Why Fallacies are False -- 20, the subculture divide

It's not enough to talk about MAGA in terms of people who can't tell when they're dealing with misleading authority. Now a bunch of things come together that I talked about before, including MAGA as a subculture. This post talks about traditions of a cultural subset, using a field of study you probably know nothing about. This is my fourth issue for SWLT which I mentioned a long time ago.

The fourth issue is the larger context of communication: whether it originated in oral transmission or in writing. At the start of the 20th century a Danish researcher teased out the structure of ancient oral traditions, and it turns out to apply worldwide, including the Jewish Bible, Mahabharata, Popol Vuh, Mwindo Epic, and folk tales. (I can’t speak for its applicability to Christian scripture because I haven’t studied it. One of y’all now has a project – that requires you to learn koine Greek so you’re not working with strawman arguments like translations.)

Axel Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research identifies:

a/ that the structure of orally transmitted material is so different from what originates in writing, you can tell it at a glance.

b/ People who invent material in writing, never use this structure. Before Olrik, nobody knew of the difference, because they didn’t study things like Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Those were for the nursery and nobody who wanted to be taken seriously studied them.

c/ Oral narratives may be recorded in writing but on the contrary, written works do not survive intact as oral transmissions. You’re going to say what about kids’ books, but wait a couple of posts.

Olrik begins from an analog of the first rule of SWLT: oral narratives, like words, arise as an expression of a culture. They document its customs or history as narratives.

It’s like gossip arising in a group of people who are all acquainted, but it’s more: oral narratives do not transmit between groups, even if both primarily communicate orally. A narrative that is meaningful in one culture is meaningless in another. You have to be separated from your culture and immersed in another, to start caring about its narratives. That’s why “we’d all love to see the plan” for changing MAGA and why it means separating families – to get the kids out of the cultural subset that teaches them to be MAGA.

Oral narratives arose and spread in ancient cultures before writing existed (I’ll say more on this later). But ancient cultures did not swap stories. The Semitic and Indo-European cultures did not transmit material to each other. That’s not why some of their stories sound similar.

The fact that the Semites and Indo-Europeans originated in the same part of the world, and the similarity of some of their narratives, suggests that they are descendants of a common ancestral culture. This also appears in their languages; for example, Hebrew yada, "know", is cognate to Classical Greek oida, which you will find in the Iliad. The split happened after wine grapes were domesticated, around 4000 BCE; that’s why their words for “wine” are cognates. There are other cognates, most notably words for “three”. (Remember that number.)

The same is true for Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch. They’re both available free online, as I found in 2014. I already did the heavy lifting for you by studying both.

1/ SP, as I call it, has 100% of the same narratives as JT. That tells you they are descended from a common ancestor.

2/ They have 90% of the same wording, a diagnostic of the split.

3/ 80% of Dr. John Cook’s specialized Biblical Hebrew grammar, that is in JT, is also in SP. The differences reflect developments since at least 600 CE. (See my thread on 21st century Biblical Hebrew.)

I have a detailed book about SP which I have boiled down to about 40 pages if you’re interested.

The stories that Semites and Indo-Europeans both have versions of, did not arise in Lola’s hunter/gatherer culture, nor would Lola pick up those stories and transmit them in her own culture. She might tell one around the campfire, and people might say “uh-huh” and then curl up for the night, but it’s hardly likely they would ask Lola to tell it again. They had their own oral narratives expressing their own culture; they weren’t interested in stories people were telling ten thousand miles away dealing with wine, which was a complete mystery to them.

Lola would tell stories that her ancestors brought with them. And Olrik says they would have morphed over the thousands of years between that migration and Lola’s lifetime. All oral narratives morph, the same as gossip morphs. Oral narratives start out expressing some cultural or historical reality, they survive as long as the culture still values the history or observes the cultural traits, and when that changes, people stop telling those stories.

What’s the key that a narrative originated orally? The “grammar”, which I will talk about next week.

If you don’t care about the “grammar”, you can skip a week.

21st Century Classical Greek -- some days you eat the bear

It's amazing what you find on the internet, especially Internet Archive, and how a little digging can reinforce a hypothesis that may seem somewhat gaga.

