Category Archives: Numbers

Heavenly Synchronicity

by in Hmmm..., Mystery, Numbers, Science | 26 Comments

“…la Providence était le nom de baptême du Hasard,…“
[“…Providence was the baptismal name of Chance;…“]
-Nicolas Chamfort (1741-1794), Maximes et Pensées [Maxims and Thoughts] (1795, posthumous).

Four astronauts just launched toward the Moon for the first time in more than a half-century. To be clear, they won’t land on the Moon. They won’t even be going into orbit around the Moon. Rather, they will be following what is known as a “free-return trajectory”. 

This is actually just an elongated orbit around the Earth that extends to a distance beyond the moon. Timed correctly, the passing Moon’s gravitational influence will then bend this Earth-orbit into a tight figure-eight that will send the spacecraft almost directly back. This was how the Apollo 13 astronauts managed to return to the Earth.

How the Earth’s single, relatively large Moon came to exist is still something of a mystery. No one really knows the exact mechanisms of how it was formed, or how it ended up in its current orbit. There are a number of theories. But every idea has some underlying technical difficulty.

Lunar rocks brought back from the moon during the Apollo missions appeared to show that the moon’s surface is made from material virtually identical to that found on the Earth. This means that both the Earth and the Moon had to have formed together in the same region of the early solar system, and that the moon wasn’t simply captured after forming elsewhere. But the physics doesn’t provide any simply way for this to have happened.

One popular idea, known as the “giant impactor”, proposes that a proto-planetary object about the size of Mars collided with the early Earth, mixing their crustal materials together while ejecting debris into an orbit around the Earth where it would eventually coalesce into the Moon. However, computer simulations show that this would have required a very precise collision. And the calculated overall spin of the resulting system wouldn’t account for the Earth/Moon system’s present “angular momentum”.

While the Artemis II crew won’t be staying at the Moon, they will get a view of its mysterious far side. This is an aspect not visible from the Earth due to the Moon being “tidally locked” to the Earth. This gravitational effect results in the Moon having a spin-rate that exactly matches the length of its orbit around the Earth. As a result, we always see the same side of the Moon.

The Moon’s hidden face, however, appears very different from the side that we can see from the Earth. Its far side is heavily cratered. And it also lacks the dark, lower-lying basins, or “maria”, that comprise the cloud-like patterns humans have long described as a “man”, a “rabbit”, or as “seas”. Measurements made in 2012 also revealed that the Moon’s far-side crust is thicker, and that it includes an extra layer of material.

Several ideas have been suggested to explain the difference between the Moon’s near and far sides. Among them is that a dwarf planet in orbit around the sun collided with the moon some time after its formation. Simulations show that if an object about 480 miles (780 km) in diameter hit what is now the near side of the moon at around 14,000 miles-per-hour (22,500 kph), it would have resulted in a cloud of debris that would have fallen onto the Moon’s far side to a depth of from 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 km).

Regardless, the moon’s existence has played a significant role in the development of life on the Earth. Its pockmarked face would have provided some shielding from large comet and asteroid impacts in the early solar system. And the early, much closer moon would also have created powerful tides, intermittently flooding tidal zones where prebiotic materials may have collected to form the Earth’s first life. And the moon also helps stabilize the Earth’s spin axis, keeping its seasons from fluctuating wildly.

However the Earth-moon system formed, it initially resulted in a much faster rate-of-rotation for the Earth, creating an about 5-hour day. This would have been fairly close to the physical limit of angular momentum for the formation of a planet within the proto-planetary disk. But the short days would have helped to stabilize planetary temperatures at a time when the the sun was at only about 70-percent of its present luminosity.

The Earth’s rapid spin, however, places a tidal drag onto the Moon. And this slowly transfers some of the Earth’s “angular momentum”, or spin-energy, into the Moon’s orbit. This gravitational transfer of energy gradually expands the Moon’s orbit while slowing the Earth’s rate of rotation. Even today, the Moon grows more distant from the Earth by about 1.5-inches per year as the Earth day lengthens by about 1.7-milliseconds every 100 years. In fact, an Earth day would currently be around 60-hours if not for various mediating influences from the Sun.

When the Moon first formed about 4.5-billion years ago, it was at a distance of only about 15,000 miles (24,000 km) from the Earth, and took a mere 11-hours to complete an orbit. But as the Earth’s rotation gradually slowed from its original 5-hour day to our present 24-hour day, the tidal energy transferred into the Moon’s orbit expanded it out to its present-day, almost 239,000 mile (385,000 km) distance. Today, about 80-percent of the Earth-moon system’s total angular momentum (its overall spin-energy) is concentrated in the Moon’s 27.3-day orbit. But this leads to an intriguing coincidence.

“Anatomically modern” humans have been on the Earth for only around 500,000 years. And their “pre-modern” ancestors who first developed larger brains and then migrated out of Africa only date back perhaps 1.8-million years. This represents such minds having perhaps looked toward the heavens in wonder for a mere 0.04%, or four ten-thousandths of the time in which the Earth/Moon system has existed.

And yet, humans have existed during a brief interval in which to witness both the Sun and the Moon covering the same arc in the sky. The Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun. But at just this point in the Earth’s long history, the Moon’s orbit also just happens to have reached a distance from the Earth that’s about one four-hundredth the distance to the Sun. In fact, the balance is so close that just the difference in the Moon’s slightly elliptical orbit can create both “total” and “annular” eclipses of the Sun.

It’s a curious coincidence; and it won’t last forever. As the Moon continues to drift away from the Earth, it will also continue to appear smaller. And in about 300-million years, there will never again be a total solar eclipse.

“Nobody” Will Read This

by in Boundary Behavior, Hmmm..., Mystery, Numbers | 29 Comments

“The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” 
– Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (411 BC).

Melos was a free state, on an island in the Cyclades. It had remained neutral in the war between the Athenian empire and Sparta. But in 416 BC, the Athenians landed troops on the island and demanded that the Melians surrender and become a tributary colony to Athens. The Melians refused. So the Athenians, finding the Melian defenses too strong to overcome by direct force, instead blockaded their supply routes. The Melians, eventually starved into submission, surrendered the following winter. The Athenians then executed all of the young men of Melos, sold the women and children into slavery, and resettled the island with Athenian colonists.

 

About a week or so back, I noticed a strange occurrence with my WP page. It seemed that every article that wasn’t password protected had been visited twice. If that had been all, I’d simply have figured that I’d been discovered by some A.I. training engine. However, about a dozen pages were visited up to six times, two old articles were visited 14 times, and one particular article had been visited 48 times.

I don’t post regularly. My writing here is merely for a little self-expression; I even have the site set for “Search Engines Discouraged”. And the vast majority of others whom I’ve “followed” on WP over the years have long since disappeared.

How often I post depends mostly on external factors… work, the weather, what’s going on locally, visitors, travel, or whether or not I have anything to say. So, I’m accustomed to the stats jumping around. Still, I would consider 20 visits to a new post to be unusual. So 54 hits just seemed odd.

The older article with the 48 hits is titled “〇”, and it’s almost impossible to find in a title search without a copy-and-paste. The character in the title isn’t a letter, nor is it a Japanese “kana” or “kanji”. Rather, it’s an ideographic character used to represent a kanji’s meaning in certain contexts.  The kanji used in Japanese is pronounced “rei”, and traditionally written in Japanese as “零”. It means “nothing”.

