Isegoria

A diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place

April 10th, 2023

William Dalrymple shares many stories about India during The Anarchy that could come from Game of Thrones or its sequel House of the Dragon:

The main architect of the Afghan incursions into northern India, Ahmad Shah Durrani, had now returned to the mountains of his homeland to die. He was suffering the last stages of an illness that had long debilitated him, as his face was eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy or some form of tumour.

Soon after winning his greatest victory at Panipat, Ahmad Shah’s disease began consuming his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place. By 1772, maggots were dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and his food as he ate.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

We must be willing to consider what might at first seem absurd and unworkable

April 9th, 2023

A recent paper proposes the deployment of volcanic geothermal energy from the Yellowstone Caldera Supervolcano, using a completely new copper-based engineering approach:

The proposed ideas, if implemented, would allow the production of green, 100% emission-free energy for the United States of America and possibly beyond, to last the years and centuries to come, while having the great added benefit of forestalling the Yellowstone Supervolcano from potentially ever erupting again.

To consider such an implementation, the reader is asked to be willing to think big and bold. We must be willing to consider what might at first seem absurd and unworkable, only later to realize that it is absolutely feasible and realistic to implement, with even today’s current technologies, and with some imagination.

[…]

By utilizing thermally conductive copper pillars on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a means to draw up this Supervolcano’s mighty energy reserve from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed on a sufficient scale and number, to power the entire USA, from a single, multi-redundant facility that utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern. In so doing, over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy from the Supervolcano’s magma chamber will potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again. In 2017, NASA conducted a study to determine the feasibility of preventing the Yellowstone Supervolcano from erupting. The results of this study showed that cooling the magma chamber by 35% would be enough to forestall another eruption.

[…]

This paper proposes to make a power generation facility on the Yellowstone Caldera, with a satellite view shown in Fig. 1 from Google Maps, capable of generating well over twice the projected electrical energy usage in the year 2050 of 5.5 Quadrillion Watt hours for the entire United States of America. We therefore assume well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy over the course of one full year used by the USA.

[…]

The Arabelle steam turbines run on high pressure, superheated steam. Steam is made from water and heat. Shoshone Lake is next to the Yellowstone Caldera [37]. This fresh water lake covers over 8000 acres and has a maximum depth of over 200 ft. Water from this lake could be used for the steam production. In the proposed design laid out in this paper, all water taken from the lake would be returned to the lake, cleaner than it was originally, at ambient temperature, and free of any contamination, as all major plumbing in this proposed design is made with copper, a standard plumbing material. As with all plumbing, scaling buildup on the inside of the piping and corrosion resistance on the outside of the plumbing in contact with the Earth are important considerations for the long-term life, water flow performance, maintenance of all necessary thermal conduction and heat transfer capabilities of the piping. To prevent scaling buildup on the inside of the plumbing, the water passing through these pipes must first be demineralized. All extracted minerals will be returned to the lake with the returning water, so as not to affect the lake’s chemistry, and thus the aquatic inhabitance of the lake. External corrosion resistance of the copper plumbing in contact with the Earth will be obtained through minimally adequate gold (with a nickel interface) plating, as gold is nearly impervious to corrosion. By taking these measures, there should be no degradation of geothermal energy extraction over time.

Based on numerous studies, and also reported by the U.S. Geological Survey the temperature in Yellowstone Supervolcano’s magma chamber is approximately 1475°F, and its size is approximately 40 km long by 80 km across, similar in size to the flat, overlying Yellowstone Caldera. The Yellowstone Caldera is large enough for all of the required Arabelle steam turbines and all other required hardware and plumbing to fulfill the proposal set forth in this paper. In terms of depth, the top of the magma chamber is 8 km below the surface, and the bottom of the magma chamber is 16 km below the surface.

In the most general terms, this paper proposes to use metallic thermal conduction as a means to transport the tremendous thermal energy flux of the Yellowstone Supervolcano magma chamber to the surface for utilization. Looking at the selected material of copper, reveals that its melting point is 1983°F, which is well above the internal temperature of the Yellowstone Supervolcano magma chamber. At this temperature, copper has a thermal conductivity value of 350 W/(m x °K). Copper is an excellent metallic thermal conductor, lacking in corrosion resistance. The use of gold (with a nickel interface) plating on copper that may be in contact with the Earth is recommended. This plating has a melting point at or higher than the copper it is meant to protect. Furthermore, this minimalist plating method, used extensively in the electronics industry, provides superior corrosion protection while imposing relatively minimal impact on the facility cost, the overall thermal conduction, and heat transfer performance of the geothermal energy extraction process.

[…]

As the magma chamber is 8 km below the surface, 8 kilometer-long copper cylinders (mostly hollow) would be required for this work. We propose that these cylinders be made in 10 m long segments that interconnect with one another at their ends.

