Christianity is spreading to China via Africa

Christopher Rhodes, How Africa is converting China, Unherd, 13 feb 2019:

Much has been made of the influx of Chinese money and workers into Africa over the past two decades, as China has become the primary economic partner for the continent. Both the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company have compiled the numbers – and they’re staggering. China-Africa trade reached a high of $215 billion in 2014; $143 billion in Chinese loans have poured in to Africa between 2000 and 2017, and annual inflows of foreign direct investment have exceeded $3 billion in recent years.

As a result there are many Chinese workers in Africa, far from home.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens have gone to work in Africa, where they have encountered foreign cultures that leave many of them feeling alienated. For some of these disaffected Chinese workers, a source of comfort has come from religion, most notably the Evangelical Christianity that pervades much of sub-Saharan Africa. Evangelicalism prioritises conversion of non-believers, and the Chinese, heavily discouraged from practicing religion at home, are attractive potential converts.

Many local African churches have reached out to Chinese workers, including incorporating Mandarin into services. A number of Chinese, in turn, have welcomed the sense of community and belonging that these Christian churches offer. And a small but growing number of ethnically Chinese missionaries from Taiwan and other countries are specifically targeting Chinese nationals in Africa, preaching to them with a freedom they’d never be allowed in the People’s Republic.

Many of these Chinese workers are returning home, and they’re bringing their newfound religion with them. Visitors to the coastal province of Fujian, for example, now hear South African accented English and see houses adorned with crosses. African migrants are also moving to China in larger numbers, many of them practitioners of very evangelistic forms of Pentecostal Christianity who are willing to flout the rules placed on religious activity in China.

This new dynamic is creating a headache for the Communist Party, which heavily regulates state-recognised religious bodies and considers non-sanctioned religious activity illegal. The CCP has always been anti-religion, but after Xi Jinping assumed Party control in 2012, China enacted a level of religious persecution not seen since Mao attempted to eliminate religion and other sources of dissent during the bloody Cultural Revolution.

It's not working.

And yet, to the dismay and confusion of the CCP, Christianity keeps growing; many Christians take persecution as a sign that they are doing something right. If US State Department numbers are to be believed, there are nearly as many Chinese Christians (70 million) as the 90 million CCP members reported by Chinese state media, and at current growth rates, China will soon have more Christians than any country in the world. Despite its best efforts, China is losing its fight against Christianity, and the growing influx of citizens returning from Africa is shaping up to be another hopeless front in that war.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Computing had lots of woman programmers in the early days

From an article in the NYTimes Magazine(Clive Thompson, The Secret History of Women in Coding):

Elsie Shutt learned to code during her college summers while working for the military at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, an Army facility in Maryland. In 1953, while taking time off from graduate school, she was hired to code for Raytheon, where the programmer work force “was about 50 percent men and 50 percent women,” she told Janet Abbate, a Virginia Tech historian and author of the 2012 book “Recoding Gender.” “And it really amazed me that these men were programmers, because I thought it was women’s work!”

When Shutt had a child in 1957, state law required her to leave her job; the ’50s and ’60s may have been welcoming to full-time female coders, but firms were unwilling to offer part-time work, even to superb coders. So Shutt founded Computations Inc., a consultancy that produced code for corporations. She hired stay-at-home mothers as part-time employees; if they didn’t already know how to code, she trained them. They cared for their kids during the day, then coded at night, renting time on local computers. “What it turned into was a feeling of mission,” Shutt told Abbate, “in providing work for women who were talented and did good work and couldn’t get part-time jobs.” Business Week called the Computations work force the “pregnant programmers” in a 1963 article illustrated with a picture of a baby in a bassinet in a home hallway, with the mother in the background, hard at work writing software. (The article’s title: “Mixing Math and Motherhood.”)

By 1967, there were so many female programmers that Cosmopolitan magazine published an article about “The Computer Girls,” accompanied by pictures of beehived women at work on computers that evoked the control deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The story noted that women could make $20,000 a year doing this work (or more than $150,000 in today’s money). It was the rare white-collar occupation in which women could thrive. Nearly every other highly trained professional field admitted few women; even women with math degrees had limited options: teaching high school math or doing rote calculations at insurance firms.