I was rewriting a summary of my book The Real Difference, comparing Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch and slamming ben Hayyim's self-contradictory and often senseless "grammar" of Samaritan Hebrew. I had a sentence about how northeast Anatolian languages have gutturals -- Semitic, Indo-European, and Indo-Iranian -- except for Latin, which seems to have more of a relationship to Tocharian than to the other languages.

And I referred to the Chechen language. Later in the paper, I got into verb morphology and the similarities between the Anatolian language families. And I thought, what about Chechen, a language of the true Caucasus.

Internet Archive has this.

https://archive.org/details/370682499-chechen-grammar-original

When I got to the verb morphology, I found -- how exciting! -- that it tracked closely with my verb paradigms for Classical Greek that threw out the old tense structure entirely in favor of aspect. 

Also, Chechen is an ergative language, and I showed on this blog how the "aor.2" verbs show up in ergative structures in Classical Greek. What's more, Chechen has a morphology with the same function as the certainty epistemic in Biblical Hebrew, and another that has the same function as my Classical Greek oblique.

The Semites and Chechens share the J1 and J2 Neolithic Y-chromosome haplogroups but the Semites belong to an older clade, suggesting that the Chechens have a relationship to the Minoans while the Greeks have that Siberian influence found in the Mycenaeans. 

So it's time to shred the old grammars and dig back into the Anatolian languages. I don't support the Nostratic macrofamily concept, I'm sticking to Anatolia and the Caucasus. But I feel my Greek studies sit on firmer ground.

Summary:

1. Verbs

2. More on verbs

3. Verb definitions

4.  Gerundives

5.  Imperatives

6.  Negatives

7.  Conditionals

8.  Syntax particles

9.  The particle an

10. Nouns

11. Adverbial equative

12. Syntax 1

13. Syntax 2

14. Ergatives

15. Concepts that are dead or ought to be

DIY -- GREAT eggless recipes

WE NEED OUR COMFORT FOOD, even though eggs are almost worth their weight in gold (even at $3,000 per troy ounce).  I've been posting these one at a time but here's a whole set. Some are also gluten free or dairy free.

1. WWII eggless cakes were developed for rationing. Use these recipes for muffins. Change out the raisins for other smallfruit or chopped cherries, figs or dates.

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup water

1 cup raisins

2 tablespoons oil or 2 tablespoons margarine

1 teaspoon cinnamon, ground

1⁄2 teaspoon clove, ground

1 1⁄2 cups flour

1⁄2 teaspoon salt

1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder

1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda

1⁄2 cup walnuts, chopped

1.               Place the brown sugar, water, raisins, oil, cinnamon, and cloves in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil.

2.               Cook gently for 5 minutes, then remove from the heat and let cool until the mixture is comfortably warm to your finger.

3.               While the mixture is cooling, preheat the oven to 350F.

4.               Grease and flour an 8x4-inch baking pan.

5.               Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

6.               Add them to the cooled sugar mixture, beating until no drifts of flour are visible and the batter is smooth.

7.               Stir in the walnuts.

8.               Spread evenly in the baking pan and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a broomstraw inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.

9.               Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn onto a rack to cool completely.

Notes: For a good glaze, even if it is a 90's addition, save back a bit of the hot spiced water.

Mix with confectioner's sugar, a drop of vanilla, and a pinch salt. Glaze the cake while hot.

 Chocolate World War II Cake

 1 1/2 cups (225g) flour

1 cup (240mL) water

3/4 cup (150g) sugar

1/3 cup (80mL) oil

1/4 cup (20g) cocoa powder

1 tbs (15mL) vinegar

1 tsp (6g) baking soda

1 tsp (5mL) vanilla (optional)

1/2 tsp (2.5g) salt

 

For the Glaze

1 cup (125g) powdered sugar

1 tbs (5g) cocoa powder

1 – 3 tbs (15-45mL) water

 

1.               Preheat oven to 350F (180C.)

2.               Grease and line the bottom of a 9" (23cm) round cake pan and set aside.

3.               Combine flour, sugar cocoa, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. Sit aside.

4.               In a large bowl, combine water, oil, vanilla and vinegar. Add flour mixture, stirring until there are no lumps, about 30 seconds. Pour immediately into cake pan.

5.               Bake 25 – 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Center should read between 200F (93C) and 210F (99C.)

