Entitled to an Opinion

I heard about this Rudyard Kipling book via J. G. Keely’s recommendations, the same place I heard about Dictionary of the Khazars from (the other book on that list I’ve read is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, another public domain book I read on a Kindle, but I’d already heard of that earlier). I primarily associated Kipling with stories of India (where he was born) like his more famous “The Jungle Book”, or the few stories I have read from the similarly recommended collection “Tales of Horror and Fantasy”. That’s what makes it surprising that this is so specifically English, and about the idea of England. The character of Puck himself (of A Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier and Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman later) represents the ancient past of England, purportedly the only of the “People of the Hills” to remain after the religious changes there, and the chapters of the book (always bookended by a pair of poems from Kipling) consist of two then-modern English children visiting him, hearing a story from the distant past of the country from either him or another such (human) character who lived through it and has been magically brought to the present, then Puck causing them to magically forget it all as they return home (though they regain their memory each time they visit again).

He died earlier this month, but I didn’t think to blog about it until now. I reviewed his “The Folly of Fools” back in 2021. He was less successful a popular science author than Richard Dawkins or E. O. Wilson, despite them basing so much of their popular work on his ideas. He was also less successful an academic/scientist than you might expect, and years before he died I had heard he was unemployable due to his bipolar disorder which could manifest as threats of violence. His last graduate student, Robert Lynch, confirms in a remembrance that such threats also applied to him and that Trivers also carried a large knife everywhere he went (less irrational than behaviors like his self-confessed kleptomania from Folly, as Lynch reports he used it to defend himself against home-invaders in Jamaica). I found that remembrance via Steve Pinker’s, who takes a dimmer view of Trivers’ later accomplishments as a scientist (Lynch rather expectedly thinks there was value in the work they did together in the ’00s) and bemoans the squandering of his potential. Of course, perhaps we value too high the publication of new papers, and not enough the retraction of bad ones, where Trivers was unusual in his dedication to correcting fraudulent work he had his name attached to.

Hat-tip to Marginal Revolution for Pinker’s obituary, which in turn linked to Lynch’s.

I have been reading Bryan Caplan’s blogging for decades (he was listed on my blogroll as being at EconLog when I started this blog nearly two decades ago), but of his books I had previously only read “The Myth of the Rational Voter“. It is something of a coincidence that I picked up his second less than a month after Greg Clark’s The Returns to Education: A Meta-Study (arguing that publication-bias afflicts causal estimates) was posted to SSRN. Much of what he argues I had already read before at EconLog (and a big chunk of the references in the back are to his blog posts), but I think it’s a good thing to collect all the evidence in one book vs having to individually search for things on that blog (hampered by the search function there), and indeed called that sort of thing a public service as recently as arguing with Phillip Magness on the merits of Scott Alexander’s one-stop-shop comprehensive blog posts.

I have occassionally blogged about being banned from commenting at certain sites, and in the most recent case prior to today was also blocked on twitter by the blogger. Phillip Magness is an unusual case in that he has actually liked a number of my tweets, including earlier today.

This is where he gives his reasoning for blocking me while we were arguing about COVID and lockdowns. As I wrote, nothing I said was “disingenuous”, nor did he provide an argument the alternate estimates were “junk”, nor that any of them were in the “statistical dark ages”. The irony is that this began with me pointing out that Curtis Yarvin was correct about COVID minimizers being wrong (objectively and demonstrably in cases like Richard Epstein), and the outcome which would have debunked Yarvin’s indictment of Trump’s response would be if Trump had succeeded. In the tweet I linked there I also said that Magness was correct to call out Yarvin on his BS now about “Civil Disobedience”, and I’d also noted in that thread that “Mencius Moldbug” sold out if you compare early Unqualified Reservations to what he wrote later as Curtis Yarvin. This is not a matter of me being pro-Yarvin and anti-Magness, and instead that Magness insists that the effects of lockdown are zero and thus that cost/benefit analysis is irrelevant, while actual statistician Andrew Gelman (is he in the “dark ages”?) often says that the true effect size is never zero. I would have been open to the argument that the costs weren’t worth the benefit, which someone with a background in economics should be comfortable with, but he ruled that out.

