Pun Salad

I've had bad luck with self-help books lately. (I'm not sure why I keep checking them out! It's not like I need help!) But good news, readers: although Goodreads sticks a "self help" genre tag on this book, it's much more, and better. (Other Goodreads tags: Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Science. All accurate.)

It's very good, well deserving the praise you can read on the book's Amazon page and elsewhere. I regularly blog my "top 10" nonfiction reads for the year. If I make it to 2027, I can guarantee this will be on that list.

The author, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writes superbly on this topic she clearly cares so much about. She does not talk down to her readers, she doesn't avoid fancy lingo, like "ontological". I think she assumes you're gonna catch up via Google.

(Example, page 86: "It was a trompe l'oeil at an ontological level, a trompe l'ontologie." Well, shoot. There's two things I have to look up.)

She is, however, not above a bit of wordplay. Page 64, the bit that made me smile is bolded:

There are exceptions to the constancy of self-attention. You might have sometimes experienced extraordinary intervals when your attention was drawn so fixedly toward something outside of you, perhaps as you concentrated on a task that so entirely absorbed your attention that you lost all sense of yourself—together, most tellingly, with the psychological sense of time's passage. That is how fundamental to us our self-attention is: Escape it temporarily, and you temporally escape temporality. These extraordinary episodes have come to be called flow and they are so psychologically distinct precisely because they are so anomalous.

The book is also full of I-didn't-know-that items. Example: back in the early 20th century, pretty and rare feathers were worth (ounce for ounce) four times more than gold. And so: "The costliest loss of valuables aboard the Titanic lay in the boxes of feathers that went down with the ship."

All this, and I haven't really talked about the book's subject: mattering. It's a near-universal human instinct, coming into play when you have won the basic struggle against entropy, and assured your self-preservation. Then you start wondering: what was the point of all that. Isn't there more? Shouldn't I (somehow) matter?

There are a number of tactics people use to scratch this itchy instinct. The author has composed a "mattering map" showing the four basic varieties (if you don't want to track down the book, it's reproduced in the WSJ review). Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but you will almost certainly recognize your neighborhood.

Finally, the author tells fascinating stories of the famous and not-so-famous, and how they worked out their mattering instincts. (That bit about the feathers above? It's about this cat burglar…)

In short: this book has my highest recommendation.

Recommended by Ronald Bailey at Reason! So I asked the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library to get a copy on that. And (sigh) I didn't like it as much as Ron did. But (hey) you might.

But it leaves you wondering right off the bat: how many babies did Dr. Benjamin Spock (indirectly) kill when diligent parents followed his "expert" advice to have their infants sleep on their tummies? That turned out to have a significant risk of SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Good news: My sister and I survived our 1950s infancy, even given the occasional misguidance promulgated by that era's authorities. And our kids made it through the 80s OK, too, even though that tummy-sleeping advice persisted after that. Whew!

But mostly Helen Pearson's book is about "evidence-based" practices. Their earliest adoption was in medicine, and its use of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) to determine the efficacy of medicines, procedures, and general advice. If there are no RCTs, or the existing ones are problematic (low sample sizes, etc.), a backup technique is "systematic review", where the literature is scoured for relevant studies, which are combined via statistical magic to give a reliable result.

Pearson goes on to show how the "evidence-based" technique has been applied in other areas: "social policies", policing, conservation, education, and management. The results there are more of a mixed bag. And Pearson's descriptions can get a little tedious at some points. I found the section on management to be extremely boring, with my eyes often wandering off the page, checking out what the cat is doing, or maybe looking at my phone… (She did, however, seem to imply that managers get taken in by fads promoted by charismatic hucksters. That matches my experience!)

At times, Pearson lets her ideology fly.

In discussing social policy, she claims Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 campaign, "told derogatory stories of the notional 'welfare queen,' referring to women who were supposedly claiming welfare fraudulently or even deliberating having children outside marriage in order to milk the system."

Reader, I researched this back in 2014. As far as anyone can tell, Reagan uttered the phrase once, in a 1976 radio address. And even then, he clearly attributed the phrase to someone else ("as she's now called"). He was referring to an actual (non-"notional") woman, known most commonly as "Linda Taylor". And his source was not the KKK, but Jet magazine.

Pearson also does a considerable amount of Trump-bashing, and a slightly less amount of RFKJr-bashing. This is to be expected, I suppose, from an editor of Nature, which dropped its usual neutrality to endorse Wheezy Joe in 2020 and Kamala in 2024. And (of course) she explicitly drops her "evidence-based" demands when it comes to climate change. The practice of "spewing greenhouse gases" simply "need[s] to stop". Period. Just shut up and do whatever the "experts" say.

I read a different book on RCTs back in 2012: Uncontrolled. I liked it better, and you might too.