6.               Cool completely in pan before icing.

7.               For the Glaze

8.               In a small bowl, combine powdered sugar and cocoa. Mix in water, one teaspoon at a time, until you get a thin glaze. Pour over the still warm cake slowly and allow it to seep into the crumb.

9.               Let icing harden 10 – 15 minutes before serving.

 NOTES

You can substitute self-rising flour.  If you do, use equal amounts flour and omit both the baking soda.  It will change the final texture slightly.

If you do not have vinegar, lemon juice can be used or it can be left out.  The rise will be less if left out, more like a thin brownie.

The water can be replaced with coffee to bring out the flavor of the chocolate.

Flour rationing cake

3/4 c. molasses

1/4 c. oil

1 1/4 c. flour

1 c. corn flour (process in blender until fine)

1 c. milk

4 tsp. baking powder

2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. cloves

1 c. raisins

Beat molasses and oil. Add flours and milk, baking powder, cinnamon, salt, and cloves, stirring just until smooth. Add raisins. Pour into loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 60 minutes.

Eggless date cake; uses milk.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/228297/eggless-date-cake/

A collection of cakes with the eggs taken out:

https://www.allrecipes.com/egg-free-cake-recipes-8681357

2. Pasta and noodles for soup. Somebody on Bluesky said they have been doing this for a while.

https://oldworldgardenfarms.com/2023/01/24/homemade-egg-free-noodles/

3. Kugel traditionally uses noodles. Here's a potato kugel that is also gluten and dairy free and you can add smallfruit or grated apples or pears or chopped nuts to it.

Eggless Potato Kugel: just leave the eggs out of this recipe. 

https://toriavey.com/wprm_print/passover-potato-kugel

4. Fried chicken usually uses a buttermilk batter. That's not kosher. For that and chicken nuggets, I used spiced egg to hold the matzo meal coating. Instead of that, use the batter for the fish in a fish and chips recipe, but use a fancy spice mix like chili powder, curry powder, garam masala, Montreal, Caribbean jerk, or "KFC" 11 spices. To make this gluten free, use rice or potato flour instead of wheat flour. You can also substitute potato STARCH for the flour.

https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-are-kfcs-11-herbs-and-spices/

5. I love cauliflower in a spiced crust. Use a pakora batter, which you make thick for cauliflower or zucchini, and thin for spinach. It's already gluten-free because it uses chickpea flour, and it's dairy-free.

6. Cookies. Swap out butter and use yogurt, which you can make chain batches of with a dehydrator to cure it overnight.

https://www.allrecipes.com/gallery/eggless-cookie-recipes/

6. In other posts, I pointed out that you can't make challah without eggs. You can use one less egg per batch. 

7. Eggplant parmigiana. You can just layer the raw eggplant, cheese and sauce in your baking pan; you can also use zucchini this way. You can also drizzle the vegetable with oil and roast at 425 F for 15 minutes, then layer and bake. MUCH easier, much less fat because you don't fry the vegetables first, and still delicious. Gluten free.

8. Stuffed vegetables, aka farcis. I made stuffed green peppers the other day and the recipe wanted you to bind the filling with egg. I left out the egg and it tasted great, plus it was gluten free and dairy free. Here's a stuffed eggplant recipe that doesn't call for egg in the first place. If you can find a nice BIG zucchini, this works for that, too.

https://www.recipetineats.com/moroccan-baked-eggplant-with-beef/

9. Breakfast. Pancakes -- replace the egg(s) with 1/4 cup banana or apple, or with 1 tablespoon each of oil and water. Also replace any milk with yogurt. Otherwise -- fruit salad, oatmeal (get the old fashioned because you can't make cookies with the instant) and other hot cereals, scrapple as a side for your ham or corned beef, yogurt with granola and chopped nuts that you aren't allergic to.

We will get through this. In the meantime, we deserve good food.

Why Fallacies are False -- 19, Appeal to Misleading Authority

We have had a bellyfull of appeals to misleading authority over the last ten years. This post starts a "story arc" that will lead to some surprising results, because it will get into a subject almost nobody knows about, as far as I can tell.

One area of my expertise is with urban legends; most of my blog attacks them. Urban legends arise in subsets of a culture, some of which are echo chambers. Urban legends are related to gossip, something we all do, I guess, but the definitions of gossip and urban legend are different, so I’m going to go through the progression. This will come up again in a later post.

