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.

Why Fallacies are False -- 16, popularity

We just had an election for president. It was a close-run thing. While MAGA is claiming a victory by holding both branches of elected leadership, the margins in Congress are razor thin. Three seats in the House of Representatives face elections this spring. Disruptive elements in the controlling party may push leadership into sore straits. So winning a majority of votes is not a recipe for control.

Put it another way. Those of us who were on the other platform during the first Trump administration know that behind his popularity on that platform, lay the fact that 2/3 of his followers were Russian or Chinese bots or trolls. They live on every platform. If you don’t curate your followers, the raw number may not be meaningful.

Or to put it still another way, Gd told the Israelites specifically, “It was not because of your numbers being more than all the nations that the Lord chose you…” (Deuteronomy 7:7)

Assuming that raw numbers are meaningful is the Appeal to Popularity fallacy, AKA Authority of the Many.

We know that popularity is not a recipe for success. James Buchanan got us into the Civil War. Herbert Hoover got us into the Depression. Then there was the S&L crisis in the 1980s, the debt collapse in 2008, and covid.

Popularity is related to the Base Rate Fallacy, and this relates to polls. Pollsters inundated us in the run-up to the election, but the problem was, every single one of those polls was skewed in one way or another.

1/ The methods for contacting participants skewed them right.

2/ The questions skewed things in the poll-takers’ preferred direction.

3/ We found out later that pollsters manipulated the data to produce right-leaning results.

Or, as I constantly replied to posts, POLLS ARE NOTHING, VOTES ARE EVERYTHING.

Some pollsters used only material from members of specific associations. However, more than half of all registered voters belong to no party; more than a quarter of all Americans belong to no religious denomination, including those who are religious but not members of any defined group. When a pollster limits their contacts to specific associations, that creates sampling bias.

So when CNN published a poll that says “most Americans favor Trump” but they only polled CNN viewers, it’s important to know that CNN has a less than 30% viewer share of cable news – and that increasingly, people DON’T get their news from MSM. MSM has poisoned the well against itself in this election cycle and is losing eyeballs and eardrums. As with any other data, you have to know if your source is reliable.

The Base Rate Fallacy operates in somewhat the same way. It claims that membership in X means you’re Y times as likely to have a given consequence compared to membership in Z. If somebody has that consequence, this would make you think they are part of X. In fact, the raw numbers of members of X and Z who have that consequence might be equal, but if X is a smaller set than Z, the likelihood is higher in X than Z. You have to know the raw numbers and the sizes of X and Z, before you can draw an accurate conclusion.

Base Rate edges into the “apples and oranges” false equivalence fallacy. There’s a difference between a voter who is registered “independent” (to NO party) and an “undecided voter”. The “undecided voter” was held out as a problem because supposedly a candidate should be able to come up with a way to make them decide. This might work with an independent voter, but somebody who stubbornly tells pollsters they are undecided could be trying to avoid an argument – or they could be hiding that they have a preference and that no candidate could make a reasonable argument that would change their minds.

All of this should make you realize that any time somebody tells you “the numbers speak for themselves,” you should get ready for a flim-flam. As with sources, it takes a lot of work to be sure you’re getting a true picture of the situation. The same is true for economic data. Never agree with anybody who throws you a single price quote for stocks, bonds, or money markets. Always go to a reputable market site like MarketWatch or Trading Economics and call up a multi-week or multi-month graphic of price variations. The Russian ruble is going through some contortions. On the day in 2024 that it was quoted at 113, it was possible to look at five-year data and see that in February 2022, it hit a price of 125 to the dollar.

And the same for “pictures don’t lie”. I saw a post that said this, made by an elected legislator, and I said, this is the 21^st century: we have photoshopping, laptop video editing, and deep fakes that don’t require hiring Industrial Light and Magic. Pictures, like numbers, do lie.

Somebody throws out an exciting piece of data and everybody jumps on it like a duck on a June bug, without checking the source for reliability, or studying the history of the field. Nothing means anything in isolation, that’s why Cartesian method forces practitioners to fit their results into the big picture. Nothing means anything in isolation from its environment as part of human culture, which includes historical data and contributing factors. You can’t pipeline or cherry-pick your data and hope to say anything useful. And that includes pretending that numbers are meaningful in and of themselves.

Why Fallacies are False -- 15 the two-fer

This time I’m talking about two fallacies that you have probably seen, but either it wasn’t important or you didn’t know the difference between them. They are very similar but it’s not hard to explain them.

Historian Fallacy and Presentism Fallacy both involve the present and the past. The first assumes that people, at a selected point in the past, knew things that weren’t discovered until decades or centuries later. The second projects present ideas or attitudes into the past.

If you read historical novels you have likely seen examples of Historian Fallacy, like packing a womb with moldy bread to prevent infection, but it didn’t matter because that’s fiction. It matters when somebody is trying to write historical fact. My favorite example is pretending that, in the Bible, tahor/tameh mean hygienic and non-hygienic, respectively. I have blog posts about that.

Gibbon commits Historian’s Fallacy constantly. I have a thread showing why you shouldn’t read Gibbon, or why you should not sit still for it if a teacher presents Gibbon as fact in a history class.

Gibbon pretends that the Roman Republic was run by free and fair elections, and that Augustus and the emperors up to the Antonines deprived the Romans of “liberty”. Then he turns around and commits the Presentism Fallacy by pretending that liberty, as understood by the British constitution in the 1700s CE, had a role in the Roman Republic nearly 2000 years earlier.

And then a website touting its postings as documents of liberty, confuses what Gibbon was talking about, with liberty as understood in the US in the 21^st century. That’s another example of the Presentism fallacy.