At the time I wrote the article, my word processing software wouldn’t display the correct character for the title. And WP wouldn’t display the correct character for the kanji. As of now, however, both issues seem to have been mostly resolved. Although, the phonetic Japanese kana to kanji selection in my word processor still comes up with only the “simplified”, or Mainland Chinese rendering for the kanji.
–

“Dead Internet Theory” proposes that most Internet activity is now the product of bots, algorithms, and automated systems. Originally, the idea was seen as a fringe theory, having more in common with claims of state surveillance systems, COVID having escaped from a Chinese bio-lab, or the existence of networks for underage sex-trafficking to the super wealthy. But AI tools are now capable of producing content that mimics human creativity.

Indeed, much of YouTube has been buried under masses of AI-generated “clickbait” sufficient to render searches for legitimate or historical uploads almost useless. But AI can also be used to gather information useful for eliciting large-scale social patterns that can later be exploited. And some of the channels for collecting this type of information aren’t so obvious.

For anyone following the policy trail, this was the real reason for the transfer of Tik-Tok management onto US-based servers. No one in the US government actually cares whether some Chinese corporation or government official has your personal information. Rather, they’re more concerned with what the Chinese know about people’s mindless media preferences.

Using this data, algorithms could be utilized to target emotionally charged clips at certain, particularly receptive demographics. Timed deliberately, these could be an effective psychological warfare strategy intended to internally destabilize US society at some critical moment. Think, armed and angry flash mobs. And the “information” driving these emotionally charged crowds can now be entirely AI manufactured.
–

About a month ago, I left a comment on a slick YouTube video that has since disappeared. It was presented as a comparison of the US system of governance versus that in Mainland China. It was a fairly well presented argument… if rather one-sided. And I’m sure it was AI generated.

Concluding that the Chinese system was clearly superior to that of the US, the video referred to a 2014 Princeton paper that I recognized immediately as a flag for Chinese propaganda pieces. The paper, one of the more blatantly biased and statistically manipulated pieces of research I’ve encountered, has since been removed from the Princeton archives. But I posted a link to a copy at the Internet Archive, with a notation that it would take some careful reading to see how they had generated their results.

My own YouTube page is a fairly innocuous collection of playlists, music, records of bike rides, and one brief commentary on the local traffic. Most of it is private. But what isn’t certainly became popular shortly after I left my comment. And within a few days, I also started receiving unsolicited text messages asking about my political views on various topics. I’ll just block the phone numbers; but a new question from a new number will arrive few days later. Today’s simply asked whether I was a Democrat or a Republican.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve also started receiving Japanese-language email messages from various “charities”, either thanking me for my donations, or for upping my donation amounts. They’re clearly fishing. But it’s an interesting strategy given that anyone who’s read through my posts will know that I have been involved with some Japanese-based organizations.
–

If you’ve followed Japanese politics at all lately, you might have caught that Japan’s Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, just won a landslide in a snap election, while also securing a single-party super-majority in Japan’s more powerful Lower House. Takaichi, who was slated to hold office for two more years, called the election in order to gain both a public mandate and the legislative strength to introduce a sweeping conservative agenda. And a part of that agenda is taking a tougher stance toward China while rebuilding Japan’s military.

Acknowledging that Japan’s shipping lanes, and thus its economic lifeline would be at risk should China impose a naval blockade of Taiwan, Takaichi publicly removed any ambiguities about how Japan would view such an action. On November 7 of last year, Takaichi openly affirmed that any Chinese blockade or attack on Taiwan would constitute a “national emergency”, and that this could very well trigger the deployment of Japan’s Self Defense Force (JMSDF).

Xue Jian, China’s consul general in Osaka, responded by writing on X that, “We have no choice but cut off that dirty neck that has been lunged at us without hesitation. Are you ready?” But rather than being taken as a withering threat, the remark ended up merely confirming to many Japanese citizens that Takaichi’s assessment of China was correct. And this has driven the CCP’s propaganda machine into overdrive.

Internally, the CCP has been whipping up nationalist fervor with horrific images of atrocities committed by Imperial Japanese soldiers during its occupation of China during the lead up to WWII. Externally, we’re seeing things like the YouTube video that I mentioned. And that’s why I think the particular post attracted so much attention. Just as with using a platform such as Tik-Tok to divide a nation’s population, potentially to the point of inciting violence, CCP messages now seek to divide the various alliances that have formed to resist Mainland Chinese regional threats.

“〇” ends with mention of the Japanese “Zero”, an exceptionally fast and maneuverable Japanese fighter aircraft, feared by Allied fliers at the start of WWII. An industrial and technological symbol of Imperial Japan’s rise to great military power, it would ironically also end up amounting to nothing. But I have to wonder if that may have meant something to a large information gathering system tasked with conveying the futility of defending an island.

Emergence – part 1, Patterns

by in Hmmm..., Mystery, Numbers, Philosophy, Science | 22 Comments

“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny,
for what could more aptly fit your needs?“
– Marcus Aureleus, Meditations.

Around the time I started college, the video-game, “Sim City” became popular. It was a city-building simulation game, where players tried to create a viable metropolis with infrastructure, neighborhoods and sources of economic production such as factories and businesses. The goal of the game was to improve the standard-of-living for the city’s residents over time by investing tax-revenues, without  going bankrupt or destroying its own environment.

Sim City was a slow, problem-solving game. But it was possible to have a little short-term, if perhaps sociopathic fun by doing things like burning down a city’s crappy neighborhoods or misappropriating the tax revenues from a future Superfund site. But around 2000, the game spun-off a more human simulation in “The Sims”.

The Sims was a sort of “virtual doll house” without any particular goals or objectives. Players simply created digital simulations of people, or “Sims”, put them into homes that could be designed in various ways, and then tried to direct their simulated humans’ actions by slightly adjusting their moods and desires. Later versions of the game added to what players could do with their Sims, eventually diverging into some fairly preposterous territories.

Will Wright, the original developer of The Sims, said that the game’s initial intent was merely to satirize US consumer culture. Taking ideas from 70s-era architecture and urban design philosophies, Abraham Maslow’s “Theory of Human Motivation and Hierarchy of Needs”, and Charles Hampden-Turner’s “Maps of the Mind”, he came up with a sort of primitive artificial intelligence that would direct the actions of the game’s simulated humans.
In other words, it was pointless.
–

I’m not aware of anyone ever considering Sims as conscious, self-aware beings. But computers, and especially the software they can run have now reached a point where it can be pretty difficult to distinguish an exchange with another human-being from a digital simulation of one. Artificial Intelligence systems now produce “art”, have friendly conversations, or even discuss philosophy. So questions about machine self-awareness or consciousness now elicit at least some degree of debate.

In 1949 the English mathematician and computer scientist, Alan Turing, proposed a test to answer the question, “Can machines think?” The “Turing test” as it’s come to be known, is a measure of a machine’s ability to act in a way that is equivalent to that of a human. Turing proposed that if a human communicatively interacting with a machine can’t reliably distinguish it from another human, then it must be assumed to be equivalent, and thus to be able to think.

Turing made it clear that his proposed test’s results weren’t dependent upon actual “consciousness”, or even correct responses. Rather, it implies that the only observable distinction that humans can make regarding other humans is based on behaviors. Consequently, anything behaviorally indistinguishable from a human must be assumed to have the same capacities. Of course, it could be argued that the “mind” is something non physical, or that it at least has some non-physical properties that can’t be measured. But Turing’s point was simply that when observing the universe, all we actually see are its patterns.

Fundamentally, this is what defines “science”. As a discipline for revealing knowledge, science is based in the observation and measurement of patterns. Science moves forward by searching out, questioning, testing, and then cataloging the valid patterns which define our universe. And this also sets the limits for science.

