Sunday: Hili dialogue

January 5, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, January 5, 2025, and National Whipped Cream Day, a product with many uses, including being part of a pie-in-the-face stunt. Here’s Bill Gates getting one in 1998 (it is an odious act):

It’s also National Bird Day, International Jewish Book Day, and National Keto Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I applaud Jonathan Haidt for his battle against cellphones in schools, and at The Free Press Olivia Reingold tells us “How Jonathan Haidt won the fight against smartphones in schools” (article archived here).

This past fall, the Seaside School District became one of the first in Oregon to ban cell phones for both middle and high schoolers, forcing kids to lock their devices in pouches near the school entrance until the end of the day. Seaside has joined thousands of schools nationwide in recently banning smartphones, as a growing body of evidence shows they’re linked to falling test scores and rising rates of teen mental illness. This January, just over two million students will return to phone-free schools as statewide bans go into effect in Virginia and South Carolina. The following month, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the nation, will join them.

. . . So why is this movement finally getting results now? I spoke to a dozen people—educators and activists and parents—and they all offered the same answer: Jonathan Haidt.

In March, the New York University social psychologist, who has studied the negative effects of phones on kids for years, published a book called The Anxious Generation, which immediately became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. It has remained on the list ever since, thanks to a range of influential boosters on both sides of the political aisle. It’s impossible to think of another book that’s been equally celebrated by both Democrats and Republicans: Barack Obama recently named Haidt’s book one of his favorites of the year, while Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the GOP governor of Arkansas, posted an Instagram video of herself with Haidt, promoting his message to her 885,000 followers. Even Bill Gates, who helped wire America by co-founding Microsoft, has listed The Anxious Generation as one of his top four reads of 2024.

Cookbook author Jessica Seinfeld, who has three children with her husband, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, was one of Haidt’s earliest and most vocal online advocates. She told me Haidt’s book “came along at just the right time”—when the negative effects of the Covid-era reliance on screen learning were being widely reported. Even The New York Times, which encouraged social restrictions during the pandemic, is now finally acknowledging that school closures damaged an entire generation.

“We have the first generation of kids who are native to phones and social media,” Seinfeld said, and “the addiction got really real” during Covid. “I can’t tell you how many moms have come up to me and said, ‘My kids hate me because I won’t let them get a phone, and I’m the only one.’ ”

Part of the book’s power is its simplicity. Haidt spells out four “foundational rules” to inspire a “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” They are: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones at school, and more unsupervised play and independence for kids. Haidt has consistently repeated these talking points at talks around the country and on his Instagram page, where he has 341,000 followers.

Even so, Haidt told me he is “astounded” by how quickly the movement has spread throughout America, even rippling across the pond to the UK. “The only other example of social change I’ve seen that has moved this quickly is the fall of the Iron Curtain,” he told me. When I asked him why it took so long, he called it a “collective action problem,” in which the general public resents the status quo, but individuals are too scared to challenge it.

The man should get a damn medal for what he did! Imagine the changes (or rather reversion to the “good old days”) that will happen when phones are widely banned from schools. People will talk to each other!

*The NYT answers the nagging question, “Could monkeys really type all of Shakespeare?” (archived here). You might already have guessed that the answer is “no” unless time is infinite. But time is not infinite.

A new paper by Stephen Woodcock, a mathematician at the University of Technology Sydney, suggests that those efforts may have been for naught: It concludes that there is simply not enough time until the universe expires for a defined number of hypothetical primates to produce a faithful reproduction of “Curious George,” let alone “King Lear.” Don’t worry, scientists believe that we still have googol years — 10¹⁰⁰, or 1 followed by 100 zeros — until the lights go out. But when the end does come, the typing monkeys will have made no more progress than their counterparts at the Paignton Zoo, according to Dr. Woodcock.

“It’s not happening,” Dr. Woodcock said in an interview. The odds of a monkey typing out the first word of Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy on a 30-key keyboard was 1 in 900, he said. Not bad, one could argue — but every new letter offers 29 fresh opportunities for error. The chances of a monkey spelling out “banana” are “approximately 1 in 22 billion,” Dr. Woodcock said.

