Disrupters of the world unite!

Friday, February 17th, 2017

Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class suggests that America lost its taste for risk, and Edward Luce opens his review by poking a bit of fun at innovative start-ups:

Walk into any start-up company in America and you will likely see an almost identical decor: the walls will have been dutifully stripped of paint; the workplace will be littered with the same multicoloured pouffes; and most of its denizens will be wearing a variation on the casual hipster uniform. In an age of hyper-individualism, entrepreneurs strike a remarkably similar pose. The same applies to those who have refurbished their university common areas, set up corporate “chill-out zones”, or stripped their downtown apartments to look like a Silicon Valley unicorn. Everyone wants that creative energy to rub off on them. Disrupters of the world unite!

Flag Football Is More Dangerous

Friday, February 17th, 2017

Flag football is more dangerous than tackle football:

The study, which examined 3,794 players in grades 2-7 in two tackle football leagues and one flag football league, is one of the largest to compare injury rates in the different types of football. It was published online last week in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine.

[...]

All injuries that resulted in loss of playing time were recorded. An injury was considered severe if it resulted in a concussion, fracture or ligament tear. All other injuries were considered nonsevere.

Across all leagues, 128 injuries were reported out of 46,416 exposures—that is, a practice or a game. The overall injury rate was 2.76 injuries per 1,000 exposures, which Dr. Peterson notes is similar to the injury rate in high school football.

Tackle football players in the study reported 2.6 injuries per 1,000 exposures, compared with 5.77 injuries per 1,000 exposures in flag football. While tackle football players reported concussions at a slightly higher rate, the difference with flag players wasn’t statistically significant.

Dr. Peterson theorizes that tackle football players suffer concussions individually, whereas in flag football, concussions often result from two people running into each other. Looking at the injury logs, he noticed, “concussions seemed to come in pairs in the flag league.”

We should spend less

Thursday, February 16th, 2017

Arnold Kling shares what he believes about education:

1. The U.S. leads the world in health care spending per person, but not in health care outcomes. Many people look at that and say that health care costs too much in the U.S., and we should be able to get the same our better outcomes by sending less. Maybe that is correct, maybe not. That is not the point here. But —

2. the U.S. leads the world in K-12 education spending per student, but not in student outcomes. Yet nobody says that education costs too much and that we should spend less. Except —

3. me. I believe that we spend way too much on K-12 education.

4. We spend as much as we do on education in part because it is a sacred cow. We want to show that we care about children. (Yes, “showing that you care” is also Robin Hanson’s explanation for health care spending.)

[...]

8. I do not expect educational outcomes to be any better under a voucher system. That is because I believe in the Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions do not make a difference.

9. However, a competitive market in education would drive down costs, so that the U.S. would get the same outcomes with much less spending.

Overgrowth in Certain Brain Areas Associated With Autism

Wednesday, February 15th, 2017

Autism is associated with overgrowth in certain brain areas:

The study, led by scientists at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and published in Nature, focused on 106 high-risk infants—those with autistic older siblings—and 42 low-risk babies. Researchers imaged the babies’ brains at 6, 12 and 24 months of age. Diagnoses of autism usually take place around age 2.

Of the 106 high-risk infants with brain scan at all three time points, 15 went on to develop autism. Their scans showed that by 12 months, there was significant overgrowth in several brain areas, including those involved in communication and in processing sensory information, compared with infants in the low-risk group and high-risk kids who weren’t later diagnosed with autism.

Xenu’s Paradox

Wednesday, February 15th, 2017

Alec Nevala-Lee describes Xenu’s Paradox:

If there’s one overwhelming conclusion to be drawn about [L. Ron] Hubbard’s career, it isn’t that he wrote science fiction, or even that he was influenced by its ideas. It’s that he ended up writing science fiction almost against his will, and for much of his life, he seems to have actively despised it.

[...]

Most of his stories displayed little, if any, interest in science itself, an attitude that extended to his protagonists. The heroes of Hubbard’s adventure yarns were invariably tall, virile, and masculine, while the central figures in his science fiction and fantasy stories were more likely to be henpecked weaklings. As Isaac Asimov wrote of his first meeting with Hubbard: “He was a large-jawed, red-haired, big and expansive fellow who surprised me. His heroes tended to be frightened little men who rose to meet emergencies, and somehow I had expected Hubbard to be the same.” His constant use of such characters reflected his low opinion of his audience, and even when he offered up a more conventional lead, as in the relentlessly sour series The Kilkenny Cats, the result reeked of contempt.

The war offered Hubbard the chance to become the kind of hero that he had always wanted to be:

Campbell wrote to Heinlein: “I imagine that the thing that would really satisfy [Hubbard’s] nature . . . would be a chance to command a sub sent out to raid Tokyo harbor. I wouldn’t permit him to, if I were running the Navy. He’d probably try to up ship and bombard Hirohito’s hovel with his deck gun, just for the hell of it.”

As it turned out, Hubbard alienated his superiors in Australia and Massachusetts, attacked two nonexistent submarines off the coast of Oregon, and fired without authorization in Mexican waters, causing him to be relieved of his command. He would later say that he had been crippled and nearly blinded in action — he really suffered from a duodenal ulcer — and he spent much of the war in the hospital, although he continued to play the charming rogue in public. In late 1944, Asimov attended a party at which Hubbard told stories, played the guitar, and effortlessly dominated Heinlein and the author L. Sprague de Camp, who listened “quietly as pussycats.” The writer Jack Williamson, who was also there, came away with a different impression: “I recall his eyes, the wary, light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old West, watching me sharply as he talked as if to see how much I believed. Not much.”

Before long, the mask began to crack, and Hubbard grew visibly depressed. His appearance startled his friends — Campbell wrote that Hubbard was “a quivering psychoneurotic wreck” after the war, and that “his conversation was somewhat schizoid at points.” The reasons for this downturn are unclear, although de Camp may have come closest to the truth in a letter to Asimov: “What the war did was to wear [Hubbard] down to where he no longer bothers with the act.”

One of those who noticed Hubbard’s fragile mental state was Heinlein, who had spent the war at the Philadelphia Navy Yard with de Camp and Asimov. He had recruited Hubbard — on Campbell’s recommendation — for a think tank in which science fiction writers gathered on weekends to brainstorm responses to the kamikaze threat. None of their ideas were ever used in combat, but Heinlein was moved by Hubbard’s tales of being repeatedly bombed, sunk, and wounded, and he evidently encouraged Hubbard to have a sexual relationship with his wife Leslyn. Hubbard later recalled: “He almost forced me to sleep with his wife.”

After the war, Hubbard briefly lived with the Heinleins in Laurel Canyon, where they set up a shared working space. Heinlein was undoubtedly impressed by Hubbard, whom he credited with introducing him to the plot formula of “the man who learned better,” and he introduced him to Jack Parsons, a rocket engineer in Pasadena with an interest in black magic. Hubbard became housemates with Parsons in December 1945, and he took part in occult rituals before the two men had a falling out, caused in part by Hubbard’s affair with Parsons’s lover Sara Northrup. Hubbard married her the following year, without bothering to divorce his first wife.