In his autobiography, the physicist and originator of Quantum Theory, Max Planck, asserted that accurate knowledge about the universe requires accepting only that which can be observed and measured. “The belief in miracles must retreat step by step before relentlessly and reliably progressing science…” But Planck also acknowledged that those same patterns must have their foundations in something we cannot observe. Mathematics, for example, is the means through which the patterns of science are described. And yet, it exists as a concept emergent from something that can’t be held. “Modern Physics impresses us particularly with the truth of the old doctrine which teaches that there are realities existing apart from our sense-perceptions…” 

In 1931, the mathematician, Kurt Gödel, presented two theorems of mathematical logic that describe the limits of logical provability in formal theories. The first of these theorems demonstrates that a complete and consistent set of “axioms”, or foundational truths for all of mathematics is impossible. And the second theorem shows that there exist cases where certain “true” patterns will have no mathematical algorithms through which to prove that they are true. 

None of this refutes either science, or that the universe is defined by patterns. However, it does suggest that what we perceive in the universe around ourselves is based in something potentially unconstrained by any of the rules that govern our own existence. What we experience as “reality” could be little more than our own interpretations of patterns held in something otherwise unknowable.

A “computation” is simply a consistent pattern within some system. In a “computer”, like the one you’re probably reading this on right now, the patterns are simply electrical “ons” and “offs”, which can be represented as numerical ones and zeroes. Patterns are created when these “ones” and “zeroes” interact according some simple set of rules, like light switches flipping in predesignated responses to other lights being either on or off. And a software engineer can represent this pattern with numbers.

A “computer”, however, can work by any means of interactions. It can be waves that interact, or tubes, or wheels and gears, or levers and buckets of water… or something we can’t even imagine. All that’s important is that there is enough consistency to maintain an overall pattern.
–

In the metaphysical computer of my imagination, I see an infinitude of interconnected meta-water buckets, pouring into one-another as they’re tipped by a system of interacting levers. A trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion buckets slowly shift in its first computation… a “Planck time”, the shortest meaningful interval in the overall pattern. Standing at a great enough distance, and watching over a great enough number of shifts, the buckets create a beautiful pattern of waves propagating in various directions, sometimes recycling, or interacting to form new patterns.

Merely a vast infinitude of shifting buckets and spilling water, one particular collection of patterns describes the interactions of an incredibly complex murmuration and all of its environmental interactions. Examining it carefully, the numbers that represent full and empty buckets and their up or down positions describe places where some patterns are blocked, and others where they are able to pass through. Water spreads through the system, temporarily collecting in some areas, and irretrievably dispersing into others… decaying meta-hydrodynamics.
–

Sima knows nothing… can know nothing of those metaphysical buckets, despite her sometimes wondering. Watering the pepper plants in her kitchen window, she looks out, admiring the beautiful sunset and the trees swaying in the wind.

Fire-Horse Nation

by in Culture, Family, Feminism, History, Identity, Japan, Numbers, Politics | 11 Comments

“You cannot control your own population by force;
but it can be distracted by consumption.”
– Noam Chomsky

Despite decades of government programs intended to encourage having children, Japan has now experienced nine consecutive years of population decline. And current trends don’t seem to be pointing in the right direction. August 2025 numbers released by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs showed the country’s total population for 2024 as 122,631,432, a 1.51% decline in a single year! Moreover, the birthrate had dropped by another 5% last year, to its lowest ever. And next year will bring a Fire Horse!

As an overpopulated island country, bearing children has always been a balancing act for the Japanese. For most of the country’s recorded history, a third child could earn an entire family the status of a community burden. The Edo-era (1600-1868) euphemism, “mabiki” (間引き), meaning “thinning”, was an eastern Japanese reference to infanticide. In some parts of the country, it was a common enough practice to actually reduce local populations. It wasn’t until Japan opened to outside resources in the mid-1800s that a typical family might have four or more children.

“Replacement-level fertility” refers to the total number of children per female needed to keep a population size stable over time, without migration. It’s generally considered to be around 2.1 for most countries, although it can vary according to factors such as child mortality rates, average lifespans, or an overall population age distribution. After WWII, the fertility-rate in Japan was sufficient to keep its population growing through the 1960s. Oddly, however, very few children were born in 1966.

This was due to 1966 being a “Year of the Fire Horse”. An Edo-era story from puppet theater and popular books alleged that women born in such a year in the sixty-year cycle of twelve zodiac animals and five traditional elements of wood, earth, metal, water and fire were hot-tempered, and that they would rather gruesomely kill their own husbands. These years are consequently seen as an inauspicious time in which to risk bearing a potentially murderous female child.

So few children were born in 1966 that eighteen years later, Japanese college entrance acceptance rates surged by over 50% due to the lack of competition. The number of births bounced back in 1967. But then overall fertility-rates began to drop fairly steadily after 1970. And since 1975, the year my family left Japan, they have remained below replacement-levels.

With the exception of some mid-80s economic bubble years, the fertility-rate trend stayed downward until 2006, when government incentives combined with a strong Yen to encourage bigger families. But within a decade, birthrates had again started to drop. And since the pandemic years, the decline has been precipitous. In 2024, the country’s total fertility-rate fell to just 1.15.

Japanese women are simply choosing not to have children for a variety of reasons. Some are economic, such as cost-of-living, missing work or high childcare costs. Work pressures, such as long hours and a stigma associated with working mothers also discourage women who work from having children. And the Japanese social reality is that as populations have increasingly shifted from close-knit countryside communities into the fast-paced blaze of city life, the social foundations once provided by family have been replaced by conspicuous consumption. 

Concurrent to its low number of yearly births, Japan is now also experiencing a “mass-mortality” phenomenon due to the high average age of its population… which could be “good” or “bad” depending upon one’s perspective. But the net effect is to also elevate replacement-level fertility numbers as the country’s overall population plunges. If one walks around some of the central neighborhoods in Tokyo, this phenomenon has become visible as shuttered local businesses and abandoned homes… or homes that merely appear abandoned because the people who live in them are simply too old to care for the properties anymore.

Japan’s new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has called this population decline the country’s “greatest problem”. As a response, she instituted the creation of a new government department known as the “Population Strategy Headquarters”. Its primary purpose will apparently be to establish local family social services, and to improve rural living conditions in ways that would attract a younger population. But in an interesting rhetorical reference to immigration, it will also develop ways to “promote coexistence with foreign talent.”

Immigration is, however, a currently somewhat controversial topic. Japanese society places enormous emphasis on community harmony, social order, and collective responsibility. The social structures, expectations and relationship-building aspects of Japanese culture extend from the workplace into general societal norms. And these social expectations define much of what it means to be “Japanese”.

This is why Japan has a reputation as one of the world’s safest and most efficient countries. It’s a cooperative mono-culture, where mutual trust provides the social currency necessary to maintain a high standard-of-living. When a society doesn’t have to expend resources repairing vandalism, insuring theft, policing crime, or housing criminals, then those resources can be applied to infrastructural benefits such as healthcare, transportation, human-services or disaster-relief. But it also means that Japanese culture has little ability to tolerate disorder.

Foreigners only account for about 3% of Japan’s total population. Contrast this with the high standard-of-living and tiger-economy of Singapore, where 13% of its citizens are permanent-resident immigrants, and a whopping 29% of the population is temporary-immigrant labor. Immigrants in Japan, however, are mainly associated with a disproportionate number of crimes. The majority of those crimes involve immigration violations, such as overstaying visas or working without proper authorization, which aren’t threats to public safety. Unfortunately, however, Japanese immigrants have also become associated with more serious crimes.