[…]

As water is pumped down the center bore hole under pressure, high pressure, superheated steam would be forced to return up through each of the surrounding smaller diameter bore holes of the copper cylinder. This returning steam would exit the copper cylinders at the top, above the surface of the caldera, and be piped through the Arabelle steam turbines generating electrical power. After exiting the steam turbines, this exhausted steam would then be collected and cooled with a water condensing network. The re-condensed water would be brought to ambient temperature before returning the water back to Shoshone Lake. This entire process would be done in parallel for all 100 of the copper cylinders simultaneously. In so doing, all 1000 Arabelle stream turbines would be generating power at the same time. This electrical power would be put onto the nationwide power grid, supplying electrical energy to the entire USA, and possibly beyond.

Posted in Science, Technology | 9 Comments »

The Boston Tea Party was provoked by fears that the East India Company might be let loose on the thirteen colonies

April 8th, 2023

In 1780, the East India Company found itself more than £10 million in debt and unable to pay its own salaries, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), and its poor reputation had global consequences:

In America, the Patriots had turned on the King, partly as a result of government’s attempts to sell the stockpiles of East India Company tea, onto which was slapped British taxes: the Boston Tea Party, an event that built support for what would become the American War of Independence by dumping 90,000 pounds of EIC tea, worth £9,659 (over £1 million today), in Boston harbour, was in part provoked by fears that the Company might now be let loose on the thirteen colonies, much as it had been in Bengal.

[…]

Even as Haidar was pursuing a terrified Munro back to Madras, British forces in America were already on their way to the final defeat by Washington at Yorktown, and the subsequent surrender of British forces in America in October.

[…]

In Parliament, a year later, one MP noted that ‘in Europe we have lost Minorca, in America 13 provinces, and the two Pensacolas; in the West Indies, Tobago; and some settlements in Africa’. ‘The British Empire,’ wrote Edmund Burke, ‘is tottering to its foundation.’

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Intelligence correlates positively with wanting more social freedom and economic freedom, but these two political dimensions are negatively correlated

April 7th, 2023

Conservatives aren’t stupid, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard notes, depending on how you slice the data:

Depending on whether we look at political ideology or political party, the gaps can reverse in the general population, but they aren’t large.

Non-White voters drag down the Democrats, so when looking at only Whites the left has a consistent lead in intelligence, but it’s pretty small. However, it is true that extreme liberal Whites are the smartest group with a mean of 107 IQ versus their counterparts extreme conservative Whites with a mean of 98.5, close to a 10 IQ gap.

[…]

So, intelligence correlates positively with wanting more freedom as in social freedoms (abortions, free speech etc.) and economic freedom (less government involvement), but these two political dimensions are negatively correlated. This brings forth the libertarian high IQ rarity pattern. Because the ideologies are negatively correlated, people who are high in both views are rare, but their IQs are particularly elevated. Noah notes that if you combine the political ideologies into a single component, this correlates .40 with IQ. That’s pretty high!

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

A single day’s delay would have allowed the two armies to unite

April 6th, 2023

On 25 August 1780, the East India Company’s largest concentration of troops in southern India marched out of Madras and headed south towards Kanchipuram, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), to confront Haidar:

At their head was Sir Hector Munro, the Highland general who fifteen years earlier had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat when he broke Shuja ud-Daula’s lines at Buxar. This time, however, he had only managed to muster 5,000 sepoys – they were unpaid and semi-mutinous – and they were facing a force 100,000 strong.

[…]

Twenty-five miles to the north, another Scot, Colonel William Baillie, had just received instructions to rendezvous with Munro at Kanchipuram with a second force of 2,800, most of whom were local sepoys, accompanied by a few hundred newly arrived Highlanders. If these two small armies were able to join up, they would only be outnumbered ten to one, and might have some chance of taking on the Mysore troops; but divided as they were, neither force stood much chance of success against so well trained and disciplined a force as Haidar had assembled, an army that, according to Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘covered the plains like waves of an angry sea, and with a trail of artillery that had no end’.

[…]

Munro should have waited for Baillie to join him, but, as impatient as ever, and hearing that there were ample provisions and a full magazine in Kanchipuram, which Haidar might otherwise have seized for himself, Munro headed off with his small force, when a single day’s delay would have allowed the two armies to unite.

[…]

On the evening of 25 August, Baillie camped on the banks of the small river Kortalaiyar, north-west of Madras. That evening, the monsoon broke and it rained heavily and without a break for twelve hours. By first light, the Kortalaiyar had become a raging torrent, impossible to ford. It was eleven days before Baillie was able to move his troops across it, and, by the time he did so, Tipu had managed to interpose 11,000 of his best cavalry between Baillie and Munro.

[…]

The officer in charge of the relief column begged Baillie to move immediately, and to use the cover of darkness to rejoin Munro’s force in the shelter of the Kanchipuram temple, now only nine miles away. But Baillie ignored the advice and did not move off until first light. It proved a fatal hesitation.

[…]

Thirty minutes later, troops in the front ranks reported hearing the distant sound of beating kettledrums and blaring nageshwaram (long Tamil oboes). As the Company troops watched, a great cloud of dust rose up in the distance. This soon resolved into several long lines of scarlet columns advancing steadily towards them.

[…]

The Scots assumed it was Munro coming to save them and gave out a loud cheer. It was only when the columns grew closer that they realised it was actually Haidar’s main army – some 25,000 cavalry accompanied by thirty battalions of sepoys – closing in to seal their fate. ‘We were quickly surrounded by Haidar’s horse,’ wrote one Highland officer. ‘They were followed by his guns which joined a kind of semicircle round us, the number of about 50 at least, which opened upon us by degree.’

