Victor the Vegan

In the treasury that contains this strip, this is the author's commentary:
"If you were wondering if vegans have a sense of humor about strips like this, wonder no more:
'Dear Stephen, Your Victor the Vegan character ... must come from your deep well of guilt and shame that you feel due to your complicity in the destruction of the environment and innocent lives because of your food choices.'
The truth is that I feel neither guilt nor shame. But I do wish she'd spell my name correctly."

 

Five Minutes to Change Your Life. No Joke.

Put yourself in a position where you don't need to do anything and have no distractions.

Now, use your free will to choose to think no thoughts at all for just five minutes.

If you're like me or anyone I know (including heavy meditators), you won't be able to clear your mind. Thoughts will just ... occur. 

The implications of this are many and profound. But even before considering what this means, take a second to note how powerful it is to notice the lack of control. 

Most people assert they have free will because they can feel it. But experiencing thoughts thinking themselves despite our "conscious choice" is simple but indisputable proof of our lack of control over our thoughts. (More examples if needed.)

This is difficult to even consider, let alone accept and internalize. I've heard many smart people insist they have free will; on a podcast I heard recently, a brilliant person contended they "could not go on" if they didn't have free will. But of course they can. It is exactly like saying we know there is a god and we couldn't go on if there weren't. 

I've said a great deal about the implications of recognizing we have no free will; I think this is the single best post. Personally, I'll be trying to draw on those insights in the coming days and weeks.

More on this in the "Brains!" chapter of Losing My Religions, which you can read for free.

Weed Eater

Click for larger; original at GoComic

 

Gifted Children (John Green)

From his An Abundance of Katherines*:

The biggest study of highly gifted children ever undertaken was the brain-child (as it were) of one Lewis Terman, a psychologist in California. With the help of teachers around the state, Terman chose some seven thousand gifted children, who have now been followed for almost sixty years. Not all the kids were prodigies, of course—their IQs ranged from 145 to 190, and Colin, by comparison, had an IQ that sometimes measured above 200—but they represented many of the best and brightest children of that generation of Americans. The results were somewhat startling: the highly gifted kids in the study weren’t much more likely to become prominent intellectuals than normal kids. Most of the children in the study became successful enough—bankers and doctors and lawyers and college professors—but almost none of them turned out to be real geniuses, and there was little correlation between a really high IQ and making a significant contribution to the world. Terman’s gifted children, in short, rarely ended up being as special as they initially promised to be.

Take, for instance, the curious case of George Hodel. With one of the highest IQs in the study, one might have expected Hodel to discover the structure of DNA or something. Instead, he was a fairly successful doctor in California who later lived in Asia. He never became a genius, but Hodel did manage to become infamous: he was quite probably a serial killer. So much for the benefits of prodigy.

As a sociologist, Colin’s dad studied people, and he had a theory on how to transform a prodigy into a grown-up genius. He believed Colin’s development ought to involve a delicate interplay between what he called “active, results-oriented parenting” and Colin’s natural predisposition to studying. This basically meant letting Colin study and setting “markers,” which were exactly like goals except they were called markers. 

Colin’s father believed that this kind of prodigy—born and then made smarter by the right environment and education—could become a considerable genius, remembered forever. He told Colin this sometimes, when Colin would come home from school sullen, tired of the Abdominal Snowman, tired of pretending that his abject friendlessness didn’t bother him.

“But you’ll win,” his dad would say. “You have to imagine that, Colin, that one day they will all look back on their lives and wish they’d been you. You’ll have what everyone else wants in the end.”

* A follow-up to this from Losing:

Grades 1-12 suuuuucked. 

My parents knew this was coming, right from the bitter beginning. Dad told me the story after I had left for college:

When I was in first grade, my folks went to the parents’ night where they were given the results of our standardized tests. My mom sat beaming, holding out the sheet with all my 99th percentiles like a trophy. When the test expert got to the part of his presentation about gifted students, he noted that kids at the very top often had significant problems fitting in. He even mentioned troubles with teachers.

Goddamn was he prophetic.

As he painted this gloomy picture, mom’s face slowly fell. She pulled the sheet in closer and closer and sank down lower and lower, trying to hide.

