>an uncensorable mix of heterosexual and homosexual pornography (using the Kinsey Report as market research), gore (such as details of bullfights and photographic evidence from the Nuremberg trials), and communist propaganda.
So, basically early /b, which was close to having the most freedom of expression of anywhere ever. Just goes to show that true freedom actually leads to the opposite of what pampered intelligentsia imagines.
Because they were less free. In particular, the technical ease of spam coupled with the tolerance of it were unmatched outside of the chan culture as far as I can tell (for the better, as I'm sure most would agree).
I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. Knowing about specific historical events seems not especially important to that. It's not as if Tuskegee was the only event of this kind. If my parents, friends, family, neighbors all say don't trust X, I probably won't trust X! That's a lot of people! I don't need to know one of the many reasons I shouldn't trust X is because of Y.
That's good and fine, just for some reason there has (for quite a while) been a real mythology about Tuskagee being this really salient cause... and it turns out almost no-one who is vaccine hesistant directly cares about it.
My guess is that it's easier to tell an upper middle class white person "black people are suspicious of the medical establishment because of things like Tuskegee" than it is to go into detail about what "things like Tuskegee" actually means.
What's the thinking (if one can even call it that)? There's a conspiracy to secretly give black people a different vaccine to those safely received by >100 million white americans?
Black vaccine hesitancy is just as nutty as white vaccine hesitancy, and declaring "things *like Tuskgee" is just a way of rationalising the nuttiness of a politically protected group.
What is the explanatory value of it's "nutty?" Even if you choose to just accept that a certain percentage of people are going to have nutty beliefs, then what explains the relative distribution of nuttiness across different groups?
This was my thinking as well. I can't name other similar experiments off the top of my head, but I have heard of them and they influence my thinking on whether the government might try to experiment on people again. The obvious conclusion is that we cannot rule it out, because it's happened multiple times. If someone asked me on a survey if I've heard of [name of experiment] I might not know that name or the experiment specifically, but the idea of government experimentation is still floating around in my head.
[After looking it up] - Oh goody, there were dozens of experiments on US citizens without their knowledge or consent! This is the kind of stuff that really bolsters confidence in your government, though not all of these were related to government.
“Doctors treat black patients worse on some axis” (usually either “they don’t listen/trust black patients” or “they don’t treat black patient pain effectively”) was a plot point in multiple major network shows I’ve seen in the last year. So there is a definite message being pushed that black patients should find doctors untrustworthy, often in the same media outlets lamenting vaccine hesitancy.
In interviews of vaccine hesitant minorities, I’ve read multiple mentions of concerns about being experimented on (there is a conspiracy theory that the J&J vaccine was being pushed in majority black areas because it was less effective, and the fact that this vaccine was at one point pulled for side effects “proved” that there was an intention to use a riskier or more experimental drug on black people). I think this is a cultural meme at this point that may very well trace to Tuskegee originally, while a lot of people aren’t familiar with the actual origin.
Eh...it's not that much more than they already get, I think. For example, if you listen to media directed at black audiences, one thing that stands out is how much of the advertisement is from hucksters. Shady lawyers, exploitive financial offers, get-rich-quick schemes, payday loans, the whole nine yards. It's kind of horrifying, the vultures that circle around this community. and these are just those that can advertise legally.
So it would not surprise me if it were simultaneously true that (1) blacks trust doctors less than whites, but also (1) blacks trust doctors more than random ordinary people. Basically given their experience I wouldn't find it surprising if blacks trust *almost everybody* less than whites do.
Black Lives Matter isn't training black people to distrust the government - it grows out of that distrust. This gets the direction of the causality wrong.
How many people do you know personally who are part of that movement? I'm guessing zero. It's easy and fun to make people you don't know and disagree with into villains - we used to do the same thing with the Tea Parties - but you're usually going to get them wrong, they way you are here.
Of course, it's also easy and fun to make people you don't know and don't like into evil boogiemen, so feel free. I obviously don't expect to persuade you, but I do feel obligated to at least show up and tell you that you're wrong.
Are we certain that it's racial discrimination as opposed to socioeconomic discrimination? There could be some Simpson's paradox here were poor/stupid people are more likely to be dismissed, and that black people tend to be more poor/stupid than white people. That could result in this data, even if the causal factors are different.
We're definitely not *certain* that it's racial discrimination as *opposed* to socioeconomic discrimination. But it's quite plausible that racial discrimination is a part of it, *as well as* socioeconomic discrimination (and perhaps more relevantly, educational attainment discrimination).
There is more medical distrust among Black Americans. A useful explanation for this that comes up in the literature a lot is that Black Americans persistently face discrimination from medical providers relative to other racial groups.
It is also the case that there is a recent, as within the living memory of, examples of profound mistreatment of Blacks by medical providers symbolized by the most famous example of Tuskegee, that can have an impact simply by creating distrust that spreads through social networks even if individual actors don't understand the particulars of cases that prompted that distrust.
And, of course, distrust in medical providers is one of the on-the-table explanations for vaccine hesitancy in that group. A study showing that Blacks don't know the details of Tuskegee all that well or that such knowledge doesn't correlate with hesitancy doesn't really speak to that hypothesis.
What I'd further add is that knowing the details of Tuskegee is a sign of education and educational status is something that is positively correlated with getting vaccinated.
"I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. "
By that standard, Japanese-Americans must be among the most unvaccinated people of all, and Blacks must be voting for *intensely* anti-establishment candidates in Democratic primaries. And yet...
The real answer as to why Black people are less likely to get vaccinated is simply their lower average IQs (the IQ gap is also found within the GOP, judging from heavily Republican heavily college educated counties being much more heavily vaccinated than similarly Republican non-college-educated counties). The real question is why IQ is so important in propensity to get vaccinated in America and not, say, Brazil or Cambodia (or is it... I haven't actually looked at the Brazilian numbers by race, it's just that the % desiring to be vaccinated there seems to be almost universally high).
I don't really think my claim does imply that Japanese-Americans would be less trustworthy of the government, or less vaccinated. I don't think that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans than Black Americans. Japanese Americans were briefly confined to concentration camps during a war with the place they came from; later they were released and paid compensation. Black Americans were enslaved for hundreds of years, following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years. And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally. And they never got compensation! I really don't see how you can look at that pattern of facts and say that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans.
I also don't really see that it's necessary that distrust of authority figures implies a willingness to vote for anti-establishment candidates. There's no guarantee, after all, that the anti-establishment candidate would be more trustworthy once they were in power. If trust is your primary concern, I would expect you to vote for someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates.
Slavery ended more than 150 years ago; it has no relevance for the present except where Blacks prefer to live. Meanwhile, there are still Japanese people alive who experienced internment. Also, it was the Federal government which forced desegregation on the South. Major events closer to the present should have more relevance than those of the distant past.
"someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates."
Hillary Clinton is not someone much more similar to the typical Black American than Bernie Sanders. And yet...
>following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years
Segregation is not oppression. Is it "oppression" that we have separate countries where people who aren't citizens don't get to freely move around here and have equal rights etc?
And I'm sure you'll bring up "lynchings", which really just refers to 'execution by public hanging at the hands of a mob' and doesn't inherently have anything to do with race. Black people were lynched....and so were white people. And in fact the black/white lynching ratio was LOWER than the black/white incarceration ratio today. So either lynch mobs were less racist than today's criminal justice system, or black people commit less crime during a period where you say they were "oppressed" which contradicts the liberal narrative on the causes of crime disparities.
>And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally
Institutionally oppressed? You mean like elite universities engaging in overt and perfectly LEGAL racial discrimination to the benefit of black americans?
>And they never got compensation!
Compensation for what? From whom? Nobody alive is benefitting from slavery, and the eocnomics of american slavery makes it questionable that anybody (other than slave traders) actually did. Plantation owners were often wealthy, but the ROI for slavery has been demonstrated to be not significantly above the general RIO of the economy at the time, but these farmers weren't privy to modern accounting methods. Slavery retarded economic growth (because it diverted funds away from actually productive investments like factories and railroads etc) plus the civil war and its long-term impacts devastated the southern economy.
And what happened to American slaves? Well, they were slaves in America instead of being slaves in Africa or Arabia (where the men would most likely have been castrated and there would be no underclass of resentful slave descendants). I think getting to live in America is more than adequate compensation.
As for segregation, this is nothing to compensate for. Black economic equality was higher and increasing during segregation, there was ah igher employment rate and higher business ownership rate. Plus lower rates of single parenthood etc. These things all got worse after segregation ended, so cannot possibly we attributed to it.
I think the issue here is more of a tribal framing bias for an anti-vax stance. The red staters are anti-vax because of their own well earned stupidity and their own immoral politicians leading them astray. They deserve their fate. However my tribe's anti-vax stance is due to them being abused by society and they have little agency in their own decisions, which incidentally are in no small part caused by the previous and current systemic racism by red-staters. It's all a little too convenient.
Once you start seeing this framing bias it cannot be unseen. It's very common in the elite media.
I don't know that I've seen a distrust of authority in general. Of people currently in authority in the United States, I'd say I've seen it. I'm not sure if it's moreso than the mean, because I'm not sure what the mean is. Black distrust of US authority figures definitely seems higher than my social circle but my social circle's mean is probably different from the general population mean.
This is an underrated point. Getting vaxxed twice is a nontrivial inconvenience (and it genuinely puts a lot of people under the weather for a couple days).
There are probably a lot of people who just can’t be bothered, and honestly for the vast majority of otherwise healthy people, it’s quite possibly NOT worth it, on an individual level, to get vaccinated.
For that group, maybe “mumble mumble something about Tuskegee or freedom or whatever” is easier to personally justify than “meh, I’m lazy”. There are some true believer anti-vaxxers out there, but I’m not sure they represent the median unvaxxed person.
I respect Heckman but he is a good example of someone who grabbed hold of an idea early on and held on tenaciously in the face of alternative explanations. He has a paper out earlier this year showing that Denmark has no higher educational mobility than the United States despite vastly great socioeconomic equality and lower poverty. He spends a great deal of time explaining the various ways that family effects might influence educational mobility, without once mentioning genes or heritability - because genetic influence cuts against his narrative of the supremacy of early environmental influence. I always find it a little frustrating.