DH got its start due to Presentism Fallacy. It got its start among people who pieced together information they collected from discrete documents invented in writing by individuals, creating pastiches of information that supported a given conclusion. It assumed that what it perceived in its translations of the Jewish Bible, resulted from Jews between 600 and 400 BCE also creating a pastiche from existing documents. To support this concept, DH had to propose one or more editors, some of them creating expanded editions as somebody authored new material.

The idea of editors creating ever larger pastiches implies, and the description of the DH dataset stated, that each of the documents has a different historical context. That’s all over. The Dean of Yale Divinity School has declared that DH has nothing to do with historicity; it is strictly literary. If he has published the new dataset description that eliminates historicity, I haven’t found it online. If you know what it is, you would help out fans of DH by publishing it.

Since we know on other grounds that DH has no possibility of being true, I for one don’t care about it. But you may care, because if historicity is now irrelevant, it doesn’t matter if archaeologists ever turn up the hard evidence of DH. DH will ignore it. Or at least the Dean will.

Look, historical novels are one thing, nobody is saying you should study them for fallacies. People who want their writing about history to be taken seriously, have to watch out for fallacies in their work. My experience is that they don’t do it.

DIY -- health

So of course you'd like to save money on meds but what you probably don't realize is that you might be able to save if you would do the hard stuff.

1. Eat right. Medicine has clinical studies since 2012 that show supplements are a waste of money. I've posted about that before. Get your veggies and fruits, your whole grains, ditch the processed foods and their chemicals, buy a bread maker and make your own. Oh, and by the way, supplements never were regulated by the FDA. Unless they made medical claims. Without the FDA, you're even farther up shit's creek. 

2. Exercise any way you can. Yoga will help. Cooking from scratch will help, especially things like kneading your own bread. Between this and eating right, you can reduce your dependence on cholesterol and blood pressure meds, and exercise has a positive effect on depression. I've done it.

3. GET YOUR SLEEP. Set a schedule, set a routine (brushing your teeth, cooling shower in hot weather), ventilation and air movement (closing your door will interfere with this), cut back on tech at bedtime, exercise stopping an hour before bedtime. Obesity and heart problems can arise from lack of sleep. I have a history of insomnia, and I know half a dozen tricks that fixed it without using meds.

4. Clean house. Not only is this a great form of exercise, but you can detect and eradicate mold and mildew, both of which can cause illness. Those of us with dust mite allergies need to clean regularly. This includes clearing food from the fridge when it's going over. If you buy vegetables in bulk because it's cheaper, you may be able to freeze them. Some need to be blanched before freezing. There are websites about that.

5. Herbal remedies. There's a lot of bullshit out there about herbals. Clinical studies show that echinacea and black cohosh aren't what they're cracked up to be. White willow bark, on the other hand, is what aspirin was developed out of. Some herbals you can grow for yourself with a full-spectrum LED lamp: feverfew, horehound, arnica, chamomile (but don't use this if you have a goldenrod allergy), comfrey (natural source of allantoin for your skin). Mullein, plantain and calendula are others. If you have a yard, you can plant things like elderberry and juniper.

6. Environment. A number of plants will make your yard inhospitable to mosquitoes, including bright-colored Mexican marigold, classic lavender, bee balm, lemon basil or verbena, and any kind of mints. Dill grown in the yard will attract beneficial insects and you can use it in cooking. Don't dig up or poison your dandelions; most of the plant is edible. Grow mint in the house; mice hate the smell. Grow aloe vera indoors under your LEDs; not only can you make an excellent skin care product doped with comfrey infusion, but it also purifies the air. A lot of classic herbs like parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, and oregano will grow in many US agricultural zones. You can grow your own coriander/cilantro and cumin. And don't forget the birds. Insect-eating birds love fruit. My holly and mulberry trees support lots of them for part of the year and I put out mealworm and things in the winter.

7. Outside the box. US agricultural zones 6a and above can grow tea, a form of camellia. Every winter you need a frame wrapped in burlap and stuffed with raked up leaves, to protect the plant. You can avoid the high prices coming on coffee and still get your caffeine. There are websites showing you how to process the leaves. You don't have to buy Celestial Seasonings: you can grow roses and use the hips, as well as your herb leaves, to make tisanes. 

8. Mental health. Along with exercise to combat depression, you are faced with increasing prices for drugs that combat dementia and Alzheimer's. If you have no symptoms yet, get started on prevention. Exercise and eating right are key to staving them off. But you also have to take care of the connections in your brain as well as the chemicals. Studies show keeping your brain active will do that. Whatever it is you think you're not good at, take it as a challenge. The object is not to get good, it's to use the experience to keep your brain ticking over. Math, art and music, learning a foreign language, getting into crafts, will all help. Sitting in front of the boob tube or doomscrolling will not. It doesn't take finding a class somewhere. Youtube has videos on just about everything you could want to do. I've used it to help me learn the techniques I use in my knitting. I've seen videos on flint-knapping and processing animal skins. I've found websites that taught matrix math, which helped me understand Dr. Susskind's physics lectures -- the videos of which are on Youtube. I recently posted a laundry list of resources.

Don't ever go off a medication without your doctor's assistance. OTOH, we know that drug companies bribe doctors, one way or another, into using their products or recommending them for things that there are no clinical studies for. Check with the Mayo Clinic website or the Merck website. For example, the Merck website specifically says that Ozempic for diabetes works WITH DIET AND EXERCISE. The entry also warns about adverse effects. WORK WITH YOUR DOCTOR. But get yourself set to do the hard stuff, and when you can't afford the Ozempic any more, you'll be ready to go it alone.

Why Fallacies are False -- 014, Labels

One of the things that results in fallacies is labeling. You just saw that labeling conjugations as going by tense, instead of aspect, created strawman arguments in translations from Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek.

A number of fallacies involve labels.