[…]

In the course of the following hour, under Baillie’s direction, the Scottish square repulsed thirteen successive charges from the Mysore cavalry. Failing to break the line, Haidar ordered a pause, and brought forward his biggest guns.

[…]

Around 8 a.m., the heaviest cannonade of all began from close range, with grapeshot scything down the ranks of thickly packed redcoats. ‘Our fate was for above an hour to be exposed to the hottest cannonade that ever was known in India,’ wrote Baillie’s younger brother John. ‘We were mowed down by scores.’ Then two ammunition tumbrils were hit and both blew up simultaneously, making ‘large openings in both lines, on which their Cavalry made the first impression. They were followed by the Elephants, which completed our overthrow.’

[…]

After expending all the remaining gunpowder, Baillie tried to surrender and tied his handkerchief to his sword which he held aloft. He and his deputy, David Baird, both ordered their men to ground their arms; but straggling fire from some of his sepoys who had not heard the order meant that the Mysore cavalry disregarded the surrender and refused to give quarter. Instead the horsemen rode in and began to cut down the disarmed and defenceless troops; ‘a most shocking massacre ensued … It was in vain to ask for the quarter they offered readily enough, but cut you down the moment you laid down your arms.’

[…]

According to a lieutenant in the 73rd Highland Regiment, ‘The last and most awful struggle was marked by the clashing of arms and shields, the snorting and kicking of horses, the snapping of spears, the glistening of bloody swords, oaths and imprecations; concluded with the groans and cries of mutilated men, wounded horses tumbling to the ground amid dying soldiers, the hideous roaring of elephants as they trampled about and wielded their dreadful chains amongst both friends and foes.’

[…]

Around 200 prisoners were taken. Most of the rest of the force of 3,800 was annihilated.

[…]

‘They began by pulling the buttons of my coat which they took for silver,’ wrote the wounded John Baillie. ‘They then tore the knee buckles out of my breeches & the coat off my back. One of them putting the butt end of his firelock to the back of my neck pinned me to the ground with it whilst another tried to pull off my boots.’

[…]

He got off one with difficulty and enraged I suppose at not being able to pull off the other, he gave me a cut on my right thigh that laid it open to the bone. Shortly after another fellow, passing by, wantonly thrust his sword into my other thigh … After they were gone, one of Haidar’s sepoys perceiving that I still lived, raised me up, placed me against a tree and gave me some water to drink.

[…]

I lay there by an artillery man with his head shot off, with my face to the ground. By this time my wounds began to grow stiff, so that I was unable to move from the position I was in, or to defend myself from the swarms of flies which, getting into my wounds, seemed determined to suck the little blood that was left in me.

[…]

Eventually, Baillie was brought before Haidar strapped to a gun carriage and made to sit at his feet in a semicircle with the other survivors, as the Sultan rewarded his officers in proportion to the number of heads or corpses of European soldiers they produced. ‘Some had been dragged to his camp, so mangled and besmeared with blood and dust that they were unrecognisable; some had dropped speechless on the road and had been refused any water by their guards.’

[…]

There were so many Company amputees that there were not enough Indian medical orderlies to bear them away from the front lines.

[…]

Of the 7,000 prisoners Tipu captured in the course of the next few months of warfare against the Company, around 300 were forcibly circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam and given Muslim names and clothes.

[…]

Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear dresses – ghagra cholis – and entertain the court in the manner of nautch (dancing) girls.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Oligarchy is inherently leftist, just as monarchy is inherently rightist

April 5th, 2023

Our problem, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) explains, is that the world is run by a regime with a long-run structurally leftist bias:

It evolves leftisms. On Mars, the same regime structure would evolve the same ideas. Oligarchy is inherently leftist, just as monarchy is inherently rightist.

[…]

The engineering problem is that when a marketplace of ideas makes final decisions, the marketplace is polluted with power. When the marketplace is polluted with power, its ideas compete not just on their wisdom, but on their ability to generate power—for example, their power to attract (or reject) funding.

This is why leftism always wins: leftism is what generates more power. Leftism always has more energy and more excitement. This is because its ideas generate power—leftist ideas always involve impact on the world. If science is put in charge of science, science will favor ideas which make science more powerful, which will be or become leftist ideas. Leftism at bottom is just the natural and inevitable human urge to matter.

Everything is science, or at least works like science. If diplomats and foreign-policy experts are put in charge of foreign policy, they will want to take over the world. If they can. If we can. Why wouldn’t they? How can isolationism compete in the market for foreign-policy ideas? Isolationism is to foreign-policy jobs as rat-poison is to rats.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | 7 Comments »

Hastings, ever the gentleman, decided to let Francis fire first

April 4th, 2023

Philip Francis was wrongly convinced that Warren Hastings was responsible for all the corruption in Bengal, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), and challenged him to a duel:

The two duellists, accompanied by their seconds, met at 5.30 on the morning of 17 August at a clump of trees on the western edge of Belvedere, a former summer house of Mir Jafar, which had since been bought by Warren Hastings.