Definitely an odd circle. Anyway, Hubbard moved on from science fiction — sort of:

“Terra Incognita: The Mind,” which marked the inauspicious debut of dianetics in print, was published in the Winter/Spring 1950 issue of The Explorers Club Journal. Hubbard’s membership in the Explorers Club, a scientific society based in New York, had long been a feather in his cap. He had applied years earlier on the strength of some unremarkable travels in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, and after he was accepted, he took enormous pride in the achievement, frequently mentioning the club in his stories and using its address on his personal letterhead.

In the article, Hubbard provides a brief description of dianetics, his new science of the mind, and makes the strange claim that he developed it to provide expedition leaders with a way to screen team members for mental problems, as well as a form of emergency medicine in the field. It was a clear attempt to frame his work in terms of how he liked to see himself — as an adventurer and man of action. The piece aroused no perceptible response, but it sheds a revealing light on the audience that he was hoping to reach. Hubbard wanted to attract explorers and men of the world. Instead, he ended up with science fiction fans.

And they weren’t his first, or even his second, choice. Hubbard had been working on dianetics for years, and he had approached a number of professional societies with offers to share his research. None of them took the bait, and he ultimately returned to a proven market, writing to Campbell in the spring of 1949. At the editor’s invitation, Hubbard and his pregnant wife Sara moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, not far from where Astounding had recently relocated. Campbell could have collaborated with him at a distance, as he had with so many other writers, but he seems to have decided early on that he wanted to keep this one close.

When the two men met again, Campbell was impressed with Hubbard’s appearance, which was newly composed and confident, and he became convinced that the author had healed himself using his own techniques. He was primed to be receptive. Like Hubbard, Campbell had grown depressed after the war. Atomic weaponry had always been a staple of science fiction, but the reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led him to publish a series of bleak postnuclear stories, and he became obsessed with making a discovery that would save the world from the bomb.

Over the following year, Campbell worked intensively with Hubbard to develop dianetics into a science that could prevent a nuclear catastrophe. His goal was to turn Hubbard’s “rules of thumb” into something that his readers could accept. Hubbard himself took a more casual approach, and he spent much of that summer looking into jobs in Hollywood. For a working writer, dianetics was just one angle among many, and Hubbard was cheerfully willing to allow Campbell to turn it into whatever he thought it needed to be.

What emerged was rather different from what Hubbard had initially envisioned. It was a theory of the brain as a kind of computer that could be damaged by recordings, or engrams, implanted when it was unconscious. The treatment, called auditing, required no special equipment, and it could be conducted by an auditor and a “preclear” in any quiet room. After entering a state of reverie, the preclear would relive memories going back to the period before birth. If successful, the subject would be left with total recall, a heightened intellect, and freedom from psychosomatic illness — a “clear” free at last to achieve his or her full potential.

When the first article on dianetics appeared in the May 1950 issue of Astounding, followed by the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, it seemed unlike anything else Hubbard had ever written. Campbell — who appears anonymously in several of its case studies — wrote some of the text, borrowing terms and ideas from the new discipline of cybernetics to give it a veneer of scientific respectability. Still, it’s a truly weird book, with a level of sexual explicitness that must have taken many readers by surprise: “Mother is saying, ‘Oh, I can’t live without it. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. Oh, how nice. Oh, do it again!’ and father is saying, ‘Come! Come! Oh, you’re so good. You’re so wonderful. Ahhh!’”

On the whole, however, its tone is unexpectedly restrained. Hubbard calls it a provisional theory, subject to revision, and he concludes: “For God’s sake, get busy and build a better bridge!” In fact, it was conceived as the beginning of an ongoing scientific revolution. Campbell saw the newly founded Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth as a think tank for the superior brains that dianetics would produce. Many of the earliest converts were science fiction fans, who had always believed that a major discovery would emerge from their ranks. And no one was more surprised by its success than Hubbard, who embraced his sudden celebrity and boasted to his agent: “I’m dragging down Clark Gable’s salary.”

Campbell thought that he had found his life’s work, but the dream quickly fell apart. Once it became clear that dianetics would be a greater financial windfall than anyone had anticipated, Hubbard grew convinced of his own infallibility. (One of his few works of fiction from this period, Masters of Sleep, is an Arabian Nights tale that turns halfway through into a piece of propaganda for dianetics, which has rendered psychiatry obsolete.) Money was spent as quickly as it came in, and a series of messy internal disputes led Campbell to resign. As Asimov later observed: “I knew Campbell and I knew Hubbard, and no movement can have two Messiahs.”

Hubbard subsequently said that Campbell became “bitter and violent” after his ideas were rejected, while Campbell, who had staked his position and reputation on dianetics, dismissed Scientology years afterward as “intellectual garbage.” He also claimed: “It was, as a matter of fact, I, not Ron, who originally suggested that it should be dropped as a psychotherapy, and reconstituted as a religion. Because only religions are permitted to be amateurs.” It’s impossible to verify this statement, although the notion of a religious cult founded by scientists frequently recurs in the stories that Campbell published, and the editor Lloyd Eshbach — to whom Hubbard allegedly made his famous remark that a religion would be a good way to make money — said in a memoir that the plans for the church were drawn up in Campbell’s kitchen.

With Campbell out of the picture, Hubbard published no more stories for decades, but a strain of science fiction remained in his work, and it grew even stronger after he set up shop in Wichita, Kansas, where a businessman named Don Purcell had offered to underwrite his research. Many of the disciples who followed him there owed their first exposure to his ideas to Astounding, and he began to tailor his teachings, consciously or otherwise, to the audience he had left, just as he had opportunistically turned to science fiction to satisfy his publishers and allowed the terminology of dianetics to be shaped by Campbell.

Is Romantic Kissing A Human Universal?

Tuesday, February 14th, 2017

In a recent study, less than half of the cultures the researchers sampled engaged in romantic kissing:

We looked at 168 cultures and found couples kissing in only 46 percent of them. Societies with distinct social classes are usually kissers; societies with fewer or no social classes, like hunter-gatherer communities, are usually not. For some, kissing seems unpleasant, unclean, or just plain weird. Kissing is clearly a culturally variable display of affection.

No one knows the exact origins of the romantic kiss. Some say it evolved to help test potential partners’ health through taste, their genetic compatibility through the smell of their immune system, or their romantic interest and sexual compatibility. Alternatively, it might have evolved from “kiss feeding” — the practice of a mother chewing up food and pushing it into her infant’s mouth with her tongue. The earliest known reference to kissing is in the Vedas, a 3,500-year-old Sanskrit scripture. Many classical societies, including the Romans, were passionate about kissing.

At least 90 percent of today’s cultures have kissing of one type or another, but the majority of it is parents kissing their children. Far less is known about patterns of who kisses romantically and who does not, and why.

Shakespeare in the Bush

Monday, February 13th, 2017

Off and on from 1949 to 1953 Laura Bohannan and her husband lived among the Tiv tribe of southeastern Nigeria. After the harvest and before the planting season, the swamps rise, and during this period of enforced isolation, she found herself reading Hamlet, while the tribe spent their days drinking maize and millet beer and singing and telling stories:

“You should sit and drink with us more often. Your servants tell me that when you are not with us, you sit inside your hut looking at a paper.”