One is the loaded label. You use a word with a large emotional load to turn people for or against something, and the label might not fit what you hang it on. But it can also be a false dilemma. Currently 10% of the US population is multi-racial; they don’t fit labels like black or white.

But more than that, I have replied to people time and again showing them that “black” or “white” is bullshit. I had the most fun with this on the anti-Semitic posts that said Jews were or were not white. It ignored the DNA reality, and issues of conversion.

The Semites originated in NE Anatolia between Lake Van and the Caucasus by 4000 BCE. Men descended from them in the direct male line have Y-chromosome subclades of J1 or J2. This includes Muslim Palestinians as well as Jews, Arabs, and Canaanites.

The Indo-European people originated in the same region and became distinct from other groups by 2500 BCE. Men descended from them in the direct male line have Y-chromosome subclades of R1a and R1b.

Jews descended from Indo-European converts, then, have Indo-European genes. And yes, these Jews can be targets of anti-Semitism, a label invented in the 1800s by a French political party for their own anti-Jewish policies.

Before the Semites, a people lived in the same region of NE Anatolia. One of their descendants turned up in Denmark. Her ancestors left Anatolia about 8000 BCE, at the time of development of a wheat strain which could not sow itself and required human intervention.

That is, on the cusp of domestication and agriculture.

Descendants of these emigrants washed up all over Europe. They were the Basques, and the people who built Stonehenge. (The Celts are Indo-Europeans.)

Our lady got the nickname Lola. She lived about 3700 BCE, before the Indo-Europeans existed. She had blue eyes. And she had dark skin.

1/ Most of you would say she was Caucasian because her people came from near the Caucasus.

2/ Others would say she wasn’t white because her skin was dark.

3/ But she had blue eyes, and some of you probably think that blue eyes go with white skin.

So now you see that all the “white” “black” “brown” stuff is bullshit. You need to look at the DNA.

Lola had K1e mitochondrial DNA, meaning that her foremothers were hunter-gatherers, not farmers like the Semites and Indo-Europeans. The mothers of the Neolithic early agricultural period had mtDNA haplogroup subclade T2b, although K subclades hung around because the migrants did not take all their women to Europe.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13549-9

You can say a lot of meaningless things with labels. You can use a word for an abstract concept and treat it as if it were concrete. This is reification, the problem with talking about evolutionary selection. Evolution is a concept. What really makes the selection is whatever events wipe out a population. Whatever population remains then has the opportunity to leave descendants that occupy the new blank spot in the ecology. They may evolve as they take advantage of it. That’s the lesson of Darwin’s Galapagos finches.

You can assume that everybody means the same thing by certain words. Any dictionary can show that this is false. Sometimes it’s a case of the referential fallacy, which assumes that a word says something inherent about an object or situation (its essence) when actually it’s a matter of perception or happenstance (accidence). That goes back to my vicious dogs discussion.

You could also be using a word in the wrong setting (context). When you talk about “intent” in a courtroom, you mean that no responsible person would do whatever was done, unless they desired the given outcome which is covered by the legal code. When your lawyer then goes out in front of news cameras and says you didn’t intend to do it, she’s trying to confuse the public into thinking you couldn’t possibly be found guilty. The name for this fallacy is ambiguity.

You can also have the redefinition fallacy. When somebody says “If we define X as [whatever]”, watch out because they’re getting into redefinition. Make them get out the OED and prove that some group of people really define it that way in the context of which you are speaking. The OED only adds an entry based on multiple uses by multiple people over some period of time in multiple environments. A discussion does not stand or fall by just one person’s definition of a word.

One sign of a cult is to have special connotations for certain words; knowing those connotations is how you show you are part of the cult. This partakes of the redefinition fallacy, but it’s also part of that litmus test to see if you’re part of the cultural subset.

And if people start calling you names for not agreeing with them, that’s the ad hominem fallacy and they automatically lose.

Why Fallacies are False -- BONUS ROUND

There was just a fray over on Bluesky that I created because somebody posted a false opinion based on a false translation of a word from a foreign language. 

The poster claimed that Greek ἰδιότης means the same thing as modern English idiot. It does not. Here is the LSJ entry.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Di)dio%2Fths

If anything, the word means individual. There is no pejorative sense to it. The poster committed the redefinition fallacy.

This is the same sort of thing as pretending that the medieval word villein has the same pejorative connotation as the modern word villain.

Or that a churl in the medieval sense of the word was a gloomy nasty person. The medieval churl was unlettered and uncultured, and the word derives from German kerl which today means "guy". 

Anybody with the Internet, and the will to make sure you're not being lied to, could have done the research that just took me 5 minutes. So now if you saw the original post, you know that the poster is somebody you can't trust to tell the truth.

Knitting -- ribs three ways -- fisherman's and shaker's

I have been using up leftovers in throws, like this one in Victorian double stitch using Palette.

I did another with Wool of the Andes in Eye of Partridge.  

Then I used up Comfy Worsted in brioche. 

Brioche is a ribbed stitch that doesn't need a ribbed hem to keep the edge from curling up. Some websites confuse it with fisherman's rib. The two are not at all alike. 

One of the issues with fisherman's rib is you can't use your normal round counts. I would normally do 130 rounds below the armpits for fingering weight yarn. The knit-belows and purl-belows compress the rows or rounds. You must measure. 

OTOH the number of stitches does work, so 280 stitches in the body and 56 in the sleeve, increasing up to 92, did work.

You can do steeking above the armpits so as to keep working in the round.

What you cannot do is pick up around the steeking so as to knit the sleeves top down. You will end up with the ribs going around your arm, not along it, and in a bulky yarn you will look like you're wearing a Cuban music hall dance costume. So you have to knit the sleeves separately, making sure they are the right length for your arm, and then sew them in at the steeking.