But, as we know, things changed. And then there is culture:

If biology limited women’s ability to code, then the ratio of women to men in programming ought to be similar in other countries. It isn’t. In India, roughly 40 percent of the students studying computer science and related fields are women. This is despite even greater barriers to becoming a female coder there; India has such rigid gender roles that female college students often have an 8 p.m. curfew, meaning they can’t work late in the computer lab, as the social scientist Roli Varma learned when she studied them in 2015. The Indian women had one big cultural advantage over their American peers, though: They were far more likely to be encouraged by their parents to go into the field, Varma says. What’s more, the women regarded coding as a safer job because it kept them indoors, lessening their exposure to street-level sexual harassment. It was, in other words, considered normal in India that women would code. The picture has been similar in Malaysia, where in 2001 — precisely when the share of American women in computer science had slid into a trough — women represented 52 percent of the undergraduate computer-science majors and 39 percent of the Ph.D. candidates at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur.

The nostalgia angle

When do students in elementary school have agency?

Not very often.

Recess and "show and tell" are virtually the only times elementary school students are granted agency. Democracy, fair play, imaginative play, decision-making, dealing with bullying are important parts of learning. https://t.co/6dpw02aAfK

— (((Howard Rheingold))) (@hrheingold) February 13, 2019\

Jordan Peterson on education

Tyler Cowen has interviewed Peterson on a variety of topics. Education is one of them. Peterson's started an online education project and Cowen quizzed him on it.

I can tell you the problems that we’re trying to solve. The first problem we ran into was that — because the original idea was to build an online university — but as soon as we started thinking about that deeply, we thought, “Well, that’s like building a horseless carriage.” Because when cars first came out, that’s how people conceptualized them, but they weren’t horseless carriages. They were something else. Right?

And whatever you do online to educate people isn’t going to be a university because you don’t know what a university is. And it isn’t obvious that it can be duplicated in the virtual world. One of the things we immediately ran into was the problem of, “Okay, well, what does the university do?” And the answer to that was, “Well, we don’t know.”

You might say, “University educates people and accredits people.” It’s not that obvious that it educates people. It is obvious that it accredits and that the accreditation has some value, and it might be that the primary goal of university is, in fact, accreditation.

But universities give young people a four-year, socially sanctioned identity that they can adopt while they’re experimenting and trying to mature. That’s a big function. Universities give students, young people something to do when they leave home first while they grow up. Right? Universities give people a chance to reconstitute their peer network and emerge as different people.

Universities give people a chance to contend with the great thought of the past — that would be the educational element. To find mentors, to become disciplined, to work towards a single goal. And almost none of that has to do with content provision. Because you might think, how do you duplicate a university online? Well, you take lectures and you put them online, and you deliver multiple-choice questions. It’s like, yeah, but that’s one-fiftieth of what a university is doing.

So we’ve just scrapped that idea, and what we’re trying to do instead is to figure out, how can you teach people to write in a manner that’s scalable? That’s a big problem because teaching people to write is very, very difficult, and it’s very labor intensive and expensive. So that’s one problem we’d really like to crack. How can you teach people to speak? And can you do that in a scalable manner as well?

Then we’re trying to figure out how we could bring content to the largest number of people in the most efficient manner possible, so one of the projects that we’re working on right now is, we’d like to do an introductory overview. We’re going to start by concentrating on humanities courses.

Our vision at the moment is that we’re going to make a history humanities timeline, something like that. Maybe that might encompass somewhere between 50 and 100 topics. We start 10,000 years ago, and move forward up to the present time. And we’re going to commission contests, to have people generate three- to five-minute videos for all 500 topics, and that would give people a walk through the entire course of Western civilization.

The people that we’re aiming at — my target market — would be intelligent, working-class people. That’s the target market. That’s the right level of focus, as far as I’m concerned.

On personal tutors:

COWEN: Will the role of personal tutors go up or down in your vision?

PETERSON: Oh, I think it’ll go up.

COWEN: It’ll go up?

PETERSON: I think so. One of the things that we want to do is accredit people for serving as tutors because part of the process of getting educated in our online system will be educating other people. So we want to give people credit for doing things like grading and for peer assessment. What we envision is that your power as an operator in the online education system will increase in proportion to the amount of the material that you’ve mastered.