While I mostly hear about Fritz Leiber’s writing in the fantasy genre (particularly his stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser), I decided to start with his scifi novel “The Big Time”, after learning it was in the public domain, the only Hugo Award winning novel to be there as far as I know. The last Hugo winner I reviewed was A Canticle for Liebowitz, and it makes total sense to me that Miller’s novel from a few years later is more remembered now than Leiber’s. It’s relatively short, which was why I knew I’d be able to finish it at my convenience while watching the Netflix series “Dark” (which is about time-travel to a greater extent than this is), and I wouldn’t say the contents here are relatively weighty either. I suppose I would have been less disappointed if I’d taken more seriously Josh Wimmer’s review (as part of his “Blogging the Hugos” series), which opens by describing it as “less a time-travel tale and more Agatha Christie-style Matrix, in play form”. I didn’t notice much resemblance to The Matrix myself, but play-like confinement to a single location is apparent (Algis Budrys asserted after the Hugo win that it was a play rather than a novel for that reason), and one of the things I wound up not liking in a story with time-travel, even though I ordinarily give films extra points for being single-location.

I finished reading Charles Darwin’s first, and now lesser-known book, back in 2024. Since I’ve only been reading public domain books on my Kindle while traveling as a passenger (I read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando last year flying to the east coast and back), it took some delayed trains in the current cold snap for me to finish his follow-up, but since the two books were published roughly 20 years apart I suppose this is a relatively small gap in time. The fact that it has been such a long gap in time since I started reading it until now means I don’t have it all in my head, nor was my memory of preceding material generally fresh when I was reading. Thus, my comments will be shorter than the book deserves, and lighter on quotations than books I read at home with a laptop handy to copy passages to (I could have copied to my phone, but didn’t bother since I hadn’t started any document to add notes to until I finished).

This might be one of the most well-known books I’ve reviewed here (despite ending my last review of a novel by claiming I didn’t expect to do more literary rather than genre fiction), to the extent that the very title is now a well-known phrase for a phenomena. It’s also one whose film adaptation I enjoyed more than any other Mike Nichols movie, much less the completely overrated M*A*S*H, and I didn’t understand the detractors who complained about the book being better. Now having read it, I think they are both good examples of their respective mediums. It has admittedly been over a decade since I saw that, which meant my memory was foggy enough to still be surprised by some things that were in both (possibly it was made worse by the inferior miniseries with a completely different ending).

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Yesterday, Marginal Revolution linked to this tweet on the films with the largest “delta” in men vs women’s rankings on IMDB. I don’t know anybody else who still talks about the Double Feature podcast, since it went completely defunct a while back and had been mostly defunct for some time even prior to that, but precisely because there’s only an archived version of their complete coverage list (although the actual audio files aren’t available), that means it wouldn’t be tweaked in response to such findings.

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I recently had to dig through pages of Hopefully Anonymous’ blog in the Internet Archive in order to find this post. As noted recently, TypePad’s disappearance means that will be the only way to access it. As I’d rather not have to repeat that, I have decided to copy his post below, which I acknowledge is flattering to me. I am not going to copy all the comments below the post, but I recommend readers check out the archive link to see the discussion there.

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The WCI accouncement is here. Marginal Revolution & Overcoming Bias were hosted there long ago, and the long-defunct Hopefully Anonymous still is. I’ve been linking to WCI for well over a decade, so presumably anyone following those links will need to feed them into the Internet Archive in the near future. I will miss Nick Rowe’s posts on “the people of the concrete steppes“, Milton Friedman’s thermostat, Lloyd George’s People’s Budget as antagonist of James Cameron’s Avatar, and a whole series of posts (linked from here) on how government debt is inherited by later generations and whether we really do “owe it to ourselves”.
EDIT NOVEMBER 2025: The last post on the WCI Typepad blog (now only accessible via the Wayback Machine) announces that their new home will be at https://worthwhileblog.ca/ but that doesn’t currently contain any new posts after that.

