Category: Uncategorized

Introverted and Extroverted blogs

I hadn’t previously read Jonathan Rauch’s popular article on introversion in The Atlantic. It’s simple, but pretty good, although I shudder to think that many people actually regarded this as containing much in the way of new information.

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that this blog appears to be a stronghold of introversion, which may help explain why it has such a hard core, but relatively small readership. For example, I actively dissuade what could be considered extrovert-style commenting – generally described in these parts as comment diarrhea – in which the commenter leaves many multiple one-line comments as they occur to him. And I’ve also noted that many of the blogs with bigger traffic tend to have more and shorter posts.

It has never bothered me that more people might prefer other blogs to this one, nor did I ever wish to imitate them, but I did find it puzzling that so many people like to regularly read blogs that essentially say nothing, and say nothing so succinctly. I’m not talking about aggregators like Drudge and Instapundit, you understand, but the sort of blogs where the commentary on the Republican debate is four lines or the contents of their meals is a frequent topic of conversation. I’ve tried reading several very popular blogs on occasion, and to be honest, I not only could not read them regularly, I couldn’t even figure out why anyone was reading them. Ever.

It couldn’t be described as an intelligence thing either. Some of these bloggers were quite smart and very successful, others perhaps not quite so much, but the one thing they had in common is that a) their average post length is very short, both in terms of the selections from the links provided and their own writing, and b) their readers’ average time on site is measured in single-digit seconds. That latter fact has always puzzled me too. Who reads anything except Twitter or market prices in less than 10 seconds? How is that even possible? I understand that those who are checking back to see if there is a new post or not will tend to drive down the average, but why would there be so many multiples of post-checking in comparison with incidence of readers actually reading the posts?

If it is true that extroversion and introversion have fundamentally different styles of communication, then these differences should translate to blog writing, blog commenting, and even blog readerships as well. This may also explain why most of the early big bloggers completely failed as book authors… authors tend to be introverts, for obvious reasons, whereas the more visible bloggers who attracted mainstream media attention are more likely to be extroverts and extroverts are seldom able to focus long enough to complete a coherent thoughtcomplete book. SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi of Whatever is an interesting case; is he an extroverted geek who is able to focus himself long enough to complete his books or an introvert who enjoys performing in public on occasion? Since I find tend to find his approach to both his blog and his books rather scattershot, I suspect the former, but I wouldn’t bet much on it. The Prince of Wängst strikes me as extremely introverted, as does Roissy. Ann Althouse’s blog, on the other hand, appears to be of the extroverted variety.

To what extent the blog matches the blogger, or the readership, for that matter, I don’t know. It’s more of an impression than an observation and I’d be interested in hearing your opinions about what blogs fit which category. As should be obvious, like most of the readership, I am rather strongly introverted myself, which is why I always find it both bizarre and amusing when I am accused of writing things solely in order to attract attention. That is the classic extrovert’s projection at work; they simply cannot imagine that anyone would not want to be on stage or appear on TV.

As for Rauch’s article, the best part of it is where he describes the concept of social fatigue. At every social gathering, there is the inevitable moment when the mundane chatter surrounding me like an aural miasma appears to crescendo, grow ever more incoherent and frenetic, until it finally all fades away into the blessed silence inside my mind.

Occasionally someone will notice that I am paying absolutely no attention to the conversation and ask me what I am thinking. This is a mistake. But because I am sufficiently civilized, I never answer truthfully. There is no benefit to sharing the dark thoughts inspired by an overdose of social exposure, and anyway, it’s nothing that a little time alone won’t cure.

The week in Alpha

Science has spoken and demonstrated that ALPHAS are merely selfless men bringing health and wellness benefits to the opposite sex.

We already know the answer to why a 10 percent shortfall in the number of female physical science and math degrees is a problem but an eight percent shortfall in the number of male biology degrees is not.

Athol adeptly translates a song into Spielsprache and Vox suggests that being able to do what you want all the time is not necessarily the worst fate in the world.

Vox does his best Pat Moynihan impression and deduces that black statistical canaries are suggesting 50 percent of white college women today will not marry by the age of 40.

Game in Libya suggests that women help choose what sort of society they will live in by influencing young men to pursue careers as builders or destroyers.