We want to make people responsible for the education of others as rapidly as possible. Now, that happens in the universities too, right? It’s slightly slower. Once you’re an undergraduate, you’re a graduate student, and then you’re immediately involved in teaching. We’d like to speed that process along.

Globalism, the fall of the USSR, and the rise of an international kleptocracy storing wealth in high-end real estate [among other things]

Franklin Foer, Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America, The Atlantic, March 2019.

The collapse of communism in the other post-Soviet states, along with China’s turn toward capitalism, only added to the kleptocratic fortunes that were hustled abroad for secret safekeeping. Officials around the world have always looted their countries’ coffers and accumulated bribes. But the globalization of banking made the export of their ill-gotten money far more convenient than it had been—which, of course, inspired more theft. By one estimate, more than $1 trillion now exits the world’s developing countries each year in the forms of laundered money and evaded taxes.

As in the Russian case, much of this plundered wealth finds its way to the United States. New York, Los Angeles, and Miami have joined London as the world’s most desired destinations for laundered money. This boom has enriched the American elites who have enabled it—and it has degraded the nation’s political and social mores in the process. While everyone else was heralding an emergent globalist world that would take on the best values of America, Palmer had glimpsed the dire risk of the opposite: that the values of the kleptocrats would become America’s own. This grim vision is now nearing fruition.

However, in the wake of 9/11

Title III of the patriot Act, the International Money Laundering Abatement and Anti-terrorist Financing Act, was signed into law little more than a month after September 11.

This section of the bill was a monumental legislative achievement. Undeterred by the smoke clouds of crisis, representatives of the big banks had stalked the Senate, trying to quash the measure. Citibank officials reportedly got into shouting matches with congressional staffers in the hall. This anger reflected the force of the patriot Act. If a bank came across suspicious money transferred from abroad, it was now required to report the transfer to the government. A bank could face criminal charges for failing to establish sufficient safeguards against the flow of corrupt cash. Little wonder that banks fought fiercely against the imposition of so many new rules, which required them to bulk up their compliance divisions—and, more to the point, subjected them to expensive penalties for laxity.

There is, alas, another "however":

But nestled in the patriot Act lay the handiwork of another industry’s lobbyists. Every House district in the country has real estate, and lobbyists for that business had pleaded for relief from the patriot Act’s monitoring of dubious foreign transactions. They all but conjured up images of suburban moms staking for sale signs on lawns, ill-equipped to vet every buyer. And they persuaded Congress to grant the industry a temporary exemption from having to enforce the new law.

The exemption was a gaping loophole—and an extraordinary growth opportunity for high-end real estate. For all the new fastidiousness of the financial system, foreigners could still buy penthouse apartments or mansions anonymously and with ease, by hiding behind shell companies set up in states such as Delaware and Nevada. [...] Much of the money that might have snuck into banks before the patriot Act became law was now used to purchase property.

And so:

Nationwide, nearly half of homes worth at least $5 million, the Times found, were bought using shell companies. The proportion was even greater in Los Angeles and Manhattan (where more than 80 percent of Time Warner Center sales fit that description). As the Treasury Department put it in 2017, nearly one in three high-end real-estate purchases that it monitors involves an individual whom the government has been tracking as “suspicious.” Yet somehow the presence of so many shady buyers has never especially troubled the real-estate industry or, for that matter, politicians. In 2013, New York City’s then-mayor, Michael Bloomberg, asked, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”

Naturally enough there's more, lots more, in the article.

Map of nuclear explosions since 1945

Map shows all nuclear explosions since 1945. Slowing down nuclear tests and minimizing nuclear weapons must be a main objective of every government. Nice choice of map projection. Source: https://t.co/U1REzaQT3T pic.twitter.com/M18SkQPMBD

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) February 12, 2019

What psychology needs is theory

Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich, A problem in theory, Nature Human Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0522-1.

Abstract: The replication crisis facing the psychological sciences is widely regarded as rooted in methodological or statistical shortcomings. We argue that a large part of the problem is the lack of a cumulative theoretical framework or frameworks. Without an overarching theoretical framework that generates hypotheses across diverse domains, empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally-biased folk theories. By providing ways to develop clear predictions, including through the use of formal modelling, theoretical frameworks set expectations that determine whether a new finding is confirmatory, nicely integrating with existing lines of research, or surprising, and therefore requiring further replication and scrutiny. Such frameworks also prioritize certain research foci, motivate the use diverse empirical approaches and, often, provide a natural means to integrate across the sciences. Thus, overarching theoretical frameworks pave the way toward a more general theory of human behaviour. We illustrate one such a theoretical framework: dual inheritance theory.