Hastings had hardly slept. He spent much of the night composing a farewell letter to his beloved wife Marian, to be delivered in the event of his death. It began: ‘My heart bleeds to think what your sufferings and feelings must be, if ever this letter be delivered into your hands … I shall leave nothing which I regret to lose but you. How much I have loved you, and how much, beyond all that life can yield, I still love you, He only knows. Do not, my Marian, forget me. Adieu, most beloved of women. My last thoughts will be employed on you. Remember and love me. Once more farewell.’

[…]

It was at this point that it became clear, as Pearse noted, ‘that both gentlemen were unacquainted with the modes usually observed on these occasions’; indeed, neither of the two most powerful British intellectuals in Bengal seemed entirely clear how to operate their pistols. Francis said he had never fired one in his life, and Hastings said he could only remember doing so once. So both had to have their weapons loaded for them by their seconds who, being military men, knew how to operate firearms.

Hastings, ever the gentleman, decided to let Francis fire first. Francis took aim and squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped, but the pistol misfired. Again, Francis’s second had to intervene, putting fresh priming in the pistol and chapping the flints. ‘We returned to our stations,’ wrote Hastings. ‘I still proposed to receive the first fire, but Mr F twice aimed, and twice withdrew his pistol.’ Finally, Francis again ‘drew his trigger,’ wrote Pearse, ‘but his powder being damp, the pistol again did not fire. Mr Hastings came down from his present, to give Mr Francis time to rectify his priming, and this was done out of a cartridge with which I supplied him finding they had no spare powder. Again the gentlemen took their stands and both presented together.’

‘I now judged that I might seriously take my aim at him,’ wrote Hastings. ‘I did so and when I thought I had fixed the true direction, I fired.’

His pistol went off at the same time, and so near the same instant that I am not certain which was first, but believe mine was, and that his followed in the instant. He staggered immediately, his face expressed a sensation of being struck, and his limbs shortly but gradually went under him, and he fell saying, but not loudly, ‘I am dead.’

[…]

They found the wound not dangerous, having entered the side before the seam of the waistcoat a little below the shoulder, and passing through both muscles and within the skin which covers the backbone, was lodged within visible distance of the skin in the opposite side.

[…]

The doctor later reported that Hastings’ musket ball ‘pierced the right side of Mr Francis, but was prevented by a rib, which turned the ball, from entering the thorax. It went obliquely upwards, passed the backbone without injuring it, and was extracted about an inch to the left side of it. The wound is of no consequence and he is in no danger.’

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas — but not in the same places

April 3rd, 2023

Hydrogen almost never turns up in oil operations, and it wasn’t thought to exist within the Earth much at all, but a 108-meter borehole in Mali yielded 98% hydrogen:

The Malian discovery was vivid evidence for what a small group of scientists, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas — but not in the same places. These researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth continuously generate hydrogen, which percolates up through the crust and sometimes accumulates in underground traps. There might be enough natural hydrogen to meet burgeoning global demand for thousands of years, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model that was presented in October 2022 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.

[…]

Critically, natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas. By contrast, natural hydrogen is always being made afresh, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished, says Prinzhofer, who has consulted on the project. “Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable source of energy, not a fossil one,” he says.

[…]

One kilogram of hydrogen holds as much energy as a gallon of gasoline (just under 4 liters). But at ambient pressures, that same kilogram of hydrogen occupies more space than the drum of a typical concrete mixing truck. Pressurized tanks can hold more but add weight and costs to vehicles. Liquefying hydrogen requires chilling it to –253°C — usually a disqualifying expense.

These storage issues — along with a lack of pipelines and distribution systems — are the main reasons why, in the race to electrify cars, batteries have won out over fuel cells, which convert hydrogen to electricity.

[…]

The oil and gas industry has punctured Earth with millions of wells. How could it have overlooked hydrogen for so long? One reason is that hydrogen is scarce in the sedimentary rocks that yield oil and gas, such as organic-rich shales or mudstones. When compacted and heated, the carbon molecules in those rocks consume any available hydrogen and form longer chain hydrocarbons. Any hydrogen the oil encounters as it migrates to a porous “reservoir” rock such as a sandstone tends to react to form more hydrocarbons. Hydrogen can also react with oxygen in rocks to form water or combine with carbon dioxide to form “abiotic” methane. Microbes gobble it up to make yet more methane.

Even if the hydrogen survives, geologists thought, it should not accumulate. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule of all: It can leak through minerals and even metals. If Earth were producing hydrogen, it seemed unlikely to hang around.

And so, historically, when well loggers cataloged their borehole emanations, they rarely bothered to measure for hydrogen.