That said, fisherman's rib is better done in worsted or bulky yarn than fingering.

For fisherman's rib, use a 24-inch circular needle and cast on an even number of stitches. Join and start a marker so you know when to switch between steps 1 and 2. 

Work 1 knit round and one of K1/P1. 

Step 1: knit into the bottom of the knit stitches. This means, don't put your needle through the knit stitch, but under it, knit and pull off. Purl the purl stitches.

Step 2: knit the knit stitches. For the purl stitches, you have two loops that look like the purl stitches in a brioche. This is probably part of the confusion. Bring your yarn to the front. Put your needle back to front between these two loops. Wrap the yarn counterclockwise around the needle and pull to the back, then pull the joined stitches off. BE VERY CAREFUL to do this right, or you will find you have a dropped stitch.

You do NOT want to drop stitches. Recovery is a...OK pain.

Repeat steps 1 and two until you get to the armpits. Put an even number of stitches on each side of the "seam" on a holder. Then do steeking and finish above the armpit with 10 rounds of K2/P2 rib, and bind off in rib.

Do the sleeves the same only start with 56 stitches. Join and do your knit round. Then K2, K1/P1 around, K2. Put your marker between the two K2s; these will be your "seam" and you will do increases on the second knit stitch.  I did 220 rounds in the sleeves to get the right length.

When you get to the right length, bind off. Turn the body inside out, match the armpits and knit those stitches off, ease the body around the top of the sleeve and sew together.

I used Cascade 220 super-wash merino in fingering weight. It comes in hanks of 219 yards and a hank does 45 rounds (3.5 inches) in the body and half a sleeve in the arm. 

Now the problem child, Shaker Rib. I've seen three different videos on it, and one of them clearly shows brioche. So here's the apparent winner.

Cast on an even number of stitches.

Knit one round.

P1, K1BELOW, repeat.

Knit one round. 

Repeat the last two steps all the way up the body or sleeve. 

Notice that you are not purling below, so this won’t be as compressed as Fisherman’s rib. I had hanks of 494 yards of fingering yarn and worked 42 rounds at 280 stitches per round.

Here is a side-by-side comparison.

So now you have some new stitches to try out with your stitch count although, sadly, you also have an example of how the experts don't always present all the information you need.

Now. Fisherman's rib is the stitch in a sweater I saw James Steward wearing in Dear Brigitte. Yesterday I searched all over the internet for something that also has this shawl collar, and mostly what I got back were Aran patterns. The exception was a discontinued pattern by Purl Soho. I emailed them and they were kind enough to give me a link to the pattern for free. I am sending them a link to this post. and here is a link to their discontinued pattern. Contact them if, like me, you are into classic styling.

https://www.purlsoho.com/create/2016/02/04/top-down-shawl-collar-cardigan/?srsltid=AfmBOor2_UkghmU97mlqfYIjwytvXgCU7cK4bwvSQZRzXrAGGos0awQa

And that's why I love knitting. The feeling of community.

Why Fallacies are False -- 13, false dilemma

Now I turn to another of my favorite fallacies because it shows the limitations of mortal thought.

It’s the false dilemma. It gives you two options and it’s a sort of sampling bias if they are not the ONLY options available in the natural world.

In other words, to me, nature presents more than a pair of options, and sometimes a long ribbon of options.

So whenever anybody presents me with a dilemma, I reject it until I’ve had time to think of the third possibility, or the umpteenth one, or whatever it is.

There’s a really fun way of coming up with the other options.

1/ You have to know your audience.

2/ You have to know what would make their head explode.

3/ You have to evaluate whether that is an option that exists out in reality.

And I have found over and over again, that you can avoid the trap of the false dilemma by going straight for the option that will make heads explode.

I’ll give you an example.

How many of you were told you had to go to college, even if you majored in a business field, or you would never get a good paying job?

And did you stop and think about why you couldn’t be vocational? Why couldn’t you go and learn HVAC or plumbing or electrical work or any of the myriad other skills we need in our infrastructure? Some of those jobs pay well, you can get loans for trade school if your parents won’t pay for it, and they are ALWAYS needed.

Your parents couldn’t see that option, or didn’t want to, or didn’t know enough to see that it could be a good thing. And that’s why you got shoved into college in the first place.

In college, your parents forced you to take classes only if required, or only in your major, by refusing to pay for anything else. This is called “staying in your lane”. If you went for post-graduate work, your advisor did the same thing, enforcing it by downgrading your work.

There’s another name for “staying in your lane”, it’s pipelining and it creates sampling bias. I can’t tell you how many academic papers I’ve read and rejected because the author pipelined the research and missed important facts that discredited their conclusion. I can’t tell you how often I’ve replied to a tweet or skeet and included a link to professional data or historical reports on the missing facts.

You’re saying, “but you told us we could break the problem up and work each small piece separately”. I sure did. That’s Cartesian method. Peer review guarantees that somebody reports on whether the small pieces fit back into the big picture. I’m talking now about papers that don’t seem to know there is a big picture to fit into, or they don’t follow the method. Anybody writing about the Philistines after 1995, who wants to be taken seriously, has to show that they know about the Sea Peoples and that Linear B was a script used by their Pelishtim subset as well as in Crete. The big picture goes far beyond the Bible.

Anybody doing archaeology after the Oxford Project reported out its findings, about 2010, has to show they know that radiocarbon dating shows the ancient past of the Mediterranean was more ancient than we thought. A well-known archaeologist bucked this trend in his work at Avaris by ignoring radiocarbon dating altogether, and he has been criticized to death. It only got worse when archaeologists found out during peer review, that his old-fashioned stratigraphy was at best all wrong and at worst manipulated.

