Religiosity vs. Time

In reference to a Pew study on intergenerational religiosity, Scott writes:

Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations.

Okay, but those generations add up.

Here is the Pew data as a matrix. I have reversed the row order such that both row and column indicies increase with religiosity. I have also subtracted 1% from element (4,4) such that the table sums to 1.0.

PEW =

0.0600	0.0100	0.0100	0
0.0400	0.0800	0.0300	0.0100
0.0300	0.0900	0.1600	0.0300
0.0200	0.0500	0.1400	0.2400

Note these are joint probabilities. To find the religious probabilities of the parent generation, we must sum all columns in each row (all code is MATLAB):

P_parent = sum(PEW,2);

P_parent'

ans =

0.0800 0.1600 0.3100 0.4500

To find the religiosity of each subsequent generation, we need the conditional probabilities, which we can derive from Bayes' Theorem:

P_child_given_parent = PEW./repmat(P_parent,1,4) 

P_child_given_parent =

0.7500	0.1250	0.1250	0
0.2500	0.5000	0.1875	0.0625
0.0968	0.2903	0.5161	0.0968
0.0444	0.1111	0.3111	0.5333

Finally, we construct a table showing the generational change over time:

for gen = 1:10

    R_gen(gen,:) = P_parent' * P_child_given_parent^(gen-1);

end

R_gen =

0.0800	0.1600	0.3100	0.4500
0.1500	0.2300	0.3400	0.2800
0.2153	0.2636	0.3245	0.1966
0.2675	0.2748	0.3050	0.1527
0.3056	0.2763	0.2899	0.1281
0.3321	0.2748	0.2795	0.1137
0.3498	0.2727	0.2726	0.1048
0.3616	0.2709	0.2682	0.0993
0.3693	0.2695	0.2653	0.0959
0.3743	0.2686	0.2635	0.0937

Which we can plot:

So, clearly, the Very Religious are the long-term demographic losers. My first thought was that we could make this up in volume, but then I realized that the initial table confounds our greater on-average fertility with the starting percentages; this is a poll of the children, so the children of very religious families were already more numerous among the respondents, assuming the poll was representative. My calculation of the conditional probability assumes fertility is equal, but I'm pretty sure I would need additional fertility data and a way to map it on to these categories in order to correct this.

My second thought is that these statistics might be biased with respect to "family" religiosity: it is plausible that children's characterization of their family's religiosity may be colored by their own. For instance, a child from a "somewhat" religious family who is personally "not at all" religious, might exaggerate family religiosity to "very". OTOH, I'm not sure this matters for predicting the trend.

Sherrod Brown Redux

I see that Sherrod Brown is trying to get back into the Senate by replacing John Husted.

Here are a couple of campaign mailers from 2024. We surmise the Democrats were only sending them to registered Republicans.

Looks like the upshot is that Bernie Moreno is a scuzzy foreigner. I would have thought this line of attack would be off-brand for the Democrats, but never underestimate your opponent's opportunism.

Similarly:

I expect few Ohio voters had ever heard of Don Kissick apart from this Democrat-funded mailing. Their points being:

• Wants the government completely out of your life

• Wants absolutely no restrictions on firearms of any kind

• Is a Navy Vet, but wants to end American foreign aid and pull us out of overseas conflicts

• Promotes a radical flat tax plan that cuts taxes and underfunds government programs

Down boy!

Of course, the Democrats never talk this way when they're actually arguing for Democrat policies. They never say "firearm restrictions", only "gun safety". They never say "government out of your life" as a general criticism, only about "reproductive health" when they're against intervention and "civil rights" when they're in favor of it. They never say "government programs" in general, only the most photogenic recipients in particular. Etc.

This was an obvious effort to siphon votes away from Moreno towards Kissick. This doesn't benefit Brown except to force a runoff election, but I assume the calculation is that Brown would have fared better in Ohio by not having Trump on the ticket. As discussed, the Democrats have the upper hand in low-turnout elections.