[…]

Yet the hints were there for those who did look. According to Zgonnik, a geochemist who recently published a review of natural hydrogen, the first scientific discussion of it dates to 1888, when Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table, reported hydrogen seeping from cracks in a coal mine in Ukraine. Zgonnik, who was born and raised in Ukraine, says reports of hydrogen are relatively common throughout the former Soviet Union — because Soviet researchers were looking for it. They held to a now discredited theory that would have required significant amounts of natural hydrogen to produce oil from nonliving processes rather than from ancient life.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

Clive walked out of the drawing room ‘to visit the water closet’

April 2nd, 2023

Clive of India was the first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency. He returned to Britain with immense wealth, but he was also held partly responsible for the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. William Dalrymple describes (in The Anarchy) how Clive died:

He had always suffered from depression, and twice in his youth had tried to shoot himself. Since then, despite maintaining an exterior of unbroken poise and self-confidence, he had suffered at least one major breakdown. To this burden was now added agonising stomach pains and gout. Not long after his return to England, on 22 November 1774, at the age of only forty-nine, Robert Clive committed suicide in his townhouse in Berkeley Square.

His old enemy Horace Walpole wrote about the first rumours to circulate around London. ‘There was certainly illness in the case,’ he wrote, ‘but the world thinks more than illness. His constitution was exceedingly broken and disordered, and grown subject to violent pains and convulsions. He came to town very ill last Monday. On Tuesday his physician gave him a dose of laudanum, which had not the desired effect. On the rest, there are two stories; one, that the physician repeated the dose; the other that he doubled it himself, contrary to advice. In short, he has terminated at 50, a life of so much glory, reproach, art, wealth, and ostentation!’

The truth was more unpleasant: Clive had actually cut his jugular with a blunt paperknife. He was at home with his wife Margaret, his secretary Richard Strachey and Strachey’s wife Jane. Jane Strachey later recorded that after a game of whist, which had been interrupted by Clive’s violent stomach pains, Clive walked out of the drawing room ‘to visit the water closet’. When after some time he failed to return, Strachey said to Margaret Clive, ‘You had better go and see where my Lord is.’ Margaret ‘went to look for him, and at last, opening a door, found Lord Clive with his throat cut. She fainted, and servants came. Patty Ducarel got some of the blood on her hands, and licked it off.’

Clive’s body was removed at the dead of night from Berkeley Square to the village church in Moreton Say where he was born. There the suicide was buried in a secret night-time ceremony, in an unmarked grave, without a plaque, in the same church where he had been baptised half a century earlier.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Ozempic and Wegovy do help people lose weight

April 1st, 2023

The popularity of GLP-1 receptor agonists, like Ozempic and Wegovy, has skyrocketed, because they do help people lose weight:

Though a certain amount of lean loss is inevitable with significant weight reduction (usually about 25% of total weight loss), the goal is to increase the body’s overall proportion of lean mass – in other words, to improve body composition.

[…]

However, from the information we can scrape together based on sub-cohort data, these “miracle drugs” start to look a bit less miraculous. In 2021’s STEP 1 trial — the first trial demonstrating the efficacy of semaglutide as a treatment for adult obesity — a subset of 140 patients underwent DEXA scans for body composition analysis. Among these patients, lean mass accounted for approximately 39% of total weight loss — substantially higher than ideal. In a substudy of 178 patients from the SUSTAIN 8 trial on semaglutide as a diabetes treatment, the average proportion of lean mass loss was nearly identical at 40%, despite lower doses and less total weight loss than in the STEP 1 trial.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Nearly seven feet tall, with oiled moustaches that projected from his face like a pair of outstretched eagle’s wings, he was a man of immense physical strength

March 30th, 2023

William Dalrymple describes (in The Anarchy) Shuja ud-Daula and his troops:

Shuja ud-Daula, son of the great Mughal Vizier Safdar Jung and his successor as Nawab of Avadh, was a giant of a man. Nearly seven feet tall, with oiled moustaches that projected from his face like a pair of outstretched eagle’s wings, he was a man of immense physical strength. By 1763, he was past his prime, but still reputedly strong enough to cut off the head of a buffalo with a single swing of his sword, or lift up two of his officers, one in each hand.

One hostile Maratha source described him as ‘no ordinary man. He is a demon by nature … who, if he puts his foot on the hind leg of an elephant and seizes its tail, that elephant cannot get away.

Jean Law described him as ‘the handsomest person I have seen in India. He towers over Imad ul-Mulk by his figure, and I believe also in qualities of the heart and temperament. He is occupied in nothing except pleasure, hunting and the most violent exercises.’

[…]

Shuja’s forces were even more diverse. There were contingents of Persian Qizilbash cavalry in their red felt hats, and 3,000 pigeon-coated and long-booted Afghan Rohillas, who had once fought with Ahmad Shah Durrani; they were mounted on both horse and camels, and armed with large-bore armour-piercing swivel guns. Then there was Madec’s regiment of French deserters, still, somewhat ironically, dressed in the uniform of the Company. But perhaps Shuja’s most feared crack troops were a large force of 6,000 dreadlocked Hindu Naga sadhus, who fought mainly on foot with clubs, swords and arrows, ash-painted but entirely naked, under their own much-feared Gossain leaders, the brothers Anupgiri and Umraogiri.

Posted in War | 2 Comments »

America really is the greatest country in the world

March 29th, 2023

Around the wide world, Scott Alexander notes, all cultures share a few key features:

Anthropologists debate the precise extent, but the basics are always there. Language. Tools. Marriage. Family. Ritual. Music. And penis-stealing witches.