The idea for the paper came to Dr. Woodcock during a lunchtime discussion with Jay Falletta, a water-usage researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. The two were working on a project about washing machines, which strain Australia’s extremely limited water resources. They were “a little bit bored” by the task, Dr. Woodcock acknowledged. (Mr. Falletta is a co-author on the new paper.)

If resources for washing clothes are limited, why shouldn’t typing monkeys be similarly constrained? By neglecting to impose a time or monkey limit on the experiment, the infinite monkey theorem essentially contains its own cheat code. Dr. Woodcock, on the other hand, opted for a semblance of reality — or as much reality as a scenario featuring monkeys trying to write in iambic pentameter would allow — in order to say something about the interplay of order and chaos in the real world.

Even if the life span of the universe were extended billions of times, the monkeys would still not accomplish the task, the researchers concluded. Their paper calls the infinite monkey theorem “misleading” in its fundamental assumptions. It is a fitting conclusion, perhaps, for a moment when human ingenuity seems to be crashing hard against natural constraints.

2brnt2bidhgqyuq-8q734tr=9ig[weruy986&^%$(%^_%$TRsdx

*Glory be! According to the WSJ and many other sites, the U.S. has agreed to sell a lot of weapons to Israel (archived here).

The Biden administration notified Congress of an $8 billion weapons package for Israel, including thousands of bombs, missiles and artillery shells, in one of the largest new arms sales since the war in Gaza began in 2023.

The weapons package, which congressional officials received notification of late on Friday afternoon, also includes the planned sale of thousands of bombs, air-to-air missiles and precision munitions, according to U.S. officials familiar with the sale.

The new weapons package includes some items that could draw objections from Democrats who have opposed the transfer of large bombs to Israel amid concerns over the civilian toll of the war in Gaza. The proposed sale includes a set of guidance kits designed to be fitted to large MK-84 2,000-pound bombs, as well as BLU-109 bunker buster bombs, one of the officials said. Also included are AMRAAM and Hellfire missiles and 155mm artillery rounds.

The planned weapons sale, which comes just weeks before President Biden hands over power to President-elect Donald Trump, is the largest the U.S. government has authorized for Israel since the massive $20 billion weapons package the administration approved in August. Israel was also informed of the move, said an Israeli official, who said that the country expected the weapons to begin arriving in 2025.

“We will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense,” said an administration official familiar with the deal, which still requires congressional approval to move forward. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment. The new weapons package was reported earlier by Axios.

Arms sales to Israel have been a troublesome issue for the Biden administration, which organized an airlift of bombs and other munitions to Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and militants seized some 250 hostages.

Given that Israel is at war with seven countries or territories (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and likely Syria, not to mention militia in Iraq), and that Israel has the $8 billion (its economy is doing well), this is a well-timed benefit for Israel, and Yahweh knows they need it.

*Joe Biden is trying to leave a “green” legacy, and has done something good to further it, just prohibiting oil drilling under a huge amount of federally-owned waters (archived here). But will Trump manage to overrule it? It doesn’t look like it.

President Joe Biden will move Monday to block all future oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of federal waters — equivalent to nearly a quarter of the total land area of the United States, according to two people briefed on the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement is not yet public.

The action underscores how Biden is racing to cement his legacy on climate change and conservation in his last weeks in office. President-elect Donald Trump, who has described his energy policy as “drill, baby, drill,” is likely to work with congressional Republicans to challenge the decision.

Biden will issue two memorandums that prohibit future federal oil and gas leasing across large swaths of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Northern Bering Sea in Alaska, the two people said. The oil and gas industry has long prized the eastern Gulf of Mexico in particular, viewing the area as a key part of its offshore production plans.

Some details of the expected decision were first reported by Bloomberg News. The total acreage and the inclusion of the Northern Bering Sea have not previously been reported.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, said in an email: “This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

Environmentalists praised Biden’s plans, saying they would prevent future oil spills that threaten coastal communities and marine wildlife.