Anybody writing about the migration of peoples after the report of the Human Genome Project, has to show the DNA hard evidence supporting their supposed history. That’s that philology thing I talked about a few weeks ago.

It takes some practice to make a habit of looking for the third option, and it takes research to find it. And you have to get out of your lane to do some of the research.

But you’ll avoid getting trapped in a no-win situation and you lessen the possibility that your work will get debunked.

Why Fallacies are False -- 12, strawman fallacy

I shoved a lot of stuff into that last post. If you came back, you gave me a chance to straighten things out.

Every place in the world has subsets of culture. Every subset has a different culture – not just material goods, like the difference between an evening gown worn by a Russian countess and the vyshivka worn by a peasant woman, but also their language, which reflects their mental concepts.

This creates communication problems. The best communicators know this from learning or experience, and adapt their communications to their audience. For decades, writing teachers have specifically said, “know your audience,” so that you write in a way they will understand. The writing style you would use in a historical novel will never work in a manga. The audiences have different expectations, even if some of them read both types of work.

When people sit on their high places and hand down information with content and expression of their choice, the people on the receiving end may reject it. It’s not a matter of the speaker using insulting words or voice tones. It’s a matter of communicating in the way the audience understands. Or not. Free speech has limits: even if your speech is protected, speaking doesn't mean your audience automatically has to agree with you.

Languages are expressions of a culture and are specific to that culture.

Every language has words for culture-specific phenomena. A translator who uses word for word substitution, first will not put across the complete nuance of single words and, second, will make nonsense out of idioms.

Every language has its own grammar. It may be ergative, aspectual, or based on tense. It’s not just morphology; it’s also sentence structure and punctuation. A translator who fails to incorporate the nuance of grammar cheats the reader into a false impression of the source document.

The meaning of words depends on their context. Dictionaries reflect this by having sub-entries. A translator who uses the meaning from the wrong sub-entry produces a strawman argument about the source document.

The context of a language is the culture using it. A translator who doesn’t explain cultural nuances deprives the reader of cultural riches.

The words and grammar issues are the original rules of SWLT. The contextual issue is implied but not stated in both of them. You’ll find the mantra CONTEXT IS KING all over my blog. A fourth issue is involved, but for that I have to discuss a whole other area of knowledge and I’m saving it for later.

Most people who teach Hebrew nowadays, in relationship to the Bible, are teaching a strawman argument about its grammar. They teach according to Mishnaic Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew is an ancient Semitic language resembling its oldest known relative, Akkadian, and its cousins. It uses aspect, which Modern Standard Arabic also does – and if you take a course in Arabic and your teacher doesn’t teach aspect, get your money back. Mishnaic Hebrew uses tenses. BH and MH differ in other ways as well, but the important thing is that the verb system of Biblical Hebrew is more complex and carries more layers of nuance than Mishnaic Hebrew.

Most teachers of Classical Greek are in the same situation. The oldest grammatical descriptions present a strawman argument by describing verbs in terms of tense, when it should be aspect. (Actually, it’s worse: up to one-third of grammarians’ claims either have no attestation in the surviving literature, or are contradicted by it.)

If you don’t know the language of the source document, as part of its cultural setting and in the context of what it says about that culture, anything you say about the source document is a strawman argument. If you insist on talking about a translation, you’ll have your best success if you do it inside your echo chamber. But as soon as you say the same things to people outside your echo chamber, you’ll deserve any pushback you get from people who can debunk what you say.

Which is true for every subject under the sun.

I'm just saying....dumbing down

I just read a skeet blaming the internet for dumbing us down.

Oh, no, my friend, we did this to ourselves. Project Gutenberg got its start in 1971 and went up on the Internet almost as soon as the public could get subscriptions. It now has over 72,000 documents.

Internet Archive started in 1996. It has billions of web captures and access to the Wayback Machine.

Universities post lectures on line. That's how I got to view Dr. Leonard Susskind's physics lectures based on his book series, The Theoretical Minimum. It's also how I got access to an antique Tanakh in Ladino, written in the Rashi script, and to the 1342 Munich Talmud manuscript which proves that all copies of Talmud now in print have restored what the pope censored in the 1500s.

LiveLingua and other sites provide language learning materials and access to individualized teaching. Websites worldwide, including Liber Liber in Italy; Audiolitterature in France; and a hundred other sites provide access to classics in various languages in audio. Other sites have the texts.

You can access international media to help your language learning: BBC, RFI, Deutsche Welle, RNE, NHK, Kan, and other media post audio, video, and articles online. You can also learn that the US viewpoint is not the only one out there. 

Wordproject and Sefaria are just two of many sites providing access to religious literature in more than one language. Several websites are dedicated to the Quran. Internet Archive has Max Muller's classic Sacred Books of the East. There are sites dedicated to Hindu, Buddhist, and other literature, in various languages.

Openstax and other Creative Commons websites host college level textbooks in business, math and science. There are websites that teach basic or advanced math. 

You can take art studies on the net; most of the well-known art in the world is available, including audio and video. 

If you are dumbed down but you have access to the Internet, you are dumbed down because you choose to be. 

Why Fallacies are False -- 11, translation

So now you understand why MAGA and non-MAGA can’t communicate in general; they are different cultural subsets. They speak differently and they think differently. Coming to agreement only works one on one, with pushback on every false fact and every fallacy involved in a MAGA conspiracy theory. It’s time-consuming and exhausting. And once your MAGA goes back into their subculture, they forget everything you told them. It’s not how their culture thinks.

But, back to my language geekiness. The science behind this goes back to the 1950s. It’s called Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Theory, and some people may try to convince you it’s outdated.

It can’t be outdated. Its two canonical rules address the things that ruin translations, which I discussed last week. I read a paper that complained that SWLT makes translation impossible. That’s a case of the ambiguity fallacy and how you define “translation”: if you expect a translation to be a word-for-word substitution, yes it does, but I showed last week that word substitution will always produce a bad translation anyway.