Nobody knows when the penis-stealing witches began their malign activities. Babylonian texts include sa-zi-ga, incantations against witchcraft-induced impotence. Ancient Chinese sources describe suo yang, the penis retracting into the body because of yin/yang imbalances. But the first crystal-clear reference was the Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century European witch-hunters’ manual. It included several chapters on how witches cast curses that apparently (though not actually) remove men’s penises.

In 2001, journalist Frank Bures came across an unusual BBC article about a mob that had killed twelve people in Nigeria, believing them to be penis-stealing witches, and then, few months later, he came across a similar article about five people in Benin. He travels the world looking for cases:

I want you to picture the scene. An American journalist has been traveling the world in search of a dying variety of witchcraft. Now he’s reached the end of the line, the wildest and most primitive region of China. With great difficulty, he has procured an interpreter. Together, they consult a shaman, who sends them on a quest to find a second, wiser shaman who specializes in ghosts. After many trials and tribulations, he reaches the second, wiser, ghost-specialist shaman, who invites him into his home, filled with strange charms and magical images. “Tell me your question,” says the shaman. And Bures asks: “What do you know about penis-stealing witches?”

…and the shaman answers: “Haha, no one believes in that stuff anymore.”

As a nature documentary, Nurse’s book The Geography of Madness is kind of a bust, Alexander notes, but he rescues it with his insight into culture-bound mental illness:

A culture-bound mental illness is one that only affects people who know about it, and especially people who believe in it. Often it doesn’t make sense from a scientific point of view (there’s no such thing as witches, and the penis can’t retract into the body). It sometimes spreads contagiously: someone gets a first case, the rest of the village panics, and now everyone knows about it / believes in it / is thinking about it, and so many other people get it too.

Different cultures have their own set of culture-bound illnesses. Sometimes there are commonalities — many cultures have something something penis something witches — but the details vary, and a victim almost always gets a case that matches the way their own culture understands it.

THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MAKING IT UP. I cannot stress this enough. There are plenty of examples of people driving metal objects through their penis in order to pull it out of their body or prevent the witches from getting it or something like that. There is no amount of commitment to the bit which will make people drive metal objects through their penis. People have died from these conditions — not the illness itself, which is fake, but from wasting away worrying about it, or taking dangerous sham treatments, or getting into fights with people they think caused it. If you think of it as “their unconscious mind must be doing something like making it up, but their conscious mind believes it 100%”, you will be closer to the truth, though there are various reasons I don’t like that framing.

[…]

The phrase “run amok” comes from Malaysia, where it referred to a specific phenomenon: some person who had been unhappy for a long time would suddenly snap, kill a bunch of people, then say they had no memory of doing it. Malaysian culture totally rolls with this and doesn’t hold it against them; the unhappiness is a risk factor for possession by a tiger spirit, which commits the killings. Although Malays have been doing this since at least the 1700s, there are some fascinating parallels with modern US mass shootings that suggest ~~the damn tiger spirits have finally made it to the US~~ common psychological origins.

I have seen exactly one demonic possession case in my ten years as a psychiatrist. The man fell to the ground, mouth foaming, chanting strange syllables and the names of Biblical demons. My attending doctor at the time — one of those people who somehow manages to be an expert in everything — was an expert in demonic possession, and told us that he was in no way psychotic, antipsychotics wouldn’t help him (except insofar as they help everyone by decreasing all behaviors), and he needed to “work through his issues”. The patient was uncooperative — he was only visiting MDs because the local bishop wouldn’t call in an exorcist until he got a psych exam — and eventually left against medical advice.

After going down the list, Bures asks the correct next question: how do we know whether or not our own mental illnesses are just as culture-bound as the Japanese or Malaysians’? Cultures that believe in witches have witch-related culture-bound illnesses; cultures that believe in demons have demon-related ones. We believe in science, so we should expect sciencey-sounding culture-bound illnesses, and these might be hard to tell apart from other, more physical conditions. So how suspicious should we be, and of what?

[…]

Anorexia was mostly unknown in the West, until becoming “trendy” in the mid-1800s. During that period, doctors reported high prevalence of anorexia among “hysterics”, but the fad ended after about ten or twenty years, and it went back to being basically unknown. In 1983, famous singer Karen Carpenter died of anorexia, thrusting it back into the national news, and suddenly lots of people (in the West) were anorexic again.

Meanwhile, foreign doctors who trained in the West went back to their home countries, searched far and wide for it, and found almost nothing. The few cases they did see didn’t resemble the typical Western version at all – for example, one Hong Kong psychiatrist was able to find a woman who refused to eat out of grief when a boyfriend left her, but she didn’t think she was fat, or feel any cultural pressure to be thinner. The absence of anorexia abroad was especially surprising since anorexics tend to end up in the hospital with extremely noticeable malnutrition that doesn’t really mimic anything else. It’s not really possible to hide severe anorexia the way you can hide severe depression.

In 1994, Hong Kong got its own Karen Carpenter — a young girl died of anorexia, setting off a national panic and many public awareness campaigns. Near-instantly, anorexia rates shot up to the same level as the West, with the appropriate number of people presenting to hospital ERs with severe malnutrition.

