers, that's why). He uses this power to cheat at poker by seeing through the cards to the ink on the other side. Once he gets bored at this he decides to make it his life purpose to cheat casinos out of their money with his trick and donate all his winnings to charity. Weird (but fun) story: the fact that Dahl had any of this in mind would indicate that at some point there was the pop culture idea that you could see using other organs besides the eyes, if you had enough mystic woo.
I can taste with my feet, but the other people in the restaurant keep complaining.
So you're an invertebrate?
I can smell certain things with my mouth (flehming) but that is because I am a cat.
I don’t fully understand “seeing” with the stomach. On the other hand we do feel with it - butterflies in the stomach, knot in the stomach. We don’t feel with our mind. Lots and people who believe we can upload our brain (and thus personality) forget that.
You don't understand "seeing with the stomach" because it is fake. People see with eyes, but their were claims in the first half of the 19th century that through animal magnetism people were able to read letters and such through their stomachs.
Yes I saw your link above. Did you use a dedicated search engine for that?
I just searched google books and limited the date of publication. Google Books is probably the best part of the internet.
Thanks.
It's possible that the phenomenon he is referring to is dermo-optical perception (I vaguely remembered the concept but had to Google to find out the exact term):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermo-optical_perception
That is, that certain people have a psychic ability to 'see' with organs other than the eyes (usually the fingers/hands by placing them on objects and 'reading' their history):
"Dermo-optical perception (DOP) — also known as dermal vision, dermo-optics, eyeless sight, eyeless vision, skin vision, skin reading, finger vision, paroptic vision, para-optic perception, cutaneous perception, digital sight, and bio-introscopy — is a term that is used in parapsychological literature to denote the alleged capability to perceive colors, differences in brightness, and/or formed images through the skin (without using the eyes, as distinct from blindsight), especially upon touching with the fingertips.
Typically, people who claim to have dermo-optical perception claim to be able to see using the skin of their fingers or hands. People who claim to have DOP often demonstrate it by reading while blindfolded. The effect has not been demonstrated scientifically."
It might be that Salmon is poking fun at the idea by using 'the pit of the stomach' rather than 'the hands'. Or there might be some confusion with psychometry as well, the claimed ability to 'read' the history of an object by touch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)
There's a phenomenon called Riddoch's Syndrome where people who have no detectable activity in their retina or optic nerves, being able to distinguish the shapes of large objects without touching them and making judgement as to colors of the objects — but either they or the objects had to be moving.
Of course there's that experiment where a fellow implanted a dense set of electrodes under the derma his back. He connected them to a device with Internet access to a site that was continuously displaying weather maps. And he came to "see" the developing weather patterns in his mind.
From a book entitled: _Dream Land and Ghost Land: Visits and Wanderings There in the Nineteenth Century_, By Edwin Paxton Hood, published 1851. From a chapter entitled "Seeing with the Stomach"...
"There is another remarkable phenomenon to which a few words may be devoted. Persons who read in a state of somnambulism, it is know, read from the pit of the stomach. Dr. Kerner says, 'I gave Mrs. Hauffe two pieces of paper, carefully folded, on one of which I had secretly written, 'There is a God," and on the other, 'There is no God.' I put them into her left hand, when she was apparently awake, and asked her if she felt any difference between the. After a pause, she returned to me the first, and said, 'This gives me a sensation, and the other feels like a void." I repeated the experiment four times and always with the same result...'"
Paxton then recounts other similar experiments done while people were hypnotized (assuming sonambulism equates to hypnotism and not just sleep walking).
Interesting. This must be where we get the term "gut feeling".
It reminds me of an ethnography I read in college where an Amazonian shaman informant explained to the anthropologist author how he could tell whether a plant was harmless, poisonous, or had psychotropic properties by holding it close to his stomach.
Thanks very much for posting this. I appreciate it.
The pdf of my book "Evidence-based software engineering based on the publicly available data" was released under a creative commons license. I investigated the possibility of producing a paper version, but the extensive use of color and the A4 size made it look difficult.
Somebody has taken the trouble to produce a paperback version and make it available on Amazon at a reasonable price. I bought a copy, it looks fantastic and feels good in the hand to read.
Looks interesting, ordered!
https://twitter.com/shoe0nhead/status/1518006583187456006/photo/1
FaceApp morph of all Democratic Senators ("what if John Hickenlooper was a cannibal") and all Republican Senators ("what if Bob Katter was the smuggest individual on the planet") is *extremely* evocative of Paul Fussell's chart distinguishing upper-middle from prole that Scott posted in his book review. Once you get past that they made the faces eerie and demonic.