The old man was acquainted with four kinds of “papers”: tax receipts, bride price receipts, court fee receipts, and letters. [...] I did not wish them to think me silly enough to look at any such papers for days on end, and I hastily explained that my “paper” was one of the “things of long ago” of my country.

“Ah,” said the old man. “Tell us.” I protested that I was not a storyteller. Storytelling is a skilled art among them; their standards are high, and the audiences critical — and vocal in their criticism. I protested in vain. This morning they wanted to hear a story while they drank. They threatened to tell me no more stories until I told them one of mine. Finally, the old man promised that no one would criticize my style, “for we know you are struggling with our language.” “But,” put in one of the elders, “you must explain what we do not understand, as we do when we tell you our stories.” Realizing that here was my chance to prove Hamlet universally intelligible, I agreed.

The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals from the fire to place in the pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the proper style, “Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them.”

“Why was he no longer their chief?”

“He was dead,” I explained. “That is why they were troubled and afraid when they saw him.”

“Impossible,” began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, “Of course it wasn’t the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on.”

Slightly shaken, I continued. “One of these three was a man who knew things” — the closest translation for scholar, but unfortunately it also meant witch. The second elder looked triumphantly at the first. “So he spoke to the dead chief saying, ‘Tell us what we must do so you may rest in your grave,’ but the dead chief did not answer. He vanished, and they could see him no more. Then the man who knew things — his name was Horatio — said this event was the affair of the dead chief’s son, Hamlet.”

There was a general shaking of heads round the circle. “Had the dead chief no living brothers? Or was this son the chief?”

“No,” I replied. “That is, he had one living brother who became the chief when the elder brother died.”

The old men muttered: such omens were matters for chiefs and elders, not for youngsters; no good could come of going behind a chief’s back; clearly Horatio was not a man who knew things.

“Yes, he was,” I insisted, shooing a chicken away from my beer. “In our country the son is next to the father. The dead chief’s younger brother had become the great chief. He had also married his elder brother’s widow only about a month after the funeral.”

“He did well,” the old man beamed and announced to the others, “I told you that if we knew more about Europeans, we would find they really were very like us. In our country also,” he added to me, “the younger brother marries the elder brother’s widow and becomes the father of his children. Now, if your uncle, who married your widowed mother, is your father’s full brother, then he will be a real father to you. Did Hamlet’s father and uncle have one mother?”

His question barely penetrated my mind; I was too upset and thrown too far off-balance by having one of the most important elements of Hamlet knocked straight out of the picture. Rather uncertainly I said that I thought they had the same mother, but I wasn’t sure — the story didn’t say. The old man told me severely that these genealogical details made all the difference and that when I got home I must ask the elders about it. He shouted out the door to one of his younger wives to bring his goatskin bag.

Determined to save what I could of the mother motif, I took a deep breath and began again. “The son Hamlet was very sad because his mother had married again so quickly. There was no need for her to do so, and it is our custom for a widow not to go to her next husband until she has mourned for two years.”

“Two years is too long,” objected the wife, who had appeared with the old man’s battered goatskin bag. “Who will hoe your farms for you while you have no husband?”

“Hamlet,” I retorted, without thinking, “was old enough to hoe his mother’s farms himself. There was no need for her to remarry.” No one looked convinced. I gave up. “His mother and the great chief told Hamlet not to be sad, for the great chief himself would be a father to Hamlet. Furthermore, Hamlet would be the next chief: therefore he must stay to learn the things of a chief. Hamlet agreed to remain, and all the rest went off to drink beer.”

While I paused, perplexed at how to render Hamlet’s disgusted soliloquy to an audience convinced that Claudius and Gertrude had behaved in the best possible manner, one of the younger men asked me who had married the other wives of the dead chief.

“He had no other wives,” I told him.

“But a chief must have many wives! How else can he brew beer and prepare food for all his guests?”

I said firmly that in our country even chiefs had only one wife, that they had servants to do their work, and that they paid them from tax money.

It was better, they returned, for a chief to have many wives and sons who would help him hoe his farms and feed his people; then everyone loved the chief who gave much and took nothing — taxes were a bad thing.

I agreed with the last comment, but for the rest fell back on their favorite way of fobbing off my questions: “That is the way it is done, so that is how we do it.”

I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite right to marry his brother’s widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew they would disapprove of fratricide. More hopefully I resumed, “That night Hamlet kept watch with the three who had seen his dead father. The dead chief again appeared, and although the others were afraid, Hamlet followed his dead father off to one side. When they were alone, Hamlet’s dead father spoke.”

“Omens can’t talk!” The old man was emphatic.

“Hamlet’s dead father wasn’t an omen. Seeing him might have been an omen, but he was not.” My audience looked as confused as I sounded. “It was Hamlet’s dead father. It was a thing we call a ‘ghost.’” I had to use the English word, for unlike many of the neighboring tribes, these people didn’t believe in the survival after death of any individuating part of the personality.

“What is a ‘ghost?’ An omen?”

“No, a ‘ghost’ is someone who is dead but who walks around and can talk, and people can hear him and see him but not touch him.”

They objected. “One can touch zombis.”

“No, no! It was not a dead body the witches had animated to sacrifice and eat. No one else made Hamlet’s dead father walk. He did it himself.”

“Dead men can’t walk,” protested my audience as one man.

I was quite willing to compromise.

“A ‘ghost’ is the dead man’s shadow.”

But again they objected. “Dead men cast no shadows.”

“They do in my country,” I snapped.

The old man quelled the babble of disbelief that arose immediately and told me with that insincere, but courteous, agreement one extends to the fancies of the young, ignorant, and superstitious, “No doubt in your country the dead can also walk without being zombis.” From the depths of his bag he produced a withered fragment of kola nut, bit off one end to show it wasn’t poisoned, and handed me the rest as a peace offering.

“Anyhow,” I resumed, “Hamlet’s dead father said that his own brother, the one who became chief, had poisoned him. He wanted Hamlet to avenge him. Hamlet believed this in his heart, for he did not like his father’s brother.” I took another swallow of beer. “In the country of the great chief, living in the same homestead, for it was a very large one, was an important elder who was often with the chief to advise and help him. His name was Polonius. Hamlet was courting his daughter, but her father and her brother . . . [I cast hastily about for some tribal analogy] warned her not to let Hamlet visit her when she was alone on her farm, for he would be a great chief and so could not marry her.”

“Why not?” asked the wife, who had settled down on the edge of the old man’s chair. He frowned at her for asking stupid questions and growled, “They lived in the same homestead.”

“That was not the reason,” I informed them. “Polonius was a stranger who lived in the homestead because he helped the chief, not because he was a relative.”

“Then why couldn’t Hamlet marry her?”

“He could have,” I explained, “but Polonius didn’t think he would. After all, Hamlet was a man of great importance who ought to marry a chief’s daughter, for in his country a man could have only one wife. Polonius was afraid that if Hamlet made love to his daughter, then no one else would give a high price for her.”