Paterno is still a decent man

One of his biographers, Joe Posnanski, defends Joe Paterno:

I’m not saying I know Joe Paterno. I’m saying I know a whole lot about him. And what I know is complicated. But, beyond complications — and I really believe this with all my heart — there’s this, and this is exclusively my opinion: Joe Paterno has lived a profoundly decent life.

Nobody has really wanted to say this lately, and I grasp that. The last week has obviously shed a new light on him and his program — a horrible new light — and if you have any questions about how I feel about all that, please scroll back up to my two points at the top.

But I have seen some things in the last few days that have felt rotten, utterly wrong — a piling on that goes even beyond excessive, a dancing on the grave that makes me ill. Joe Paterno has lived a whole life. He has improved the lives of countless people. I know — I’ve talked to hundreds of them. Almost every day I walk by the library that he and his wife, Sue, built. I walk by the religious center that tries to bring people together, and his name is on the list of major donors. I hear the stories, the countless stories, of the kindnesses that came naturally to him, of the way he stuck with people in their worst moments, of the belief he had that everybody could do a little bit better — as a football player, as a student, as a human being. I’m not going to tell you these stories now, because you can’t hear them. Nobody can hear them in the howling.

But I will say that I am sickened, absolutely sickened, that some of those people whose lives were fundamentally inspired and galvanized by Joe Paterno have not stepped forward to stand up for him this week, have stood back and allowed him to be painted as an inhuman monster who was only interested in his legacy, even at the cost of the most heinous crimes against children imaginable.

Shame on them.

And why? I’ll tell you my opinion: Because they were afraid. And I understand that. A kind word for Joe Paterno in this storm is taken by many as a pro vote for a child molester. A quick, “Wait a minute, Joe Paterno is a good man. Let’s see what happened here” is translated as an attempt to minimize the horror of what Jerry Sandusky is charged with doing. It takes courage to stand behind someone you believe in when it’s this bad outside. It takes courage to stand up for a man in peril, even if he stood up for you.

And that’s shameful.

I don’t know Joe Paterno at all. I don’t know Joe Posnanski either. But I very much agree with what he is saying here, which is that one act of omission, one moment of cowardice, one moral failing, is not definitive of any man. And I also agree wholeheartedly that is shameful for people to pile on Paterno in an attempt to morally preen. Posnanski isn’t saying that Paterno did the right thing or that he shouldn’t have lost his job. Failure has consequences, after all. But the loss of a man’s halo doesn’t render him a devil, merely another fallen man.

The situation reminds me somewhat of when my father was being tried in federal court. Virtually none of his peers, including a number of his friends, were willing to step forward and testify on behalf of his character. No one was being asked to lie or spin anything, merely to recount their personal experience of a man who had paid their salaries, given to their charities, hosted them in his home, or eaten at their table over the course of thirty years. They didn’t have any substantive reason not to do so, but were simply afraid of the social consequences of stepping forward and saying “this man may be guilty of what he is accused, but because that is not the entirety of who he is, let me tell you what I know about him.” I was extremely proud of my friends, several of whom volunteered to testify on my father’s behalf without even being asked to do so.

I wasn’t angry, only disappointed with those who hid behind the rationale of “not wanting to get involved”. What a lame excuse that is, as if anyone would ever seek to get involved in such unpleasantries. But even though I was disappointed, at no point did I lose any affection or respect for people I had known nearly all my life. It would have been outrageous for me to judge them on the sole basis of a single moment where their moral courage failed them.

The irony is that some of those posturing so dramatically about Paterno are exhibiting a failure of moral courage similar to the one that gave them grounds for criticizing the man in the first place. The man merits criticism , to be sure, and I think he deserved to lose his job, but it is simply ludicrous to claim, as some have done, that his behavior was on par with Sandusky’s or even the university administration’s. There is an important difference between a fundamentally decent man whose moral courage failed him at a vital moment and a fundamentally indecent man, and it is not only foolish, but downright societally destructive to equate the two.

Mailvox: answering the inevitable response

Some atheists appear to view homosexuals as comrades in the great struggle against Christianity. In light of this, MD wonders if Christians can be similarly considered to harbor disproportionate inclinations towards pedophilia on the basis of the Catholic priest abuse scandal:

Hmmm. Wonder what proportion of Christian clergy molest children cf general population? . . . Conclusion: Christians more likely to molest children?