Man watching Shoe become a Bernie bro was quite amusing. Something fun to offset feeling bad every time he lost. She wasn't exactly right wing before but kinda.
There's definitely a strong resemblance to that image, but the median Republican senator doesn't look prole to me; he looks like the president of the yacht club.
Still, "Republican face" and "Democrat face" are definitely a thing, and somewhat orthogonal to class-based physiognomy, which is also a thing. Could it be a testosterone thing? A thicker jaw immediately makes you look 50% more Republican.
One of the things I noticed in the US, when I lived there, was that there are conservative and liberal voices. Particularly on radio. You could tell 90% of the time, a callers politics, by the timbre of the voice. Deeper = more conservative.
The redness of the combined faces makes me think of the English term "gammon" (recently revived as an insult for Brexit):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gammon_(insult)
"The archetype of a red-faced, angry, pompous, jingoistic, and stereotypically British right-wing male has been in present in popular culture since the mid-20th century, with the character Colonel Blimp first appearing in 1934, in newspaper cartoons and in the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1948"
So not prole, middle-class, but not college-professional type middle class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Blimp
"Colonel Blimp is a British cartoon character by cartoonist David Low, first drawn for Lord Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard in April 1934. Blimp is pompous, irascible, jingoistic, and stereotypically British, identifiable by his walrus moustache and the interjection "Gad, Sir!"
Low claimed that he developed the character after overhearing two military men in a Turkish bath declare that cavalry officers should be entitled to wear their spurs inside tanks. The character was named after the barrage balloon, which was known as a blimp."
To be honest, I’m dubious about this. Average faces tend to get better looking and trend towards the norm. These are caricature.
Vernon Dursley is probably the best modern example.
How did that Democrat end up so definitively white male, when 1/3 of the Democratic senators are women, and 6 are non-white? And how did the Democrat end up so much toothier than the Republican when the same number of them seem to be showing teeth in their official photos?
I think Eugene Norman's got it right: it's a fake.
Role of concussion/mTBI in culture: maybe some human behaviors which are sometimes thought of as learned or modeled, actually originated as a response to mild traumatic brain injury? I'm thinking specifically of some models of "masculinity" but also general ideas of mental wellness.
Over a decade ago I had basically an undiagnosed mTBI. It delivered a very unexpected plus: I was no longer emotionally oversensitive. All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better. The downside: several years of forgetting words, disappearing thoughts, misspeaking, getting lost, headaches, difficulty writing, loss of sensitivity to others' feelings when it might matter, balance problems, etc.
The speech bit especially was very trying. But the emotional upside was profound.
Since then I have begun to wonder if humanity is actually optimized for receiving very mild brain injury. Just enough of a bonk on the head that that tremendous oversensitiveness goes away. Perhaps evolutionarily, if males were more likely to get blows to the head, maybe the uncommunicative, unfeeling man with occasional rage derives from mTBI symptoms, and entered culture as a recognition of the way "men are," being the way men become after they are hit in the head often enough, generally as boys.
And now that we are much more careful physically, we get far fewer concussions in general, and that extra layer of emotional sensitivity is not removed, leading to all kinds of mental health problems (for some people) but also requiring skill sets which really are new across large populations - because before about 100 years ago, people in general would have largely lacked the sensitiveness to use those skills. Especially people who did a lot of heavy work leading to head injuries.
Of course for some people there is no upside to a concussion. But I think considering groups of people, especially for the "stereotypes of masculinity" part, there's explanatory power.
It seems pretty darn unlikely to me that the cogs of evolutionary biology turned in such a way as to require an ideal amount of brain damage for optimal functioning. Why wouldn't evolution just optimize for concussion resiliency? Are you sure that the concussion was causal in your emotional improvements? People more often have emotional dysregulation following a traumatic brain injury due to higher level structures controlling emotional inhibition being damaged.
There's a general phenomenon of the optimal amount of stressors for biological systems being small, but nonzero. "Hormesis" is the name.
Without thinking too hard about it, the intuitive story I tell myself is that when stressors can't easily be eliminated through evolution (or it's too costly below some level), other optimisations evolution is doing take place in the context of that small amount of the stressor remaining and thus become reliant on it to some extent. It's a local optimum, not a global one, and moving the stressor toward a more global optimum might decrease fitness until other parameters have time to be optimised in the new, low-stressor context.
E.g. if evolution was optimising for emotionality in the context of some hard-to-avoid stressor dulling the emotions, it would set the level a little higher than the optimum so that in the context of the stressor it would come out about right.