“No one wants an oil spill off their coast, and our hope is that this can be a bipartisan historic moment where areas are set aside for future generations,” Joseph Gordon, climate and energy campaign director for the conservation group Oceana, said in a phone interview.

Biden plans to invoke the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which gives the president broad powers to withdraw federal waters from future leasing. A federal judge ruled in 2019 that such withdrawals cannot be undone without an act of Congress.

The question is whether the new Republican Congress can undo this order.  If that takes overriding a Senate filibuster, Biden’s ruling may stand.

*Although Jimmy Carter was a “man of faith”, which I don’t consider a compliment, he was also a great human being and a superb ex-President, despite his coolness towards Israel. At the AP, Paul Newberry wrote an engaging piece about what it was like to go to Carter’s Sunday school classes, which he taught for years. I would have gone!

Before the former president entered the sanctuary, with a bomb-sniffing dog outside and Secret Service agents scattered around, a strict set of rules would be laid out by Ms. Jan — Jan Williams, a longtime church member and friend of the Carters. She would have made quite a drill sergeant.

It felt like a good-cop, bad-cop routine. Ms. Jan barking out rules you knew had come straight from Mr. Jimmy, who studied nuclear physics and approached all things with an engineer’s orderly mind.

Most important for those wanting a photo with the Carters — and nearly everyone did — you had to stay for the main 11 a.m. church service. Picture-taking began around noon.

If you left the church grounds before that, there was no coming back. If you stayed, you followed rules. No autographs. No handshakes. No attempts at conversation beyond a brief “good morning” or “thank you.”

Carter, consistently in sports jacket, slacks and bolo tie, would start his lesson by moving around the sanctuary, asking with a straight face if there were any visitors — that always got a laugh — and where they were from. In my many trips to Maranatha, I’m sure I heard all 50 states, not to mention an array of far-flung countries.

If anyone answered Washington, D.C., the answer was predictable. “I used to live there,” the one-term president would say, breaking into that toothy grin.

Carter’s Bible lessons focused on central themes: God gives life, loves unconditionally and provides the freedom to live a completely successful life. But the lesson usually began with an anecdote about what he’d been up to or his perspective on world affairs.

Carter could talk about building homes with Habitat for Humanity or bemoan U.S. conflicts since World War II. He could talk about his work with The Elders, a group of former world leaders, or a trip out West to go trout fishing with Ted Turner. He could talk about The Carter Center’s successes in eliminating the guinea worm, or his long friendships with Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan.

“Willie Nelson is an old friend. He used to come visit me in the White House,” Carter related once, touching ever so gently on Nelson’s affection for weed.

“I don’t know what Willie and my children did after I went to bed. I’ve heard rumors,” the former president said, with a sly grin and a wink that suggested he believed every word.

There a fair bit more, and it’s worth reading. Carter’s official funeral begins this week as his cortege heads towards Atlanta where he’ll lie in state before heading to D.C., where he’ll also lie in state in the Capitol. His body will then be returned to Plains, Georgia, where he’ll be buried next to his beloved Rosalynn.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is angling for noms.

Hili: If I remember correctly I didn’t have my breakfast.
A: Certainly you had.
Hili: A modest one.
In Polish:
Hili: Jeśli dobrze pamiętam, to chyba nie jadłam śniadania.
Ja: Owszem, jadłaś.
Hili: Jakieś skromne.

*******************

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Cat Memes:

From Now That’s Wild:

Masih is still on hols, but here’s the equally controversial Titania, who made a Christmas post!

From the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, who hates attention:

From Malcolm; an early restored photo. It was, of course, of a CAT:

From my feed, which consists mostly of animal tweets.  A giraffe meets his offspring:

I’d gladly pay this toll:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

A dutch girl killed with cyanide gas upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-01-05T12:02:43.111Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, the Amphibian Way to Wealth:

Just an incredible opportunity from 1935

— Adam Rothman (@adamrothman.bsky.social) 2025-01-02T23:47:08.714Z

 

This is true, but I’m gonna try to avoid this route:

A gentle reminder that new year resolutions don’t have to be about positive changes. You can commit to be more petty, seek revenge, and disrespect your enemies.