Preprint version (not behind paywall). 

Yes, psychology needs robust theory. While I'm in favor of dual inheritance theory, I'm not sure how much it gets us. It's no more than a start.

Two kinds of drammatic light at FDR SK8park

Reframing 1619 and enslaved Africans at Jamestown

Michael Guasco, The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History, Smithsonian, Sept. 13, 2017:

In 1619, “20. and odd Negroes” arrived off the coast of Virginia, where they were “bought for victualle” by labor-hungry English colonists. The story of these captive Africans has set the stage for countless scholars and teachers interested in telling the story of slavery in English North America. Unfortunately, 1619 is not the best place to begin a meaningful inquiry into the history of African peoples in America. Certainly, there is a story to be told that begins in 1619, but it is neither well-suited to help us understand slavery as an institution nor to help us better grasp the complicated place of African peoples in the early modern Atlantic world. For too long, the focus on 1619 has led the general public and scholars alike to ignore more important issues and, worse, to silently accept unquestioned assumptions that continue to impact us in remarkably consequential ways. As a historical signifier, 1619 may be more insidious than instructive.

And so, after various revision and problems we arrive at:

...the most poisonous consequence of raising the curtain with 1619 is that it casually normalizes white Christian Europeans as historical constants and makes African actors little more than dependent variables in the effort to understand what it means to be American. Elevating 1619 has the unintended consequence of cementing in our minds that those very same Europeans who lived quite precipitously and very much on death’s doorstep on the wisp of America were, in fact, already home. But, of course, they were not. Europeans were the outsiders. Selective memory has conditioned us to employ terms like settlers and colonists when we would be better served by thinking of the English as invaders or occupiers. In 1619, Virginia was still Tsenacommacah, Europeans were the non-native species, and the English were the illegal aliens. Uncertainty was still very much the order of the day.

When we make the mistake of fixing this place in time as inherently or inevitably English, we prepare the ground for the assumption that the United States already existed in embryonic fashion. When we allow that idea to go unchallenged, we silently condone the notion that this place is, and always has been, white, Christian, and European.

Where does that leave Africans and people of African descent? Unfortunately, the same insidious logic of 1619 that reinforces the illusion of white permanence necessitates that blacks can only be, ipso facto, abnormal, impermanent, and only tolerable to the degree that they adapt themselves to someone else’s fictional universe. Remembering 1619 may be a way of accessing the memory and dignifying the early presence of black people in the place that would become the United States, but it also imprints in our minds, our national narratives, and our history books that blacks are not from these parts. When we elevate the events of 1619, we establish the conditions for people of African descent to remain, forever, strangers in a strange land.

And of course there's more.

H/t Bruce Simon.

Finnegan's Wake into Latin: The (ultimate) deformed reading of the (ultimate) deformed text? [#DH]

I know that Deformed; a' has been a vile
thief this seven year; a' goes up and down like a
gentleman: I remember his name.

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Adam Roberts has teamed up with Google Translate to render Finnegan's Wake into Latin. Sounds crazy, no? And he's written a blog post to explain why and how.

Somebody needs to engage critically/theoretically with Google Translate. It's a fascinating programme in many ways. It doesn't ‘translate’. It compares source text with a triaged selection of already existing online translations and spits out the result. It's the world's most voracious and least discriminating ‘reader’ of texts. Puts professors to shame.

Anyway: at odd moments over a couple of weeks, and depending on my time and inclination, I would prep chapters of the Wake and feed them to the machine. Then I would work through the raw quasi-Latin that came out the other side. This involved sieving the text through various filters: sometimes search-and-replacing specific things throughout the whole text, sometimes going through line by line and altering bits of the finished project. Quite a lot of Latin is included in Joyce's original Wake actually, and in those cases I had to translate into English, obviously. And there were lots of other fiddly things that proved needful, or so it seemed to me. Indeed, I could easily have spent many months going through the text, titivating it in various ways, Latinising the myriad unrefined (or uncontaminated, depending in your point of view) nuggets that had passed through the filter of Google Translate unLatinised. But I had neither the free time, nor anything like the requisite motivation, to do that. Instead I mucked about with the text in various ways and then just walked away, leaving some parts of the Pervigilium Finneganis worked by me, some Latinspattered by unrevised Google Translate, and a few spots of the original Wake-y canvas visible between the application of the paint, like a Pollock painting. I worked quickly, until I reached a point where the book looked texturally interesting when I, as it were, stepped back and squeezed up my eyes. The judgment becomes whether its scribbled and scratchy texture approximates to the scribbled and scratchy texture of the Joycean original.