“That might be true,” remarked one of the shrewder elders, “but a chief’s son would give his mistress’s father enough presents and patronage to more than make up the difference. Polonius sounds like a fool to me.”

“Many people think he was,” I agreed. “Meanwhile Polonius sent his son Laertes off to Paris to learn the things of that country, for it was the homestead of a very great chief indeed. Because he was afraid that Laertes might waste a lot of money on beer and women and gambling, or get into trouble by fighting, he sent one of his servants to Paris secretly, to spy out what Laertes was doing. One day Hamlet came upon Polonius’s daughter Ophelia. He behaved so oddly he frightened her. Indeed” — I was fumbling for words to express the dubious quality of Hamlet’s madness — “the chief and many others had also noticed that when Hamlet talked one could understand the words but not what they meant. Many people thought that he had become mad.” My audience suddenly became much more attentive. “The great chief wanted to know what was wrong with Hamlet, so he sent for two of Hamlet’s age mates [school friends would have taken a long explanation] to talk to Hamlet and find out what troubled his heart. Hamlet, seeing that they had been bribed by the chief to betray him, told them nothing. Polonius, however, insisted that Hamlet was mad because he had been forbidden to see Ophelia, whom he loved.”

“Why,” inquired a bewildered voice, “should anyone bewitch Hamlet on that account?”

“Bewitch him?”

“Yes, only witchcraft can make anyone mad, unless, of course, one sees the beings that lurk in the forest.”

I stopped being a storyteller and took out my notebook and demanded to be told more about these two causes of madness. Even while they spoke and I jotted notes, I tried to calculate the effect of this new factor on the plot. Hamlet had not been exposed to the beings that lurk in the forests. Only his relatives in the male line could bewitch him. Barring relatives not mentioned by Shakespeare, it had to be Claudius who was attempting to harm him. And, of course, it was.

For the moment I staved off questions by saying that the great chief also refused to believe that Hamlet was mad for the love of Ophelia and nothing else. “He was sure that something much more important was troubling Hamlet’s heart.”

“Now Hamlet’s age mates,” I continued, “had brought with them a famous storyteller. Hamlet decided to have this man tell the chief and all his homestead a story about a man who had poisoned his brother because he desired his brother’s wife and wished to be chief himself. Hamlet was sure the great chief could not hear the story without making a sign if he was indeed guilty, and then he would discover whether his dead father had told him the truth.”

The old man interrupted, with deep cunning, “Why should a father lie to his son?” he asked.

I hedged: “Hamlet wasn’t sure that it really was his dead father.” It was impossible to say anything, in that language, about devil-inspired visions.

“You mean,” he said, “it actually was an omen, and he knew witches sometimes send false ones. Hamlet was a fool not to go to one skilled in reading omens and divining the truth in the first place. A man-who-sees-the-truth could have told him how his father died, if he really had been poisoned, and if there was witchcraft in it; then Hamlet could have called the elders to settle the matter.”

The shrewd elder ventured to disagree. “Because his father’s brother was a great chief, one-who-sees-the-truth might therefore have been afraid to tell it. I think it was for that reason that a friend of Hamlet’s father — a witch and an elder — sent an omen so his friend’s son would know. Was the omen true?”

“Yes,” I said, abandoning ghosts and the devil; a witch-sent omen it would have to be. “It was true, for when the storyteller was telling his tale before all the homestead, the great chief rose in fear. Afraid that Hamlet knew his secret he planned to have him killed.”

The stage set of the next bit presented some difficulties of translation. I began cautiously. “The great chief told Hamlet’s mother to find out from her son what he knew. But because a woman’s children are always first in her heart, he had the important elder Polonius hide behind a cloth that hung against the wall of Hamlet’s mother’s sleeping hut. Hamlet started to scold his mother for what she had done.”

There was a shocked murmur from everyone. A man should never scold his mother.

“She called out in fear, and Polonius moved behind the cloth. Shouting, ‘A rat!’ Hamlet took his machete and slashed through the cloth.” I paused for dramatic effect. “He had killed Polonius.”

The old men looked at each other in supreme disgust. “That Polonius truly was a fool and a man who knew nothing! What child would not know enough to shout, ‘It’s me!’” With a pang, I remembered that these people are ardent hunters, always armed with bow, arrow, and machete; at the first rustle in the grass an arrow is aimed and ready, and the hunter shouts “Game!” If no human voice answers immediately, the arrow speeds on its way. Like a good hunter, Hamlet had shouted, “A rat!”

I rushed in to save Polonius’s reputation. “Polonius did speak. Hamlet heard him. But he thought it was the chief and wished to kill him to avenge his father. He had meant to kill him earlier that evening….” I broke down, unable to describe to these pagans, who had no belief in individual afterlife, the difference between dying at one’s prayers and dying “unhousell’d, disappointed, unaneled.”

This time I had shocked my audience seriously. “For a man to raise his hand against his father’s brother and the one who has become his father — that is a terrible thing. The elders ought to let such a man be bewitched.”

I nibbled at my kola nut in some perplexity, then pointed out that after all the man had killed Hamlet’s father.

“No,” pronounced the old man, speaking less to me than to the young men sitting behind the elders. “If your father’s brother has killed your father, you must appeal to your father’s age mates: they may avenge him. No man may use violence against his senior relatives.” Another thought struck him. “But if his father’s brother had indeed been wicked enough to bewitch Hamlet and make him mad that would be a good story indeed, for it would be his fault that Hamlet, being mad, no longer had any sense and thus was ready to kill his father’s brother.”

There was a murmur of applause. Hamlet was again a good story to them, but it no longer seemed quite the same story to me. As I thought over the coming complications of plot and motive, I lost courage and decided to skim over dangerous ground quickly.

“The great chief,” I went on, “was not sorry that Hamlet had killed Polonius. It gave him a reason to send Hamlet away, with his two treacherous age mates, with letters to a chief of a far country, saying that Hamlet should be killed. But Hamlet changed the writing on their papers, so that the chief killed his age mates instead.” I encountered a reproachful glare from one of the men whom I had told undetectable forgery was not merely immoral but beyond human skill. I looked the other way.

“Before Hamlet could return, Laertes came back for his father’s funeral. The great chief told him Hamlet had killed Polonius. Laertes swore to kill Hamlet because of this, and because his sister Ophelia, hearing her father had been killed by the man she loved, went mad and drowned in the river.”

“Have you already forgotten what we told you?” The old man was reproachful. “One cannot take vengeance on a madman; Hamlet killed Polonius in his madness. As for the girl, she not only went mad, she was drowned. Only witches can make people drown. Water itself can’t hurt anything. It is merely something one drinks and bathes in.”

I began to get cross. “If you don’t like the story, I’ll stop.”

The old man made soothing noises and himself poured me some more beer. “You tell the story well, and we are listening. But it is clear that the elders of your country have never told you what the story really means. No, don’t interrupt! We believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; therefore, there are always witches and it is we, the elders, who know how witches work. We told you it was the great chief who wished to kill Hamlet, and now your own words have proved us right. Who were Ophelia’s male relatives?”