When you talk about people you know, that’s gossip. The standard for gossip is that everybody in the chain changes the story a little bit. When you receive gossip, NEVER believe it unless you can get back to the first person who said it. You will be astonished at the difference between what they said and what you heard. Accepting gossip always involves a fallacy called Appeal to misleading authority, the “authority” being whoever told you the gossip.

Urban legends have four key features.

1/ they spread person to person like gossip, although often the medium is email.

2/ they name a vague authority, if any. If the urban legend is detailed enough, you can check with the supposed authority and 100% of the time they debunk the legend. Either they never said anything on the subject, or they never said anything like what’s in the urban legend, or it distorts something they said. Again, this is the fallacy of misleading authority, with the person who sends the urban legend as the misleading authority. Also, any claim that fails to list any sources is probably an urban legend. ALWAYS CHALLENGE CLAIMS THAT DON'T HAVE SOURCES. (Just went through this on Bluesky)

3/ an urban legend is always about some group to which the person spreading it does NOT belong. So an urban legend about people flashing their car lights, saying that they are gang members, does NOT spread among gang members but only among outsiders. This will be important for a definition in a later post.

4/ all urban legends are false because their data is false or their logic is false.

Reporters almost never have worked for the organizations they report on, and they can fail on /2/ because they are part of /3/. They are at risk of creating an urban legend every time they speak on camera or publish an article. Since MSM has fired the experts who know who to talk to at various organizations, reporters have to develop sources – and may pick unreliable ones. And if MSM is publishing articles based on Google results, they are counting on their writers to know which results came from reliable sources. What I’m seeing from MSM suggests that their writers don’t know that at all.

It’s also true that the more sensational the report is, the more you have to doubt vague “sources”.

a/ It could be somebody with a grudge on.

b/ It could be somebody far down in the chain of command who has no idea what is going on above their pay grade but likes the attention they get, or who gets quoted on overall issues they have no clue about because the reporter doesn’t have the brains or experience to know better.

c/ When it’s somebody who “used to work there”, you have to suspect that things have moved on and their information is out of date. Also these people might have been fired, or might have resigned, and have a grudge on.

Why would MSM destroy its reputation by spreading obvious urban legends?

Well, do they know how to tell when they are spreading urban legends?

Second, are they willing to fire writers that create urban legends?

And last and most shameful – both gossip and urban legends attract attention or they wouldn’t spread. MSM can’t survive if it doesn’t attract readers or listeners – what I call eyeballs and eardrums. So when they’re barely surviving anyway, do they stop attracting people (the basis of their advertising revenues), in the interests of having a good reputation?

Before you judge them, look back and think about how many times you refused to pass along gossip. It gets you attention, it’s exciting, and if you answer “Yeah but I’m not asking for money” remember, there are all kinds of compensation. Yours was emotional. MSM has stock holders.

Why Fallacies are False -- 18, the search for causes

I ran a little test on social media and got exactly what I expected. So here it is.

I told a true story about a large estate that got split equally among the children. One of them spent every penny within a year.

And as I expected, somebody tried to come up with a cause for that, including education.

The person who spent all that money has worked for over 30 years as a CPA/CFP, getting all the CEUs after getting a college degree in the field. The idea that education was involved in the spending spree is part of that Enlightenment Era myth that if you educate people, they will base their choices on that education.

I know of another example. Somebody I worked with at one time in federal procurement, had all the same training as I had, all the CEUs and whatnot. But seemingly "that was just stuff I gotta do for work". They procured the same kind of product twice for home use, each with different bells and whistles, instead of writing out a requirements list and sticking to it as they would have to do at work. Even if they could return the first item, it was a waste of time and money out of their own pocket.

The fallacy here is supposedly called the “just world” fallacy, which tries to find a reason for everything.

MAGA does it with conspiracy theories.            

Other people do it by trying to be intellectual or scientific or blaming it on education, or they show wishful thinking and the cognitive bias of exaggerated expectations.

If you watch enough talk shows or news series like 60 Minutes, you get exposed to discussions of criminals with “experts” who may have lots of letters after their names, but don’t understand the fundamental reality about criminals: they are mentally adolescent. History going back ten thousand years at least, has billions of examples of people who got caught in criminal behavior, even if it required circumstantial evidence, but every criminal believes s/he will not get caught. What’s more, every single one of them who does get caught, believes they won’t get sanctioned. But the “expert” cognitive bias exaggerates their confidence in their ability to diagnose.