Richard Hanania just* blogged his Mate Selection Theory of Feminization, arguing that relatively feminine/feminist men are signalling to women that they are more reliable partners in this post-monogamy era of easy divorce and reduced social stigma. It occurred to me that the General Social Survey (see my earlier posts on it) should have some questions showing whether that really does work as a signal. I have generated the data below, but anyone can replicate it by running the same query, which they can also tinker with at the interface I have linked numerous times before.

*I now see the post was from February, and I even used the GSS in a comment there showing that lower IQ men were less likely to have partners.

Row EVSTRAY Have sex other than spouse while married

Column FEMINIST Think yourself as a feminist?

Filter MARITAL(1-4) Marital status (5 is excluded, as never-married)

Filter SEX(1) Respondents sex(=MALE)

Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff’s book is obviously titled after Allan Bloom’s more dated but famous in its time The Closing of the American Mind. Both books are about perceived problems with the kids these days on campus, but I think this would have less narrow appeal. Bloom was a political philosopher with a focus on Plato who somewhat unsurprisingly finds Plato to be vital to then-contemporary issues, but Haidt & Lukianoff are interested in the wisdom of the ancients more broadly, opening by quoting (among others) the Buddha. Neither Harold nor Alan Bloom were especially interested in non-western thinkers (like Saul Bellow, who notoriously asked “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?”), and the philosophers who were tended to be those Germans (who excelled as Orientalists despite lacking oriental colonies) that Alan thought caused such problems. They do give a humorous nod to the ancient Greeks by inventing an oracle who gave them the Three Great Untruths of the Book, but then admit that backstory was a joke and that the real origin was in noticing a shift exemplified by Columbia students objecting to a course on the western canon as harmful on quasi-medical grounds of the material not being “safe” for them.

As mentioned in my previous post, directly after finishing Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” I started reading Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein”, which is a roman a clef about Bloom’s life and death subsequent to the success of that book, for which Bellow (fictionalized as the narrator “Chick”) is given responsibility for convincing Bloom/Ravelstein to write it. Before I read either book, I was aware there was some controversy over Bellow’s outing of Bloom and making it explicit that his standin died of AIDS (in reaction to said controversy Bellow admitted he didn’t actually know whether that was true of Bloom, but merely had that impression and thought that made for a more tragic novel). Bloom’s surviving friends (some of whom have their own standins in the novel, one of whom had their own controversy I wrote about last summer) can consider it defamatory, but I think the issue relevant to the book is that Bellow didn’t actually know Bloom nearly as well as Chick knew Ravelstein, and this ties in with Chick being tasked by Ravelstein to write a memoir about him after his death which would spare nothing (since Ravelstein valued bluntness) and convey all sorts of personal info that Ravelstein provided.
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I had heard that Allan Bloom’s book was a big deal back in the day, but on reading it I can hardly believe that it was. His focus is rather narrowly on elite schools and students of the humanities there, and not because of downstream consequences on the rest of society (though he does place a lot more causal importance on philosophical ideas than I would), but instead because that was his world and what he valued. I studied STEM at a state university, but perhaps my willingness to read Allan last month and Harold Bloom months earlier makes me part of that subset of humanity he’s interested in despite my still being much less interested in Shakespeare than either Bloom (whose shared surname was as good a reason as any to make this a follow-up). Insofar as he would have cared what I thought, Allan would have regarded me as part of the problem: atheism led me to Hobbesian amoralism, an indifference toward actions of others that don’t directly concern me which might be dubbed “moral relativism” (though I’d still reject that label) and is certainly not what this book calls “the good”, and a rejection of the “natural rights” he trumpets to the point my one published bit of writing is about the myth of them. In addition, I am a proponent of Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education”, which points out that students retain little knowledge of what they’re taught, and that the utility of university degrees comes more from their signalling than human capital. Kieran Egan would say in The Educated Mind that the problem is us wanting different things from schools, and that I take the “academic” stance as normative and negatively judge schools for failing at that, while Bloom seems to blend that with a Rousseauian focus on his individual students’ development.

Despite having a WordPress site, there are no WordPress comments, so I could only send a message that might disappear into the void, so I decided to copy it here as well (with some added links to my blog posts):