“There were only her father and her brother.” Hamlet was clearly out of my hands.

“There must have been many more; this also you must ask of your elders when you get back to your country. From what you tell us, since Polonius was dead, it must have been Laertes who killed Ophelia, although I do not see the reason for it.”

We had emptied one pot of beer, and the old men argued the point with slightly tipsy interest. Finally one of them demanded of me, “What did the servant of Polonius say on his return?”

With difficulty I recollected Reynaldo and his mission. “I don’t think he did return before Polonius was killed.”

“Listen,” said the elder, “and I will tell you how it was and how your story will go, then you may tell me if I am right. Polonius knew his son would get into trouble, and so he did. He had many fines to pay for fighting, and debts from gambling. But he had only two ways of getting money quickly. One was to marry off his sister at once, but it is difficult to find a man who will marry a woman desired by the son of a chief. For if the chief’s heir commits adultery with your wife, what can you do? Only a fool calls a case against a man who will someday be his judge. Therefore Laertes had to take the second way: he killed his sister by witchcraft, drowning her so he could secretly sell her body to the witches.”

I raised an objection. “They found her body and buried it. Indeed Laertes jumped into the grave to see his sister once more — so, you see, the body was truly there. Hamlet, who had just come back, jumped in after him.”

“What did I tell you?” The elder appealed to the others. “Laertes was up to no good with his sister’s body. Hamlet prevented him, because the chief’s heir, like a chief, does not wish any other man to grow rich and powerful. Laertes would be angry, because he would have killed his sister without benefit to himself. In our country he would try to kill Hamlet for that reason. Is this not what happened?”

“More or less,” I admitted. “When the great chief found Hamlet was still alive, he encouraged Laertes to try to kill Hamlet and arranged a fight with machetes between them. In the fight both the young men were wounded to death. Hamlet’s mother drank the poisoned beer that the chief meant for Hamlet in case he won the fight. When he saw his mother die of poison, Hamlet, dying, managed to kill his father’s brother with his machete.”

“You see, I was right!” exclaimed the elder.

“That was a very good story,” added the old man, “and you told it with very few mistakes.” There was just one more error, at the very end. The poison Hamlet’s mother drank was obviously meant for the survivor of the fight, whichever it was. If Laertes had won, the great chief would have poisoned him, for no one would know that he arranged Hamlet’s death. Then, too, he need not fear Laertes’ witchcraft; it takes a strong heart to kill one’s only sister by witchcraft.

“Sometime,” concluded the old man, gathering his ragged toga about him, “you must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.”

The dangers of status competition

Sunday, February 12th, 2017

Status competition can have corrosive effects:

Neighbours of lottery winners often make extravagant status good purchases (Kuhn et al. 2011) and are more likely to go bankrupt (Agarwal, Mikhed, and Scholnick 2016). Card et al. (2012) and Ashraf et al. (2014) show that job satisfaction and performance suffer when there are direct rankings and explicit comparisons with others in the same group.

Status competition can kill you — if you’re a fighter pilot:

During the height of the [Battle of Britain], in the summer of 1940, two of Germany’s highest-scoring aces did something unexpected: they went deer hunting. Werner Mölders, commanding a squadron of fighters on the Channel Coast, was asked by Hermann Göring head of the German air force, to confer with him for three days at Karinhall, his country retreat. Mölders at first refused, as he was competing against Adolf Galland for the honour of being the highest-scoring German ace. Mölders relented only on the condition that Galland would also be grounded for three days. Göring, who had also been a fighter ace in World War I, agreed and brought Galland along on the hunting trip (Galland 1993).

So, in the middle of the defining conflict for the German air force, two of its best pilots had been pulled from the front line – and one of them was not brought because there was an operational or administrative need, but to maintain a ‘level killing field’ with his competition. Competition for status was intense amongst German pilots. It was behind the elaborate systems of awards and medals that pervaded the military. Similar awards are also common in many other walks of life, from academia to the top ranks of business and politics.

Most air forces during WWII devoted considerable bureaucratic attention to filing, witnessing, adjudicating, and aggregating the victory claims made by their pilots. In the German system, pilots had to give the grid coordinates, aircraft type, type of destruction (pilot bail-out, impact, explosion, and so on) and time to file a claim. The claim would have to be witnessed by another pilot to stand a chance of being accepted. Claims would be sent to a central office of the Luftwaffe for adjudication, where many would be rejected.

This elaborate system was necessary because awards and medals were closely tied to victory scores. The Luftwaffe awarded medals based on informal quotas. For example, in early 1942 for a pilot to have a chance of receiving the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, that pilot would have needed 100 victories.

We have data on the victory claims of more than 5,000 pilots for the entire conflict, 1939-45. These pilots filed claims that they had shot down 54,800 enemy planes. Victories were extremely unevenly distributed. The highest-scoring ace, Erich Hartmann, claimed more than 350 victories, and the top 100 pilots scored almost as many victories as the bottom 4,900. The maximum monthly victory score was 68, recorded in 1943 on the Eastern front.

These successes were bought at a high price (Figure 1). In an average month, 3.3% of pilots died. After two years of service, half the low-scoring pilots would have been killed. Amongst the better-performing pilots, only one-quarter would have survived. Towards the end of the war, loss rates became extremely high, averaging 25% or more from the spring of 1944 (Murray 1996).

Victory claims and exit rate among German fighter pilots, by month

Figure 2 summarises our key results. Good pilots – those whose average monthly victory score put them in the top 20% of the distribution – on average improved their victory score by 50%, from less than two to more than three a month, when the successes of their former peers were advertised. Pilots in the bottom 80% scored fewer victories overall, but also improved by a small margin. Strikingly, results are different for exit rates (‘exit’ usually meant death). Great pilots, on average, died more often, but they were not more likely to exit in times of peer recognition. The opposite was true for average and the poor pilots, whose exit rate increased by almost half. In other words, aces tried harder when a former colleague got a public pat on the back, but didn’t take many more risks. Average or poor pilots tried harder, were a bit more successful, but also tended to get themselves killed more often.

Victory and Exit

German pilots during WWII had the highest numbers of aerial victories ever recorded:

The top 100 pilots of all time are all German.

Real potential benefits without being a panacea

Saturday, February 11th, 2017

The empiricists’ anti-charter arguments that were trotted out against Betsy DeVos weren’t particularly empirical, Ross Douthat notes:

There’s no evidence that DeVos-backed charters actually visited disaster on Detroit’s students. Instead, the very studies that get cited to critique her efforts actually show the city’s charters modestly outperforming public schools.

That “modestly” is important, because it tracks with much of what we know about school choice in general — that it offers real potential benefits without being a panacea. Decades of experiments suggest that choice can save money, improve outcomes for very poor kids whose public options are disastrous, and increase parental satisfaction. (The last is no small thing!) But the available evidence also suggests that choice alone won’t revolutionize schools or turn slow learners into geniuses, that the clearest success stories are hard to replicate, and some experiments in privatization (like Louisiana’s recent voucher push) can badly disappoint.