Official data shows the number of arrests of foreigners for major crimes, such as murder and robbery, have indeed increased over the past decade. And per-capita crime rates are overall significantly higher among foreigners when compared to native Japanese. But much of this represents a broad interpretation of what are in actuality localized phenomena. A recent example is with regard to a Turkish refugee population in Kawaguchi City in Saitama Prefecture, which has a per-capita violent-crime rate that’s over fifteen times that of the native Japanese population. In response, Economic Security Minister, Kimi Onoda, has suggested that it’s time to start deporting those immigrants who don’t want to coexist with Japanese society. 

Unfortunately, Japanese media often generalizes coverage of such incidents, which contributes to overall negative perceptions of immigrants. This has resulted in a current proposal to offset the monetary costs of immigrant crime by raising foreign residency fees from an equivalent of a few tens-of-dollars per year to as much as $400 next year, and later to perhaps as much as $1,000. Regardless, when crime statistics are interpreted according to individual immigrant groups, most actually show serious crime rates fairly consistent with the native Japanese population… or lower. In fact, many immigrants do assimilate and even go on to raise families in Japan. 

How Japan can address its collapsing population while maintaining its cultural identity in the process raises difficult questions. Such a regimented society makes for an admirable harmony; but it can also be stifling. For a new generation of Japanese families, the nation will also need to sell its young population on a future that promises more than the mere distraction of consumerism. And if the solution is to arrive as immigrants, then the native Japanese population may need to accept the loss of some parts of its culture. Regardless, Japan’s rapidly declining population portends a social and economic conflagration that the country will be forced to extinguish.

Further Reading and References:

Fifty years since the decline of total fertility rate to below 2.1 | Japan Center for Economic Research. (n.d.).
https://www.jcer.or.jp/english/fifty-years-since-the-decline-of-total-fertility-rate-to-below-2-1

Hernon, M. (2025, November 21). Japan to significantly raise foreign residency fees from 2026. Tokyo Weekender.
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/japan-raises-foreign-residency-fees/#691f9a2466098

Kincaid, C. (2025, November 23). Could South Korea or Japan disappear? Japan Powered.
https://www.japanpowered.com/japan-culture/south-korea-japan-disappear
(Chris Kincaid’s article at Japan Powered looking at this issue from a longer-term perspective is what precipitated this post.)

Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2025a, April 14). Blog. Clear Language, Clear Mind.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2025/04/race-and-crime-in-japan/
Related data from the Saitama Prefectural Police Department (Japanese):
https://www.police.pref.saitama.lg.jp/documents/31689/reiwagonennohannzai.pdf

McCartney, M. (2025, November 20). Japan says population crisis is ‘Biggest problem.’ Newsweek.
https://www.newsweek.com/japan-says-population-crisis-is-biggest-problem-11078544

Weekender Editor. (2025, May 1). Japan’s Population Crisis: Why the Country Could Lose 80 Million People. Tokyo Weekender.
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/japans-population-crisis-why-the-country-could-lose-80-million-people/

The Pain Scale of Acetaminophen

by in Death, Hmmm..., Numbers, Risk, Science | 21 Comments


“When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”
– Jane Austen

Acetaminophen (aka: “APAP”, “paracetamol” or “Tylenol”) has been in the news lately, for reasons I won’t even bother to address. However, I find this all rather amusing. The drug is actually something I avoid for several reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the current kerffuffle.

Acetaminophen is a non-opioid, non-steroidal “analgesic” (pain-reliever) and “antipyretic” (fever-reducer”) that is widely available as an over-the-counter drug sold under various brand names, including Tylenol and Panadol. It’s commonly used as an alternative to acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) or ibuprofen in cases where these latter medications cause stomach or gastrointestinal discomfort. It’s generally not considered an especially controversial drug. However, I avoid acetaminophen entirely for a couple of reasons that I think are worth mentioning.

Acetaminophen isn’t a “patent drug”, so it’s too inexpensive to be profitably researched by the pharmaceuticals industry. So there haven’t been many controlled studies regarding its efficacy or long-term side-effects. Most information regarding its effectiveness and safety is consequently either anecdotal, observational, or from documented cases of overdose.

These show a consistent pattern relating acetaminophen use with increases in mortality, strokes and heart-attacks, kidney damage, and gastrointestinal bleeding. However, causal relationships here aren’t clear. That’s to say that while acetaminophen may have caused the noted problems, it could also be that whatever caused the health problems merely encouraged the use of the acetaminophen. It is known, however, that acetaminophen does cause an increase in blood pressure and heart rate.

Acetaminophen is, however, well known to be “hepatotoxic”, or harmful to the human liver. In fact, by the time of my brief stint as a pre-med in the 1990s, unintentional acetaminophen overdoses accounted for nearly 25% of all emergency-room (ER) visits, a large percentage of which resulted in hospitalizations.

The drug can cause “hepatocellular necrosis”, or the death of liver cells. In fact, acetaminophen toxicity had become the single most common cause of acute liver failure in the United States as of 2003. And as of 2005, acetaminophen accounted for the single largest number of drug overdoses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. And as of 2004, acetaminophen overdose resulted in more calls to poison control centers in the U.S. than overdose of any other drug or medication.

More recently, acetaminophen overdoses have become associated with recreational drug use, and especially opioids. These drugs are often “cut”, or combined with with acetaminophen, with the drug’s toxic effects on the liver amplified by concurrent alcohol consumption.

Acetaminophen toxicity presently accounts for around 500 deaths, 100,000 calls to Poison Control Centers, 50,000 emergency room visits, and 10,000 hospitalizations per year in the US alone. As an over-the-counter and prescription drug (when mixed with prescription opioids), acetaminophen toxicity far surpasses all other prescription drugs as a cause for acute liver failure in both the United States and Europe. And despite this well known risk, it still isn’t significantly regulated.

To add insult to injury, acetaminophen is also recognized as a relatively ineffective pharmaceutical for pain relief. Among the few serious scientific studies done on the drug, most have involved its efficacy as an overall pain-reliever, including as a means to reduce opioid use in cases of severe pain. Among these…

  • In a 2020, randomized, double-blind controlled trial published in a peer-reviewed journal, IV acetaminophen when compared to a placebo, the drug entirely failed to show any beneficial effect.
  • In a 2021 Australian study of the effects of acetaminophen in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial, the authors concluded: “For most conditions, evidence regarding the effectiveness of paracetamol (acetaminophen) is insufficient for drawing firm conclusions. …there is strong evidence that paracetamol is not effective for reducing acute low back pain.”
  • A 2017 Cochrane Review study of pain relief in children and adolescents, researchers examined the reported efficacy of acetaminophen in treating chronic, non cancer-related pain in children and adolescents between infancy and 17 years old. The researchers concluded that results were too statistically insignificant to conclusively draw any conclusion one way or another. 
  • Another Cochrane review in 2016 citing a study of over 1,700 subjects concluded that acetaminophen was ineffective in treating lower back pain.
  • In 2016, Dr. Andrew Moore, then Director of Pain Research at Oxford, who had by then written 200 systematic reviews, posted a blog entry titled, “Paracetamol: widely used and largely ineffective“. Dr. Moore also refuted the idea that acetaminophen is safe.
  • In 2017, Dr. Jonathan (Josh) Bloom, Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science at The American Council on Science and Health, one of the least hyperbolic resources for legitimate US health information available, suggested that Tylenol could be, “By Far The Most Dangerous Drug Ever Made?” And in 2023, Dr. Bloom went on to conclude, “…acetaminophen fails to provide adequate pain relief for any condition. Yet, hospitals will dispense the pills like candy and/or an expensive and useless IV form of the drug.”

Subjectively, my own experiences with acetaminophen, including some instances when dosages were sufficient to cause liver pain, haven’t encouraged its use. I don’t even keep any in the house, as I’ve found it ineffective for even minor headaches or muscle pain. I also tolerate aspirin, which seems to work well for muscle and joint pain. And I’ve found ibuprofen to be as effective as a non-narcotic gets for anything else.