Why is that frustrating? Despite what a lot of commenters here seem to think, most people accept as common sense that some people are "naturally" smarter than others, ie that intelligence has a strong heritable component.* That kind of "natural" inequality among individuals isn't a problem policymakers could or should fix, any more than we as a society need to fix the fact that some individuals are more beautiful or more athletic than others. Those are cosmic unfairnesses, not injustices. The fact that some large groups of people are significantly less likely to succeed academically than other large groups points to an injustice, one that has to be tackled by addressing environmental variables.
I think it's possible that someone like Heckman is underestimating more neutral cultural influences on educational outcomes - for example, a very intelligent child from a family with a traditional business they're expected to inherit might be less likely to achieve in school than a similarly intelligent child of two professors. But he's right not to focus on genetic influence, because there's really nothing to be done about it.
*You can accept that intelligence is largely heritable and still understand that there is no such thing as inherent racial or socioeconomic differences in intelligence.
I think you should read the paper. When you specifically are asking, in a research paper, why children so resemble their parents in educational outcomes, and you have a whole section devoted to explaining what "family effects" might be, but don't once consider genetic heritage... it's unhelpful. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28543
I read the paper. I agree that Heckman brings up the specter of "family effects" without taking the time to dig into what he really means. But the observations he lays out don't require an investigation into "family effects" to make sense.
It's important to keep in mind that:
1) Not everyone seeks social mobility, since people adapt to and tend to feel most comfortable in the environments they were raised in. This is a practical, emotional reality that has nothing to do with intelligence. Even in a society with perfect equality of opportunity, you would not expect to see people moving freely between neighborhoods and subcultures. (Think of the upper middle class Americans you know - are they all striving as hard as they can to become multimillionaires, or are they content working jobs their parents can tell their friends about? Those same people may moan about how America is so much worse than Canada or Sweden, but do they pack up and move?)
2) An overall increase in educational attainment in Denmark, coupled with the expansion of the welfare state, means that people looking to achieve social mobility through education would see diminishing returns on their efforts after the late 20th century. Heckman's graphs help show that whatever social mobility exists is mostly a middle-class phenomenon - poor people tend to stay poor, and rich people tend to stay rich, because
3) Any class system is designed to prevent mobility - it functions by keeping a small, stable group at the top, with some modest ladder climbing in the middle. Just because Heckman can't clearly see the mechanisms blocking mobility doesn't mean they aren't there. There's a glimpse of this when he points out that schools in wealthier areas mysteriously tend to have better teachers.
I think people get really turned around when they make a series of linked assumptions: that measures like cognitive tests and grades can capture population-wide differences in intelligence, that people who obtain more schooling are more intelligent, and that because people with higher-paying jobs tend to have higher educational attainment, they must also be smarter.
You need to work instead from the realization that while inherited intelligence differences among individuals are real, these differences don’t map on to large populations. And while intelligence tends to be an advantage in basically all contexts, it’s an incredibly weak predictor of any specific life outcome.
Cooper's take on Greenwald is pretty bad. He writes "Greenwald is treating the revelation of new information as proof that people were lying, when in fact these journalists were just reporting what was available to them at the time. He pulled this same childishly dishonest trick with the publication of the D.C. medical examiner's report on Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. 'Watch how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies,' he writes of a CNN segment with Erin Burnett and Don Lemon from the day of the assault."
But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically. The fact that Cooper can't make this distinction reflects very poorly on his writing and critical thinking skills. It is possible to aggressively spread lies through indifference to the truth without concsiously lying.
I'm reminded of Scott's post about whether unintentionally saying something which makes your partner sad is "abusive". I have no idea which definition of the word "lying" would cover the scenario "reporting something which, as best they can tell, is in fact true, although they readily believe it to be true in part because of their own biases". That's not lying, that's just being wrong.
I think the intended point was that "spreading lies" does not require "lying". If A invents a lie, L, and tells it to B, and B believes it and repeats it to C, then B is helping to spread L, which is a lie, even though B is not lying.
Kind of like saying "the Internet helps spread lies". The Internet can't lie; it's just infrastructure. But the Internet helps spread all information, including lies.
Sure, but first: is there an 'A' in this situation? Did some malicious actor make up a lie that the CNN reporters then picked up? I would have thought any inaccuracies would simply be biased assumptions all the way down, I don't think we need to posit a willful liar in this process.
And second: the Greenwald quote given above is "how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies". That doesn't read like he's just saying the CNN reports passively echoed lies; he's assigning very direct moral blame to the reporters. The "just" in "just spread lies", in particular, is a phrasing that evokes the idea of bald-faced, inexcusable lying; to "readily just spread lies" carries very different connotations from "inadvertently signal-boosting lies" or something of the kind.
Honestly, it feels a bit like a motte-and-bailey to me. Greenwald plays on the ambiguity of "spread lies" so that, if called out, he (or defenders of his) can fall back to the motte that he's just saying the CNN reporters are reporting fraudulent claims in good faith, though they should exercise more diligence in fact-checking; when the bailey is the assumption that they are "often" "aggressively" "just" plain *lying* themselves.
In between deliberately lying and innocently repeating a lie, there is the very common case where someone believes a falsehood on inadequate grounds because it fits what he wants to believe. In the case of a reporter, part of whose job is supposed to be providing information to people, acting that way is irresponsible even if not as bad as a deliberate lie.
Greenwald is making the very reasonable point that reporters should check sources, confirm information, and fact check prior to publicizing information. He's harped on reporters acting as pass throughs for information instead of journalists many times, and it's a regular point on his Substack.
What value does a CNN reporter mindlessly sharing an MSNBC reporter's unsourced story provide to society? Sharing by a reporter implies the story is true, despite the second reporter having no better knowledge of it than a random person.
You are questioning whether it is a reasonable point that journalists should do journalism? Is fact-checking a passé relic of the past? Greenwald is reporting a comprehensive report that interviewed a ton of people. It's not the same as just parroting some assertion some CIA stooge or even some other journalist made.
Also, if B doesn't even bother to figure out whether L is true or false but just accepts it at face value because it's convenient in their argument with C, while not technically lying they are still bullshitting, in Harry Frankfurt's sense.
And the valid criticism of CNN et al is surely that they accept and repeat things that are too flattering to their view of the world far too easily and far too often without interrogating them, not that they are willfully lying (sure there is some of that too). Like think Nick Sandmann, or Jussie Smollett, or how the shooter in Colorado a few months back was a white male until he was an Arab, and so forth. When everything is about "the narrative" you end up spreading a lot of "too good to check" stories (also c.f. Alleged-Covid-Medicine-That-Should-Not-Be-Named and horses - I'm actually blanking on the name of the medicine right now and I think it's funnier that way so shan't look it up to correct).
I think if you say someone is "aggressively and readily spread[ing] lies" it's reasonable to assume that you're intentionally leading your readers to assume they were deliberately lying, unless you specify that you don't think it was deliberate. Greenwald's "not technically lying" here isn't really any better than CNN's "not technically lying;" either way they're either deliberately or recklessly leading their audience to a false conclusion.
I would describe much of the coverage of Nick Sandman et al. as "aggressively and readily spreading lies", and would defend such a description of it. If you say something as if it is true beyond doubt, and you could easily verify/investigate it but choose not to (instead, leaving the actual journalistic work to Robby Soave), and instead just trust your "primary/original witness" (who is presumptively the one lying), then yeah, I think you are "spreading lies". I don't want to debate pedantry but I think there is a real difference between "willfully lie" and "spread lies" and the distinction exists to cover stuff like useful idiots repeated stuff that is false.
Yes, this. Greenwald’s argument is that these outlets are spreading falsehoods, maybe not necessarily knowingly, but with a reckless disregard for their actually veracity. A recklessness (or laziness?) that they would not apply for stories that didn’t flatter their preferred narrative. Publishing something that is “too good to verify” is, maybe not exactly “willfully lie”, but it’s a lot closer to “lying” than “responsible journalism”.
Greenwald is actually very clear about this so I don't think this is an issue. He consistently hammers the same point about spreading lies by accepting assertions without fact-checking.
Greenwald is really aggressive about this stuff but I think his general points only make sense if you have the background the media is claiming they're trustworthy truth tellers who you can offload some verification work onto. Outside of that context Cooper's argument makes sense. The issue is I do think that context is there.
"But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically."
Funnily enough I think this is exactly what Greenwald did. His 'convenient narrative' is that the media lies to hurt trump, and so applied it here when (as Cooper shows) it isn't true.
Meanwhile Bill Barr said at the time, with a bit of lawyerly language, that he ordered it.
So many variants of the swiping model. Somebody needs to teach a neural net how to matchmake. There must be somebdy around who has the technical ability and also the trustworthiness to be handling corpora of sensitive data.
Then write a paper once it surpasses the benchmark of neo-trad adj twitter.
Maybe the ability of human beings to read the nonverbals in other humans' actual presence is still way beyond what computers can tell from the marks we make in their world. See the way humans can gravitate in a crowded room towards others that they have something in common with. Hendrix's models for romantic attraction in 'Getting the love you want' might also be relevant. Almost all those nonverbals are out of range for computer models.
4. The write up doesn't convince me. I think intergenerational transmission of general medical hesitancy is possible, even if the original source is forgotten.
That said, I do think Tuskegee is a convenient way to rationalize different reactions to the same behavior by blacks and by deplorables.
Spike Lee once said on Bill Maher's show, not long after Katrina, that he thought the federal government had intentionally blown up New Orleans's dykes. When he was asked why he thought that, he said "the Tuskegee experiment."
It's also quite possible that "Tuskegee" is really being used as shorthand for a general feeling of disrespect from doctors, and experience with them lying to you, whether or not you're aware of a very famous institutionalized case of doctors disrespecting and lying to black people.