So in DeVos, we have an education secretary who perhaps errs a little too much on the side of choice-as-panacea, overseeing (with limited powers) an American education bureaucracy that pretty obviously errs the other way. And wherever you come down on striking the right balance, it’s hard to see this situation as empirically deserving the level of political controversy that’s attached to it.

What happened when the U.S. got rid of guest workers?

Friday, February 10th, 2017

What happened when the U.S. got rid of guest workers?

A team of economists looked at the mid-century “bracero” program, which allowed nearly half a million seasonal farm workers per year into the U.S. from Mexico. The Johnson administration terminated the program in 1964, creating a large-scale experiment on labor supply and demand.

The result wasn’t good news for American workers. Instead of hiring more native-born Americans at higher wages, farmers automated, changed crops or reduced production.

What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read

Friday, February 10th, 2017

I wasn’t familiar with Steve Bannon, the White House’s chief strategist, before the Trump campaign, but his reading list feels awfully familiar:

Bannon, described by one associate as “the most well-read person in Washington,” is known for recommending books to colleagues and friends, according to multiple people who have worked alongside him. He is a voracious reader who devours works of history and political theory “in like an hour,” said a former associate whom Bannon urged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “He’s like the Rain Man of nationalism.”

[...]

Bannon’s 2015 documentary, “Generation Zero,” drew heavily on one of his favorite books, “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book explains a theory of history unfolding in 80- to 100-year cycles, or “turnings,” the fourth and final stage of which is marked by periods of cataclysmic change in which the old order is destroyed and replaced—a current period that, in Bannon’s view, was sparked by the 2008 financial crisis and has now been manifested in part by the rise of Trump.

[...]

Many political onlookers described Trump’s election as a “black swan” event: unexpected but enormously consequential. The term was popularized by Nassim Taleb, the best-selling author whose 2014 book Antifragile—which has been read and circulated by Bannon and his aides—reads like a user’s guide to the Trump insurgency.

It’s a broadside against big government, which Taleb faults for suppressing the randomness, volatility and stress that keeps institutions and people healthy. “As with neurotically overprotective parents, those who are trying to help us are hurting us the most,” he writes. Taleb also offers a withering critique of global elites, whom he describes as a corrupt class of risk-averse insiders immune to the consequences of their actions: “We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.”

[...]

Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed “neoreactionary” who blogs under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” attracted a following in 2008 when he published a wordy treatise asserting, among other things, that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.” When the organizer of a computer science conference canceled his appearance following an outcry over his blogging under his nom de web, Bannon took note: Breitbart News decried the act of censorship in an article about the programmer-blogger’s dismissal.

[...]

If Taleb and Yarvin laid some of the theoretical groundwork for Trumpism, the most muscular and controversial case for electing him president—and the most unrelenting attack on Trump’s conservative critics—came from Michael Anton, a onetime conservative intellectual writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus.

Thanks to an entree from Thiel, Anton now sits on the National Security Council staff. Initial reports indicated he would serve as a spokesman, but Anton is set to take on a policy role, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. A former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush’s National Security Council, Anton most recently worked as a managing director for Blackrock, the Wall Street investment firm.

Hiring Anton puts one of the key intellectual forces behind Trump in the West Wing. In his blockbuster article “The Flight 93 Election,” a 4,300-plus-word tract published in September 2016 under his pseudonym, Anton strikes many of the same notes as Taleb and Yarvin. “America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad,” he writes. He blasts conservatives as “keepers of the status quo” for refusing to take account of the need for “truly fundamental” change—especially a crackdown on immigration that he argues is promoting “ethnic separatism” and risks entrenching a permanent Democratic majority.

Strauss and Howe? Taleb? Moldbug? I think I’ve heard of ‘em.

You always have to have a plan B

Thursday, February 9th, 2017

Everybody fails, but not everybody responds to failure the same way, Mike Riggs notes, as he interviews Megan McArdle about The Up Side of Down:

Mike: You use the writing profession as an example of this.

Megan: You have to accept that being bad is part of learning to write. Most people who end up approaching professional writer status were always better at it than other kids. Then they get into the professional landscape and realize everyone else in the industry was also better at it than the other kids. This can be very traumatic for a lot of writers, and I’ve seen some of them just freeze. They don’t turn stuff in because as long as they haven’t turned it in, it’s not bad yet.

How do you hack that thinking? You say to yourself, “Look, I can rewrite garbage, I can’t rewrite nothing.”

Mike: It’s the iteration paradox. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, but you also miss a ton of the shots you do take when you’re first starting out. You have to do a thing over and over to get good at it, while somehow dealing with the fact that it’s really embarrassing and discomfiting to try hard at something and still be bad.

Megan: And the only way around that is to accept that failure is an essential part of the process.

You are not supposed to sit down and be Proust on your first pass. Proust wasn’t even Proust on the first pass. That means you have to see doing something badly as better than not doing anything at all. I won’t get fired for handing in 1,000 bad words. I will definitely get fired for not handing in anything.

After that, the next step is learning to recognize where and why you’re bad without rolling around on the floor, saying, “This is terrible, I’m obviously the world’s worst writer.” And you do that by looking at your bad work as a dipstick that measures where you can improve rather than one that measures your innate talents.

Mike: This speaks to the idea that learning how to do something new is good for you even if it doesn’t necessarily turn into a career.

Megan: We learn by doing stuff not well. That’s how people learn to play tennis. You don’t become good at it by creating a really elaborate theory of tennis ball physics, or else MIT would win Wimbledon every year. You hit a ball, you try to guess where it will go. It doesn’t go where you expect and then on the 100th time you finally hit it right. By hitting it wrong all those times, you learn to hit it right.

If you’ve never done anything you weren’t good at, you can’t learn the valuable skill of sucking at something but continuing to do it, which is how people get good at anything. And we have to make ourselves do it because doing something you aren’t good at is usually less rewarding than things that come more easily.

[...]

Mike Riggs: It seems like the best way to hedge against that kind of collapse at the institutional level is to be as diversified as possible at a personal level. Try things that are difficult, save as much as you can, contribute to a 401k. But even that is hard for lots of people.

Megan McArdle: The fact is you can’t assume nothing bad will happen. You could get hit by a truck tomorrow. Your company could go under. We should prepare for failure, which is why I always tell my readers to save 20% of their gross income. As you can imagine, this is not a popular suggestion with my readers.

I also advise people to have a year’s worth of expenses in an emergency fund. This was viewed, even by financial advisors, as quite conservative. But I spent two years being unemployed after getting what was supposed to be the golden ticket to a guaranteed job, which was an MBA from a top-five school. And that taught me there’s no such thing as a golden ticket. You always have to have a plan B. You always have to be thinking about what you’ll do if your company fails. Where will you go next? You should be maintaining connections in that industry, but you should also be living below your means. You should have a smaller mortgage than what you can afford. You should have more savings than you really need.

If you end up dying of cancer at the age of 40, you’ll have over-saved. But if you die of cancer at the age of 40, your biggest regret is not going to be that you didn’t spend more money while you were healthy. Your biggest regret is going to be about relationships and the people you didn’t call, so call your mother.