To be fair, I could find research concluding that acetaminophen is about 10% more effective than a placebo in relieving headaches, and that it can probably help with cold symptoms. I also came across something suggesting that it can augment ibuprofen after a wisdom tooth extraction. And it has been shown to help reduce fevers in children.

Still, I’ve grown rather attached to my liver… or at least what’s left of it. So current distractions notwithstanding, I have to question whether any of these benefits might outweigh acetaminophen’s already well known risk.

Regression to Mediocrity, Part 2

by in Culture, History, Hmmm..., Humanity, Identity, Numbers, Science | 15 Comments

“Medianocrity”

“One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, seduced by different delusions.”  —Horace

A “median” is the point at which 50% is above, and 50% is below. Imagine lining up 99 people by height. Person number 50 would be at the median. It’s the point of 50/50 odds for the individual. A “mode” is simply the most frequently seen value, or the high-point of a distribution curve. But if extreme cases off to one side create a long “tail”, the median will move in that direction.

Much has been made of the fifth-grade level vocabulary and grammar of our current voice from the bully-pulpit. But that’s also the “readability” level of U.S. Air Force maintenance manuals for nuclear weapons. And most Americans have gone from reading their news in a morning paper to watching it on TikTok anyway.  So the surprisingly articulate speeches given by this same person at the Arab Islamic American Summit in 2017, and again at the US-Saudi Investment Forum last May might surprise some in the US.

A Flesch-Kincaid score of the 2017 text resulted in a 9.5 grade-level as a speech, and a reading level at the “10th to 12th grade (fairly difficult to read )”. But most political addresses are actually the result of speech-writers who also know about things like medians, modes and “bell-curves” as they relate to audiences…

–
“Regression to the mean” was the statistical phenomenon Sir Francis Galton discovered in his 1877 analysis of heredity patterns in human populations. Galton explained this as resulting from an as then unknown mechanism of inheritance. The mathematics of random chance in this process would cause the offspring of extraordinary parents to revert increasingly toward some average, or statistical “mean” over successive generations, what Galton termed, “regression to mediocrity”.

“Mediocrity”, however, can range in definition. Fifty-percent would be “mediocre”, if a measure of the accuracy of predicting outcomes in random coin tosses. But ninety-percent might be a “mediocre” score in a class full of committed students with a competent instructor. The “mediocrity” of being in the statistical median of that particular classroom simply means being in the middle of the pack. Just where that middle is located is something else entirely.

Galton seized upon just this idea when developing “eugenics”. He proposed that a society might work to skew the median toward beneficial inherited physical potentials through selective human reproduction. In the nutshell version, people of good health and high intellect would be encouraged to reproduce from among others of similar stature, with the objective of improving odds within the inheritance-pool.

Of course, it’s not too difficult to imagine how this could turn into a dystopian nightmare as the concept of “family” becomes more like the breeding of racehorses. Indeed, the racial ideology of “Nazism” encouraged selective child-bearing by those with “Nordic” or “Aryan” traits, and used this to justify involuntary sterilization and mass-murder.

Appealing instead to economic incentives, Singapore attempted to encourage a voluntarily shift in fertility-rates toward its college-educated population in the 1980s. Still, ethnic controversies rapidly shuttered the program. Regardless, modern genetic manipulation may render natural approaches to changing the odds in human heredity a moot point, another dystopian possibility examined in the 1997 film, Gattaca. But there are other ways to change the odds in societies.

From a person simply learning a new skill to the choosing of mates with desirable characteristics, skewing probabilities to our own favor is an innately human endeavor. Humans can bend the odds of nature, moving the zone “mediocrity” to our own benefit.

For people born in Nigeria in 2023, the expected at-birth “average” lifespan is 54.5-years (World Bank). However, it’s 84.6-years in Japan, almost half-again as long! Genetics may play some role in this difference. But far more likely is that it reflects conditions that affect rates of infant-mortality, or conversely premature deaths among the elderly. And these create tails that skew distribution curves that plot ages-at-death.

So a “mediocre” lifespan in Nigeria versus Japan probably says more about societal access to medical care, healthy food, clean water, and a safe environment. “Mediocrity” is consequently relative, and can be changed by both individual and collective human behaviors. But this kicks the legs from beneath an intellectual sacred cow.

“Cultural relativism” is the idea that societies should be evaluated only relative to their own cultural norms, values, and practices, rather than as compared to other cultures. It’s a criticism of ethnocentrism, instead emphasizing the evaluation of differing cultures without external bias. The perspective is intended to present a more empathetic and humanistic understanding of societies.

From the perspective of objective study, this makes perfect sense. Evaluating the social function of a tradition, religion, or system of hierarchies might require observation from an entirely unfamiliar perspective. And unfamiliarity with cultural meanings can leave traditions open to misinterpretation… consider a “crucifix”. But there is a limit to this kind of objectivity when evaluating cultures in terms of their relative reciprocal benefits to and from the individuals that comprise them.

Most people would probably choose to live in Japan as opposed to Nigeria based solely on those longer expected lifespans. But they also imply a relative cultural stability that allows for more productive individual development, such as education, work-skills, and the accumulation of wealth. And conversely, these individual benefits can feed back into the society, helping to provide that medical care, healthy food, clean water, and safe environment.

The result is that an ordinary expectation in one society becomes divergent from the norm in the other. And this results in a kind of cultural inequality that can’t easily be resolved. This can even happen among sub-cultures in a larger society, and especially when there are forms of sectarianism.

This was much of the point in Charles Darwin’s 1871, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. With regard to the reciprocal benefit of societies and individuals, Darwin proposed that a society which extends the instinctive bonds found in family to a greater population works to strengthen both its individual members as well as the society itself.

Even accepting that Darwin was a product of a nineteenth-century British perspective, each successive generation can still make the same comparative assessments. And Darwin viewed the human-driven (by female choice) selection for both physiological fitness and compassion as an ongoing process central to the evolution of healthy civilizations.

Societies and their norms are consequently not equal in what they produce, whether for their members, or for themselves. The values and traditions that they select for and hand down are the heredity of civilizations. And they are subject to the same skews and even regression to mediocrity seen in physical traits if they are left to the odds of nature, whether mother’s or human.

That nature doesn’t give a damn about “equality” is an unpleasant truth, and especially in societies where we value the conflicting perspectives of compassion versus merit. In the US, we accept that all people are intrinsically endowed with, “…certain unalienable rights.” But we also enshrine the idea of an “American dream” that is meritocratic, that, “…to become a great and a happy people. …they who live under its (the United States’) protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” (George Washington, 1790)

Whether either Darwin or Washington would be all that impressed with the present-day United States, whether we’re really all that much more compassionate, or even better citizens, I can’t say. At some point, the US managed to skew its median into an expectation that attracts the attentions of half of the Earth’s human population.

But, which half?