Truly, writing about this is definitely picking the low-hanging piñata; everyone seems to be talking about $20 burritos. But I like Jack Butler at the WSJ's "Free Expression" newsletter; he writes of A Burrito Brouhaha. (WSJ gifted link)

My contribution is the Amazon Eye Candy above. It is, as I type, $18.23 for a half-dozen shelf-stable burrito bowls, a little over $3 each. Pick up some nice flour tortillas, maybe some queso or sour cream… Detailed instructions and suggestions are available (of course) on the web.

I must admit, I'm tempted to try it myself. But instead I'm splurging on a Taste of Inspirations Five Cheese Pizza, on which I'm putting an immoderate amount of Hormel Pepperoni with Jalapeno.

Also of note:

• I think Betteridge's Law of Headlines wins again. Noah Smith wonders Are the Democrats going to save us this time? After he recounts (accurately) the many ways the GOP has turned into a "bizarre Trump cult"…

  Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people:

  As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”:

  Hong backtracked a couple of days later, declaring that Thanksgiving is her “favorite holiday”, but the damage appears to have been done — Bernie Sanders said he didn’t think he would endorse her, and prediction markets immediately began to discount Hong’s chances of beating her Republican opponent in the fall:

  (Tweets and graphic elided.)

  I'm not sure what I'll do if my November choices are between Trump idolaters and leftist moonbats. Leave the ballot unmarked, I suppose.

• Say it ain't so, Bryan! Ah, don't fret by Bryan Caplan's headline: I Stopped Being a Libertarian Because I Realized the Sky is Blue.

  When a thinker publicly changes his mind on major questions, neutral observers normally interpret it as a sign of courage and maturity. Almost no one enjoys admitting they were wrong — and “I changed my mind” is tantamount to “I was wrong.”

  On reflection, however, this favorable interpretation is premature. Yes, changing your mind because you discover surprising new evidence or arguments is courageous and mature. But what if you change your mind for purely emotional reasons, like “The idea that murderers shouldn’t be punished started to disgust me”? Or because you have a falling out with friends who share your views? “My girlfriend dumped me, so I left the church.”

  Neither of these intellectual paths even hints at courage or maturity.

  As I've mentioned (probably over-mentioned), my come-to-libertarian-Jesus moment was reading Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom as a youngster in the early 1960s.

• Yes, that makes me a boomer. So is Dave Barry, and his essay today is about us: Boomers. After some slapstick humor (which you should check out, it's hilarious):

  But enough slapstick humor. It’s time for today’s topic, which is an article I came across in the distinguished British publication The Economist. The headline is:

  Why people over the age of 55 are the new problem generation

  My immediate assumption when I saw this headline, was: Oh, great, yet another article about how we Baby Boomers are terrible because we’re hoarding all the wealth, and we’re draining the Social Security trust fund, and we refuse to vacate our houses so younger people can live in them, and we think that all popular music has sucked since roughly the Eagles, and we drone on and on about how back in our day we didn’t have mobile phones or GPS, as if that makes us courageous hardy pioneers instead of just old farts, and WHY DON’T WE JUST GO AHEAD AND DIE ALREADY.

  That’s what I assumed the article was going to say. But I was wrong. The article says that the problem with us Boomers is... We’re partying too hard. Seriously. The article states that our generation was too wild and crazy back in the day, and we’re STILL too wild and crazy, so that compared to younger generations we’re drinking more and using drugs more, and we’re going to wild retirement-community parties where sometimes we’re even — if you can imagine — having sex.

  Dave goes on to note that the Economist doesn't approve of all this canoodling, which … well, I can see their point. Old people are disgusting.

  And not that it matters, but I find my old Eagles CDs to be … not as good as I once thought they were.

• LFOD Appears in unexpected places. I don't read SCOTUSblog, and even if I did, their headline isn't that grabby: Tariff refunds reach $100 billion mark. Zzzz.

  Ah, but at the end of the article, they excerpt the oral argument transcript in United States v. Jones, a 2011 case dealing with the thorny issue of whether it was Constitutionally OK to attach a GPS tracker to a suspect's car without a warant.

  JUSTICE ALITO: “And what if it was put on the license place? Would that be a technical trespass? Is that the property of the driver?”

  MR. LECKAR: “Well, a license plate, as I understand it, is the property of the State, and driving is a privilege. But it's not a technical trespass in this particular case. Mr. Jones had the –”

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “Is that right? I don't own my license plate? I didn't know that. How do you know that?”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE SCALIA: “How do you know that? I paid for my license plate.”

  (Laughter.)

  JUSTICE KENNEDY: “We don't need to get into it, but ‘Live Free or Die’ was spelled on the license plate.”

  Those crazy cutups! FWIW, I'm pretty sure Justice Scalia did not have a car registered in New Hampshire.