To some extent, the answer depends upon your definition of clergy. But in the end, the inescapable conclusion by MD’s metric is not only that Christians are less likly to molest children than the general population, but that gays should not be permitted in the clergy. Now, there are three significant caveats here which I will point out afterwards, but consider:

Clerical abuse
– 4,392 priests and deacons were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002.
– The Jay Report stated there were 10,667 reported victims of clergy sexual abuse younger than 18 years during this period. The RCC victims per abuser rate was 2.43
– The 4,351 priests who were accused amount to 3.97% of the 109,694 priests in active ministry during that time.
– There were 28,700 active priests in 2005. The historical/current rate is 3.72.

Teacher abuse
– It is reported that 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical sexual abuse by a school employee from 1991-2000.
– This indicates an estimated 1,508,000 cases of school children being abused by school employees between 1950 and 2002.
– There were 3.8 million school teachers in 2010. Multiplied by the 3.72 historical/current rate, we estimate 14.1 million teachers active from 1950.

Dividing the 14.1 million historical teachers by the 1.51 million victims, then dividing by the 2.43 victim/abuser rate, this means school children have a 4.4% abuse per teacher rate compared to 4.0% per Catholic priest.

Now, the three problems. The first is that this includes the abuse by school employees who are not teachers without including the non-teachers. Currently, teachers only make up half of the PUBLIC school employees in the country, but that number was historically much lower. Nevertheless, we can safely assume that teachers historically made up about three-quarters of the school employee total, which would lower the teacher abuse rate to 3.3 percent. However, we don’t know if teachers have a higher rate or a lower rate of abuse than janitors, counselors, and administrators. I suspect it is higher, due to low average teacher IQ and the larger amount of contact with children intrinsic to the job, but I simply have no information on this.

Second, the RCC abuse numbers include the victims of priests and deacons, but don’t include the number of permanent deacons. This is because there were only 41 deacons accused of the 12,500 ordained during the period concerned. This gives a total of 122,194 clergy and reduces the RCC abuse rate to 3.6 percent.

And the third problem. 81 percent of the RCC victims were male. All of the abusers were male. This is an astonishing statistical outlier, since in the general population, girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys. The heterosexual abuse rate was therefore 0.7 percent for the clergy compared to 2.5 percent for the teachers.

The conclusion, therefore, is that Christian clergy are 3.6 times less likely to abuse children than the general population unless they are homosexual. The larger part of the clerical problem is not the Church, but Teh Gay. In fact, four-fifths of the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests could have been avoided simply by barring homosexuals from the clergy, just as Christian doctrine has always deemed necessary. And the increasing restrictions on homosexual seminarians is the obvious reason why the rate of clergy abuse has been significantly dropping since the 1980s.

However, due to the increased embrace of homosexual clergy by the Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, we can safely conclude that the chickenhawks will be gravitating to these organizations as well as to other gay-friendly institutions that are actively involved with children. It should therefore be no surprise that the Sandusky scandal took place on a college campus and concerned a children’s organization; twenty years before, Sandusky might well have decided he was “called” to the priesthood instead of setting up a “children’s charity”.

Logan’s Run looks better all the time

I told you it wasn’t just Gen X’s imagination that the preceding generation is, when viewed in the collective, a selfish, worthless, generation of grasshoppers:

“Paws off, Junior, this cash is mine.”

Don’t expect a big inheritance from your boomer parents — even if they are rich. Less than half of millionaire boomers say that leaving money for their kids is a priority for them, according to a 2011 U.S. Trust study. But 64% of boomers say they plan to use their money to travel and more than one in three say they want to use it to “have fun.”…

“Make room kids, we’ll be living with you when we’re old.”

Boomers are expected to live longer than any other generation. At the same time, it’s no secret they haven’t saved nearly enough for retirement. Overall, the average retirement savings shortfall for married baby boomers is about $30,000, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Nearly half of early boomers, born between 1948 and 1954, and 44% of late boomers, born between 1955 and 1964, may not be able to afford even basic living expenses in retirement, according to EBRI. The result? Kids could be supporting mom and dad well into their eighties and nineties.

Yeah, I don’t see that happening on a grand scale. My generation is going to turf the Boomers into government housing faster than we saw them put our grandparents into nursing homes and we’ll do it with the same lack of remorse that they left us alone in the afternoons with a bowl of cereal and the television.