The complaint also ignores history. The Septuagint was known to be a bad translation within a hundred years of its publication, based on what Greek words and grammar it used, and that was nearly two thousand years before SWLT came out.

The corollary is that every translation that relies on the Septuagint, is a bad translation.

How do you know if a translation of the Bible relies on the Septuagint?

Look at Isaiah 7:14. If it uses the word “virgin”, that comes from the Septuagint.

It does not come from the Biblical Hebrew. It is a misrepresentation of the source document, and that fails the Test of Occam’s Razor, data portion. This is a case of SWLT Rule 1.

Another indicator is if it uses “and” all the time. The Septuagint uses kai almost every place the Biblical Hebrew has the vav prefix, and English translations that rely on the Septuagint turn kai into “and”.

In 21^st century Biblical Hebrew, that vav means something other than “and” ohhhh I think 90% of the time. With nouns, it means “but” some of the time. With verbs, it’s what Dr. John Cook labeled a “narrative past”, or it marks a verb as part of an oblique structure. I found out that it may be the “then” clause in an “if-then” involving a promise to do something. (Dr. Cook disagrees strictly on the basis of morphology but I talk about that on the blog.) Grammar is the subject of SWLT Rule 2.

Since translations are strawman arguments, misrepresenting what the source says, any claims or conclusions based on translations fail the Test of Occam’s Razor for the data portion of the test.

This includes DH. The earliest writer accepted into the canon is Jean Astruc. He admits that he used the Neuchatel French translation done by and for French Calvinists. DH is founded upon a strawman argument, a fallacy that makes its probability of truth zero percent. I have four or five posts about Astruc on my blog.

The strawman argument of a translation also affects claims that Talmud refers to Jesus. The first such claim came out in the 1700s CE; it is available on Internet Archive in both German and English. The author did not know Aramaic, making it impossible for him to know what the Talmud says. He had to rely on translations and….

Anybody who cites to him, or repeats his arguments, also fails. There is a standard set of citations that show up in the articles I’ve seen arguing the “Jesus in Talmud” claim. I know where all of them are – except for the ones that don’t actually exist. If you cite to something that doesn’t actually exist, you have a zero probability of truth.

This is a case of a true argument from silence; the claims are based solely on the surviving texts of both Talmuds, which thus represent complete datasets. The “censorship” thing is a red herring fallacy; for Babylonian Talmud, the surviving text has all the citations in the 1342 Munich manuscript (available free online), which pre-dates the 1555 cum nimis absurdum bull that led to (temporary) censorship.

I have studied the existing citations in the source documents. I have four or five blog posts about this. I told readers to submit new supposed citations and haven’t gotten any comments on my blog with a new citation. If you submit one to me, either I’ll show you that I already knew about that one, or we’ll both learn something.

All of this is why Descartes said language is the beginning of knowledge, as an introduction to his argument that language cannot be all of knowledge. But the textbook of a language’s grammar can also be a strawman argument. If you study Modern Standard Arabic or a Slavic language like Polish, and your teacher or text don’t deal with aspect (but use tense instead), you are being ripped off.

I have two examples on my blog, Biblical Hebrew, which I referred to above, and Classical Greek. Until the sack of Constantinople in the 1400s CE, the west knew Greek writings only in Latin translation.

When westerners started reading the Greek manuscripts brought to Europe by refugees from Constantinople, they learned the grammar from Armenian and Syriac (Aramaic) translations of a Greek work that discussed the verbs in terms of tenses. The author of this original grammar book, Thrax, was teaching Greek to a Latin-speaking audience, and he said that the verbs used a system of tenses, the way Latin does. Maybe he couldn’t make them understand it any other way. Maybe he didn’t see a difference. He even copied the Latin labels. And in that lies the problem, which I discuss on my blog thread about Classical Greek.

Am I saying that we have to go back and re-evaluate everything that has ever been said about Greek classics? No. When we know that translations are probably strawman arguments, there’s no sense in worrying about commentaries, a further step away from the source, or interpretations, a still further step away. Let’s go straight back to the source documents, study them in terms of a modern understanding of grammar and in their cultural context. (This is the same thing I said a couple of posts ago about reading the actual NIH documents.) On my Greek thread I made a start with Thucydides, and threw in a little Xenophon and Herodotus. You have a hundred years to roll your own.

21st Century Classical Greek -- dependent clause particles

Grammars of Classical Greek define dependent clauses as those starting with one of five particles, and being unable to stand alone to provide meaning.

However, in the very first chapter of Thucydides, a number of clauses cannot stand alone, but do not use these particles. I've talked about this chapter and these clauses before. In this chapter, they use personal gerundives. 

The problem isn't even thinking in Grenglish. In English, we can say, "Thinking it over, I decided I had to take action." You could not use "Thinking it over" stand-alone, because you could also say "they decided..." whatever. 

The problem is copying what your sources say, and your sources copied from theirs, maybe all the way back to Thrax. 

I said that I was looking deeper into this, and I have now gone through Thucydides looking at his usage of the five particles. My conclusion is

a/ they all have multiple purposes.

b/ their main usage is not at the start of dependent clauses but in idioms or common expressions that, unlike idioms, do translate in a fairly straightforward way.

c/ negation can follow all of them, and Thucydides uses both ou and mi to negate them, except for the purpose particle ina, for which he only uses mi.

Dependent clauses are just another case of grammarians hanging their claims on the obvious, like morphology in verbs, and getting things not even wrong sometimes.