Which brings us to 2026, an off-year election where the Democrats can be expected to enjoy an out-of-power boost. Assuming the Democrats want to nominate an old white guy in the primary, I would expect Brown to have at least an even chance against the appointed Husted, who hasn't exactly lit the world on fire. We shall see.

The Best Defense

This article has been the occasion for some rumination.

I knew Tim when we were lieutenants. We ordinarily didn't work together directly, but we served in a unit of a size and under circumstances such that we were in regular social contact for a year or so. There is a personality type likely to ascend bureaucratic hierarchies, so . . . no, we were not friends.

That said, I don't have an informed opinion about his removal as NSA director. I'm inclined to trust the people reported to be involved, but also to say that I would have assessed Tim as likely to rationally follow the incentives as they were presented to him. I can only hope the Trump administration is working to bring those incentives into long-term alignment.

But my rumination isn't really about Tim, except in the most general way. It's really about my career-long inability to deal effectively with Random Acts of A$$holery. No, not everyone I dealt with in government service was as an asshole. But the culture doesn't seem to do much to deter it, and I personally couldn't seem to deter it when it was directed at me. The textbook solution is, I suppose, the same as it was in Junior High: it is deterred by the credible threat of retaliation. But I sucked at it in Junior High, and I sucked at it in the armed forces. It may be counterintuitive, but I have thought more about this since getting my Dream Job and realizing that, no, not all organizational cultures are toxic.

While composing this post in my head, I thought several times about giving specific examples of that toxicity, and each time become mentally buried under the avalanche of potential vignettes. There may be a limit to my trauma re-enactment. But read the linked article above about the personality type. Then read the Venkatesh Rao articles linked there. Then imagine a company of a million employees, most of whom want to grow up to be David Wallace and Jan Levinson. That was what it was like, and it gives me recurring nightmares to this day. I can only be grateful that it is now behind me.

In Defense of A$$holery

To paraphrase Henry Girard: I am not, by nature, interpersonally an asshole. But sometimes it is socially expedient for me to ask myself: what would an asshole do in this situation? Because whatever else you might say about it, assholery is almost never second-guessed. "You asshole!" Well, no, but I don't mind you thinking that if it beats the alternative.

Peachy Keenan writes of Colgan Air flight #3407 that crashed in 2009:

If you read the cockpit transcript, you will be shocked at how unsterile it is. Normally no non-essential conversation is allowed in the cockpit during takeoffs and landings. But this captain chatted the entire flight to Rebecca, regaling her with old flying stories, giving her pilot career advice, advising her on lifestyle choices, complaining about his own career decisions. To me, it’s obvious that the older man-younger woman dynamic was at play as he talked her ear off, perhaps in an effort to simply make conversation in an awkward, unnatural pairing, or perhaps to impress her, or perhaps because he just felt awkward around a cute young blonde."

Keenan writes this in the context of pointing out that this and the two recent commercial aircraft accidents all involved under-qualified female aircrew. But reading her account made me grateful that my job doesn't require me to interact with females. Who needs that sh!t.

The sad fact of the matter is that it is trivially easy for us men to be maneuvered into a headspace where we start trying to "impress" a woman. I recalled this scene from the 1996 movie "Beautiful Girls":

I hate this. I hate this enough that this is the point where I stopped watching the movie, and couldn't even get through this clip for the purpose of this post.

I must have trauma.

And lest this seem an exercise in hatin' de wimminz, let me clarify that I hate the degree to which I myself am susceptible, except by vigilant assholery, to the maneuvering.

I hate it for two reasons. I hate it because it's sterile. As a married man, I would not (I avow) be trying to cash this out, and in any case am fully aware how futile that would be anyway. That's probably true in general: like I said, I haven't seen the rest of this movie, but I predict that none of these poor guys has any interaction with Uma Thurman beyond the level we are seeing in this scene. We all of us know this. But here we are, tap dancing for loose change anyway.