Sources, References, and whatnot:

Carnegie Mellon University. (n.d.). Most presidential candidates speak at grade 6-8 level – News – Carnegie Mellon University.
https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2016/march/speechifying.html

Ekman, P. (2010). Darwin’s compassionate view of human nature. JAMA, 303(6), 557.
https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.101

Ekman, P. (2023, December 10). Survival of the kindest. Lion’s Roar.
https://www.lionsroar.com/survival-of-the-kindest-november-2010/

Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 – present). (n.d.). Genome.gov.
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/timelines/eugenics

Population Research and Policy Review (Vols. 5, No. 1). (1986). Springer Nature.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40230009

President Trump’s speech to the Arab Islamic American Summit – the White House. (2017, May 21). The White House.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-trumps-speech-arab-islamic-american-summit/

Schumacher, E., & Eskenazi, M. (2016). A Readability Analysis of Campaign Speeches from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign. arXiv (Cornell University).
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1603.05739

University of Virginia Press. (n.d.). Founders online: From George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport . . .
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135

World Bank Open Data. (n.d.). World Bank Open Data (accessed 6/6/25).
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?most_recent_value_desc=false

 

Regression to Mediocrity, Pachinko

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Existentialism, Hmmm..., Humanity, Japan, Numbers, Risk | 25 Comments

“Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.”
-Sherlock Holmes

Taking a bit of a side-trip between my “Regression to Mediocrity” posts (or maybe just some avoidance behavior), the mention of “Pachinko” (パチンコ) had me realizing that this is something most Americans don’t really know all that much about. While many in the US have probably seen Pachinko machines at one time or another, especially when they became a fad in the US back in the ’80s, they might not understand just what they represent.

In Japan, Pachinko is a form of gambling that was originally intended to get around the activity being illegal. In fact, most of those Pachinko machines that found their way into the US back in the ’80s were ones that had been removed from service in Pachinko parlors because they were paying out too much.

Essentially, a “Pachinko machine” is similar to an American-style “pinball” machine, except that it’s in a vertical position, rather more simplified, and the player has less control over a ball’s progression through the machine. Modern Pachinko machines have added more flashing lights and electronic score-keepers. But playing one remains effectively like playing a “slot machine” in a gambling casino… fast, noisy, and unpredictable.

A Pachinko hall is in reality a low-stakes, low strategy gambling casino. And they are still fairly common throughout Japan. To get around the illegality of gambling, however, Pachinko hall operators traditionally used a legal loophole that avoided the direct exchange of money. Today, this process might not be necessary in some areas, as Japanese gambling laws in certain regions have relaxed.

In principle, the process of gambling first involves the “rental” of the 11-millimeter steel balls that run through the machines. The player will then use these for the “entertainment” of watching them bounce around in the Pachinko machine, presumably for as long as possible while the machine credits points with more balls for more play until they are all eventually returned through the machine.

To keep there from being any gambling involved, the Pachinko hall can’t reimburse a player for any extra or leftover balls generated from play should the player decide to leave before running out. So instead, the player will gather up all of their remaining steel balls and carry them out, perhaps to be used at a later time.

In reality, however, the player will proceed around some corner into a back alley. And then, at the window of a nearby wholesale buyer of 11-millimeter steel balls, they will sell them… a lucrative “business” considering a local Pachinko parlor that provides a constant demand for the product.

No one has ever been fooled by the fact that it’s actually gambling. But it has been tolerated, at least in certain areas, because so many people engage in the activity. The Pachinko business is also sufficiently profitable to keep many local authorities well compensated with either community contributions or simply bribes, so no one wants to bite-the-hand-that-feeds. It’s a perfect Yakuza business.

In an effort to clean things up a bit, some jurisdictions in places like Tokyo have attempted to legitimize Pachinko by licensing and regulating the venues, and by officially collecting taxes and fees. In exchange, these Pachinko halls are allowed to make direct transactions, and additionally to maintain and to operate low-stakes “Pachi-slot” machines that can directly accept money.

Where I lived in eastern Tokyo, there was local Pachinko hall on a main street just around the corner. It was almost always well attended. I never managed to make it past the wall of cigarette smoke at the entrance. But living in a US state where gambling is legal, it looked a lot like the slot-machine floor in a casino. Rows of people sat staring into the flashing lights and garish displays of the machines.

Doing a quick search for some images to use for writing this, I was struck by just how easy it is to deceive humans into self-destructive behaviors. Article after article in Japanese, the recurring themes were addiction and financial hardship. Below is my translation of just a part of one article written by someone who apparently struggled terribly to regain control of his life:

“It’s been five years since I washed my feet of Pachinko and Pachi-slot. I’m just an ordinary office worker in quality control for manufacturing for about 25 years. I’m a dad with three kids (smile). I will turn 50 this year. I was hooked on Pachinko at 18, and went to Pachinko halls for 25 years whenever I had free time. At first I enjoyed playing… but I became absorbed in it. I would even reserve a spot in the morning to relieve my stress (at work).

When I was young, I thought, ‘Maybe I can earn money without working?’ But as I got older, it became ‘I’ve lost so much that I have no money! I’m quitting Pachinko!’ But I still went to Pachinko halls, even though I knew I would lose. I wanted to quit, but I didn’t know how. I understand that feeling very well.”

Happily, the writer went on to explain the steps he took to wean himself away from his addiction.

Probability is one of those things that humans have difficulty grasping, myself included. One of two “D” grades I received during my undergraduate studies was in an upper-division statistics course. (The other was for a Sociology class.) While I could do the math, I never really understood the meaning of half of what I was calculating.

But probabilities are a fundamental aspect in the human ability to make predictions and to plan. In fact, “behavioral psychology” is an entire field based in how the brain responds to perceived probabilities of outcomes. And the most powerful of behavioral modifiers is what’s called “variable, intermittent reinforcement“.

Essentially, this describes cases where there’s a reward, but of differing amounts at differing intervals… just like gambling. The mind perceives this as indicating a behavior that warrants perseverance, like a bear enduring the bee-stings because there’s occasionally a stash of honey. And whether as individuals, or as a collective society, that’s how we shift our odds in life.

Image:
Electric City Akihabara in Tokyo, By Tischbeinahe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12746666

Regression to Mediocrity, Part 1

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Existentialism, Hmmm..., Humanity, Identity, Numbers, Philosophy, Politics, Science | 16 Comments

“Remember, half the people you know are below average.”
-Larry the Cable Guy (Daniel Lawrence Whitney).

Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, the polymath, Sir Francis Galton, was likewise knighted in 1909 for his own contributions to science. Galton created the first weather maps, discovered “anticyclones”, and devised classifications for fingerprints that are still used by forensic experts. He also analyzed the medical benefits of prayer (concluding that it had no measurable effect).

Galton was interested in statistical patterns, and especially those emerging from humans. However, this would eventually result in his becoming among the more controversial, if not maligned of scientific theorists. Today, Galton is mostly remembered as a product of his time and culture, for his role in promoting eugenics (a term he coined in 1883), and for his theories of social Darwinism.

Hundreds of Galton’s academic papers and books discussed statistical correlations in populations, especially with regard to human intelligence. He first used the phrase, “nature versus nurture“, and his 1869 book, Hereditary Genius, was intended as a scientific study of extraordinary intelligence through statistical correlations.

Valid ethnocentric, moral and ethical criticisms aside, Galton was at the very least a brilliant mathematician.  And he did make some interesting, if controversial observations.  Among the more amusing, and generally misrepresented, is Galton’s “regression to the mediocre”.

The idea, which describes a mathematical tendency of the extraordinary to return to some average state over time is often attributed to Galton. Indeed, Galton found that generations of offspring of extraordinary individuals tended to deviate increasingly less from the mean (average) value of a population than did their parents.  That is, successive generations became increasingly ordinary, or what Galton called, “regression to mediocrity”.

While the statistical phenomenon is real, its emergence in discussions of Galton’s work is generally misinterpreted.  Regression to the mean, as it’s usually termed, is merely the result of dumb luck.

In college, I was generally a good test-taker. Much of that had to do with actually studying, and consequently knowing how to at least get into the ballpark with my responses. But I’ll admit to a fair amount of guesswork.