Hormesis is a favorite word of mine. Understanding hormetic stress and the associated dose-response curve is certainly useful. I don't see it as evolutionary laziness or energy conservation so much as a mechanism for biological systems to adapt to their unique environment. The issue with the hormesis argument in the context of brain injury is that we know very clearly that brain injury is associated with greater emotional distress rather than less. The higher level brain structures are the least insulated and thus the most vulnerable to damage. I don't see any mechanism whereby damaging higher level brain structures improves emotional regulation.
It's pretty common for organisms that undergo a certain amount of environmental damage to eventually develop processes that only work well if they do in fact undergo that environmental damage. The obvious example is trees whose seeds only germinate in fires, but the way the human immune system becomes allergic if it doesn't receive enough early childhood practice fighting actual invaders seems relevant.
> All the feels that got wrapped up into other people's lives were suddenly gone, replaced with a cheerful peacefulness. Unburdened from the over-consciousness of other people, I went about making decisions to benefit me & my kids, and life has gotten immeasurably better
Are you sure that this was concussion-related? I've had a similar transformation without any head knocks, and I attribute it just to age, maturity and fatherhood.
That’s good to hear :)
Day-of, I didn’t realize what it would lead to, I just felt oddly undisturbed by dynamics that had been upsetting only the day before. The abruptness made me notice the difference. Maybe the difference it made was positive for me because I was much too far over to the wrong side of compassionateness.
I think humans are pretty well adapted for concussion resilience, I don’t know how much better it can get. But it’s not that good, we still get concussed. If all or nearly all people sustained at least one mild concussion, over time that would constitute an evolutionary pressure. People who had any compassion left after getting hit in the head might have been the ones with too much to start with. They might outcompete others in that landscape.
And it wouldn’t have to be extreme blows to the head. Successive smaller impacts can ding a person for sure. It’s the type of thing we might not have historical records of medically, it would have to be estimated from child abuse records and child labor accidents.
Thinking that widespread concussion could have an impact on culture is one thing. The added theory that maybe lack of getting hit upside the head is actually a big problem - that’s definitely harder to prove and yes, might be totally wrong.
The idea that maybe now society is less concussed than we’ve ever been, so we have to develop some new skill sets, that I can buy into.
Oh shit do I have the relevant video for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
Apparently getting a stroke makes you enlightened.
My personal guess would be that damage to certain parts of the brain (amygdala?) makes you more chill, and damage to others makes you less chill, but we only ever hear about the first because it's surprising.
Thanks for posting this - I should be able to watch it later - but I think you’re right about the brain region affecting whether it goes the more chill or the less chill direction (or some of both).
It seems more likely to me that you simply got a bit lucky. You were fairly high in neuroticism, maybe with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder which was significantly hindering your life. If you'll indulge a very mechanical analogy: a TBI is like hitting a rotary ball bearing with a hammer; you'll get a few flats on the balls where they impacted one of the races so the whole thing will be a BIT more clunky, but it can also knock loose a ball that was binding up on one of the races and free it to spin again. (And, indeed, hitting a seized-up ball-bearing with a hammer is occasionally useful in repair in spite of the immediate damage from it.)
I suspect TBIs are very similar to ECT in this way. ECT seems to simulate a minimally-destructive TBI; minor temporary amnesia, etc., but all the firmly-embedded brain patterns get shaken up and are able to reform (potentially into a better equilibrium.)
I like the ball bearing repair/hammer metaphor. I think mechanical analogies are very useful (for me anyway.) And yes to the comparison with ECT.
prediction: if this theory is true then otherwise similar men from areas with similar levels of athletism but different sports of choice will have different levels of mental health.
that is, we would expecta a pro football player and a pro basketball player to be similar psychologically, but if the football players were systmatically more stable, this would support your theory.
I agree - I think it might be really hard to sort this geographically now, because so many sports are so widespread, but yes, I think there would be a correlation.
Unless the ones that matter are the concussions in childhood, in which case it would matter what sports men played as children/youth.
I think you would expect there to be an optimal amount of traumatic brain injury, and you would expect the average modern person to be below it, and the average professional football player to be above it. Not clear who would be close to the evolutionary optimum.
Clumsy people at the optimum?
Yes, with location on the head, direction & intensity of force, as well as frequency, being part of that optimization.
Agreed it is not clear who would be at the evolutionary optimum.
TBI's more frequently involve increased emotional instability because they tend to occur in ways that damage the forebrain or washboard the limbic system. You got lucky.