The second reason I hate it is that however difficult it is to escape the "older man-younger woman dynamic" mentally, it is impossible to escape it socially. Let's take the Congan Air example. It is possible that Capt. Renslow is chatty by nature, and I'm not even judging. There is a reason that There-I-Was is a pilot cliche; we ALL do it to anyone who sits still for it, especially other pilots. But throw in a cute blond girl, and now the cliche gets mapped onto a template where That Creepy Guy Is Hitting On Me. It doesn't matter what Renslow's intentions actually were. You know that Rebecca spent the last hour of her young life thinking this; you know that the NTSB investigators listened to this tape, looked at each other, and rolled their eyes; and you know that it really sucks that Renslow's family had to mourn with this as their last memory of him. I cringe in embarrassment for all of them.

The Magical Kingdom of Little Saint James

So I see from my newsfeed that AG Bondi will start releasing The Epstein Files today.

Meh. We'll see.

A month or two ago I watched 2024's movie "Scoop" about the November 2019 Prince Andrew BBC interview in which he addressed the Epstein / Virginia Roberts allegations, and it made me realize that I have no intuitive feel for how such an interview will be broadly perceived. To summarize, during the interview Andrew denied any relationship with Virginia and claimed that the photograph of them together had to have been faked. He further expressed regret with how his friendship with Epstein had brought embarrassment to his family. This struck me as reasonable in the sense that it sounded like what an innocent person might say, but the fallout for Andrew was public excoriation and dismissal from any royal association. I guess the rule is: never submit to a media interview in which your own misbehavior is the principal subject.

I was also struck by the questions that were never asked.

The media is clamoring for the #flightlogs, which to me is the least interesting part of this story. The most interesting part is the answer to the questions:

• Who was he working for; and

• What was his agenda.

We in our corner of the internet have speculated for years that the answers to these questions are "Israeli intelligence" and "blackmail", but we don't actually know, the MSM has shown zero interest, and given that our own IC is almost certainly implicated, this is the least likely element to be included in Bondi's imminent doc-drop.

The second most interesting question is: what was it like to travel the Lolita Express?

My understanding is that Epstein would fly groups of prominent people out to Little Saint James for the purpose/pretext of discussing the Big Issues. How did the, um, sex thing happen?

1. Were the girls lined up for you to pick from? "I'll take that one."

2. Were the girls were just milling about, being friendly, flirting a little, waiting for you to make the first move?

3. Was a girl assigned to you in advance, and if so, what was that interaction like? a) Did she just tell you, "Jeffrey assigned me to you this weekend." Or perhaps b) she just flirts with you in particular, making herself look like an easy score?

What kind of reactions did these approaches get?

It seems to me that options 1 and and 3a ought to set off alarm bells. My sense is that the market for actual prostitutes is smaller than that for casual hookups, but maybe Epstein's guest list was pre-screened for people for whom this would not be a problem. (This seems plausible with respect to Prince Andrew.)

Options 2 and 3b maintains the possibility of plausible deniability / self-deception. But did anybody ever say to himself, "You know, I've never been quite this lucky, and . . . how old are you, exactly?" I recalled this scene from the movie "Heartbreakers".

I never watched past this scene. I know that "suspension of disbelief" is the attitude appropriate to a rom-com, but I can't overcome my sense of being insulted on behalf of the male half of the species when we are depicted in media as reduced to slobbering idiots by women. Wouldn't any remotely normal man in this situation slow down enough to wonder whether these girls' agenda is aligned with his own?

I must have trauma.

BTW, Mrs. Phi's theory is that the kind of people Epstein invited onto his airplane were the kind of people who (how can I put this) enjoyed a higher-than-average background level of availability signalling. (This is especially plausible with respect to Prince Andrew.) So when you're sitting there and a Virginia Roberts-level young woman is throwing herself at you, you reasonably say to yourself, "Huh, must be a Tuesday."

Were no normies ever guests? Let's suppose you're "the talent", e.g. a researcher at the MIT Media Lab invited to give a presentation. Of course you would be invited to the afterparty. And you're hanging out by the bar and you look over and there is a Prince Andrew-level celebrity sitting on the couch with a girl on his lap and his hand up her skirt. What do you do?