What the Boomers have forgotten is that they broke the generational contract. So they have no claim on the younger generations.

Hiding the depravity

It’s always interesting to see precisely what people are attempting to hide or avoid when they utilize false equivalences or incorrect definitions:

JT: Was this man sexually attracted to boys? Was he male also? Yeah… That’s the very definition of homo-sexual.

Evil Kirk: By that logic, a man who molests a girl is a heterosexual, presumably the sexuality you identify with. So are you agreeing that molesting girls is part of your sexuality?

First, I note that Evil Kirk doesn’t understand that JT is not relying on logic, but on a definition. Resorting to the dictionary is not resorting to logic. Second, his own attempt at logic suggests an inability to distinguish between the set and the sub-set. Molesting girls cannot be an intrinsic aspect of heterosexuality because girls are also molested by women. But molesting girls is certainly an intrinsically heterosexual act if perpetrated by a member of the opposite sex, just as molesting boys is an intrinsically homosexual act if perpetrated by a member of the same sex.

What Evil Kirk is attempting to avoid through his linguistic contortions is the fact that homosexual men are disproportionately likely to molest children. Although they make up around 1.5% of the male population, they are responsible for approximately one-third of all child molestations. This is why homosexuals try very hard to falsely impute a nonexistent aspect of age to both “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality”; they are seeking to conceal the fact that a statistically significant percentage of them are inclined to prey upon children.

My question to Evil Kirk is this: Were you intentionally attempting to hide the fact that homosexual men are around 20 times more likely to molest children than heterosexual men when you took exception to JT’s statement that a man who rapes a boy is, by definition, homosexual? If not, what was the basis for your objection to JT’s statement?

The downside of meritocracy

Ross Douthat explains the dangerous downside to America’s experiment in meritocracy:

For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history.

And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good.

In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist” agriculture.

In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks that lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)

Hubris on the part of the highly intelligent is particularly stupid because it reflects both ignorance and a lack of self-awareness. For example, I am in the top one percent of the top one percent when it comes to intelligence, and yet I could provide you with an encyclopedia of my mistakes, failures, and errors in judgment. I doubt that I have made any fewer of them than the average individual, but they do tend to be of a different order.

For example, was it the right thing to write The War in Heaven instead of Blizzard’s first Starcraft novel? Almost surely not. As it turns out, creating your own intellectual property from the start is less effective than riding someone else’s media tie-in wave, building a following from it, and then publishing your own material. My decision certainly made sense and was intellectually defensible at the time, but in retrospect it was a serious blunder.

Douthat doesn’t have it quite right, however. The problem with the mistakes of the meritocratic elite isn’t that they are too smart for their own good, it is that they are too smart for everyone else’s good. This is why technocratic visions so often go so badly awry, and why the Socratic dream of a government of philosopher-kings has almost invariably proven to be worse than the variously flawed alternatives. The worst aspect of a meritocracy is its lack of respect for tradition. Meritocracy represents the ultimate triumph of theory and potential over experience and reliability, so it should come as little surprise that by historical standards, the new meritocratic societies appear to be destroying themselves in a remarkably short period of time.

In the end, however, Douthat misses the point. A society will benefit most from being ruled by its best, not its brightest. As one of this society’s brightest, I can attest that the members of a society’s intellectual elite are no more likely to merit being described as its best than the average individual and they possess no more intrinsic right to rule by virtue of their intelligence than the obese elite do by virtue of their weight.

We are… Ped State

Let’s face it, it was inevitable.  For crying out loud, Sandusky’s autobiography is entitled Touched.  You can’t tell me he wasn’t flipping off the entire world with a title like that.  Last year, before the NCAA football season started, a guy in the Nebraska football program contacted me and asked me to translate a few things into Italian for their pre-season team video.  I don’t know if he still reads this blog, but I shall be VERY surprised and a little disappointed if there aren’t a number of variations on this theme in the Cornhusker section at Saturday’s game.

The clueless Pedo State students who rioted over Joe Paterno’s dismissal obviously need to have their noses rubbed in the institutional shame, the full extent of which is not yet apparent, until they realize that Paterno is not the victim here.

Exit Perry

Somehow, I don’t think Ron Paul would have had any problem naming the agencies he would eliminate. Of course, this shouldn’t disqualify Perry as a potential president, considering that our current one believes there are 57 states.