You also saw TV discussions that tried to assign scientific reasons for insane behavior. Do you realize how nuts that is? It’s called insane behavior because there’s no logic behind it, not even a criminal’s warped logic. We’re still nowhere close to saying that insanity runs in your genes, let alone what genes are sure to cause the problem. But yadda yadda yadda.

We shouldn’t stop asking questions. We shouldn’t stop investigating. We should take a moment to figure out what to do with the answer when we get it. If we identify genes that let people remain mental adolescents, or cause insanity, what are we going to do with them? Are we going to force universal identical thought and behavior? What do we give up?

And of course, the answer comes back: we give up individuality, we give up creativity, we give up invention. Pope Urban VIII would gladly have given up Galileo: would you say the same thing?

Now let’s reason from minor to major (called a fortiori in logic), from that estate breakup to breaking up even larger fortunes. It’s a dead cert that breaking up a huge fortune will distribute the money, and that some of the recipients will dissipate what they get. That money will wind up in the pockets of other people. People who are spending themselves broke now, would have to change their behavior to keep from going broke.

And people don’t change their habits quickly. There was a big news story many years ago about a guy who won a huge Powerball prize or something like that – and lost it all. He got cheated out of some of it. He left a huge amount of it stored in his car in cash, and it got stolen. When I heard the rest of the story, it turned out he did the same thing at least once before: got a windfall and fooled it away or it got stolen.

It's time to look at human history. There is no oligarchy of the past which remains an oligarchy today, unless you count the Royal Family in the UK, and their oligarchy dates back 200 years, not the whole way back to the Norman Conquest. Starting in 1993, they voluntarily paid taxes. All the other famous oligarchs of history have left no heirs, or their wealth was confiscated by socialists and communists. And the commoners of socialist and communist nations were never a penny the richer for the confiscation.

Do what you will about modern oligarchs, you may never be a penny the richer, and if you are, your behavior may put you right back where you are now. Any other conclusion is wishful thinking.

Information about spending behavior has been publicized by consumer reporters for decades – but it also exists in the proverbs and aphorisms of world cultures. It hasn’t changed due to the Space Age, or computers, or the Internet, or the odometer rollover to the 21^st century. There will always be some economic unevenness. Because human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years, let alone the 200 years since nations began aiming at universal education. 

And that’s why the answers to my example were false.

Knitting -- the colorways jumper

So to use up some Comfy fingering, I did a jumper and sweater in reversed colorways. The red is hollyberry, the beige is called parchment. The yarn is a cotton blend.

There are two rows of motifs, one a star and the other from Mary McGregor's edition of Robert Williamson's collection of his 1920s customers' motifs that they used in their original Fair Isle knitting.

Between each row of motifs is what I call a "rick-rack", two rows of white with a color row between them. The colors showed up better with the parchment background and I liked how the parchment made it look sort of antique while being new.

So then I got ambitious to re-do the right hand sweater as a jumper using the classic Jamieson and Smith 2-ply Shetland wool. I bought it from Woolly Thistle although Fairlight Fibers also carries it.

If you never worked with this yarn before, it feels a little rough to the fingers and it is ALWAYS trying to hackle. Just work firmly but not with high tension.

The motifs are 10 stitches wide and 7 rows high apiece. There are three rounds of base color between every band with color, whether it's a band of motifs or rick-rack.

You need 12 skeins 3 (a light brown mix), 8 skeins 9113 (Maroon), 2 skeins 01A (Optic white), one skein each 77 (dyed black), 75 (Sea foam), 80 (Dark brown), 79 (Emerald), 21 (Navy), 95 (Pink), 118 (Moss), 73 (Orange), and 123 (a purple mix). I tried 002 (Stone) for a base color, but it was too light and the white didn’t show up well. I also tried 78, a medium shade of brown, but the maroon didn’t pop.

Use size 3 or 4 needles on 24 inch circular tethers for the body, 16 inch for the neck and the start of the sleeves, and DPs for the end of the sleeves.  

So.