Perhaps. I think that our tendency to over apply racial explanations often leads us astray. My speculative theory is that blacks share similar levels of mistrust of authority as poor whites, though for different reasons. This leads to similar hesitancy to trust government mandated or promoted vaccines.
Underrated point. Like when we talk about mistrust of authority, obviously it's bad (on some object level) that the authorities aren't perfectly trustworthy and perfectly trusted. But is it remotely clear that given the authorities we have, that they are trusted too little? (Maybe, idk).
Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden (or pick your favorite boogeyman from the opposite tribe) almost everyone has plenty of reason not to trust government leaders. Really good reasons, in fact.
Definitely underrated point. I hear tons of people of all races complain that their doctors don’t listen to them, are too quick to ascribe their complicated issues to simple causes (you’re fat / you’re old / you’re menopausal), don’t give them the meds or treatment they want, are generally dismissive or disrespectful, etc. etc. Sometimes I think they have a good point, sometimes they are probably overreacting. Of course, when white people do this, they often just get called “Karens”.
In May 2020 the Navajo Nation had the highest Covid infection rate among US states (even though it is not a state it is comparably sized.) Lack of infrastructure such as running water in some places made pandemic hygiene really difficult. Covid hit Native communities very hard for reasons that are downstream of racism/colonization, but are physical and practical - lack of water, shared housing makes isolation difficult, etc. I think there was very little emotional place to say “we can beat this with what we have, we don’t need a vaccine.”
Health care access may be different as well - but IHS is famously overburdened. Also, cultural attitudes to the elderly may be different. Some people who were of the few remaining living links to old ways of life died from Covid and that represents profound loss for numerically small cultural groups which have undergone tremendous change. I think the context is different for many African American individuals and communities.
Native Americans, apart from their history of awful treatment by the US government, also have a history of being annihilated on an apocalyptic level by infectious disease. Historical memory cuts both ways in their case.
Early in the pandemic, I saw an exchange between two tribal members on social media. One claimed that traditional medicine was all you needed to ward off disease, but a second rebutted that traditional medicine wasn't enough to save their great-great grandparents from smallpox, closing with "...unless you think you know our traditions better than they did?"
Access? You are perhaps not aware that vaccines were preferentially distributed to neighborhoods with higher percentages of minorities? There were many reports of whites only getting appointments in minority neighborhoods, then showing up to the local equivalent of CVS and finding mostly white people in line. That is a little hard to ascribe to access when people are not willing to get vaccines right in their neighborhood.
Part of the problem was people not being able to schedule time off work for appointments and/or afraid of losing their jobs if they were knocked out for a day by side effects of the vaccine.
I can believe that, although I don't know how much of an impact it has. It seems that employers were/are more keen to require vaccines than the other way around.
The side effects I could see being a driving force too. I have known some people who had really bad side effects, basically a moderate case of COVID, from getting vaxxed, so I wouldn't be surprised if people who already had the disease would be disinclined to get vaxxed, on top of distrusting various authorities.
You're skeptical that "many people" work jobs where they often don't get 2 days off in a row? Are you not in the US? Here it's very common for low wage workers to only get days off one at a time. And that's not even considering the fact that many of those people work more than 1 job, or have to be able to cover child care on their days off so their partners can work.
One out of ten people are unbanked, but when we talked about that here a couple of months ago, people had trouble believing that someone could operate in the modern world without a bank account. This board skews white and affluent, and it's hard for us to imagine the lives of people who aren't like us.
My own parents got their vaccinations on a reservation, so that's not a difference in favor of African Americans... and there are no IHS clinics in the ghetto, last time I checked
Is the ghetto you are referring to any specific ghetto, or just ghettos in general? It is a bit hard to check up on your claim when you are so vague. IHS clinics are also not the only place to get vaccines, depending on where you are; that sort of thing varies a lot by state and county.
In the Tuskegee study, the scientists did not give the black men safe and effective treatment, thereby prolonging their suffering. Why would knowing about that cause someone to be more in favor of the scientific establishment preventing access to a claimed treatment?
Yeah Tuskagee mythology is strange. The most common form of the story (using it to blame govt for vaccine hesistancy among Black people) appears to get a bunch of facts wrong!
I think the real winner from the Violent Language list is "picnic". Apparently some terrible people used to picnic during horrible acts of racial violence, so now we should all say "outdoor eating". I guess we're lucky the rule isn't that decent people should no longer eat outdoors, which would be an equally valid conclusion to draw from the example.
Yeah that one stood out so much that, I went to check that one on Wikipedia, and it does get a mention in the etymology section:
> Black American communities have long believed there to be a link between the word picnic and lynching parties. This false etymology claims that the term picnic referred to the N-word and the "picking" of a target to lynch. Scholars argue that this myth persists due to a hint of truth; white Americans frequently ate and picnicked at lynchings. Some white Americans referred to lynchings as "barbecues.
So this is definitely A Thing, rather than just being some 'woke-era one-upmanship'. But I imagine most here would rather people focused on correcting the false etymology rather than eternally propagating it by banning the word.
(I'm not trying to make a point or an argument, I'm genuinely curious here)
Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier.
Also, if this data is meaningful, in what mechanism can the Flynn effect be impacting IQ if its not measurable as environmental?
For your second question, it is always important to remember that Flynn himself did not doubt the findings of the kinship studies and believed firmly that IQ was strongly heritable. His book Does Your Family Make You Smarter? is an attempt to find as much variance explainable by family effects as possible, but it's always framed in the shadow of the kinship studies - the conclusion starts by explicitly accepting their conclusions.
For the first question, think of someone with a particular genetic potential, then think of various environmental factors that limit that potential. Any given person's poor performance in a nutritionally deprived and intellectually unstimulating environment might be the produce of environment in that context, but this does not mean that there is no underlying cognitive tendency to be intelligent or unintelligent. It simply means that environmental confounds might be swamping the potential. The question is to what degree modern humans are living in environments that move most of us towards our genetic potential. If the people who claim the Flynn effect is slowing or stopped are correct, then perhaps we're nearing the limits of what an enriched environment can provide. But who knows?
The PISA differences between countries are implausibly large to be explained by genetics. "In Kosovo, Morocco and the Philippines, even the highest-performing students scored only around the OECD average. In these countries/economies, the 95th percentile of the reading distribution was close to the average score across OECD countries".
The framing of "percent variance explained by genes" is always within a given nation, basically always a developed one, and often only studies middle class and up for practical reasons - poor families usually aren't eligible to adopt children.
That does still provide a lot of useful information about the effect of different parenting styles and different schooling experiences, but you're right that when looking at countries where malnutrition or heavy metal poisoning are relatively common then environmental effects can be expected to be much than they are in the West
This would seem to imply that the environmental factor that caused the Flynn effect varied over time but does not vary in this sample. One scenario in which this would happen is if some infectious disease was making people stupid pre-Flynn but that disease has now been eradicated; another is if some lack of nutrients was causing stupidity but now everyone has enough nutrients; a third is if schools have uniformly become better at training for IQ tests or just that kids have started to be uniformly forced into going to school.
Perhaps I mis-remember, but I thought the Flynn effect was primarily observed in the abstract/pattern-based reasoning sections of the test, not so much in the natural language parts (the Raven's Matrices). This led to the theory that the effect was created by the rapidly increasing number of tasks in modern life that require abstract symbolic reasoning, i.e. machines with hidden internal state that must be manipulated by poking icons of various kinds in different orders. If you practice something you get better at it and the average farmer in 1920 would not need to identify patterns in sequences of symbols very often, but someone who has to work with computers or even a modern electric oven does.
I'm not sure if you're saying the Flynn Effect has been primarily observed in Raven's, or that progressive matrices fall under "natural language" — but either way that's wrong, AFAIK.
Talking about PISA, Ireland tends to do better on reading than on maths, and girls do better/reading while boys do better/maths. And a lot of the difference between our highest and lowest scoring students is down to socio-economic status?
In reading literacy, the main topic of PISA 2018, 15-year-olds in Ireland score 518 points compared to an average of 487 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a statistically significant difference of 23 points (OECD average: 30 points higher for girls).
On average, 15-year-olds score 500 points in mathematics compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Boys perform better than girls with a non statistically significant difference of 6 points (OECD average: 5 points higher for boys).
In Ireland, the average performance in science of 15-year-olds is 496 points, compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a non statistically significant difference of 1 points (OECD average: 2 points higher for girls).
Socio-economic status explains 11% of the variance in reading performance in Ireland (OECD average: 12%).
The average difference between advantaged and disadvantaged students in reading is 75 points, compared to an average of 89 in OECD countries. However, 13% of disadvantaged students are academically resilient (OECD average: 11%)."
I agree with the point about Raven's Matrices, I think we are generally weaker on mathematical ability so if you're scoring Irish intelligence on that, we will score lower. But what the heck do I know?
So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
If you are only testing kids in the US, then they do not have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the same house, but they do have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the US. There will be less variance in environment if you use a US-only sample than if you used an 'everywhere in the world' sample.
Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
Think about it this way: if two children have very similar upbringings: same school system, same culture, similarly loving and supportive parenting, etc., then environment will account for little of their variance in IQ, and you will decide that IQ is almost entirely heritable.
Now, compare those two children to one child who grew up in a poor third world country and was heavily malnourished throughout during infancy and early childhood and exposed to lots of lead and other pollutants, and another child with abusive parents who never sent them to school and locked them in a basement without books or toys most of their life and punished them whenever they asked questions or disobeyed orders. Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
So, to your question: the high-heritability results come from studies with homogenous environments. Before-and-after-wealth Ireland and Greece are much more different from each other than what we see in these studies, so we'd expect less heritability and more environmental impact there.
> Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
No, you'll get a different heritability rating. There is no theoretical reason to assume it will be higher.
(You can argue that the US environment is characterized by homogeneity in all relevant dimensions compared to the world, which would necessarily drive heritability up. But that's a very fact-specific claim; many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average. We used to do fashionable lobotomies.)
The US might have higher variance than other places, but it would be pretty nuts if the whole world had less variance than US alone. We know that there are places in the world with radical differences in nutrition, schooling, culture, etc.
