Paul M. Jones

I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside.

via Against Empathy | Boston Review.

Except it's not white misogynist Christian Western men attacking college-educated Strong Independent Western women, it's Pakistani Muslim immigrants in Britain attacking children:

At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, a report has found.

Children as young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated, it said.

The report, commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council, revealed there had been three previous inquiries.

Council leader Roger Stone said he would step down with immediate effect.

Mr Stone, who has been the leader since 2003, said: "I believe it is only right that as leader I take responsibility for the historic failings described so clearly."

The inquiry team noted fears among council staff of being labelled "racist" if they focused on victims' descriptions of the majority of abusers as "Asian" men.

("Asian" is apparently a euphemism for "Pakistani Muslim" in this case.) Via BBC News - Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds.

There's so much wrong here I don't know where to start, not least of which is that the police and legal systems turned a blind eye to this horrible activity, thereby enabling the perpetrators. At this time, none of the usual rape culture reporters find it interesting enough to report on. One wonders why.

I can tell you right now, you are not going to like this essay from Fred On Everything. I didn't like it, and yet it shows some sense. You should read the whole thing, but this part especially stands our for me:

As a fresh cop, you will notice that the standard editorial notion, that cops are heavily armed brutes amid a helpless unarmed populations, isn’t quite accurate. When you are on the sidewalks of a bad neighborhood, where you know you are disliked by all and hated by many, you will become aware of your vulnerability. You have to pass close to people. Any of them could blow your head off from behind, stick an ice pick in your back, or brain you with a piece of rebar.

...

Ah, but how do you know when your life is in danger? Therein lies the rub.

As an object lesson, watch the following video where an armed (!) police officer gets beaten senseless by an unarmed (!!) assailant:

Now, if she had shot him, we would have heard about another white cop killing an unarmed black man. But as we can see, "unarmed" does not mean "harmless, timid, or otherwise not-dangerous". She was lucky that he did not kick her head in while she was down. Keep this in mind the next time you hear about someone being "unarmed."

Former acting director of cyber security for the Department of Health and Human Services Timothy DeFoggi was convicted for a myriad of gruesome child pornography charges Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced.

DeFoggi, who had top security clearance in his capacity as cyber security director, first joined the child pornography website PedoBook in March 2012. The Omaha World-Herald reported that he was arrested in April of last year, when law enforcement officials serving a search warrant found him downloading child pornography in his home.

In addition to viewing and soliciting child pornography, reportedly asking another member of the site whether he’d share pictures of his son, he suggested meeting a fellow pedophile in person to violently rape and murder children together.

These are the people in charge of "Security." As with the NSA, the IRS, and everything else at the federal level, how can you ever trust a word any of them say? And you want your *medical records* entrusted to them? Via Former HHS Cyber Security Director Convicted For Child Porn | The Daily Caller.

The people they are policing aren't enemy combatants, but their fellow citizens -- and, even more significantly, their employers. A combat-like mindset on the part of police turns fellow-citizens into enemies, with predictable results.

I sometimes think the turning point was marked by the old cop show Hill Street Blues. Each episode opened with a daily briefing before the officers went out on patrol. In the early seasons, Sergeant Phil Esterhaus concluded every briefing with "Let's be careful out there." In the later episodes, his replacement, Sergeant Stan Jablonski, replaced that with "Let's do it to them before they do it to us." The latter attitude is appropriate for a war zone, but not for a civilized society.

via Police problem is unaccountable attitude: Column.

Memorizing the answers to simple math problems, such as basic addition or the multiplication tables, marks a key shift in a child’s cognitive development, because it helps bridge the gap from counting on fingers to complex calculation, according to the new brain scanning research.

The progression from counting on fingers to simply remembering that, for example, six plus three equals nine, parallels physical changes in a child’s brain, in which the hippocampus, a key brain structure for memory, gradually takes over from the pre-frontal parietal cortex, an area of higher order reasoning.

In effect, as young math students memorize the basics, their brains reorganize to accommodate the greater demands of more complex math. It is a gradual process, like “overlapping waves,” the researchers write, but it clearly shows that, for the growing child’s brain, rote memorization is a key step along the way to efficient mathematical reasoning.

via Math wars: Rote memorization plays crucial role in teaching students how to solve complex calculations, study says.