It’s possible I’m looking at this sideways, and society in general is generally more concussed due to automobile travel now, not less, and that that is influencing the increase in mental health diagnoses. So yes.
TBI's have increased because we've gotten better at reducing the impact of accidents and injuries, especially motor vehicle and military related, from something that would cause death to something that causes head injury. There's also more awareness leading to more diagnosis.
Motor vehicle accident induced TBI's have a common front to back, coup contrecoup, pattern that typically leads to reduced executive function and emotional instability. This does the opposite of the effects you report in yourself. I'm not denying your personal experience, but I think you should consider that your case isn't typical and the side-effect you report is fortunate.
I'm in no place to diagnose you from a brief description online, but your quick and dirty summary suggests a temporal lobe injury. Just understand that when people suffer brain injuries, this is not the only way it happens.
You’re right, I’m lucky. I also posed too many questions in the initial post.
I had a couple of bad concussions as a kid, and that list of symptoms - callousness included - all seem like tings that have affected me.... Really makes on think how much of what we consider our very selves is caused by external forces
I appreciate the observation.
I started this train of thought trying to understand why “talk” therapies work - some people are able to intentionally “let go” and others find it much harder. I began to wonder if some people were able to fall back on “beneficial callousness” in ways that others were not. Then I began to wonder why some had that beneficial callousness and others did not or couldn’t use it.
I think some of the “just get over it”- type mental health advice derived from eras where people probably did get more TBIs, and “just get over it” might be more directly stated as “why does this still bother you,” ie, haven’t you had your concussions yet. Which also matches the association of being unable to get over something, with being inexperienced or naive (un-concussed.) It’s probably not the only mechanism but I think it’s going on.
I had a similar experience with a mild TBI, though mine was very mild (I never lost consciousness, though I was somewhat woozy for an hour). I also think I became less emotionally sensitive, less neurotic, etc. though I never had problems with memory, word finding difficulties, etc.
Hard to distinguish from just growing up / puberty.
I think there’s a possibility that it’s a widespread experience. But yes, we don’t usually track these medically or statistically and I think we are discouraged from tracking ourselves emotionally to the extent that the before-and-after would be revealed in data. Maybe there’s a huge longitudinal data set somewhere that a study could be made with, where we already have lots of baselines and then several thousand could agree to symptom tracking and journaling. Then some number of them would probably get sub clinical TBI (and a smaller number mTBI, etc) and the after effects of sub-clinical TBI might be visible.
Where you were woozy, that counts, that registers on the “symptoms of concussion” lists.
TWCW:
Would you consider the Russian people more culpable for ignoring the atrocities in Ukraine, given that the information is available to anyone interested, internet censorship or not, compared to, say, German people in WWII, who generally had no idea about the death camps, only about their Jewish neighbors suddenly disappearing from the neighborhood?
Or, say, compared to the American people not knowing much about several massacres in Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq (e.g. the Haditha massacre)? Or, in an increasingly controversial order, to some of the actions of the IDF in the occupied territories.
I would like to explicitly exclude things like encouraging the local forces to commit atrocities by giving them financial or military aid, since it gets very murky in a hurry. So, no Sabra & Shatila, no actions by US-financed militias, no actions by Luhansk/Donetsk forces, etc. Probably not worth going further back in time and looking into British actions in SA, or Belgian in Congo.
I'm asking because Germans are brought up to feel collective guilt for the WWII atrocities and for not having done anything to stop it, and it seems to work well so far, though the effects are slowly fading, as the last the death camp survivors pass away. On the other hand, Russians and other allied soldiers (but especially the Russians) committed rape and often crimes against civilians during the liberation of Europe, but it is never a big topic of discussion... not even in Germany. And it is not just winners vs losers, since the Japanese people, nominally the losers, don't feel remorse for whatever Japanese forces did in China, even though it was on par with what Germans did in Europe.
The vast majority of Americans seem to have no trouble ignoring our atrocities in the Middle East, the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict. I don't think the availability of information matters much. Cultural and historical conditions seem to matter far more.
"the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict"
Quantitatively or qualitatively, or both? I can believe numerically more people may have been involved over the many years of Iraq and Afghanistan, but was there much deliberate rape, torture and execution of civilians?
And did the USA kill 15% of the population of Afghanistan or Irak ? Because that's what happenned in Chechen.
Sorry for a nitpick: Chechen is an adjective. The region is called Chechnya.
Wiki says 25,000 to 100,000 since 1999 - not all would be Russian killings. So your 15% is too high. In actual numbers it’s estimated that about 1 million died in Iraq since 2003.