>many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average.
Many places may have higher within-region variance than other places, but what we're talking about here is between-region variance, ie US vs Afghanistan vs Switzerland vs South Africa vs etc. Hard to imagine that within-region variance of the US is greater than between-region variance across the board. Sure, it's a hypothesis you could make, but it so flies in the face of common sense that I think the burden of proof is heavily on the person making it, not the person eliding it.
Malnourishment is a really important thing to bring up. Shift to another trait that is basically entirely heritable: height. Have you ever heard the phrase "head and shoulders above the rest?" That dates back to pre-independence America, where your typical colonist was several inches taller than your typical native of England. It's generally thought to be due to Americans having far superior childhood nutrition. The principle is that you're never going to grow taller than your genes will allow. But a childhood filled with disease and hunger can keep you closer to Earth.
The same principle applied to intelligence explains pretty well most of the observations you bring up. Though nourishment might include the normal sort of teaching/stimulation of learning that good parents practice with their children.
Sure....but so what? Nobody denies the impact of malnourishment. It's just that malnourishment explains virtually NONE of the variance in these traits within the US because so very few people are malnourished. Heritability isn't impacted by every single environmental factor that could exist and impact a trait, it's impacted only by factors that actually exist and actually have an impact for a given population.
People who point to rural African IQ scores as evidence of 'biodiversity of IQ' absolutely elide the impact of malnourishment and other factors to make their argument, whether or not they directly reject it when challenged.
I' love to live in the world you do with regards to this topic, where everyone who discusses it is knowledgeable and honest. But I encounter lot of bad actors and bad pop-science out there on this one.
>So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
It's not unaddressed at all. Most heritability studies specifically state 'heritability of X in the US' or wherever they're looking at. Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware that heritability estimates are BY DEFINITION specific to the time and place the participants are from.
Like, seriously, I cannot overstate this: This is absolutely, 100% known, appreciated and acknowledged by intelligence researchers.
> Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
This is news only to those who are patently oblivious to the intelligence research literature. Nobody disputes this.
All that matters is the scope of applying the findings. So if we're interested in IQ differences within the US, focusing on increasing the availability of food or providing free parenting classes is not going to do very much at all because the heritability of IQ in the US is very high.
It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
>Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware
Yes, which I'd estimate makes up about .01% of the people who *talk* about heritability studies.
Listen, I've talked to lots of people, including IN THIS COMMENT SECTION, who are very happy to point out a very-limited-US-only sample of IQ research showing high heritability of IQ, then say that proves that the IQ differences between whites and blacks in the US must be genetic, or the differences in IQ between white Americans and people in poor African villages must be genetic. This is not an aberration, this is the bailey where most of the non-expert discussion of this topic takes place.
That's why I said this is 'unaddressed' not 'unknown'. You'll notice Scott didn't address it here (nor did he need to, it's not central to this post). It's not addressed in most comment sections discussing these things. It's not addressed in most articles written about these things.
Yes, a journal article tells you what sample they used, and a savvy reader knows that you can only make limited generalizations beyond that sample. But that's not the level that the popular-media discussion of this topic is at, at all.
>It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
Cool beans.
I was answering a question about Ireland and Greece over long time periods of great social change.
I think 100% of your comment is you imagining that I said things I didn't? I didn't say researchers don't know this, I didn't say US samples shouldn't be used to direct US policy.
I think you might be in an 'arguments as soldiers' thing where you think I'm on a different 'side' from you and making the types of arguments that 'side' would make.
It’s variance explained in current environment. Free public schooling combined with extensive programs to find gifted kids, libraries, the internet, and cities with all sorts of jobs and groups of people means smarter people can get trained and knowledge find their spots easily. Ireland in the 1800s did not have any of that, and had a lot of malnutrition, so that doesn’t apply.
Reckon it's the difference between moving a hungry person, deprived of essential nutrients, riddled with untreated diseases and worked close to death to a nice environment, and moving someone from a less nice to a nice environment.
The study and the Flynn effect are not in fact contradictory. Environment has a large influence on adult IQ, as demonstrated by the Flynn effect, but in which (non abusive) familly you were raised does not : what seems to count is the environment at the society level (food access, disease burden, schooling available) and not the type of parenting.
"Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier."
The oft-quoted "Irish IQ is 90" result comes from Richard Lynn, who I have frequently criticised. He fudged together three tests, one done on adults and two done on school children in the 70s and took an average, then went off to tell the world that the rebellious Paddies were only rebels against the benevolent maternal British Empire because they were literally stupider than the loyal Unionists who in turn were less smart than the staunch mainlanders in Great Britain (er, I may be intruding some political commentary of my own here).
The important thing is that Lynn, in his books, didn't do any tests himself, he just scrabbled together results from all over the place. More recent national testing has not, so far as I know, been done but we do participate in PISA and have reasonably good scores there.
Luckily, somebody *has* done the work on those Irish schoolchildren IQ tests back in the 70s. Will you be astounded to hear that some of the children were from disadvantaged areas? Oh, and there's this little gem which I didn't know before:
"In considering the results of the comparisons reported here, it is important to keep
in mind that the standardization sample included children from schools for the
mentally handicapped, while the two surveys did not. Mentally handicapped
children with IQ's below 70 account for approximately 2.7% of the population
(Gelder et al., 1983, p. 688). Some of these, particularly the mildly mentally
handicapped with IQs between 50 and 70 are educated in ordinary primary
schools. Less than 0.5% of the population have IQs below 60. Altogether,
therefore it may be assumed that about 1% of children in the population attend
special schools for the mentally handicapped or that, what Jack Tizard called, the
administrative prevalence of mental handicap is 1% (Tizard, 1964). Thus the
omission of children from special schools from the recent surveys may have
inflated the median gain in IQ points on the RSPM by the equivalent of about 1
percentile point or less than 1 IQ point. Conservatively we may therefore state
that the mean gain in IQ points on the RSPM has been approximately 9 IQ points
over the past 15-17 years: that is, the periods 1972-1987 and 1972-1989."
So some of the kids involved in the Great IQ Tests were mildly mentally handicapped. Do you think this maybe, possibly, could have contributed to "Irish IQ score is 90" and that conversely, giving IQ tests to kids which exclude the mildly mentally handicapped in recent times could see the increase to "Irish have normal 100 IQ" changes? This is only my own view, but I imagine it could be a contributory factor.
"Precisely what the national and international gains on the RSPM means is
open to a variety of interpretations. If the RSPM is measuring intelligence (g),
then clearly Irish children are making the gains that their international
contemporaries are. If the RSPM is measuring the development of new test
taking strategies, then these new strategies are being developed by Irish children
at the same rate as their international counterparts. Both of these conclusions are
particularly important in view of previous claims that Irish children were
intellectually inferior to children from other countries a position discussed and
It's well established in psychology that IQ tests are not accurate outside of the community for whom the test was normed against. So when you give 10 year old Greeks an IQ test that is normed against 10 year old Greeks from 30 years ago and they tend to get more answers correct, does this mean they're smarter or does it mean that the questions have lost power to assess intelligence? This is not a question that we can really answer. All IQ tests do is rank you. There's no objective unit of intelligence, no milieinstein or whatever. What we need to know is if you got a time machine and brought the Greek kids from 30 years ago into the future, then normed an IQ test for the new batch of all 10 year olds, would the current 10 year olds still score higher? Your new test would not contain the same questions as the old one. So there's not really a way to know.
Second hot take. IQ tests include a lot of subtests for different strands of intelligence. Generally Verbal Comprehension, Visual Spatial, Fluid Reasoning, Working Memory, and Processing Speed. Four out of the five show basically no change between generations. Almost the entire Flynn effect is in Visual Spatial intelligence. That is conspicuous to me as the kind of intelligence you need to successfully drive a car. It's also the sort of intelligence that would be trained as kids ride around in cars and learn to make sense of the world zooming around them. And to a somewhat darker place, it's also the rare sort of thing that Darwinian selection would actually apply to, sometimes an entire family at a time.
Ok this is just wrong. There is a way to validate that you're measuring the same thing between two separate groups and that's measure invariance. There is internal structure to the patterns of answers on IQ tests, and that structure can be compared between cohorts to validate that the same construct is being measured. For example, if both groups demonstrate the same g-loadings on the same questions (i.e. they both agree on which questions are hard) and factor analysis shows that both groups have the same subfactor distributions, then you have a good argument that your test is measuring the same thing in both cohorts.
The Flynn effect is *not* measure invariant, which implies that it doesn't represent an increase in intelligence. There is some skill which is being learned, though I don't think anyone knows what it is - your idea about driving cars is a good candidate.
Heritability is a measure of the extent to which an observed variance is the result of genetic factors. That is to say, when you look at a group of people, what explains the differences between them? When you shift what groups of people you are looking at the answer can shift as well. People sometimes mistakenly read studies publishing on this question as stating to what extent X is genetic, but that's not what they're doing. Nutrition (for example) might explain differences in average height between two countries while explaining very little of the difference between height in one city in America.
On the AI media classification - it almost looks like the left-right political axis got mapped into a lower left-upper right axis in that graph. WSJ is still misplaced, but everything else looks more plausible.
On the IQ thing - do adoption agencies do a really good job of screening out adoptive families that live in places with high soil lead, or remnants of lead paint in the walls?
That's why I'm so surprised! Lead seems to me like it would be an environmental factor that is uncontrolled, and is said to explain some significant amount of variance in IQ in many other contexts. If it doesn't do so in the context of adoption, then this study must be measuring some conception of variance that is somewhat different from what I expect!
Adoption agencies do a good job of screening out certain bad family environments (criminals, people who couldn't provide basic necessities for the child(ren), active abusers). They do a fair job of following a basic checklist of things a house should and shouldn't have, for instance enough beds for the prospective adoptees, obvious hazards, etc. They definitely wouldn't pick up on soil lead, but they would usually pick up on problems with the drinking water. I don't think they would catch anything related to lead paint unless it was specifically disclosed.