[…]

My own experience with sensitization: every so often my house gets infested by ants and some of them crawl on me. Then I get rid of the ants, but even after they’re gone, for a couple of weeks I can still feel hallucinatory ant-crawling feelings on my arms. You can think of this as setting a threshold that balances false positives and false negatives – my nervous system will always be noisy, get random itches, etc, when do I interpret any particular pattern of impulses as a crawling ant? If I set the threshold too high, I will miss real ants; if I set it too low, I will get fake ants. Presumably there’s some optimal threshold, and that threshold is lower when I know there are ants around and probably one will crawl on me soon. Somehow my brain does the proper Bayesian math under the hood, and so I am afflicted with a few weeks of false positives. Honestly I am getting away lucky; in delusional parasitosis this becomes a trapped prior and they feel it forever.

Bodily sensations seem to be especially sensitive to this.

[…]

The ancient Romans loved war. If you loved war, and killed a lot of people, that made you glorious. Nobody worried it meant you were a bloodthirsty psychopath. Or if you were, it’s fine! The past twelve emperors were bloodthirsty psychopaths! Their families, concubines, and guards were all bloodthirsty psychopaths! You’ll fit right in! Relatedly, it doesn’t seem like the Romans had PTSD.

In our society, it’s commonly believed that War Is Hell, and if you enjoy it too much, you might be a bloodthirsty psychopath. Relatedly, estimates of what percent of veterans get PTSD range from 15% to 85%. I’m not sure the 85% number is accurate, but if it was, and I was a veteran, and I wasn’t getting PTSD, I might start worrying that this was starting to signal negative things about me. If my unconscious felt the same way, maybe I’d develop a few PTSD symptoms, just to be safe.

We’re conducting a massive experiment in how far you can take this. People now believe that you can be traumatized by hearing someone express the wrong opinion during a college class — and that intellectuals with sensitive souls and diverse equity-loving justice-promoting minorities will be traumatized most of all. I suspect all of this is true, if you believe it.

[…]

“Okay, but gender dysphoria?”

Hopefully now the answer is obvious: it is and it isn’t. People have been having gender identity crises since the beginning of time. There’s some evidence some of this is biological; people with closer to opposite-sex hormone profiles and so on are more likely to end up transgender, and very off-base hormone profiles seem to produce gender issues pretty consistently. But in our modern society, which has a category/guess/narrative around this, it seems to happen orders of magnitude more often than in other societies. And in societies with different categories/guesses/narratives, it happens differently — a lot of people who are transgender today would have been cross-dressers or lesbians 30 years ago.

[…]

So fine, yes, gender dysphoria shares some resemblance to culture-bound illnesses; I would put it around the same level as anorexia. But be careful: everything shares some resemblance to everything. What if transphobia is our culture’s version of the penis-stealing witch panic? Wise but evil women (gender studies professors) are using incomprehensible black arts (post-modernism) to make people lose their penises. Sure, those people are losing their penises through voluntary sex-change surgery, but this is just another case of the general principle that we replace the magical explanations natural to other cultures with the medicalized explanations natural to our own. And sure, other culture’s panics involved fake/illusory penis loss and ours involves the real thing, but this is just another case of the general principle that modern Western civilization turns other culture’s myths into reality. When they were telling tall tales about men who flew like birds, we went ahead and invented the airplane; when they imagined golems, we created working robots. Now we’ve finally gotten around to penis-stealing witches.

America really is the greatest country in the world.

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »

Nothing is more becoming than their behaviour to an enemy

March 28th, 2023

William Dalrymple describes (in The Anarchy) how Monsieur Law de Lauriston fought at the Battle of Helsa, near Bodhgaya, the site of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, on 15 January 1761:

A well-aimed ball from a 12-pounder killed the mahout of the Emperor’s elephant. Another stray shot wounded the elephant itself, which careered off the field, carrying the Emperor with it. Meanwhile, Mir Jafar, reverting to his usual devious tactics, had managed with large bribes to corrupt Shah Alam’s commander, Kamgar Khan, as well as several other courtiers in his retinue, ‘who soon crossed sides and joined the forces of the Nawab’, reported the French soldier of fortune Jean-Baptiste Gentil.

[…]

Moved by Law’s bravery, the Company commander, John Carnac, dismounted, and without taking a guard, but bringing his most senior staff officers, walked over on foot, and pulling their ‘hats from their heads, they swept the air with them, as if to make him a salaam’, pleading with Law to surrender: ‘You have done everything that can be expected from a brave man, and your name shall undoubtedly be transmitted to posterity by the pen of history,’ he begged. ‘Now loosen your sword from your loins, come amongst us, and abandon all thoughts of contending with the English.’

Law answered that if they would ‘accept this surrendering himself just as he was, he had no objections; but that as to surrendering himself with the disgrace of his being without a sword, it was a shame he would never submit to; and that they must take his life if they were not satisfied with the condition. The English commanders, admiring his firmness, consented to his surrendering himself in the manner he wished to; after which the Major shook hands with him, in their European manner, and every sentiment of enmity was instantly dismissed from both sides.’