That's an important correction, but it's also worth clarifying that your numbers there aren't directly comparable either. We need to distinguish the two types of blame here. There's an important moral difference between deaths that we directly caused, and those that would not have happened if he hadn't invaded. That is: we're far more morally culpable for deaths due to US troops (collateral damage, deliberate murder/rape, etc.) than for deaths due to intra-Iraq sectarian violence unleashed by taking down Saddam.
In either case the deaths were (in some sense) caused by the US, but the second category isn't parallel to the deaths in Chechnya as I understand it.
I was going to add that not all were attributable to the US, however the figures for Chechnya I quoted from wiki were not all attributable to Russia either. I accept the correction in general thoiugh.
You're not including the First Chechen War?
American troops killed *1 million* Iraqis? That's...I mean, if you're going to exaggerate, I guess you might as well do it by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Why not be bold?
Where did I say that?
I don't believe it was the *policy* of the US military to commit atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Officially, Americans were supposed to be winning hearts and minds. However, there certainly were atrocities, like the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Graib, and individuals like Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who reportedly would shoot at Iraqi civilians for fun.
Well, it is probably not an official policy of Russia to massacre civilians. Though they seem to do it a lot and on a large scale, with balaclavas and what not. But the US military, not just rogue individuals, is not without blame, either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaqi_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Mosul_airstrike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Shinwar_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narang_night_raid
When there is a military force in an occupied or invaded country, atrocities are the default. There is too much of a power differential, and too little goodwill in either direction, between soldier and enemy civilian.
Strict discipline and training can reduce the impact. I suspect the US military puts more emphasis on this than the Russian military, and also that the US military is just more disciplined, period. Nevertheless, it seems impossible to me that any amount of training could improve the relationship between soldiers and an occupied population to, say, how cops and black people in the US feel about each other right now.
You have been spending too much time watching CNN and not enough actually in black neighborhoods[1], if you think your last simple sentence bears any close resemblance to the truth on the ground.
Black people appreciate cops even more than suburban whites -- because they actually live where crime is a serious concern. That's one good reason blacks often serve *as* police officers. (For example, the current racial makeup of the LAPD is 30% white, 50% Hispanic, 9% black, 8% Asian.)
Blacks know very well how important the cop's job is, and they can see it making a diference in their actual lives much more than a young white person at a nice college in a safe town participating in her first march for racial justice.
It is also nevertheless also true that blacks are picked out for police surveillance and inquiry at much higher rates than non-blacks, and that can piss them off even when they get the reason for it. So the relationship is definitely fraught, and complicated. But it in no way resembles the trivial black-and-white (so to speak) cartoon that pundits on the tube offer for entertainment purposes.
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[1] Yes, I've personally lived in a neighborhood that was majority working-class black.
Rape? Probably not. Torture and execution? The military obviously claims they didn't do these things deliberately, but there was and continues to be so goddamned much of it that I simply don't believe them.
I’d add that American involvement in Vietnam to Iraq has drawn enormous public opposition and protests, so I wouldn’t say Americans have no problem ignoring those atrocities. Sure it’s legal to protest in the US but Russia is no Soviet Union or China either, I expected more visible opposition despite the circumstances
It may be legal to protest in Russia, but you can't say that there is a "war", because that comes with 15 years prison time.
You probably can protest against a "special anti-Nazi operation" though.
Didn't someone get into trouble for having a blank sign?
If we're comparing the US war on Iraq and Afghanistan to the Russian war on Ukraine, I think the rate of killing and destruction should be included.
> the scope of which Russia has yet to eclipse in the Ukraine conflict
Christ, they only invaded two months ago, and directly killed probably ~10,000 civilians so far. So ~5,000 per month... and ~$63 billion in property damage in just one month.
Shared beliefs and cultural assumptions can make either atrocities or human rights more or less likely, but no individual is responsible for the crimes of another, nor should he/she be expected to feel guilt for another’s actions. I would avoid the expectation of collective remorse, or the assignment of collective blame to individuals not involved in the action.
Taxpayers are financing these alleged atrocities. Does that not make them culpable?
No. Christ was right when he said “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” We live in a world with governments but the government isn’t us. “We the people” is a nice aspiration for the government, not a moral albatross for the populace to carry.
Does that rule only apply to states, or also to other organizations? I.e. may one blamelessly render unto Nestlé what is theirs even if doing so supports atrocities? How about choosing to support fledgling states, such as the Islamic State a few years back – completely blameless?