But you LOVE my travel pictures, right? RIGHT?

 Vacation photos like this:

Hannah Ritchie on Heat vs Cold (Development is most important)

Did you know that many, many more people die from cold than from heat? 

As said before, the bottom line is that anyone who truly cares about people should focus on development.

Mostly Comics for a While

As does this.

 
I'm going to run mostly (but not entirely) comics for the next month or so.

Our Adaptation to Global Warming Is Not Largely Fictional (+Comet w/ Cactus)

I am the Ansel Adams of cell-phone astrophotography!
How to see the comet; video version.

 
Definitely worth reading to get a sense of the dishonesty of the climate doomers:

Our Adaptation to Global Warming Is Not Largely Fictional
by Pat Brown

Also On Cockroaches, the Climate Movement, and Democracy
by Ted Nordhaus

Sunday Funny: Easter in October

Click for larger

Paul Bloom on Big Numbers

Baby Coati! Video.

I've talked a great deal about how citing big numbers hurts animals. 

Here, psychologist Paul Bloom goes into more detail as to why.

Just a reminder

"Make them riot"
-TFG

30 seconds of TFG's Insurrection January 6, 2021. 

(Follow-up to this)

Sunday Funny Not Funny

Click for larger

Born in 1960s

Hard to overstate how important this is.

From Losing:

I’ll also skip the shitty slave-labor jobs that fueled my horrible relationship with money...

…except the one when I was fifteen (so young that I could be paid less than minimum wage) in an unventilated factory where the paint and solvent fumes were terrible. Add that to growing up during Peak Lead – leaded gasoline, leaded paint – and it’s amazing I can even tie my shoes. 

One of the easiest ways to make a big difference (for humans)

Preface: Hillary ran on lead abatement in 2016. The "Green" party chose to de facto support Tangerine Palpatine instead.

From Matt Yglesias:

My top recommendation this week is Rachel Bonnifield’s writeup of the new Partnership for a Lead-Free Future (PLF), a joint initiative of USAID, Open Philanthropy, the Gates Foundation and others to eliminate childhood lead poisoning globally.

Rachel was my guest on The Weeds back in April of 2021 after I read a report she co-wrote about this problem. Our hook at the time was that the Biden administration had responded to the tragedy in Flint, Michigan with a big push for domestic lead eradication in the United States. But as she and her colleagues at the Center for Global Development, along with the small NGO Pure Earth, had documented worse-than-Flint conditions impacting hundreds of millions of kids routinely in poor and middle-income countries.

What’s more, while the Flint situation was horrible, it did have a pretty straightforward fix and was addressed with relative speed. But the problem facing many poor countries is even tougher to address and has languished for years — residents, including children, suffer severe lead contamination due to the use of bad cookware, adulterated spices, an unsafe form of eye makeup, unsound forms of battery recycling, and other industrial processes.

Lead exposure is thought to cause about a million deaths per year, though some estimates say the number is closer to five million. But the true toll is higher than the direct deaths because childhood lead exposure reduces IQ and higher cognitive functions. Reducing lead poisoning could generate massive improvements in the basic stability and economic climate of poor countries, or let more kids grow up to be genius-level innovators whose ideas improve the lives of billions more. Note that for all the hoopla — the launch event featured Jill Biden, Samantha Power, and multiple heads of government — we’re talking about a modest $150 million fund. Even the total budget they’re ultimately looking for here is just $350 million. I really think this is a problem on the scale of “if lots of people tweet that it would be good to contribute to this cause, such that it becomes a low-effort way for a rich guy to make people say nice things about him, we could get that money and improve the world by a staggeringly large amount.” The flip side of being a neglected issue is that it’s much less politically contentious than most other serious problems, and anyone from George Soros to Elon Musk could plausibly throw money at it.

Sometimes when we fight, they still win

A-ha: Take On Me

Has 2 billion views; it is a cool video

"Back off, Vance, this couch is mine."

Got yet another mailer saying, "When we fight, we win!"

I understand saying this in an attempt to fire people up. But I assume it goes without saying it is pretty insulting. It isn't like Hillary and team just forgot to fight. 

More: The candidates who need your money the most including a Guidebook to posting constructively