I believe it's mainly tetraethyl lead, not reduced metallic lead. It got there from decades of burning leaded gasoline, so it is highest concentration in places that were urban neighborhoods in the period from 1930-1975 or so, though places that have had major redevelopment in recent years have often had extensive soil remediation to remove it.
However, as I dig into this, I'm learning that there's actually very little documentation of which locations do or don't have substantial lead contamination. I can find some detailed maps of lead concentration in properties in a small square mile region, or I can find national maps of estimated risk of high lead concentration based on proxies like building age.
I don’t understand why you are being so scornful of the idea that a toxic metal could be toxic at concentrations that would be low for some other substances.
Where I grew up, in the Lead Belt of Missouri, there were chat dumps. Big hills from the spoil of the lead mines. They sat in the area for decades. Bored locals would sled down them (not being particularly adventuresome, I never did). A few years ago, they were finally removed. Probably all through my region we had a few generations with low level lead poisoning.
What's funny, is that when I first visited home as they were coming down, I was shocked, and regretted never having climbed one. I know better, but I couldn't help it. Even now, thinking on it makes me sad.
Er...you do realize that the spoil from a lead mine necessarily contains much less lead than the surrounding rock, right? That's *why* they throw it away. For that matter, it's lead *ore* you mine, not metallic lead, galena would be typical, and the chemical properties of lead ore are as different from those of metallic lead as, say, the properties of rust are from iron, or carbon dioxide from charcoal.
No. I don't know much about the topic. Mining isn't really a thing there anymore, and hasn't been in a long time. I guess it stands to reason that if they were *highly* dangerous they wouldn't have stayed up for so long. This is a better article that I found after I posted. It says kids from the area had elevated lead levels, so the EPA ordered them down. If it's not true it's too bad, the article captures how much a part of the regions landscape they were.
2. There was something of the sort in Spinrad's _Bug Jack Baron_-- I think the conspiracy was killing black children for (the rejuvenating effects of?) their glands.
4. I believe without evidence that greater medical neglect and incompetence would be enough to explain black people tending not to trust the vaccines without needing to bring in older history. I'm not sure if there's been research.
For that matter, I don't know whether white people who've had bad experiences with the medical system are less likely to trust the vaccines.
It seems overly US focused. There are large variances between countries in the EU in vaccine uptake rates. UK very high without much coercion for example. In Italy they're forcing people out of the economy to make them take it: one step removed from just having the police tie them down and forcibly inject them. All white people though, more or less.
I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government. The vaccination programme is at this point a Rorschach test. If you're already pre-disposed to view government agencies as unfair, power-crazed, uninterested in your life and kinda irrational ... and I'd say black Americans are more likely to hold this view than whites with PhDs ... then you'll look at this situation and see an unfair power-grab by irrational people who don't care about your life. Conclusion: stay the hell away. If you're pre-disposed to see government agencies as an alliance of technocratic rationalists who deeply care about your life, make the best decisions uninfluenced by profit, then you'll see some triumph of government planning and the need for social cohesion, etc.
"I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government."
Maybe, but comparing countries as opposed to comparing various groups inside a single country introduces massive political confounders.
Both Spain and the UK, which I believe rate lowest in the EU with regard to vaccine hesitancy, report low general trust in government. ( https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm ) But their health care agencies specifically are extremely well-regarded institutions.
France actually ranks slightly higher on the trust-in-government scale but it also had a big vaccine controversy in 2018 (number of mandatory vaccines for newborns went from 3 to 11) which may have primed the population for the Covid debate. It also has a media which tends to treat anti-vax views more leniently than in some other places. And its vaccine hesitancy is through the roof.
In Italy, the Five Star movement, a major political coalition, had been using vaccines as a proxy for civil liberties long before Covid. So, somewhat as above.
If we're going to look for the Tuskegee effect, perhaps it would be more useful to gauge the attitudes of racialised minorities relative to the general population in various other countries and then compare the results with the US.
I recall Luigi Zingales telling a very amusing anecdote on EconTalk regarding his amazement that Americans actually take what their government recommends seriously. The last line was to the effect of "In Italy if you do the opposite of what the government says, you are probably on the right track."
As to why there is no Journal of Datasets, well, dataset papers exist and do get published in fields like machine learning and computer vision. In biology and medicine it seems less common.
BUT, the main reason is not a technicality of whether a journal exists or whether you get a line for your CV. The publishability is a red herring and not the ultimate reason.
The issue is that scientists genuinely give you more "informal reputation" for coming up with interesting results, hypotheses and solutions to problems. Collecting data is boring grunt work that isn't really all that impressive from a subjective point of view. There are exceptions like the ImageNet dataset with did help Fei-Fei Li become really famous and successful, but that's computer vision again.
It's similar with all the complaints about publication bias, the file drawer effect etc. and the idea that a Journal of Negative Results will improve upon this state of affairs. However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow. Just because there's a journal for negative results won't mean that it actually gets you true recognition. And in academia informal connections are everything.
There's actually quite a lot of Data Journals, GigaScience (http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/) launched in 2012, and Nature (Scientific Data) and Elsevier (Data in Brief) followed with the same concept in 2014. Citations are a superficial metric, but at least provide a form of credit and they show people are using these datasets. Actually having something based on reusable data and software means you can place visualization tools on top of the underlying digital information and finally make papers more interactive. This is what GigaScience's new sister journal GigaByte is trying to do now https://youtu.be/ltlZ4HdJ1qY
This issue can also vary a lot by field. In astrophysics, and in some other physics fields, journals are starting to publish datasets as machine-readable tables. And when the data are too big to incorporate as a MRT, many groups are posting data for access online via dedicated servers, github, or through partnerships with government archives.
In materials science, dataset papers can be immensely popular. The Materials Project paper detailing the creation of a dataset of results from high throughput density functional theory calculations is the most cited paper of most of its authors. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4812323
Right, and taking it a step further, the problem at the root cause of many bad scientific papers is that academia is a reputation economy, not a market economy.
When I first heard about Whuffie and similar concepts I remember thinking, how novel, how cool. A world without money, who wouldn't find that appealing? Well ... I learned. Nowadays "reputation economy" as a term is falling out of use, and "social credit" is replacing it. The latter has far more dystopian overtones.
>However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow.
This kind attitude, of course, is a silly attitude. Coming up with a really good research design and collecting data correctly are the parts of the research process that test the skill of the scientists involved. It doesn't take much to download a data set (whether provided by a collaborator or online publication) and turn the crank, the scientist is the one who realizes what is needed to give an adequate answer and what questions can be asked from a given data set (if any).
The other issue is that a dataset publication still takes a lot of work beyond what it took to collect the data: the writeup itself is likely to be of a similar effort level to a typical publication and getting the data clean for all potential uses is often another paper's worth of effort. So you are using two paper's worth of effort to get a single paper that then allows competitors to pre-empt your other potential ideas.
Even if you are ideologically committed to open science, fast public data releases are competing with all your other time priorities, so it's likely to fall fairly far down the priority list even if you're not actively trying to hide it from other researchers.
The incentives are really bad around this. But there are two simple solutions: data releases with an agreed schedule as conditions of grant funding and data releases as condition of publication. Scientists really want grants and publications and will go through the effort of public data release if it's required to get them.
I work on a large research project and we consistently release our data within 3 months of collection because that's what we promised in our grant proposal. If those conditions weren't in there we would definitely release the data publicly, but I doubt we would be anywhere near as timely (a similar project in another country typically release their data 5 years after data collection).
Grant requirements are not a bad thing, but still feel an inadequate solution, like a stick that the wielder unsuccessfully insists is really a carrot (because one is tied to one end of it) while hitting the mule with it.
I think visionguy identified a correct problem in prevalent attitudes: while journals for data and open data publication requirements exist, they are going to be viewed as a hurdles to be passed (or gamed) with minimal effort as long as the underlying attitude itself doesn't change. And it won't, if inventing and running good data generating procedures (think of experiments, observational setups, identifying questions they can answer, any kind of such thing) is viewed less prestigious than / something that can be compensated by milking enough interesting results after one obtained one good source of data. I've been involved in a projects where I have felt a replaceable cog in an engine, and realized it is the design of the engine, which is quite difficult (and in those projects done by others), which should matter more as a scientific contribution.
I see those two solutions as complementary. You can signal and influence scientific values through the policies of institutions such as major funding agencies and journals.
To give contrasting examples. Political science has made major moves towards open science in its journal policies in the last decade (replication data is required for publication) and I've seen colleagues become much more open to these practices after being required to follow them. This contrasts with sociology where the journal editors explicitly state that they see no need for open science practices and most sociologists still see bothering to post data or replication files as a strange affectation.
Culture can be changed by convincing everyone that your preferred practices are the only legitimate way to do something and institutional rules are very effective at doing that.
Under point 15, the following is a poor conclusion.
"Plausibly SpaceX will still have to follow the rules of its host country, the US, so the big loser here will be China "
China will not be a loser. Tesla has significant assets within China, with the CCCP not distinguishing corporate fictions of Tesla and SpaceX. Additionally, China demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities in 2007, which lends itself to slightly more force more than a simply fist shake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
Starlink as anti-censorship technology will only work in peripheral nations.
Perhaps that's overly harsh on the internet though. We're posting here on Substack, after all.
Censorship was traditionally used by people in power to suppress speech by the citizens. Nowadays censorship is used by the citizens to suppress speech of the people in power (cf. Trump vs the amorphous mobs who hated him).
The internet did not magically eliminate all information control: after all the phrase "the internet" is overloaded to mean both a technical substrate of protocols and equipment, plus the general US libertarian culture that took hold in the early days and built the upper layers. China has the first but not the second. But it pretty massively moved the dial.
There is nothing even close to truly subversive on substack* (that has any serious amount of eyes on it!).
Re. Trump speech: Was it ever actually suppressed? I'd say it wasn't until he became threatening to the status quo re. Businesses Doin' Business, at which point he was exiled to the outer darkness n'er to return.
Substack is an company that exists to make money by catering to a clientele that likes the perception of being rebellions or counter culture; of being autre in some way even while not being anything but firmly establishment.