Cast on 308 and work 8 rounds of k2/p2 rib. The 308 stitches allow for the fact that color work is less flexible than one-color work, and let you put 2 or 3 layers under the jumper.

Knit 1 round, then knit another increasing one stitch at each underarm, then knit a third round. You need that extra stitch because while the rib uses a 4-count, you need a 10-count for the body.

Work a rick-rack band. The rick-rack bands alternate like this: 77 then 75: 80 then 79: 21 then 95: 118 then 73: 80 again then 123. Start over with the black rick-rack if you run short before you get to the shoulders.

After the black rick-rack band, work a star band.

After the seafoam rick-rack band, work the Fair Isle motif.

Work the dark brown band, then the star.

Work the emerald band and then the Fair Isle.

Work the navy band and then the star.

Work the pink band and then the Fair Isle.

Work the moss band and then the star.

Work the orange band and then the Fair Isle.

Work a brown band and then the star.

Work a purple mix band and then the Fair Isle.

If you need a longer body, start over with the black rick rack.

When the jumper is long enough under your armpits, put 14 stitches on a holder , turn your work and cable on 15 for steeking. Turn it back, bring the first stitch on the body to your right needle, pass the last stitch over, and put it back on the needle. Remember to alternate your base and pattern color on the steeking, with two stitches of base color in the middle to mark where you will cut the steeking. 

Keep knitting in alternating bands until you get to the shoulders.

Knit together 40 stitches for each shoulder. Remember, when you finish each shoulder, slip one stitch from the left needle to the right, pass the last stitch from the right needle over that, put the stitch back and knit it. Do this at both shoulders. This is one of our gap-closing techniques.

Knit one round to stabilize the neck. At each shoulder, put the needle under the long stitch and add one, knitting it, then do the same thing in the stitch after that (but not in the knit stitch that has the PSSO under it), to prevent large gaps at the neck. 

Knit 8 rounds k2/p2 rib for the neck and bind off in rib.

Now cut your steeking and pick up around it for the sleeve as usual for Fair Isle.

Knit the underarm stitches off of the holder. When you get to the end, slip the last stitch on the left needle onto the right needle and pass the last stitch from the right needle over, then knit it. This is our gap-closing technique again. Knit one round in base color and use this technique again when you get back to the underarm.

Now start knitting in pattern, with the first rick-rack band being the same color as the last one before you knitted off at the shoulders, and the first motif band being the same one as the last one before the shoulders. 

Don't forget your decreases at the underarm. Do these in the first of 3 base color rounds, in the middle round of a rick-rack band, and in the last of the next 3 base color rounds. Stop decreasing when you get to the stitch count that you want for your cuff.

When you get down to the black rick-rack band that matches the bottom of the body, do your 3 rounds in base color. Then if, like me, you need some extra length, work one band in the Fair Isle motif (the body ends with the star motif) and 3 rounds in base color. For the cuff, do 8 rounds of k2/p2 rib and bind off in rib.

Wash with a soap specialized for wool. I have one with tea tree and lavender oils to protect against moth. The wool feels softer after washing.

You can customize this with any Fair Isle motif you want, or use a Fair Isle motif instead of the star. I recommend using motifs no more than 8 rows high. 

You can also customize this by using different colors than what I chose, or doing light rick-rack bands before dark ones, or... well, you know.

And then you can knit matching socks with the banding on just the leg portion. That ought to get you one of each motif band, plus three rick-rack bands, with 3 rounds in base color above and below the banding.

For another cozy layer, make a sweater or wool jacket in Jamieson and Smith Aran Shetland Fawn to wear over the jumper.

These same amounts of yarn would also make a nice scarf with matching hat, gloves, and socks. The body of the jumper is 18 inches long, so work one repeat, then 24 rows of base color, and then another repeat in reverse order of all the bands, for a 39 inch scarf.

You probably only want to work a single motif band across the back of the gloves with a rick-rack band on each side. 

Above the ribbing of a cap, you would work the same as the leg of a sock and then decrease to a round peak.

I would wear these with a jumper in a solid color (no color work), so that the color work really stands out, in Jamieson and Smith Aran (worsted weight) in Shetland Fawn. That ought to be nice and snuggly. 

If you want a different base color, buy one skein of every color you plan to use and see how it looks next to the base color. You might have leftovers, but if you search this blog for "leftover" you will find plenty of ways to work them up. I bought lots of stone and I'll use it to make a Dovrekofta with turquoise.