— Public Defendering (@foddery.bsky.social) 2025-01-01T21:53:17.325Z

 

39 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “2brnt2bidhgqyuq-8q734tr=9ig[weruy986&^%$(%^_%$TRsdx”

    Um – guys – I am fluent in Monkeyese. This right above I’m pretty sure (without checking in detail) is:

    “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.”

    chief counsellor to the villain Claudius
    Act I
    Scene III
    Hamlet

    2. Yea, when I saw that I was pretty sure a monkey hacked this site. Thanks for the translation

    4. You’re all wrong. Cats walking and sleeping on keyboards would
      do far better than monkeys !

    5. Not producing Shakespeare’s works doesn’t preclude the monkeys’ production of other great works, even unwritten masterpieces, during their time at the keyboard.
      They might even bang out ‘Why Evolution is Untrue’!

    6. A witty person observed: “The internet has disproved the theory that infinitely many monkeys with infinitely many typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare.”

  2. Unfortunately, there are quite large problems with Haidt’s viewpoints from a scientific point of view. Of course it makes sense to ban phones in classrooms (just like in my high school days when graphic calculators were forbidden in class except obviously math and physics classes). But that’s more common sense, and Haidt goes much much further, based on very sloppy science. There are lots of questions to be asked about the supposed mental health crisis per se, let alone the effect of phones/social media.

    I think this is in large part another example of older people not understanding something and then just banning it out of reflex, supposedly to protect the youth from something but actually just based on a feeling of superiority (‘back in my day kids talked to each other!’).

    1. What sloppy science does Haidt use? All you need to know is that kids’ attention is grossly diverted from class when they can sneak peeks at their phones. And no, my own views are not based on a feeling of superiority but on observing what happened in my own large evolution classes. We also banned open laptops for the same reasons.

      Unless you mention the sloppy evidence or evidence that having phones doesn’t hurt paying attention or learning in class, your criticisms are without substance.

    2. There was a recent discussion on NPR about how kids are more stressed out today, and it included an interview with a child psychologist and several teens. I started listening with considerable skepticism, since teen life was very stressful back in my day, and I thought it was just a social media version of the stuff that I went through. But I soon learned that there are greater forces against young people today. The juicy gossip does not stop on evenings and weekends when you can be at home, and what’s more it spreads far beyond one’s immediate social group. The kids interviewed at least really wanted a way to just make it stop for a while.

    3. As someone who spent 20 years teaching middle school and also spent years reading about the cognitive science of learning and the limitations of working memory, Haidt’s claims about the detrimental effects of cellphones in the classroom make too much sense. For me, the burden of proof is on those who’d allow phones in schools to show that possession of a phone by an adolescent in a classroom does not impede learning.

      Just BTW, the day I decided to retire was the day our newly appointed principal, speaking at our 8th grade team meeting, said, “I don’t know why we even teach facts anymore, when every kid has one of these in their pocket,” and he pulled his cell phone out and held it up for us to see. Demonstrating his complete lack of ignorance of the importance of long-term memory in thinking and learning.

      Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

      1. Get back on that soapbox!

        Facts? Knowledge? Who needs that when one can create, innovate, build, and critique? Uh huh.

        People like your principal would create an entire generation of slaves who are subservient to those who hold the keys to knowledge.

        1. I’m appreciative of your response for two reasons. One, of course, is because you provided me with some validation. I’m not above appreciating external validation.

          The second reason is that it make me re-read my comment, and I discovered, much to my embarrassment, that I wrote that my principal demonstrated “his complete lack of ignorance of the importance of long-term memory in thinking and learning.”

          As I think Homer Simpson might say, Doh! Of course I meant to write “his complete ignorance of . . . . ”

          I blame my mistake on the fact that, even almost 9 years later, I can still get worked up about educators who seem not to have the slightest clue as to how the human mind works. 🙂

  3. The typing monkeys calculation is not really news. This problem is from Thermal Physics by Kittel and Kroemer, 2nd edition, 1980. The problem is on p. 53.