So imagine a whole class full of entirely clueless students merely guessing on a 10-question, true/false test. You might reasonably expect that most will score around 50%, more or less, a “failing” grade. Diverging scores, from 0% to 100%, are also possible. But they become increasing rare the farther they are from the average. The rate at which they happen is known as a “normal”, or “Gaussian” distribution.

Graphing such a distribution will ideally create what’s known as a “bell-curve”, where most scores are concentrated around the center, and increasingly extreme scores become increasingly infrequent. Still, every now and then someone might score an 80%, or a 90%, or even ace the test… if just by pure chance.

You can simulate such a randomly answered “test” on something known as a “Galton board”, or “quincunx”.  The device uses a series of carefully aligned pegs to mechanically bounce a dropped ball either right or left with an equal probability at each peg (essentially a “Pachinko” machine).  By dropping a large number of balls through the device, a probabilistic, normal distribution can be observed to appear in a series of collection bins at the bottom.

The example below is the result of a simulation where 100 “balls” have been dropped through a series of ten, right/left “pegs”, and collected into 11 resulting bins.  If this represents 100 students making random, true/false guesses on ten questions, each bin, from left to right, can also represent the number of correct answers, or of students who received scores ranging from 0% to 100%.

Hmm… So in this first simulation, the most common score was only 40%. Still, 20% of the class passed the test, with 5 students receiving 80% (a “B” grade), and 2 more 90% (an “A” grade)!
That can’t be right… can it?  So let’s try that again with another group…


Well… This looks slightly better.  Only 16% passed the test this time, and there weren’t any “A” grades.  Regardless, I know these students are entirely ignorant.  So let’s try it again…


Again, no “A” grades… Still, 19% passed, and 3 with “B”.  Hmm… Is somebody cheating?


This time 17% passed.  And there were a half-dozen “B” grades.  One more try…


19 people passed the test this time, and with 3 more “A” grades in the mix!

If these graphs all together represent 500 utterly ignorant students in a lecture class left to some entirely incompetent TA, how did 91 students manage to pass the test (“C” or better) without knowing anything at all? And how is it that 28 students received grades sufficient to go on to the next level in a core subject?  Five students even scored 90% for “A” grades!

Of course, no (competent) instructor would run a class like this. But the point here is that sometimes we get lucky. A guess might be right, the weather might have cooperated, cutting the red wire disarmed the bomb, or two fortuitously inherited genes combined to impart some unusually beneficial characteristic. But this doesn’t always happen.

Given more opportunities, random chance tends to drift each individual increasingly toward the middle. For example, if I was ball number 421 in the previous simulation, I might have been one of just that one-percent to get an “A”. But the odds of scoring a 90% (or better) again are a mere 1 in 512. And notice that about three-quarters of scores are in just the 40% to 60% range. Over time, events based in chance will tend toward the average, or the “mediocre”.

Galton observed this with the offspring of remarkable individuals. The descendants of unusually tall (or short) individuals tended to generationally drift toward some average in height. And more controversially, he observed the same tendency among the descendants of remarkable intellectuals…
with a caveat.

Humans are a (mostly) successful species because we (mostly) work to shift, or “skew” the odds… we educate ourselves, take a jacket when there’s a possibility of snow, read the instructions before cutting the wire. And given the chance, we tend to choose our mates.

Going back to those quincunx simulations, we can imagine a Pachinko player who searches for machines with some slightly bent pegs.  Likewise, a competent TA (or a little studying) might shift some number of student responses toward the “correct”, skewing the average toward a higher score.

Still, whether shifted to the right or to the left, there will be an average, a zone of comparative mediocrity. And with whatever influence is left to the gods of dumb luck, repetition will work to move results toward it.

Galton’s discussions of eugenics and cultural Darwinism were merely mathematical acknowledgements that selection, whether natural or human, have statistically predictable results. And where humans have an ability to change the odds, we also change the definition of “mediocrity”.

Photo:
Mug-shots of Francis Galton, taken at Bertillion’s criminological institute in Paris (1893).
Sourced from: https://www.galton.org/photos/slideshow3.htm
There’s an interesting discussion of what was behind the photo here:
Belden-Adams, K. (n.d.). Smarthistory – Alphonse Bertillon, Mugshot and Record of Francis Galton. https://smarthistory.org/alphonse-bertillon-mugshot-and-record-of-francis-galton/

References:

Francis Galton (1822-1911) | Embryo Project Encyclopedia. (2011, April 6).
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/francis-galton-1822-1911

Galton, F. (n.d.). Regression towards Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature.
https://www.galton.org/essays/1880-1889/galton-1886-jaigi-regression-stature.pdf

Galton, F. (1892). Hereditary genius: An Inquiry Into Its Laws and Consequences.

Jones, E. W. (2025, April 15). Francis Galton’s Theory of Intelligence | 2025. Psychology For.
https://psychologyfor.com/francis-galtons-theory-of-intelligence/

The collected published works of Francis Galton. (n.d.).
https://www.galton.org/bibliography/index.html

 

Red Sparrows

by in China, Culture, History, Hmmm..., Numbers, Politics | 23 Comments

“The bureaucracy takes itself to be the ultimate purpose of the state.”
– Karl Marx, Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 (1843-1844).

I’ve been imagining all this free money we’re being promised for paying off student loans, buying homes, child tax credits (tripled for newborns), and upper-middle income tax cuts… supposedly to be funded by taxing the same corporations and wealthy individuals financing the campaigns of the those making the promises. Indeed, Wharton can’t get it to balance without firing up the printing presses. And even with the Fed’s inverted yield, China’s buying gold now, not dollars.

But then there’s the vague alternative of consumer-funded tariffs, slashing tax revenues by trillions, deporting the cheap labor, and allowing unlimited state tax deductions for wealthy Californians. Never mind that eating and staying warm costs 30% more, no one’s walking away away from their 3% fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, and universities now graduate students who have no clue what I’m talking about anyway.

The Right likes to shout that inflation happened because the Federal Reserve irresponsibly dumped $5-trillion in funny-money into the economy… and then people tried to use it to buy stuff. The Left respond that as long as the economy grows proportionally to the money supply, then it’s no problem. It’s the old Keynesian measure of inflation as a ratio, with the numerator as the supply of Monopoly money, and the denominator as the number of hotels in the game.

2020 marked the start of what could possibly go wrong, unburdened by what has always worked before. Americans were jacked up on $5-trillion in “stimulus” while the doors to the mall were locked down with the economy. Then in 2021, the starting gun was fired and everybody swarmed at the merch like a mob of drunken looters at a burning Costco.

There was no possible way to meet the demand. Short supplies and bulging wallets spiked up prices, causing what the Fed assured was just a “transitory” form of inflation. But then the competition for staffing in order to meet all that demand also drove up wages, inflating labor costs. And that’s something that sticks.

Political pressure pushed the Fed to wait a year before hiking rates because no one wanted to admit that they’d so badly screwed-up the US economy. It wasn’t until 2022 that they even started to suggest that inflation was demand-driven. And it was 2023 before Americans’ long-COVID addled memories had faded enough for it to become politically feasible to fully admit what was going on.

The politicians knew up front that what they were doing would cause massive inflation… or at least they should have. Eleven-year olds trading Pokemon cards saw this coming. But they approved the lockdowns while sending out the checks anyway (the politicians, not the eleven-year olds), because the new regime couldn’t fess-up to not having a better plan than their overtly ignorant predecessor.

According to the Consumer Price Index, grocery store prices are now about 25% higher than when this all started. And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, energy prices have risen by 32%.  Those responsible cry that it’s because of “price gouging”, since it gives them a sound-bite solution that excuses even more economic meddling. Never mind that most large grocery chains are running at only about a 2% profit margin, and energy rate increases haven’t even kept up with inflation in most states, which doesn’t leave much slack for resurrecting the zombie-economics of a Nixon-esque wage-and-price freeze.