The REAL shit is either a ethnonationalist militia that is 50% FBI, or socialist militia that is 50% CIA.
The internet absolutely was a pro-information-idea-sharing technology though, like you can just download any significant piece of information for free whether it be movies and tv or books or porn or science studies or leaked documents, so that’s a weird take. You can say anything you want on mainstream platforms and it takes years for the moderation team to figure out how to censor it quickly.
Also, China could fine or arrest its citizens for using Starlink (as Russia is planing to do). The equipment is fairly large and conspicuous during use even if you manage to smuggle it in (assuming China would ban sales of terminals if SpaceX refused to cave in), so there would be no real benefit to the Chinese would-be-users, just like Google's not caving in would give no real benefit to the Chinese users of Google search.
Is that still true? My understanding is that the GFW got pretty good at stopping VPN usage in recent years, and the government ramped up arrests of people caught using them as a consequence.
They have cracked down some but plenty of them still work and they’re very important for for instance business use so they can’t totally nuke them. That said I’m not Chinese nor do I have any friends who live there so I could be wrong, but I’m pre sure it’s still widely available
I think the question is whether "widely available" in practice means that a million Chinese people use VPNs, or ten million, or a hundred million, or five hundred million. There's a lot of things that are in theory widely available, but not actually used by more than a small fraction of people.
I live in China and am posting this through a VPN, bought from a Chinese dealer, who I contact through Chinese social media (WeChat). I would rate VPN availability in China at about the same level as the availability of illegal drugs in the UK when I was growing up. Obviously not there on the supermarket shelves, but if you ask around, you can generally find some.
Someone above suggested that 15+% of the Chinese population might be using them - that's definitely not right. I'd be very surprised if it's as high as 1%. The vast majority of people here do not see any need to obtain uncensored internet. (The possible exception to this is porn, but there are lots of workarounds for that inside the GFW.) I've never heard of anyone being arrested just for using a VPN. I don't think that's worth anyone's trouble.
Hm. If you google china vpn use you get 15-30% from various websites (and uhh illega drug use is way above 1%, somewhere around 11-7% of brits smoked the leaf last year per survey and probably 13-14% USA)
Hard to smuggle, although in a place like China I could imagine underground replication of the hardware as the antennae are complex but not unique -- pretty easy to hide though, you just need an EM-transparent structure about the size of an average trashcan. (a plastic trashcan would probably work, actually)
Likely it will be in some countries not large enough to affect SpaceX.
It will become harder for government to cut off internet in random African countries and Foobaristans. But China/USA/EU will be able to censor whatever the want.
> said the same thing about the Internet
It is less anti censorship than some expected, but still has serious power here.
SpaceX *could* go into the business of providing rogue internet, but those countries can seek remediation through bodies like the UN for violation of their sovereignty.
Ha ha yep. But among his other talents, Musk is a gifted salesman, and he knows exactly the community to which he's selling (stock if not Teslas and sat links). These are people who are *so* wired up to the complex world of technology that they are unusually dependent on the good-will of the big companies and big government that control its base and lifeblood. If the Internet tech companies to which they are so interconnected go titzup or get compromised in big ways or small -- e.g. because of some bobble in the financial markets, or a regulatory hissy-fit by a state actor -- they are uniquely vulnerable. Far more so than Joe Sixpack turning a wrench in a Caterpillar plant in Peoria, shopping weekly for staples in the local Piggly Wiggly, picking up a few eggs from a neighbor with hens, and whose connection to all the people he knows tends to revolve around a popular bar in town and conversations after church.
So along comes Musk to soothe their existential worries: not to worry! I have a technical solution to the inherent vulnerability of your situation. Vietnam will *not* be able to cut off your Internet, should you choose to visit or even live there. Plus we are building such bulletproof security that no conceivable hacking attempt that isn't based around quantum computing with a million qubits could succeed* -- here are some math-dense white papers proving that. And I will *only* comply with surveillance orders in your own jurisdiction if they're signed by an actual live sworn-in judge, or if I feel like it because it would not be a good idea to annoy the people who control my access to the bond market. Don't you feel much better? And they do.
Also re concerns about Kessler syndrome, the Starlink satellites are relatively low earth orbit at 550 kilometers, where atmospheric drag will naturally decay their orbits in several years. IDK how much time debris would persist if you blew them up, but it's much less of a concern than say a GPS satellite (20,200 km altitude)
At 550 kilometers, I think it would only be a couple years.
I feel like I should also add that Kessler Syndrome doesn't block you off from space, either. It just makes it harder to have stuff stay in orbit, since it will get damaged faster from impacts and deorbit sooner. You can still fly stuff through a cloud of such debris if you're launching missions to elsewhere.
Yeah, Kessler means LEO is not a viable place to keep satellites (and everything there is a write-off) and that's basically it. You can send stuff through it just fine.
Forgive the domain-ignorant question, but would a satellite takedown necessarily require blowing up a satellite in orbit? I know Astroscale is proposing to clean up low-orbit debris by way of magnetic capture and I've also read somewhere that the Russian military has been experimenting with lasers intended to disable rather than destroy.
Capturing satellites and deorbiting sounds like it would be expensive (if you want to gently catch a satellite, you have to match orbits, so you need a rocket as big as the one that put it in orbit in the first place). Disabling them in one piece seems fairly plausible to me, but I'm not an expert.
But no matter how you choose to do it, destroying its coverage in China would destroy it for everyone (since satellites move), and that would probably get some complaints from other countries.
I don't think they'd be willing short of an outright "we can win WWIII" hawk. Thousands of ASAT launches against LEO is basically guaranteed Kessler and "military action blowing up large amounts of other nations' infrastructure in international territory" is literally casus belli.
Also, there are much cheaper and effective ways of solving that. For example kidnapping Elon Musk/friends/family/employees etc.
Quite extreme but less extreme and cheaper and more effective than thousands of anti-satellite rockets. I am not sure is China even capable of shooting down all (or large part of) Starlink satellites.
I mean, none of the other bands are really susceptible to it at this point (hence why I specified LEO). MEO and HEO are far too sparsely populated, and GEO is immune because while there are a ton of satellites there, they're all on the same exact path (geostationary i.e. eccentricity = inclination = 0) and thus the hypervelocity collisions needed for Kessler propagation can't happen.
There are journals for datasets (e.g. Journal of Open Psychology Data), but they are not used much in most fields for two reasons: 1) Scientific culture of valuing exciting (often nonreplicable) discoveries over high-quality data; 2) New-ish journals are almost never popular because it takes a long time to get an impact factor and overturn the inertial prestige held by the older journals, thus almost no one submits to them.
The article linked about the Tuskegee issue was frustrating to read, because it never seemed to attempt to explain why, if not Tuskegee, would Black Americans be more *hesitant* to get a COVID vaccine. There was a lot of stuff in there about unequal access and the problems that Black Americans who *want* to be vaccinated face in achieving that goal, but that's a different issue. I suppose what the article could be implying is that if you've been dealing your whole life with a system that refuses or hesitates to treat you when you want to be treated, when it starts beating down your door begging you to let them treat you for something else, you get suspicious. But I would have liked to have seen some quotes or data that actually indicated that.
It could also be true that the article wasn't ever really trying to answer the question "why don't Black people trust the COVID vaccine", but instead was saying "if you're looking at overall vaccination rates by race and noticing that Black people have lower rates than Whites, don't conclude that it's because they don't want to be vaccinated because Tuskegee", but again, it never said that explicitly. Also, I got a chuckle when it described "religious reasons" as a "modern" objection to vaccines, and once again I think that certain White people are continually confused when Black people have conservative opinions/values even though they are the most reliable Democrat voting block.
RE:Geothermal - I can say that there isn’t any real fear of wind and solar within the oil and gas industry. But geothermal elicits a “yea that’s a thing that could actually work”. Part of that might be that building geothermal capacity looks mechanically similar to E&P (exploration and production) because they both involve sticking things into the earth.
Ultimately, geothermal will run into the same problem fasting does - there’s not really a product anyone can get rich making so the proponents aren’t all that financially incentivized.
It seems decentralisation will play a factor as well, making the new industries incomprehensible to the already wealthy and powerful oil elite. Luckily their understanding or support is not necessary.
A distributed solar network combined with a more advanced grid operator with battery or other energy storage. technology need not fixate on expanding the trust funds for the children of oil executives to function.
Geothermal is just another red herring of nonsense the press like to focus on that will have incredibly niche applications. Just like with hydrogen cars that never appeared or with just about whatever the MSM points at...the finger of the media is directed by the hand of big oil in terms of what they focus on.
As with the never ever ever ending coverage of 'breakthrough technology' as though we don't already have everything we need right now to end the use of oil and coal for transport and electricity in nearly all applications.
We do indeed have everything we need. The article sets aside small scale geothermal for homes and small buildings but I've had my geothermal heating and cooling system for 8 years now and it is super efficient and seems to be super reliable with minimal maintenance. The temp range here is -10F to 100F and it's never failed to keep my home comfortable. If my hydro-supplied electric (via village co-op) weren't so damn cheap, I'd have panels too to power my geothermal. Yet most new home installations here are natural gas and traditional a/c compressors because...well, because people can't do the math to determine the cost over time of their NG/LP system.
You're exactly right. Of these, I have a horizontal closed-loop system that heats and cools my house in a cold northern clime with a perhaps a few weeks in the summer in the 90s. I had a few acres so the space was not an issue. Others with smaller lots close by have the vertical 'well-type' closed loop systems that also seem satisfactory. These prices seem about right though mine was more expensive as I had to retrofit an existing house with ductwork. If ductwork already exists, cost is dependent upon whether you need 1 or 2 heat pumps. At the time, I received 30% of the cost back in the form of a tax credit so the system was actually the same price as a conventional (nat gas heat and a/c compressor) system after the credit. When mine was installed, there were fewer installers so I would hope(?) that prices have fallen somewhat with more installers and competition. I'd absolutely do it again as none of my neighbors believe me when I tell them what my electric bill is in January/February (they know I don't have a gas connection).