I would be uncomfortable. I would have multiple thoughts simultaneously. I would think that this is the kind of thing about which I would not want to be called to testify in a deposition. And at my age (now) and grouchy disposition, I would also think: this clearly isn't for me. Those of you here to hate-read are thinking this is merely envy, but if so it's envy operating a high level: I would be uncomfortable even if I had my own Epstein-assigned doxy trying to coax me onto the couch. Because everything in my Life Experience says this can't possibly be authentic.

Anyway, the point is, these are the kind of stories about Epstein I would want to read, and also the kind of stories the media does not want to tell us. Such stories would imply/recount female agency, and female agency is anathema: women can only ever be helpless victims of The Patriarchy, never mercenaries / novelty-seekers / subject to any other motivations that would have them volunteer for this kind of work.

The third most interesting question is: how did Epstein go about his grooming / recruiting? The man was a pimp, and pimping is a skill set.

And then, okay, sure, show me the flight logs. But remember that if they were subject to blackmail, they were also Epstein's victims.

The Job-Haver's Tale

Three years ago, I started my dream job.

I was fortunate, during my stretch in the DOD civil service, to get the kind the projects that allowed me to build credible expertise as a software engineer. Fortunate, because once 2021 happened, my opportunities for gainful employment in my PhD DOD-centric area of expertise basically disappeared for a year. Fortunate as well in that I enjoy software engineering more, earn more money, work with (on average) nicer people in an environment that, while not without its aggravations, is much less politically toxic than I endured in the post-2004 DOD. Fortunate, finally, in enjoying greater personal flexibility for reasons that are behond the scope of the present analogy. Likewise, my new employer seems pretty happy with my contributions, or at any rate the positive feedback I receive for my work is much greater than I am used to, and in particular has allowed me to build new domain-specific expertise that would make me difficult to replace. And our company enjoys a dominant position in our market; with all the turmoil in the technology sector, I have not heard about any layoffs having been contemplated.

So in summary:

• I don't want to quit;
• They don't want to fire me; and
• They won't go bankrupt.

Probably.

Most companies operate their own job portals where they post (theoretically) open positions and receive résumés. These posts usually wind up echoed on the public job boards (e.g. Career Builder), which themselves also offer the opportunity to upload résumés. As near as I could tell, these résumés are hoovered up into the private databases of the third-party headhunter firms, where they can persist long after the source résumé has been taken down. Also as near as I could tell, the headhunter business has been "Uber-ized": the people who are making the recruiting calls are not (I believe) directly employed (W2) by the recruiting company, but rather are independently trying to make these matches based on leads from the company, much like an Uber driver responding to the app. I made this assessment based on the number of calls I was receiving from people with sketchy (i.e. "South Asian") accents, so I could be wrong about the economics of it.

But the point is that, long after I started my new job (which for me was pretty quickly) and had taken down my résumés from the job boards, I continued to receive recruiting calls: "hey, I've seen from your résumé that you have expertise in X field and I'm trying to fill a job with Y defense contractor and are you still available?" And my answer was always they same: yes, I have a job now; no, I'm no longer looking; please remove my name and résumé from your internal database; but . . . thank you for your call. I genuinely appreciate the interest. There is a real hedonic effect when someone says: "We want you. Or might want you pending more information, or at any rate are not rejecting you out of hand." That feels good to me. It feels good even if I'm not looking. It feels good even if the job is objectively terrible (e.g. in DC). At this level of interaction, it is hard to imagine how such expressions of interest have net-negative personal utility.

But I can imagine an alternative scenario. I imagine myself about my business when I cross paths with a stranger, or perhaps not a stranger but someone I know, or know of, but with whom I don't have an ongoing relationship. Being aspirationally pro-social, I say hello, or at any rate make eye-contact and prepare to say hello. I'm not looking for conversation (indeed, would rather not, being busy and regarding most people as uninteresting), but I have it in my head that "hello" is the minimum standard of sociability. But instead of returning the greeting the person says to me, "I work in Human Resources at company X, and I want to take this opportunity to tell you that I wouldn't hire you if you were the last engineer on earth."