This may all have been well-intentioned, at least at the start. And (most) everyone got their de-facto $15/hour minimal wage with which to buy their $600 Epi-Pens. But putting distant authority in charge of such overarching policy simply drives home why politically bureaucratized governance rarely works, no matter how good it sounds. So as November 5th approaches, I’m just trying to decide what might be best to stock up on before the next calamity.

The Great Leap Forward was Mao Zedong’s centralized bureaucratic road map to a Red Chinese socialist utopia. Departing from the nation’s ancient Daoist traditions rooted in seeking harmony with nature, Mao would instead mobilize China’s massive human population to subdue nature for the benefit of the people. The Four Pests Campaign would seek to eradicate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows as threats to health and to agriculture. What could possibly go wrong?

The Asian tree sparrows that swarmed through fields were estimated to consume nearly ten-pounds of grain per bird each year. Targeted as agricultural pests, a mass extermination campaign combined with the disruption of nesting resulted in a drastic population collapse among the previously ubiquitous birds. But this had unknowingly disrupted a delicate ecological balance.

The old landlords understood that the sparrows also consumed locusts, knowledge lost in the purges of land redistribution to the peasantry. And without the sparrows, locust populations exploded exponentially, disastrously swarming entire fields of both rice and grains. The resulting catastrophic agricultural failures would play a significant role in the deaths by starvation of as many as 30 million people, perhaps more.

Politically expedient governance produces little more than conveniently simplistic solutions, the harbingers of unnatural disasters. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, they fail in ways that result in nothing at all; no one seemed to miss the rats, flies and mosquitoes. Sparrows, however, are now a protected species in China, and killing more than twenty is a punishable criminal offense. But it only takes one Red Sparrow to destroy an entire system. And American politics seems able to produce them at will, and from thin air.

So good luck to those trying to buy a house, or land, or gold, or anything else that might maintain some value over the next few years. Maybe those investment portfolio artworks or Venezuelan Bolivars will make a comeback. But when that tax-refund won’t buy a bag of groceries or keep the lights on through the next month, just remember that the rules were changed by people who aren’t even in the game.

Free Money… Really!

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Existentialism, Hmmm..., Numbers | 9 Comments

This is Part 2 of 2 regarding Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the United States, and covers Sam Altman’s recent UBI study. Part 1 can be found here.
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“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”
– Ayn Rand

In 2016, when Sam Altman was the CEO of the tech startup venture capital firm,“Y Combinator”, he announced plans to fund a comprehensive Universal Basic Income (UBI) study. His intent was to put hard data behind answering some of the more contentious questions about UBI, such as its effect upon financial security, individuals’ motivations and productivity, or if it would create economic value. A study was ultimately financed with $60-million, including $14-million contributed by Altman himself.

The Study:

The study would follow one-thousand UBI recipients, comparing them to a control-group of two-thousand statistically similar individuals. Participants in the UBI group received a guaranteed $1,000 each month for a period of three years. Members of the control group would receive $50 each month. There were no restrictions on how the money was spent by recipients.

Participants were chosen from a cross-section of rural, suburban and urban areas in Texas and Illinois, with ages ranging from 21 to 40 years. The maximum income of participants could not exceed 300% of the federal poverty level, and the study intentionally over-sampled individuals living in households making less than 200% of the federal poverty level. Average household income was around $29,000.

All selected participants were guaranteed that they would not lose any already existing government or other financial benefits; however, this necessarily excluded participation by individuals receiving federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. Experian credit records were used to provide data regarding household financial liabilities for those who consented to access, which were approximately 86% of $,1000 recipients, and 82.7% of the control group. Payouts started in 2019, and the results of the study were published last July.

https://www.openresearchlab.org/studies/unconditional-cash-study/documentation

Data and Results:

The study procedures, data and results total around around 1,100-pages, including model surveys, health plans and assessments, evaluations and summaries. Self-reporting was used for much of the data collection, sometimes facilitated through professional screeners or survey administrators. Areas that were analyzed included the effects of unconditional cash on Moving, Agency, Employment, Entrepreneurship, Unhealthy Behaviors, Health Outcomes, and overall Monthly Spending. Anecdotal information was collected regarding reported stress.

Oddly, the study noted an average increase of $310 per individual on spending. What became of the other $690 wasn’t clear. It did not appear that any money had been set aside or saved, as the study concluded that the transfers, “…had little effect on net worth.” Analysis also concluded that their consumption survey methodology tended to, “…under-state total consumption.”

As spending habits were self-reported, it appears that some significant portion might have been directed into expenses that weren’t acknowledged. Statistics were adjusted to avoid “false positives” by inference, causing me to believe that some apparent but unreported outcomes, potentially such as increased but unreported drug or alcohol use among low and middle income earners were ignored as merely “speculative”.

The study also noted that its “Consumer Expenditure Survey” (“CEX”), “…measures don’t capture all consumption, particularly irregular expenditures.” Data was also “Winsorized”, limiting extreme values to reduce possible effects of spurious outliers.

When compared to the control groups, the most notable differences to reported dollar spending among both low and middle income individuals was on food. However, there are no specific breakdowns regarding the types of food purchases, for example groceries versus fast-food or coffee. Overall, food, transportation and rent expenditure increases totaled around $169 per month on average, with transportation being the largest percentage increase for low-income recipients.

Rent also accounted for a significant difference for all groups, and it was the single largest increase in spending for higher income individuals. Those who were able to move to new neighborhoods saw an overall 11% increase. However, close examination of the data shows that most of this effect was concentrated among highest earners who greatly increased rent expenditures. The study also noted a 5% increase in those who expressed an “increased likelihood” that they would pay for housing in the future.

The study also found increased spending on healthcare among middle ($38/mo.) and low ($16/mo.) income individuals. However, it also noted that, “…we find no significant effects on measures of physical health,…” Chronic health issues were suggested as an explanation.

Aspects of “agency” were commonly noted among UBI recipients in the study. At the start of the program’s final year, there was a 14% increase in expressed intent to pursue some form of education or job training. Low and middle income UBI recipients were also less likely to accept jobs and worked fewer hours, averaging overall to about 1.5/hrs per week less. From the study, “Households spent a further 22 cents of each dollar on higher leisure (i.e., reduced work hours and labor force participation).”

Conclusion:

Lifted from the conclusion: “The lack of improvement in net worth described above, combined with the small effects on credit access and null effects on credit delinquencies, bankruptcies, and foreclosures, suggests that the transfer did not improve participants’ long-run financial position. Consistent with this, self reported financial health rises at the start of the transfer but this effect decays to zero by year three of the transfer. These findings suggest that, at least for the young, low-income households in our sample, large, temporary transfers may not generate persistent improvement in financial outcomes.”

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In summary, this is something I personally would have liked to have seen work. But stepping back a little and taking a look at the bigger picture, the study’s positive public media presentation seems to rely upon a great deal of “feel good” narrative. In terms of measurable effect, it appeared to do little to change participant’s socioeconomic status, educations, health, lifestyles or habits, or happiness. And there isn’t any evidence to show an economically beneficial return on the overall financial investment.

It also strikes me that there’s something entirely missing in discussions of the effectiveness of simply throwing money at a problem. Merely managing money well is a skill requiring some knowledge.  And social, psychological, health, and substance abuse issues might be better addressed through the establishment of services that more directly address their treatment or beneficial lifestyle changes. Regardless, Altman and his team certainly deserve credit for the honest attempt to document the effects of a specific approach to addressing poverty.