    4. The meaning of “never.” It has been said* that “six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum.” This statement is nonsense, for it gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers. Could all the monkeys in the world have typed out a single specified book in the age of the universe?†

    Suppose that 10¹⁰ monkeys have been seated at typewriters throughout the age of the universe, 10¹⁸ s. This number of monkeys is about three times greater than the present human population‡ of the earth. We suppose that a monkey can hit 10 typewriter keys per second. A typewriter may have 44 keys; we accept lowercase letters in place of capital letters. Assuming that Shakespeare’s Hamlet has 10⁵ characters, will the monkeys hit upon Hamlet?

    (a) Show that the probability that any given sequence of 10⁵ characters typed at random will come out in the correct sequence (the sequence of Hamlet) is of the order of

    (1/44)¹⁰⁰,⁰⁰⁰ = 10⁻¹⁶⁴,³⁴⁵,

    where we have used log₁₀ 44 = 1.64345.

    (b) Show that the probability that a monkey-Hamlet will be typed in the age of the universe is approximately 10⁻¹⁶⁴,³¹⁶. The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event, so that the original statement at the beginning of this problem is nonsense: one book, much less a library, will never occur in the total literary production of the monkeys.

    Footnotes:

    J. Jeans, Mysterious universe, Cambridge University Press, 1930, p. 4. The statement is attributed to Huxley.

    † For a related mathematico-literary study, see “The Library of Babel,” by the fascinating Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in Ficciones, Grove Press, Evergreen paperback, 1962, pp. 79-88.

    A pdf of the book can be found here: https://jontalle.web.engr.illinois.edu/uploads/537.F18/Papers/Public/BOOKS/Kittel-ThermalPhysics.80.pdf

    Claude did the OCR work.

  4. Just want to point out that, while time is not infinite, neither is there an infinite number of monkeys nor an infinite number of typewriters. I didn’t think anyone really took the statement seriously.

    1. I figure the monkey story wasn’t so much about seriously expecting Hamlet to happen as about illustrating the implications of infinity. I felt the paper reads like “Exclusive! – Water is wet!”.

      The authors might wish next to explicate how an infinite stack of $1 bills isn’t really worth exactly the same as a likewise infinite stack of $20 bills because of a limited number of trees for paper, let alone economics, and conclude with debunking Hilbert’s Hotel on grounds of structural engineering and relativity.

      1. Every time I hear this – that in an infinite universe rare things exist in infinite numbers just like common things do – I think “yeah but the density of the common things is higher.” Number becomes a meaningless metric in an infinite world; density is where it’s at. I guess it’s because infinity is such an awesome concept everyone wants to illustrate it with the way it makes numbers meaningless.

        1. Ah, but what is density but a number?

          As for “common things”: There’s a reason that “Man Bites Dog” stories get published more than the converse.

    2. Your comment got me thinking (maybe too much). Anyway:

      A lot of serious cosmologists believe that the universe is infinite – from which it follows that there an infinite number of earth-like planets with advanced life. If you told one of these cosmologists that that would mean that there are an infinite number of monkeys in the universe, they wouldn’t even blink.

      So, if we assume that these cosmologists are correct, it follows that there not only could be an infinite number of monkeys, there already ARE.

      And, when you have infinite monkeys, considerations about whether we’d need infinite time or whether the lifespan of the universe would be long enough become irrelevant. That’s because an infinite number of monkeys could get the entire job done in the time it would take to type the longest book in the library – which surely couldn’t be more than a month or so.

      So, the upshot is this: in an infinite universe, monkeys not only could type all the books in the library, they already HAVE…

      An infinite number of times.