In the interest of maximum empathy, I might reason thusly: an HR guy's incentives are different from mine. He has 20 resumes sitting on his desk and he can say yes a maximum of one time. Saying "no" 19 times a day might be personally stressful in a way that saying "no" once every few months is not, and today might have been a particularly tough day. So I say to myself: self, don't take it personally.

But now I imagine having an interaction like this the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. And every working day and the occasional Sunday for ten years in a row.

I think I would have two thoughts:

1. Is "hello" really the optimum threshold for concluding that someone is a job-seeker? Even granting the maximum empathy above, and even granting that, were I myself a job seeker, I would, lacking imagination, probably start an application with "hello", it seems to me that HR guys are leaning hard into minimizing Type II errors at the expense of a huge number of Type I errors and a lot of net-negative social utility. And this matters to me personally because;

2. That sh!t is demoralizing. To review:

• I don't want to quit;
• They don't want to fire me; and
• They won't go bankrupt.

But on the other hand, these are things that do happen. Work situations that seemed promising become untenable. A company makes the (mis-)calculation that an employee's cost exceeds his benefits. And once- or apparently-strong companies turn out not to be, and disappear. No, probably none of these will happen to me. But the occasional feedback that, if it did, then I wouldn't die jobless and starving? That would have net-positive personal utility. But instead, in this imagined scenario, I would be receiving near-daily reminders that this is exactly what would happen.

"Well, then, don't be such a crappy engineer. Or at any rate, don't look like such a crappy engineer at the level of the negative interactions you are currently experiencing."

This is undeniably good advice and would be exactly what I should do . . . if I were looking for a job. But it seems difficult to operationalize when I am not looking for a job. In this imagined scenario, my boss brings me into his office. "Dr. Phi, as we have told you many times, we are happy with the work you have been doing for us, and we have planned the company's future on the assumption that you will be with us for a long time. But I just received word that you have updated your résumé on Career Builder, and also that you have been spending time developing skills outside of our company's core business line. Are you unhappy here? Are the opportunities we offer not enough for you? Are you . . . planning to leave us?"

I could reply by explaining all this, but it sounds pretty lame even to me.

"And they writhed with their feet for a little space, but for no long while."

A year ago (follow me closely here) Steve Sailer gave an interview with Alex Kaschuta, whom I had never heard of. I think it was the first of Steve's run of online podcast appearances.

Six months ago, Alex interviewed Regan Artnz-Grey, whom I had never heard of.

Two weeks ago, Regan interviewed Jacob Falkovich, whom I had never heard of.

One of Jacob's pinned tweets is a poll by Aella, whom I had . . . well, okay, I had watched the John Stossel interview with Aella a couple of years ago, but whom I had never otherwise followed, and I want to make sure everyone knows this.

Anyway . . .

My take. I've been given to understand (Louise Perry, multiple podcasts, no links, sorry) that, um, choking is now A Thing. (Don't blame me, I'm Gen X.) It occurred to me, reading this poll, that, done correctly, choking could offer its participants a replicable experience of killing / being killed? Not judging, jusk asking the question.

On a related note, in the post-election analysis of Trump's bypassing media gatekeepers by his appearance on Joe Rogan and a number of other podcasts, I have seen the word "manosphere" used to describe the universe of these podcasts. And its frankly irritating. The manosphere was indeed A Thing 15 years ago, and while I could see stretching the term to cover Andrew Tate and Fresh-n-Fit, it is an abuse to apply it to Joe Rogan. It would be rather more accurate to say that such good ideas that were pioneered by the original manosphere have now been assimilated into the larger dissident memeplex (and whatever their differences I would include Alex, Regan, Jakob and Louise as participants); those ideas that were less true or useful have been left to . . . whatever corner of the discourse Andrew represents.