Why Fallacies are False -- 17, Wishful Thinking

So in light of what happened in the 2024 election, two streams of thought are coming out.

Somebody on social media recently advocated qualification testing to let people vote. Qualification testing for the franchise has a terrible precedent. In the Jim Crow period, it was used to disenfranchise blacks. The recent proposal included IQ tests; IQ tests are known to have a cultural component. Giving multiple IQ tests throughout schooling tries to validate the results by pretending that the test evaluates a person’s educational history.

But there’s a problem with the concept of educational history, which I saw discussions of starting in 2016. People involved in science point out that up until about 6^th grade, kids love science. Then their interest crashes. “We need to educate people better in science.”

That’s an extension of the Enlightenment Era myth that all you have to do is expose people to information to educate them. Anybody who thinks that if you educate kids they’ll all turn out “intelligent”, is ignoring two things.

First: It’s the false dilemma of nature vs. nurture. It’s not genetics versus the school system. Those are not the only two influences on children. They also have their family structure and their neighborhood social structure. And about age 12, the structure radically changes its influence.

When a kid gets to age 12, the family starts pushing them to stop being a kid, to be practical, to ditch everything that isn’t necessary for their future. And we all know that some families actively discourage their kids from getting higher education, as well as some families pushing the false dilemma that you have to go to college or you won’t get a good job. I talked about that a long time ago. Knowing this, means that IQ as qualification testing is actually testing for acculturation, not for education.

Families tell their kids “You’re no good in math, you can’t be a scientist/engineer/whatever.” It's a false dilemma between brilliance and non-brilliance.

a/ I’m no good at calculations, but I understood enough math to teach you to calculate whether a logical argument also has a probability of being true. I also helped a niece, who is very good at math, understand the use of reciprocals when her high school textbook was too oriented toward verbal people.

b/ I know a CPA/CFP whose classmates complained about failing tests. He said, “Did you do all the problems in the book?” The answer was always “No.”

c/ I learned from an online course in matrix math, don’t get upset if you look at the problem and the answer doesn’t leap out at you. Go methodically through the steps to get the answer. (I was glad I used this site because, years later, it helped me follow Leonard Susskind’s physics lectures.)

It takes study to understand the concepts. It takes practice to be able to get the calculations right. It takes work to come up with the answer. It’s not brilliance vs. non-brilliance or nature vs. nurture. It’s encouragement and effort.

And then there are the natural human failings of memory, which may be responsible for people not recognizing a Conjunction Fallacy even if they’ve seen it before. Somebody I know once proposed that people should have to solve a quadratic equation to get to vote. Well, I studied quadratic equations, but that was in high school. Am I supposed to not be allowed to vote because I don’t remember how to do them 50 years later? But some kids’ families discourage them from taking the higher mathematics: “You’ll never use it in real life.” That’s a matter of encouragement, not of qualification.

If you can figure out a way to deal with a discouraging family environment without separating families, “we’d all love to see the plan.” Meanwhile, the stage is set for the next round of human culture. Not human development; we are not about to purify the human race as we get through the fallout of the MAGA period. History is not a progression – that’s another Enlightenment Era myth; it’s just change, the one true constant in the universe.

And now that I’ve dealt with MAGA I’ll point out the other misunderstanding people have about education. The Internet. If you have the Internet, you have access to everything you need for a good education in languages, science, literature, art, philosophy, even history.

And with the Internet, you no longer have to find a bunch of people interested in the same thing you are, pay for a class and books, and drive to the classroom or schedule time with an instructor in Zoom or Facetime. All you have to do is find a free book and make yourself read it.

And that’s how I got access to the material I used to write most of my blog posts. It includes The Fallacy Files which helped me distinguish useful information from bullshit.

But I went after that information myself. From what I see on social media, I’m in the minority. The way deep minority. I have a blog post about that.

There has been zero noticeable increase in educated people since the start of Project Gutenberg and, later, Internet Archive or Openstax or LiveLingua or any of the hundreds of other educational websites. I said in my very first post in this thread, that the majority of people who have the internet, refuse to make the effort of using it for self-education. If you know of a study with statistics on educational levels in this period, tell us all about it.