Goodwin claims that some of them, like oste, require specific verb forms, like impersonal gerundives and indicative. This is false. Thucydides I 70.9 uses oste to subordinate a conditional using the epistemic. Also, remember that the impersonal gerundive has the nuance of "due and owing". Use with oste might seem a lesser emphasis than the indicative, as in most cases, but "such that an action is due and owing" is a different nuance than "such that an action happened".

And Smyth discusses succession of tenses, which means you have to follow, say, an augmented "tense" with a specific other "tense", but he ignores dependent clauses that don't use the particles.

In a stunning omission, none of the grammars discuss other particles which introduce dependent clauses, like ὥσπερ, which I ran across in Book IV of Thucydides while researching one of the particles they do discuss. This is a case of copying from sources which fail to address all the data. That's a failure of the Test of Occam's Razor.

But context was always the weakest part of the old grammars: they failed to examine every context and that is why LSJ has holes in it and the grammars are not even wrong sometimes.

The only grammar I found that agrees you can start a dependent clause with a personal or impersonal gerundive in Greek, the same as in English, is Kendall Easley's User-Friendly Greek. But it is aimed at the New Testament, which was written in koine Greek not Classical Greek. So what I said about Greek grammars stands. The people writing grammars of Classical Greek failed to do comprehensive work and thus to provide comprehensive -- or even correct -- information.

Why Fallacies are False -- 10, manipulation

All right. I’m back from my sources sidebar and back on the track of failing the Test of Occam’s Razor, data portion. I talked about sampling bias and other violations of the completeness requirement, including quoting out of context to hide inconvenient facts. Now I’m up to the misrepresentation problem. This includes photoshopping and creating deep fakes, as well as publishing years-old photos or videos and claiming it as evidence of a current event.

And I’m here to talk about something that won’t make sense to you unless you’re a language geek like me. Even if you are a language geek, you may profit from me making this point. I have a scientific (tested) theory to back me up, and I have about 30 posts on the subject on my blog.

http://pajheil.blogspot.com/2017/01/fact-checking-torah-two-which-are-four.html

But if you have been reading my threads on Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek, you know where I’m going.

First, there’s the fallacy. A strawman argument misrepresents what somebody said in the interests of arguing against them. People use it to try to refute an opponent, but it fails because it doesn’t refute what they actually said, it only refutes what the speaker pretends they said.

It’s related to the red herring fallacy, which tries to introduce a different subject that may or may not be related to the discussion, and argue about that while ignoring the original subject of the argument. Us old people may remember the OJ Simpson trial with the lawyer who held Simpson’s feet to the fire by saying “that’s not what I asked.” The lawyer was rejecting red herrings.

Where am I going with this?

There is no translation of material, especially non-scientific literature, that 100% represents the source. Every language has words for which there is no equivalent in the target language. Any translator who substitutes one word in the source by one word in the translation, fails, if the language of the translation does not have an equivalent. Even if there is, the translator may carelessly, ignorantly, or with intent use a different word, of which I will have an example later.

It gets worse. Every language has idioms, which combine words to get a meaning that the component words cannot express. Any translator who does a word-for-word substitution with an idiom produces nonsense.

And it goes on. If the language of the source document has a different grammatical structure than the language of the translation, nuances disappear in translation. If the source language has honorific morphology and the target does not, the translator has to add honorific words or lose the sense of the source document.

And finally, language expresses the worldview and culture of the people who grow up speaking that language. This is the fundamental reason why two countries understand each other so poorly on occasion. It even happens between English-speaking nations like the US and UK.

But it also applies within a country. I have evidence from multiple sources, that people in different subsets of a single culture think and speak differently. Both the way they word things and the content of what they say, differs from other subsets. When people sneer at speakers who change what they say and how, in different audiences, it shows ignorance of the need to “know your audience” and write or speak so that each specific audience will understand what you say. Your audience has to get it to agree with it, and you are responsible for helping them get it.

It came out in the Mendel Beilis trial. The prosecutors and judge kept trying to pinpoint dates and times when things happened. The witnesses – shopkeepers, laborers, their relatives – did not know what month it was when things happened; even if they could read, they did not use or did not have access to calendars. They thought in terms of seasons of the year or church observances. And some church observances are moveable feasts. The prosecutors spent court time harassing witnesses to sign off that a given event occurred on a given date, and it always failed. It cast doubt on the testimony of those witnesses. Beilis was acquitted for that and a number of other reasons.

The way you speak in tone and word, is a litmus test to see who is, or is willing to be, part of your cultural subset.

Now do you understand why you don’t understand what your teenagers say half the time?

Does this help explain to you why MAGA and non-MAGA cannot communicate en masse? If not, go back and reread all of these posts.

I’ll stop here and give you a chance to do that, and then I’ll pick up with something I’ve already discussed, from a new angle.

Why Fallacies are False -- 09, Epistemology

As I said, selecting your information sources to fit very stringent conditions (staying in your echo chamber) risks eliminating important data when you make your claims. It results in sampling bias, a fallacy that fails the Test of Occam’s Razor and makes your claims easy to debunk.

But there’s another problem with source selection, and it gets into formal epistemology.

Who do you trust?

I know somebody who regularly trusts people who provide false information and even commit fraud. This same person thinks op/eds are fact, including those printed by newspapers with known biases and poor track records, and falls for pretty much every urban legend around.

I know somebody who works for a science-based organization who has no clue about the importance of clinical studies, never met one in their life, and thinks MSM publications are valid evidence to support a claim about a medical conclusion.

And as we all know, there are people who fall for every fallacious conspiracy theory put out by their favorite organizations. MAGA and Fox are the most glaring example.

But at the same time, we know of otherwise reputable media like the Lancet, which have published studies that turned out to be flawed. One was the connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Another recent one was a paper using the known false Gaza Health Ministry death statistics. For the record, Lancet has retracted both of them.