Still sounds crazy. 

Thus:

We might want, instead of engaging in the process of making the Wake easier to read, to explore the ways it resists being comprehended, even to the extent of producing a midrash upon it that moves comprehension markedly further away from us. That seems like it might be an interesting thing to do, don't you think? At any rate, that's what I did. My partner G.T. and I rustled up the text.

All of which reminds me of that (perhaps) strangest form of digital humanities, deformative reading, in which one uses a computer to rearrange a text in more or less arbitrary ways in hopes of stimulating the critic to interesting flights of interpretive fancy. It also reminds of the (inspired?) weirdness that ensues when one feeds Google Translate with nonsense strings. Language Logs has a number of posts on this subject. You can find them collected under "Elephant semifics", which gathers in some other nonsense as well.

Pansies

Home socialization and gender preferences in math

Gaia Dossi, David N. Figlio, Paola Giuliano, Paola Sapienza, Born in the Family: Preferences for Boys and the Gender Gap in Math, NBER Working Paper, No. 25535

Issued in February 2019:

Abstract: We study the correlation between parental gender attitudes and the performance in mathematics of girls using two different approaches and data. First, we identify families with a preference for boys by using fertility stopping rules in a population of households whose children attend public schools in Florida. Girls growing up in a boy-biased family score 3 percentage points lower on math tests when compared to girls raised in other families. Second, we find similar strong effects when we study the correlations between girls’ performance in mathematics and maternal gender role attitudes, using evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We conclude that socialization at home can explain a non-trivial part of the observed gender disparities in mathematics performance and document that maternal gender attitudes correlate with those of their children, supporting the hypothesis that preferences transmitted through the family impact children behavior.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Meat production as a climate problem

We do NOT have momentum in reducing carbon emissions of agriculture or manufacturing.

In agriculture, livestock methane emissions + deforestation to graze livestock are biggest problems. And meat consumption is doubling in next 40 yrs. This should scare you more than coal. 13/ pic.twitter.com/t3XxZO5HzO

— Ramez Naam (@ramez) February 9, 2019

The brain likes movement, rock-a-by baby, doodling

Richard A. Friedman, The Neuroscience of ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby, NYTimes, 10 Feb 2019:

Want to fall effortlessly into profound slumber and sleep like a baby? Everyone knows that infants can be lulled to sleep by gentle rocking. Well, now it seems that what works for babies works for adults, too.

New research shows that a slow rocking motion not only improves sleep but also can help people consolidate memories overnight. And this, in turn, tells us something interesting about how much the brain is affected by what seem to be purely physical interventions.

Synchrony:

The researchers found that rocking induced a kind of synchrony in brain wave activity that varied in tandem with the external motion. Rocking also increased the number of brain oscillations specific to sleep, which are critical for memory consolidation and learning. Though the exact mechanism is unclear, the researchers hypothesize that rocking activates motion-sensitive neurons in the inner ear, which then leads to modulation of brain activity.

All this made me wonder: How does physical movement affect the brain more broadly? It’s well known that exercise enhances cognitive functioning, but what about movements like rocking that involve minimal exertion? What effect on the brain do our seemingly purposeless everyday physical movements have — like fidgeting, foot shaking and doodling, among others?

A 2016 study showed that children with A.D.H.D. who were allowed to fidget — bouncing around and moving gently in place — performed better on a concentration task the more they moved.

Another study focused on doodling. Researchers had 40 participants monitor a boring telephone message for the names of people attending a party. Half the group was randomly assigned to doodle — they shaded printed shapes — while listening to the message. The study found that the “doodling group performed better on the monitoring task and recalled 29 percent more information on a surprise memory test.”