Later, in the Company camp, the historian was appalled by the boorishness of Mir Jafar’s Murshidabad soldiers who began to taunt the captured Law, asking ‘where is the Bibi [Mistress] Law now?’

Carnac was furious at the impropriety of the remark: ‘This man,’ he said, ‘had fought bravely, and deserves the attention of all brave men; the impertinences which you have been offering him may be customary amongst your friends and your nation, but cannot be suffered in ours, for whom it is a standing rule never to offer injury to a vanquished foe.’ The man whom had taunted Law, checked by this reprimand, held his tongue and did not answer a word. He went away much abashed, and although he was a commander of importance … No one spoke to him any more, or made a show of standing up at his departure.

The incident caused Ghulam Hussain Khan to pay a rare compliment to the British, a nation he regarded as having wrecked his motherland:

This reprimand did much honour to the English; and it must be acknowledged, to the honour of these strangers, that their conduct in war and battle is worthy of admiration, just as, on the other hand, nothing is more becoming than their behaviour to an enemy, whether in the heat of action, or in the pride of success and victory.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

The ones who could solve the problem didn’t appear any “brighter” in conversation than the ones who couldn’t

March 27th, 2023

When OpenAI released GPT-2, S.R. Constantin remarked that it was disturbingly good:

The scary thing about GPT-2-generated text is that it flows very naturally if you’re just skimming, reading for writing style and key, evocative words.

[…]

If I just skim, without focusing, they all look totally normal. I would not have noticed they were machine-generated. I would not have noticed anything amiss about them at all.

But if I read with focus, I notice that they don’t make a lot of logical sense.

[…]

The point is, if you skim text, you miss obvious absurdities. The point is OpenAI HAS achieved the ability to pass the Turing test against humans on autopilot.

The point is, I know of a few people, acquaintances of mine, who, even when asked to try to find flaws, could not detect anything weird or mistaken in the GPT-2-generated samples.

There are probably a lot of people who would be completely taken in by literal “fake news”, as in, computer-generated fake articles and blog posts. This is pretty alarming. Even more alarming: unless I make a conscious effort to read carefully, I would be one of them.

Robin Hanson’s post Better Babblers is very relevant here. He claims, and I don’t think he’s exaggerating, that a lot of human speech is simply generated by “low order correlations”, that is, generating sentences or paragraphs that are statistically likely to come after previous sentences or paragraphs.

[…]

I’ve interviewed job applicants, and perceived them all as “bright and impressive”, but found that the vast majority of them could not solve a simple math problem. The ones who could solve the problem didn’t appear any “brighter” in conversation than the ones who couldn’t.

I’ve taught public school teachers, who were incredibly bad at formal mathematical reasoning (I know, because I graded their tests), to the point that I had not realized humans could be that bad at math — but it had no effect on how they came across in friendly conversation after hours. They didn’t seem “dopey” or “slow”, they were witty and engaging and warm.

[…]

Whatever ability IQ tests and math tests measure, I believe that lacking that ability doesn’t have any effect on one’s ability to make a good social impression or even to “seem smart” in conversation.

If “human intelligence” is about reasoning ability, the capacity to detect whether arguments make sense, then you simply do not need human intelligence to create a linguistic style or aesthetic that can fool our pattern-recognition apparatus if we don’t concentrate on parsing content.

[…]

The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that the error lies with me rather than the text. This is not a safe assumption in a post-GPT2 world. Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)

Posted in Education, Technology | 3 Comments »

Hat-wearers have no equals in the art of firing their artillery and musquetry, with both order and rapidity

March 26th, 2023

William Dalrymple describes (in The Anarchy) how Clive and his troops were caught off-guard, outnumbered and in danger of being surrounded — but they kept their powder dry:

Then, towards noon, the skies began to darken, thunder boomed and a torrential monsoon storm broke over the battlefield, soaking the men and turning the ground instantly into a muddy swamp. The Company troops made sure to keep their powder and fuses dry under tarpaulins; but the Mughals did not. Within ten minutes of the commencement of the downpour, and by the time Clive had reappeared on the roof of the hunting lodge having changed into a dry uniform, all Siraj’s guns had fallen completely silent.

Imagining that the Company’s guns would also be disabled, the Nawab’s cavalry commander, Mir Madan, gave the order to advance, and 5,000 of his elite Afghan horse charged forward to the Company’s right: ‘the fire of battle and slaughter, that had hitherto been kept alive under a heap of embers, now blazed out into flames,’ wrote Ghulam Hussain Khan.

But as the nation of Hat-wearers have no equals in the art of firing their artillery and musquetry, with both order and rapidity, there commenced such an incessant rain of balls and bullets, and such a hot-endless firing, that the spectators themselves were amazed and confounded; and those in the battle had their hearing deafened by the continual thunder, and their eyesight dimmed by the endless flashing of the execution.

Among those killed was Mir Madan himself, ‘who made great efforts to push to the front, but was hit by a cannon ball in his stomach and died’.

[…]

At this point, Clive’s deputy, Major Kilpatrick, seeing several Mughal batteries being abandoned, in defiance of orders and without permission, advanced to hold the abandoned positions. Clive sent angry messages forward, threatening to arrest Kilpatrick for insubordination; but the act of disobedience won the battle.