MSM is not like that. They almost never retract. And they are untrustworthy about law, science, or religion. In 1980s cost-cutting, they fired their experts. They no longer have anybody to tell them what is significant in these fields. In the last 10 years or so, they began firing their expensive writers who knew how to do in-depth research; research takes time, and fails to keep up with trends. More and more, I find that articles read like some 22 year old was turned loose with Google. The writer lacked deep background; they may have been under deadline pressure, making good research impossible. So they turned out meaningless drivel. I rarely quote MSM in social media unless I dispute their claims – some outlets I don’t access at all.

There are people who either fail to realize how unreliable MSM is, or they ignore it in favor of getting attention on social media. I’ve busted their chops and sometimes gotten blocked because I bruised their egos. Some of these same people whine about disinformation while putting it out.

People also stick with what they know, whether because of ego or because they live in an echo chamber. Some people from the glasnost period are still stuck in that mindset and when I hear them give radio interviews, I ignore what they say. You want names? I can give you a couple.

And then there’s Wikipedia. Well, really, there are all encyclopedias. This comes from a skeet exchange; the other person said they use encyclopedias as a start, and the bibliography for more information. Not realizing that the bibliography was the starting point for the false or debunked facts in the article. Let alone what I said last week about books not counting as evidence of expertise. Let alone that the bibliography books or articles could be filled with fallacies, just like the article. All of which I pointed out in my skeets.

This all started from an announcement that Encyclopedia Britannica was going AI. Well, the old EB had falsehood and fallacy based articles, and AI will not make it better.

The closer your source is to whoever generated the data, the more trustworthy it is. I’ll say this again in a different way later.

So you should be reading the papers at NIH, not listening to a 30-second statement on radio, if you want the truth about weight loss.

Now, I can hear you saying, “But I don’t understand that stuff.” What’s that old song? When You’ve Only Got A Hundred Years to Live? Is it really OK for people to lie to you for a hundred years, as long as you don’t have to learn anything you didn’t know before?

If you’re interested in a subject, and you don’t want people to lie to you, you have to become the expert. You have to keep a tickler file of reports. Then you have to go to a site called Retraction Watch.

Anything in your tickler file that shows up there, you need to dump.

And you need to review your ticklers from time to time. If one of them bucks the trend, red-flag it in case it’s based on false data. Dump it when it gets formally debunked.

All of which is hard to do. But if we don’t do it, we wind up failing the Test of Occam’s Razor when our data gets debunked. An old article, claiming that philology shows the Indo-Europeans originated in and around the Holy Land, is debunked by 21^st century DNA hard evidence. (I always ignore philology; I have a post for that.)

Learn which people are not making their best efforts, starting with analyzing their claims in case they used fallacies.

The ones that seem to be making their best effort, go in your tickler file – but you have to dump them if they get debunked.

It’s called life-long learning. It’s recommended for preventing Alzheimer’s, along with eating right and exercising.

Look, I admit I have a problem. I’m cursed with being old, and having read since I was four, and having a good memory and a logical mind. About age 15 I got tired of being lied to so as to control my ideas and behavior, so that makes me a tight-ass about these things. Time after time, curating my sources of information has helped me avoid problems that other people have. My faults have saved my money, my time, maybe my life. But that’s just me.

21st Century Classical Greek -- dependent clauses

So I'm going back to fill in gaps in what I wrote about how bad the old Greek grammars are and I think I have objective data for why their discussions of dependent clauses are so bad. Now that you know how geeky this post will be, you can stop reading.

The old description of dependent clauses required them to start with particles like ὡς  or ὅτι (there are three others). But that is Grenglish. In English, we require dependent clauses to start with words identifying either its function in the sentence, or relative pronouns or subordinating conjunctions. Part of the reason is our lack of case markers which, in Greek, identify the antecedents of the subjects of dependent clauses.

In Classical Greek, you get personal gerundives in the same gender, case and number as their subject, which is elsewhere in the sentence, that introduce dependent clauses. You find them in Peloponnesian War I 1.1. with the personal gerundives agreeing with Thoukidides, that add information. They have none of the particles.

Where you get the particles, other things are happening in the sentence.

a) The dependent clause has a subject which immediately precedes it in a different case. That's the clause right after "Peloponnesians and Athenians". It reinforces that the subject of the dependent clause is the same as the last topic mentioned.

b) The dependent clause has a different subject from the clause it depends on, or which is not the last topic mentioned. So tekmairomenos refers to Thucydides, but the dependent clause has "the Peloponnesians and Athenians" understood to be the subject.

The dependent clause may itself be subordinate to a dependent clause; you have this in the text I refer to in (b).

This description of subordinate clauses shows that one use of an is a case of (b), making it a subordinating article IN SOME CONTEXTS. In these contexts there are only two possible subjects for the dependent clause, and in a vague way this relates to using an to introduce the "then" of a conditional which, of course, has only an "if" statement and a "then" statement (although one of them may be suppressed). 

(a) and (b) describe where you NEED the particles. You CAN have a dependent clause without a particle, which all the old grammarians ignore because first, their sources ignored it and, second, they were thinking in Grenglish. Third, they regarded personal gerundives as "absolutes", usually expressing time -- except for the -oi case. They denied that "nominative absolutes" existed, although you will find the term in English grammar. 

I'm going to keep studying this. In particular, I want to see if you can only use ὡς immediately after the antecedent of the subject of the dependent clause, while other particles have some other relationship to their antecedent the way an does. If I find other uses for the particles or I find examples of these usages that don't have a particle, I'll tell you. I'll also tell you if I find examples where ὡς after a topic, introduces a dependent clause which does not have that topic as its subject.

So once again, the point is that Classical Greek is not some poor cousin of Latin or some close relative of English. It is DIFFERENT and deserves to be treated on its own merits.