  5. Today’s date (U.S. format) is :

    5^0 / 5^1 / 5^2

    Credit : Howie Hua @howie_hua on eXtwitter

    1. Hang on … umm…

      Ok

      Just – it’s for this specific U.S. format:

      01/05/25

      [ wipes brow ]

  7. Just for information: Syria is mentioned two times as an enemy against which Israel is at war.

    (Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and likely Syria, not to mention militia in Iraq)

  8. Jonathan Haidt’s book is excellent. I attribute his success in effecting action to its simplicity. Everyone knows that cell phones are a black hole for student attention, and his Roolz for protecting children are simple. Parents and teachers are glad to have a set of Roolz they can follow.

    And the $8B arms deal for Israel. Hmmm. I’m glad that this deal is happening, but why? This time, it appears that Israel will be getting bunker-buster bombs. (Does it have the heavy aircraft to deploy them?) Does this mean that the U.S. is finally aligned with Israel and the need to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities—or at least parts that would be accessible? Is Biden anticipating that the Trump administration will work with the Israelis to solve the Iran problem? Now that the election is over, are we finally seeing the “real” Biden—the one with the ironclad support for Israel?

    Have you noticed that the Biden administration seems to have been more aligned with Israel in recent weeks than it was earlier in the war? Could it be—now that Israel has vanquished Hamas, kneecapped Hezbollah, gotten rid of Assad, and is in the process of destroying the Houthi’s of Yemen—could it be that the U.S. administration has finally decided that it wants to be on the winning side?

    1. The IAF’s F-35 and F-15 strike fighters can easily lift at least a quartet of BLU-109s at 2000 lb. each. The constraint is their physical size — a bunker buster has a thick steel case making it physically compact but it still has to fit in the fuselage or under the wings — and can the planes carry also enough fuel to get deep into Iran with them? From the strike last year we know that the IAF can fly its aerial tanker aircraft into hostile airspace without loss so it would appear Israel can attack with these bombs anywhere it can reach.

      Does it mean a green light for putting Iran’s nuclear program out of business? Perhaps not, not by the fact alone. These bombs, by “conventional wisdom of the Internet” are not powerful enough to excavate the nuclear labs buried in mountainsides under many feet of reinforced high-quality Iranian concrete. (Those facilities must have cost a fortune.) Much larger bunker-buster bombs are rumoured to exist, such as the 30,000-lb GBU-57, and these would require the USAF to commit its B-2 bombers to the task. The IAF’s ability to put bomb after bomb down a deepening hole until one penetrates the roof (as it may have done to get Nasrallah) seems to be an example of a foreign customer learning how to use a product more effectively than the innovator thought of.

      Given the cost of a B-2 to acquire and to operate (albeit with only two crew at risk from combat loss) it seems likely to me that a serious effort to liquidate Iran’s nuclear ambitions would use nuclear bunker-busters. Even the mother of all bunkers, SAC Headquarters in Omaha, would not have survived a direct hit with a precision-guided nuke. Fortunately the USSR never developed any. Some of the Iranian labs are located near to Tehran, — an explosion deep in the earth might spare the residents from blast and fallout — and others in remote desert mountains. It must weigh heavily on the minds of Iran’s leadership that this would not be the first time the United States has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear adversary that is fanatically devoted to its destruction. Good.

    1. Thanks for that. I’d have to read Haidt’s book to judge if the criticism hits the mark but the author raises trenchant points.

      I wanted to note the collective action problem of school boards prohibiting cell phones, since I’ve commented on collective action problems in other contexts. In general they are insoluble when the cost for a single actor to do the “right” thing is high and her ability to convince the other actors to follow her lead is low. This defines a collective action problem. (The usual reason for the low ability to persuade is that the other actors know that everyone else can defect, to avoid the cost of loyalty, and so they assume they all will, even if individually each one would like to be loyal because all would benefit.) Oregon seems to have solved this particular CAP. It is interesting to give some thought as to what characteristics of this game made a solution possible.

      1. I would say collective action problems were the first comments you persisted with on WEIT. Back before COVID iirc. I’ve come to your side by now. Bugger! The reality pretty much sucks, but when is reality nice? I will always struggle with reality and collective action problems, that’s the liberal in me. 😉

  12. Very heartwarming at all, but male giraffes don’t actually provide any parental care.

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