Introductory psychology textbooks lean left

Wednesday, February 8th, 2017

Introductory psychology textbooks lean left:

Writing in Current Psychology, Christopher Ferguson at Stetson University and his colleagues at Texas A&M International University conclude that intro textbooks often have difficulty covering controversial topics with care, and that whether intentionally or not, they are frequently presenting students with a liberal-leaning, over-simplified perspective, as well propagating or failing to challenge myths and urban legends.

[...]

Ferguson and his team examined textbook coverage of seven areas of research consisting of findings which might be considered particularly appealing or unappealing to textbook authors with liberal leanings, and/or which could be prone to alarmist interpretation. This included research on whether media violence incites aggression; the stereotype threat (the notion that performance differences between groups are exaggerated by the fear of conforming to stereotypes); the narcissism epidemic (the idea that today’s youth are more narcissistic than youth in the past); that smacking/spanking children leads to aggression and other negative outcomes; that there are multiple intelligences; that human behaviour is explained by evolutionary theories related to mate selection and sexual competition (in this case, the authors assumed liberal authors would prefer not to cover this research); and controversy around antidepressant medication.

The researchers looked to see if textbook authors presented the evidence as more definitive than it is in these areas, or only presented one side of the arguments. They found that there was biased treatment of media violence and stereotype threat by half or more of the books, and of multiple intelligences and spanking by a third. A quarter of books failed to deal with controversy around antidepressants. Evolutionary theories were neglected by a fifth of the books and presented in biased fashion by one quarter. “We believe that these errors are consistent with an indoctrination, however intentional, into certain beliefs or hypotheses that may be ‘dear’ to a socio-politically homogenous psychological community,” Ferguson and his colleagues said.

They also looked at textbook treatment of various psychology myths and urban legends, including the frequently exaggerated story of the murder of Kitty Genovese, which is often cited as a perfect example of the “bystander effect”: our reduced likelihood of intervening to help when in the company of a greater number of other people who could help. Nearly half the books perpetuated the myth that 33 witnesses watched the killing of Genovese without doing anything to help her. Meanwhile, nearly three quarters of the books failed to challenge the popular misconception that we only use ten per cent of our brains, or that listening to Mozart makes us smarter. And 70 per cent of the books gave the French neurologist Paul Broca undue credit for localising speech function in the brain: the researchers say that the theory of the cortical localisation of speech was first put forward by Ernest Auburtin. “It is surprising to see so few textbooks addressing common misconceptions about psychology,” they said.

[...]

After all, in recent years, we’ve also covered research by Richard Griggs at Florida State University that’s found biased textbook treatment of Milgram’s classic studies on obedience, outdated accounts of the story of Phineas Gage, biased coverage of Asch’s studies of conformity, and of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Psychology students: if you’re looking for a rounded and accurate introduction to the field , you could consider supplementing your textbook reading with regular visits to our Research Digest blog. Or maybe you do that already.

Shell shock after all

Tuesday, February 7th, 2017

Scientists assumed that explosive blasts affect the brain in much the same way as concussions from football or car accidents:

No one had done a systematic post-mortem study of blast-injured troops. That was exactly what the Pentagon asked Perl to do in 2010, offering him access to the brains they had gathered for research. It was a rare opportunity, and Perl left his post as director of neuropathology at the medical school at Mount Sinai to come to Washington.

Perl and his lab colleagues recognized that the injury that they were looking at was nothing like concussion. The hallmark of C.T.E. is an abnormal protein called tau, which builds up, usually over years, throughout the cerebral cortex but especially in the temporal lobes, visible across the stained tissue like brown mold. What they found in these traumatic-brain-injury cases was totally different: a dustlike scarring, often at the border between gray matter (where synapses reside) and the white matter that interconnects it. Over the following months, Perl and his team examined several more brains of service members who died well after their blast exposure, including a highly decorated Special Operations Forces soldier who committed suicide. All of them had the same pattern of scarring in the same places, which appeared to correspond to the brain’s centers for sleep, cognition and other classic brain-injury trouble spots.

Then came an even more surprising discovery. They examined the brains of two veterans who died just days after their blast exposure and found embryonic versions of the same injury, in the same areas, and the development of the injuries seemed to match the time elapsed since the blast event. Perl and his team then compared the damaged brains with those of people who suffered ordinary concussions and others who had drug addictions (which can also cause visible brain changes) and a final group with no injuries at all. No one in these post-mortem control groups had the brown-dust pattern.

Perl’s findings, published in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, may represent the key to a medical mystery first glimpsed a century ago in the trenches of World War I. It was first known as shell shock, then combat fatigue and finally PTSD, and in each case, it was almost universally understood as a psychic rather than a physical affliction.

[...]

A blast begins simply: A detonator turns a lump of solid matter into a deadly fireball. Within that moment, three distinct things happen. The first is the blast wave, a wall of static pressure traveling outward in all directions faster than the speed of sound. Next, a blast wind fills the void and carries with it any objects it encounters. This is the most manifestly destructive part of the blast, capable of hurling cars, people and shrapnel against buildings and roadsides. The remaining effects include fire and toxic gases, which can sear, poison and asphyxiate anyone within range.

The effects of all of this on the human body are myriad and more complicated than the blast itself. People who have been exposed to blasts at close range usually describe it as an overpowering, full-body experience unlike anything they have ever known. Many soldiers do not recall the moment of impact: it gets lost in the flash of light, the deafening sound or unconsciousness. Those who do remember it often speak of a simultaneous punching and squeezing effect, a feeling at once generalized and intensely violent, as if someone had put a board against your body and then struck it with dozens of hammers.

[...]

Very quickly [after WWI began], soldiers began emerging with bizarre symptoms; they shuddered and gibbered or became unable to speak at all. Many observers were struck by the apparent capacity of these blasts to kill and maim without leaving any visible trace. The British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett famously described the sight of seven Turks at Gallipoli in 1915, sitting together with their rifles across their knees: “One man has his arm across the neck of his friend and a smile on his face as if they had been cracking a joke when death overwhelmed them. All now have the appearance of being merely asleep; for of the several I can only see one who shows any outward injury.”

For those who survived a blast and suffered the mysterious symptoms, soldiers quickly coined their own phrase: shell shock.

[...]

One British doctor, Frederick Mott, believed the shock was caused by a physical wound and proposed dissecting the brains of men who suffered from it. He even had some prescient hunches about the mechanism of blast’s effects: the compression wave, the concussion and the toxic gases. In a paper published in The Lancet in February 1916, he posited a “physical or chemical change and a break in the links of the chain of neurons which subserve a particular function.” Mott might not have seen anything abnormal in the soldiers’ brains, even if he had examined them under a microscope; neuropathology was still in its infancy. But his prophetic intuitions made him something of a hero to Perl.

Mott’s views were soon eclipsed by those of other doctors who saw shell shock more as a matter of emotional trauma. This was partly a function of the intellectual climate; Freud and other early psychologists had recently begun sketching provocative new ideas about how the mind responds to stress.