Geothemal heat pumps are completely unrelated to geothermal energy being discussed in the original article and the posts again. I am jealous of your geothermal heat pumps. However, they do not fully power your house.
Twitter center left “””neolibs”” keep selling the idea that solar and wind are beating oil and gas and this’ll solve climate change. never taken a position on that but how wrong is it...
I am not sure what qualifies as beating, but solar and wind are forcing the price of non-renewables down and making questionable the profitability establishing of new non-renewable plants. Presumably solar and wind will continue to become more economical. (BTW, I am not on Twitter and not a neoliberal)
It is a sign that they know very little physics or geology. In terms of concentrated energy sources, there is no swap for oil. Renewables can provide maybe 10 % of our current energy use so that is probably the budget for the next hundred year time frame going forward.
We're all in the predicament together as users of the one-shot concentrated energy store we call fossil fuels. It's like a lorry of grain having been spilt in a meadow biome. The mice and bird populations explode, and then thousands of mouse/bird generations later some of the mice or birds start looking at the small pile of grain left and thinking 'perhaps people in prehistory used to eat something other than the grain mountain'.
All of the industrial infrastructure, including that for renewables is built by fossil fuels. The best applications of renewable energy are a way to displace that embodied fossil fuel energy forward in time over a time period of decades. Unless people can grasp those basics they are just hand-waving. There's a lot of it about. I think the last two years have shown how few people in the political classes remember anything much of their high-school science classes or have the inclination to build on that foundation.
It's to do with true cost accounting. The energy coming from renewable outputs doesn't capture the investment of fossil fuel energy involved in mining rare earths, transporting components and so on. Net energy is more important than gross output to see the energy landscape. Back in the early days of oil the return on energy invested for fossil fuels was very high because you could just bash a pipe in and get a gusher. What's left is more costly to access in energy terms.
Carbon payback time for a wind turbine is 8-9 months including extraction and manufacturing of raw materials, production of the turbines, their transport, erection, operation, maintenance, dismantling and disposal, and the same for their foundation and the transmission grid.
Percentages are useless for unreliable and undispatchable power source. Grid needs to match supply to demand in real time or Bad Things start to happen. Realistic scenarios are only cases of Costa Rica kind - lots of hydropower, which is the ideal peak/backup source, so when they add a lots of solar, they stretch the accumulated water for longer time and can immediately switch to it when PV production falls.
This is addressed in the link: the claim is that the fissures needed are much smaller than what is used for natural gas and therefore there is less seismic risk. Can you share more info about the Switzerland situation you refer to?
"Semiconductor manufacturers have 'about as much built-in voodoo and superstition as a major-league baseball team'"
I will observe that this book was written in 1985. About the semiconductor industry of the early 1980s. Fab process control has gotten a lot better since then.
"And baseball teams have gotten a lot more scientific."
Well ... this is true (folks pay more attention to on-base percentage and there is less stealing as two examples), but ...
the lucky underwear sort of thing still holds in baseball, however. Because YOU don't want to be the one to jinx your current success (jinx is a technical term ...).
I dunno about you, but I see plenty of cargo cult thinking, superstition, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", whatever you want to call it, in the fab and outside. It certainly wears fancier clothes these days than the textbook examples, but it's present nonetheless. People get locked into certain recipes or maintenance schedules or whatever, unable to change, because they don't understand the consequences of change.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's because the flows are so complicated for these modern devices. It's the complement of what you mentioned... Yes process control is way better, but the processes themselves are WAY more complicated. What should be a mathematical and physical exercise becomes an issue of statistical comparison, without reference to the object level.
Not to mention, the responsibilities of the engineers are so finely subdivided that many of them don't have a clue what a transistor is or how it works!! Which you would think is a base-level requirement.
I can't see the full article, but a key component of this idea relates to the female's use of chemical contraception pills which skew female preference.
The idea being that she'll choose overly similar males as company when she's on the pill with the idea of female spending more time around brothers and fathers and uncles when they are already pregnant. While females who are not on the pill will be more attracted to men who are different to them.
There are many such stories linking this to divorce rates and many stories of women who go off the pill to get pregnant with their partners, only to suddenly become repulsed by their smell and unwilling to have sex with their partner.
Nearly every woman I've talked to about this will know women in their social circle to whom this has happened. Making it clear to me it is not a rare event.
The contraception pill works to make the woman's body act as though it were pregnant. Leading to 'incorrect' selection of males who are similar to them as mates.
So I'd postulate what we may well be seeing as 'random' is in fact a mix of women not taking the pill selecting men with different immune system and women taking the pill selecting men with similar immune systems...leading to no 'overall trend'.
I'm not claiming this is necessarily impossible, but consider that the MHC on chr6 is a peculiar, befuddling place due to its high variability. In this so-called 'hypervariable' region, allele patterns are easily confounded by other geographically-distributed characteristics, and I would take any published association between MHC variants and most human phenotypes with a grain of salt -- doubly so when it comes to things like mating preferences, which pose additional (somewhat analogous) challenges.
With that said, I'm not terribly familiar with this particular research and could be pleasantly surprised; however, my prior regarding this kind of funky MHC-related finding has got to range between very skeptical ("a *lot* of things could have gone wrong, here") and downright cynical ("oh great, another group firing off flawed results to grab easy headlines").
Given your comment, I don't think you understand MHC well, or why there is a hypervariable region. (To be fair, it's kind of esoteric to immunology and the details of clonal selection theory.)
That said, my prior when I read about the hypothesis was that it would go the other direction, since it's maladaptive to marry closely to your MHC profile. Given a choice of two potential mates where the only differentiating factor is MHC compatibility, you'd want to pick the one who matches you less closely, not more. (Assuming organ transplants aren't a thing, which is true at evolutionary development timescales.)
That apparently did not replicate, or at least attraction didn’t vary with ovulation, which is the proposed mechanism of BC influencing attraction. https://t.co/N1FMK25y3c?amp=1 (h/t rolfdegen)
#2: Aldous Huxley mentions Adrenochrome in the fourth paragraph of The Doors of Perception, which was very popular (It's still the #1 search result for books about psychedelics). That's probably where most of those post-1954 fiction writers heard about it.
Adrenochrome is not an imaginary drug, although most of its uses are. The headline of the Daily Beast article is incorrect, and so is the implication that Hunter S Thomson made it up 20 years after Huxley.
Huxley implies adrenochrome is a powerful endogenous psychedelic and explains the then-current but now-disproven theory that adrenochrome contributes to schizophrenia.
See also this paper on adrenochrome inhibiting ATP production and probably not being very safe:
"Perfusion of the heart with 50 mg/L adrenochrome induced a marked decline in contractile force within 5 min and this was associated with a rapid decline in the myocardial ATP/AMP ratio...Adrenochrome at concentrations of 20 mg/L or higher was found to inhibit the oxidative phosphorylation activities of heart mitochondria under in vitro conditions. "
3 is complete bullshit. It should read: "While the Aztecs were sacrificing prisoners to the gods, their neighbors in Tlaxcala were a confederation of four despotic kingdoms that also sacrificed prisoners to the gods, because Aztec culture and Tlaxcalan culture were almost identical."
For what it's worth, Wikipedia agrees that Tlaxcala was a "republic" with both nobility and commoners on the ruling council, though I get the impression that the council was self-selected rather than democratically elected. It further says that the Tlaxcalans came to have four hereditary rulers 26 years after the Spanish Conquest.
That doesn't mean they weren't a similar culture to the Aztecs, and it certainly doesn't mean they were peaceful.
Is there any info on the numbers and nature of the Tlaxcala sacrifices? My understanding is the Aztecs stood out among the Central and South American cultures for the sheer volume and painful styles of their human sacrifice. I found this for the Aztec approach, which backs up stuff I've read elsewhere, but I didn't find anything on the Tlaxcala approach.
Come to think of it, I’m now curious how US civics classes on the importance of checks & balances, the separation of powers, separation of church and state etc. deal with the fact that the UK has none of these things but is barely different?
From what I remember from decades ago, U.S. civics classes just don't address that point. There's some discussion of British ideas from centuries ago that were the basis of our Constitution, but not really anything comparing the two countries today.
As Bullseye said, those classes largely aren't interested in comparing the US to other modern governments. The most you might get is "UK and some other countries have a parliamentary system, so basically everything goes through the legislative branch, eh, seems to work for them but we like doing it our way."
A more complete answer might gesture at:
- what separation of powers owed to the British system of the time (two houses of Parliament with lots of executive power still with the king) via Montesquieu
- the influence of Magna Carta, English Bill of Rights, etc. on the concept of freedom via binding limitations on government
- the crucial improvement of a written constitution (inspired by colonial charters); yes, the British "unwritten" one works okay given the weight of tradition, but the US was setting up a government from scratch and couldn't afford 300+ years of often violent wrangling over it
- federalism as an innovation made necessary by the size and number of colonies, with no real analogue in Britain (unfortunately for Scotland and Ireland maybe?)
- the not very representative structure of the British parliament at the time (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832; arguably this and later reforms represent Britain emulating the US!)
- the much greater diversity of background, lifestyle, and opinion in the US even today
The US constitution became a way for judges to make laws without approval by the legislative branch, so instead of increasing the barrier to institute certain laws, it made them smaller.
So better to not have a constitution that is interpreted by judges, IMO.
There’s absolutely a sense that the UK is a bit more absurd than the US with its ur-licensing, arbitrary bans on speech, and police going around confiscating knives. UK’s small c constitution also does have some checks and balances. (I.e. UK still has many rules and procedures and customs they follow even though they aren’t in a written document)
It's not clear how much of that is due to separation of powers, checks and balances, etc. and how much is just due to two very specific amendments written into the US constitution. If we hadn't passed the first and second amendments as written when we did, would the structure of US government make them easier to pass now?
UK basically does have those things, it just doesn't have a written constitution that says it does. Queen is head of the Church, in theory, but in reality isn't. Queen is head of the State, in theory, but in reality isn't. There's a separate judicial branch and the civil service sees itself as an independent provider of services to the government.