The vacuuming up of highly talented, i.e. smart, people, from all over the country, into the megalopolises, where they assortatively mate and form their own "new class", alienated from their origins, and leaving the towns and rural areas without their talent. They assortatively mate, but then have few children.

(Thus reducing average IQ levels.)

Other IQ shredders include the universities, though there's a lot of overlap between them and the big cities. It doesn't even seem to matter whether the students are in STEM or ethnic grievance studies, the results for fertility are the same - although the results for IQ are better or worse depending on field of study, since the STEM kids are much smarter than those in the humanities.

via Mangan's: Shredding IQ.

Under what circumstances, if at all, should the capacity for force and intimidation be deployed against the public by the state? This becomes controversial when one wants to answer that the capacity should be preventative rather than responsive.

Responsive force entails responding to a situation where public safety is being threatened.

On the other hand, preventative force and intimidation is far more problematic from a civil liberties perspective because it is the police force itself introducing the element of disruption into the civil equation. When a massive force rolls into Ferguson during a peaceful rally in the middle of the day, can we really say this doesn’t result in intimidation, at the least, and antagonism, at the worst? Does the presence of intimidating MRAPs, military-esque rifles, and costumed-up police force have no effect on the public to which it is directed?

And for those inclined to say “yes” there is no effect, I respond: standard gun safety rules dictate that you DO NOT point your gun at something you are not prepared to shoot. Do you really think you have the right to free speech or free assembly when you are, literally, in the state’s crosshairs?

All emphasis mine. Via The PJ Tatler » A Preventative, Militarized Police Force Is a Threat to Free Speech.

(I apologize for the hasty writing here; this subject makes me impatient.)

Reading this post from Code Rabbi makes me reflect on project structure and organization. Frankly, most project structures (as from CodeIgniter, Cake, and all the popular frameworks since then) strike me as misdirected. They're examples of why the project maintainers think their code is somehow special and different, and that the application built from it is also somehow special and different.

Your framework and application code are not special. Their code does not go in a special place. There's no need for a top-level "app" directory with its own special subdirectories. There's no need for a special naming convention to keep your different application-specfic code in specific places.

We had PSR-0, and now have PSR-4, and the Composer autoloader, to handle all that for you. Just use namespaces. All you need for code at the top level of your project is a "src" directory, where all your app code goes, just like all your library code goes in a "src" directory in a library package.

Instead of /app/controllers and /app/models, you have /src/Controller and /src/Model, or however else you want to organize your namespaced code. Then there's no need for a special autoloading system or for hard-coded paths just for your application-level code. Add one single line to Composer that points to the src directory and voila, everything inside it loads for you.

That's it. Nothing special. Just like every other library in your system.

(Again, this was hastily written. Please ask for clarfication if you feel you need it.)

Read the Reddit discussion about this post here.

(Lightly edited for streamlining purposes; all emphasis mine)

According to the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, most historical human societies bore a striking resemblance to K-12 education. In primitive tribes, for instance, the best hunters are on top. If the village brain knows what's good for him, he keeps his mouth shut if the best hunter says something stupid. The rise of civilization gave the nerds a better deal, but as long as almost everyone worked in agriculture, brawn continued to pay well.

But then something amazing happened: Nerds got enough breathing room to develop and implement amazing wealth-producing ideas. The process fed on itself, devaluing physical ability and elevating mental ability. Nerds built the modern world - and won handsome financial rewards in the process.

Notice: For financial success, the main measure where nerds now excel, governments make quite an effort to equalize differences. But on other margins of social success, where many nerds still struggle, laissez-faire prevails.

It's suspicious - and if you combine the Jock/Nerd Theory with some evolutionary psych, it makes sense. When the best hunter in the tribe gets rich, his neighbors will probably ask nicely for a share, if they dare to ask at all. But if the biggest nerd in the tribe gets rich, how long will it take before the jocks show up and warn him that "You'd better share and share alike"?

Punchline: Through the lens of the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, the welfare state doesn't look like a serious effort to "equalize outcomes." It looks more like a serious effort to block the "revenge of the nerds" - to keep them from using their financial success to unseat the jocks on every dimension of social status.

via Redistribution: Blocking the Revenge of the Nerds?, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.