Chronological snobbery [is] the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.
C. S. Lewis
History is history
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Category Archives: Cultural
Unknown cause of death is the number one killer
Voted to impeach edition
Social science experiments
Saw this in a comment somewhere.
There have been a huge number of studies using rats and mice negotiating mazes. They purport to do things such as testing whether drugs enhance or impare functioning.
So some people, for whatever reason, decided to test the tests. To see if the maze tests actually tested what the people thought they tested. In essence: they took a rat’s eye view of the mazes, “if I were a rat in the maze how would I “see” things.” They started, and went on an on, eliminating clues that rats would use, urine trails, hair drops, on and on, vibrations from outside traffic, all kinds of things I don’t even remember. Several times they thought they got it right, then they discovered there was some other clue the rats were using.
Finally, they did get it right. No clues for the rats, all of the clues finally eliminated. Then, testing the tests. None of the tests of drugs etc. could be reproduced. None of them. The rats had been negotiating the mazes based on clues in the mazes and surroundings.
The point of all that is: the researchers may actually have got what they say they got, but it isn’t reproducible because they don’t understand what was “exactly right” for that test.
Even when it works they don’t know why.
Net zero edition
Sea levels edition
Counter cultural edition
Zuzanna Lucja
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Covid imbeciles
Personally I think we will continue to have mask mandates because more than half the population remains scared and will continue that way. From Instapundit:
Biden’s symptoms ‘continue to improve significantly,’ says White House physician.
If a 79-year-old man in apparent decline health can recover so quickly while suffering so little, then it’s time for even the worst panic-mongers to admit the emergency is over.
A real leader!
University grads today stand for nothing
I have always admired the tag corruptio optima pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. Take the Ivy League. These super-rich, super-prestigious institutions are so wealthy and so beguiling because, once upon a time, they represented and — more to the point — successfully transmitted to their students the prime civilizational values of our culture.
We’re told, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the light we see from distant stars is very old and, in some cases, is light from stars that were long ago extinguished. It is same with the Ivy League and their near competitors.
Today, they are utterly bankrupt — not financially, of course. No, in a good old greedy capitalist sense, they are filthy, stinking rich. It is only in an intellectual and moral sense that they are bankrupt. They are, all of them, totally in thrall to what we have come to call “woke” ideology, which has poisoned the well of their intellectual pretensions by subordinating the life of the mind to identity politics.
All the old liberal virtues — disinterested inquiry, due process, colorblind justice, advance according to merit, not some extraneous racial, ethnic, or sexual quota — all that has been rebranded as the invidious patent of reactionary and therefore impermissible vice. In sum, the educational establishment in its highest reaches is today a cesspool, contaminating the society it had been, at great expense, created to nurture.
from Roger Kimball
Law of Markets 