[...]

Cernak became convinced [after the Balkans conflict of the 1990s] that blast ripples through the body like rings on a pond’s surface. Its speed changes when it encounters materials of different density, like air pockets or the border between the brain’s gray and white matter, and can inflict greater damage in those places. As it happens, physicists would later theorize some very similar models for how blast damages the brain. Several possibilities have now been explored, including surges of blood upward from the chest; shearing loads on brain tissue; and the brain bouncing back and forth inside the skull, as happens with concussion. Charles Needham, a renowned authority on blast physics, told me post-mortems on blast injuries have lent some support to all of those theories, and the truth may be that several are at play simultaneously.

A decade after her initial battlefield surveys in the Balkans, Cernak took a position at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she did animal research that bolstered her conviction about blast’s full-body effects. She found that even if an animal’s head is protected during a blast, the brain can sustain damage, because the blast wave transfers through the body via blood and tissue. Cernak also came to believe that blast injuries to the brain were cumulative and that even small explosions with no discernible effects could, if repeated, produce terrible and irreversible damage. Much of this would later be confirmed by other scientists.

This all sounds quite credible — but it doesn’t explain the many cases of PTSD from troops who never faced combat or suffered blast injuries.

The Stages of Grief at the Frontier

Monday, February 6th, 2017

Jakub J. Grygiel lays out the stages of geopolitical grief along the unquiet frontier:

Recounted in a biography written by Eugippius, Saint Severinus’s peregrinations along the Danubian frontier illustrate different stages of coping with a growing insecurity on a frontier that was gradually abandoned by Roman forces and harassed by small tribes roaming the area.

First, there is the gradual recognition that imperial forces were not what they used to be. The tangible presence of the empire was disappearing, and the towns were losing their main security providers. “So long as the Roman dominion lasted, soldiers were maintained in many towns at the public expense to guard the boundary wall. When this custom ceased, the squadrons of soldiers and the boundary wall were blotted out together.” But the gradual withdrawal of Roman troops did not seem to have had a shocking impact on the locals, who perhaps did not notice immediately that their security required the presence of armed men. Indeed, few consider how security and deterrence are maintained while peace reigns.

The Roman troop at Batavis (modern day Passau), however, held out. The place was itself a military base rather than a town; located on the confluence of two important rivers, the Danube and the Inn, it occupied important strategic real estate that most likely was deemed more valuable than other towns east of it. It was a remnant of a string of military outposts, and the soldiers there seemed to be severed from the bulk of the legions. At some point, “some soldiers of this troop had gone to Italy to fetch the final pay to their comrades.” They did not make it far because the barbarians marauding in the area killed them. For a while no one was aware of this massacre, but “one day, as Saint Severinus was reading in his cell, he suddenly closed the book and began to sigh greatly and to weep. He ordered the bystanders to run out with haste to the river, which he declared was in that hour besprinkled with human blood; and straightway word was brought that the bodies of the soldiers mentioned above had been brought to land by the current of the river.”

That was a shock.

The role of these few Roman soldiers was first and foremost one of reassurance. They could not have defended the small towns in case of a prolonged barbarian assault. They also did not maintain the safety of the surrounding areas, leaving it open to small but frequent barbarians incursions — and as the violent end of the few soldiers heading to obtain the overdue pay indicates, they could not even protect their own forces. Finally, these scarce imperial forces certainly did not serve as a “tripwire” because it was unlikely that, in case of a barbarian attack on them, Roman legions would have marched north in retaliation. In brief, they did not deter the barbarians. But they were there to reassure the locals. They were good enough to reassure, even if not good enough to deter and defend. And that is why when imperial forces melted away the locals were discouraged.

Second, after the reassuring presence of imperial might has vanished, the next stage does not include calls for defense or balancing or stronger walls. No. It is the stage of disbelief and self-delusion. As Roman power waned, the locals comforted themselves with the delusion that the threats did not exist or, if they did, that the menace was not great. Perhaps the enemies would seek other targets. Perhaps the walls would suffice. Perhaps the barbarians liked peace and commerce as much as they did. Perhaps they would just go away. Perhaps they would peacefully blend in. The list of possible justifications for this delusion is as long as it is wrong.

In the first town he visited, Asturis, Severinus warned the population that the enemy was indeed near and dangerous. They should repent, he told them. They should pray and fast, and they should unite by abandoning the search for the selfish fulfillment of material desires. Of course, as was to be expected from a complacent and materially satisfied polity, Severinus was laughed out of town.

People who are deluded — and do not see higher reasons for their own existence — will gladly justify their material self-satisfaction. Severinus left “in haste from a stubborn town that shall swiftly perish.” And perish Asturis did.

Third, in the next town, Comagenis, Severinus had more luck — the locals were on their next stage of grief. Because one man escaped from Asturis bringing the terrible news, the people of Comagenis could no longer ignore the hard fact that the barbarians were near and in search of destruction.

They recognized that security was a creation of force, not a self-sustaining reality.
But even before the technical question of how to defend themselves, the locals needed a reason to do it. They needed what Roman troops, however scant, had provided before: some reassurance. And this was Severinus’s greatest contribution: he reassured the local populations. He supplied the surviving towns with a firm motivation to resist and defend themselves, a reassurance that defense was worthwhile. With his presence the frontier “castles felt no danger. The trusty cuirass of fasting, and praiseworthy humility of heart, with the aid of the prophet, had armed them boldly against the fierceness of the enemy.”

This stage of geopolitical grief can be productive because it is characterized by the nascent desire to engage in the competition at hand. Security, these frontier towns realized, was not guaranteed by impersonal forces, but needed to be underwritten by somebody. And they had to do it themselves.

The problem at this stage is that the passage from delusion and panic to the desire to produce indigenous defense is not automatic. Before the “how” and the “where” of defending oneself, it is necessary to have a clear and firm answer to the “why.” A polity can have all the technical marvels, logistical supplies, and tactical skills, but without a strong motivation to defend itself they will all be useless. A castellum can be architecturally pleasing and surrounded by thick walls, but if the people inside it do not know who they are and why they should fight, it is as undefended as a wide open field.

In one of the Danubian towns, the local commander Mamertinus was concerned that the forces at his disposal were insufficient. (He was also future bishop — a pattern that replicated itself elsewhere in the decaying western Roman Empire. Bishops quickly became the main city authorities, caring not only for the spiritual life but also for the material survival of their flocks.) Mamertinus told Severinus: “I have soldiers, a very few. But I dare not contend with such a host of enemies. However, if thou commandest it, venerable father, though we lack the aid of weapons yet we believe that through thy prayers we shall be victorious.” Material capabilities are important, indeed essential; yet motivation and morale is even more so. Severinus stiffened their spines. Go out and engage the enemy, he told them. “Even if thy soldiers are unarmed, they shall now be armed from the enemy. For neither numbers nor fleshly courage is required, when everything proves that God is our champion.” Mamertinus’s troops went out, found some of the barbarians, attacked, and succeeded in routing most of them while obtaining a stash of their abandoned weapons.