If anything the UK has too much separation of powers. British government is overrun with supposedly "independent" organizations of various kinds called quangos, that think of themselves as unaccountable to anyone, even though they're taxpayer funded and legislatively empowered. Even the 1984-esque word "quango" reflects this platypus like approach: quasi-non-governmental-organization. Separation of powers usually means in practice a separation of accountability, where one side remains accountable and the other doesn't.
The US doesn't have this issue because the first thing a new President does is replace the heads of all the different government organizations. It's expected that they turn up with a team who will directly take over the running of government. In some way this is less power-separatey than the UK's approach, but it's hard to argue against it. Americans talk about the Deep State all the time, but most non-black parts of the state are at least controlled by political appointees. In the UK the Deep State is so pervasive people don't even have a name for it, they just shrug and sort of accept that half the time they think they're dealing with government it turns out to be some sort of strange company-like body that nonetheless has the power to fine them.
I haven't really seen that myself. See the exasperation evinced by ministers over the past 5 years about the antics of the Electoral Commission. The EC has failed in almost every way it's possible for it to fail and all ministers could do was moan in public and make occasional noises about reviewing its role. When the new head of the EC came in he apologised for the past "mistakes" and then immediately stated that, however, the EC was "not just a body of Parliament". In other words you have quango heads openly asserting in public that they are accountable to nobody, not even Parliament itself, despite being theoretically government agencies.
If you can't see why the Electoral Commission would want to emphasise its independence from the government for non-sinister reasons you are either an idiot or a conspiracist.
In any case if Parliament really wanted to they could just abolish it.
It is my contention that the American belief that a sensible constitution automatically spawns a rational and effective government is the reason that so many of its nation building schemes fail.
27 (real estate) seems like further evidence for my "contracts make us dumb" hypothesis. The more long-term contracts people sign, the more that locks us into doing things that no longer make sense if you're looking at objective reality, but seemed like a good idea at the time the contract was signed.
Isn’t locking people into doing things that might not seem to be their immediate preference literally the whole point of a contract? To provide a degree of predictability in spite of expected uncertainty?
That doesn’t mean they won’t result in some situations that seem dumb if certain scenarios come to pass - but the alternative world without contracts is lots of people stupidly passing up beneficial arrangements due to lack of trust and/or certainty.
Sure, you can't do without them, but perhaps they could be improved. In this case, maybe a something less like a loan and more like an equity investment that gets marked to market based on rental rates.
I look at contracts as an agreement to not change your mind later. Presumably both sides agree on the terms, and their immediate preference would be to follow the contract. Expected uncertainty comes into it, but only later. It would be odd if one or both participants would want to immediately change the deal. (Of course, both sides might prefer a deal where the exchange still happens but is more favorable to them. I wouldn't consider that the same reason we have contracts, because the end result of that is disagreement and no exchange). If both sides know that the other is prohibited from backing out or modifying if the situation changes, then they can be much more comfortable entering the agreement in the first place.
You mean like making your monthly mortgage payment even though the bank already gave you the money? Come on, contracts enforce an endless variety of non-instantaneous transactions that would be impossible without them. "Contracts are dumb" is a nonsensical position.
Although I was exaggerating a bit, I didn’t quite say “Contracts are dumb.” Sometimes the results are dumb, if they can’t be renegotiated easily.
Mortgages are a case in point. When the something bad happens, it’s sometimes in everyone’s interest to give the homeowner a break, reducing their current payments but not leaving the bank with a house they have to sell. There are horror stories where the mortgage has been resold so it’s difficult to find someone to renegotiate with, even if the it’s very much in the interest of the people who now own the securitized income streams to redo the deal so they will end up with more money versus a default.
The point is that even a well-drafted contract *is not intelligent.* It’s a bunch of dumb rules that can’t understand and adapt to circumstances unless there are people to override the rules. Ideally the contract itself allows for overrides.
Have you looked at Scots law at all? Their legal system is heavily based on contracts and might provide examples to compare. In some ways I think their legal system has advantages in comparison to the English/Welsh one based if I understand correctly on precendent.
30. There are some interesting ideas in this article, but the Voxsplainer massively oversells its promise - and it is not internally consistent.
The total energy flow out of the earth is about 30 TW. Total human energy use today is 15 TW.
Geothermal energy is not uniformly distributed, but you can use that assumption for some rough estimates. About 2/3 - 3/4 of this heat comes up in the oceans (the Earth's surface is 71% ocean). Land-based geothermal cannot cover total human energy use. The US covers about 1/50th of Earth's surface, so even if we are able to harvest all of the geothermal energy, it would be about 0.6 TW. The US uses about 3 TW.
That doesn't stop Vox from claiming "5,157 gigawatts of electric capacity" (i.e. 5.2 TW) from geothermal in the US is possible. For this to even be physically possible, the US would have to be 10 times more volcanic than usual - which it's not.
Current total geothermal energy production globally is about 15 GW, so 0.1% of global energy use. [I wonder if Vox assumes that people don't keep track of TW vs GW vs MW.] This is concentrated around 'hot spots' - unusually volcanically active areas. New technologies could increase this significantly.
The technology Vox describes is basically using fracking technology (pumping pressurized water through rock) to access more geothermal energy.
This would start as a way to expand the area around a hot spot where geothermal is viable. After the technology is perfected there, the promise is that it could be used "almost anywhere". This is not quite right - it should say "almost everywhere". If we want geothermal to compete at close to the scale of fossil fuels, we need to tap a significant fraction of all the heat flowing up through Earth's crust.
Vox promises that this is not fracking and will not cause any seismic problems, as long as it stays away from seismically active areas. This is inconsistent - I'm not sure where they're planning on finding volcanically active, but not seismically active areas.
There is an even bigger problem for "almost everywhere" geothermal. Rock conducts heat really poorly, unless it contains fluids - either water of magma. There is magma near hot spots, and water in aquifers close to the surface. Small amounts of water can be pumped down, but not enough to saturate all the way down to the mantle. You will extract heat from the rock that is in contact with the pumped water, but that rock will reheat from lower rocks extremely slowly. This should be thought of as mining the heat of the crust. It is not renewable on the timescales it can be extracted.
Using technology developed for fracking to help geothermal is a good idea. I think it's plausible that it could increase geothermal energy production by a factor of 2-10. But claiming that it could compete at the scale of fossil fuels or that it "solves energy" is completely ridiculous.
I'm not sure that 30 TW budget is all that much of an upper limit. We obviously can't pull more than 30 TW forever, but for at least some amount of time we can. I did it quickly so my math might have an error, but I get that just 100 vertical meters of 100 C rock across the US can supply 5 TW for 2000 years. Not permanent, but it'll go for a while.
30 TW by mining the entire surface of the US is about 0.1 Watts per square meter. Sunlight on average is about 200 W/m^2 (averaged over day and night), so with 20% efficient panels gives about 40 Watts per square meter. Wind is a few Watts per square meter. Geothermal potential is miniscule except in tiny, fortunate areas; there's no way it's a sizeable contribution to energy issues.
The point of my response is that 30 TW isn't an actual upper limit. You can (temporarily, but for a while on human timescales) pull out substantially more than that.
It might still be less energy sense than I dunno, but with very real advantages of not needing to worry about clouds and time of day. Which wins that in detail is way behind me though, I just wanted to disagree with the specific suggestion of 30 TW as an upper limit.
You're right. If this is the strategy, then it should not be described as a renewable energy source. I prefer to call it 'mining the heat of the crust'.
Further context on #37: "phase of the moon" is a classic idiom in tech for inputs to a process that are fundamentally mysterious or random-seeming. (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/phase-of-the-moon.html) Naturally the link includes two more examples of issues that were actually linked to the phase of the moon.
Re #17. In medicine, data are often collected under very a strict protocol to preserve privacy (see HIPPA). This makes it challenging to post datasets publicly. However, there are at least a few higher tier journals, such as PLoSOne, which insist that data be made public unless authors can provide good reason not to. The journals typically suggest one of several repositories. I've posted numerous datasets to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) repository for papers I've published in PLoSOne, JAMA, JAMA Open, and BMJ Open.
"Students trying to prove the hypothesis were less than half as likely to notice the gorilla than those investigating aimlessly. I’m agnostic as to whether this proves something important about science or is just funny."
They're students doing homework. They tested what they were asked to test and then went on with their lives. Doesn't tell you anything about real scientists.
> In 1922, someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long Straw Hat Riot in New York and several hospitalizations.
After which the culprits were punished by magistrate Peter Hatting. Very appropriate.
Well, I just filled out the form for the arranged marriage. It asked me for my age, income, a recent picture, and gave a miniature Big 5 personality quiz. Wish me luck, I guess.
"Not sure if this counts as “the left is eating itself”, but the (unofficial) Brandeis Suggested Language List now recommends students not use the term “trigger warning” because it is “violent language”."
Well, you're linking to the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center website of a private university, so I don't really see how that would count as "left" politics. Can you explain to me your reasoning here, Scott Alexander?
Yes, I would still have an objection towards that. Scott would still need to explain what "woke" is (and I would argue that this category is even more unclear than "left") and then he would have to explain how this example has anything to do with "eating itself".
Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say I linked the exact same link and said:
"Not sure if this counts as “THE RIGHT is eating itself”, but the (unofficial) Brandeis Suggested Language List now recommends students not use the term “trigger warning” because it is “violent language”."
Would you still find this "interesting"? Would you still be as willing to think about the "implications" without any real proof?
Universities in a capitalist society tend to be liberal which I think can be argued to be centre-right. Not all universities are like this, for example I would expect Universities in Cuba to be significantly more left-wing.
That seems like bad, circular argument. The unsupported assumption is that language policing is "left-type" stuff (really? is it?), therefore any "language policing" that we see on an organisation's website must be "left".
Let's use an real-life example. I've previously had my language policed on this blog and even been banned from it for a while. Is this evidence towards the "left eating itself"?
I get where you're coming from, I really do, private universities in a mixed economy don't look especially leftist.
But a lot of people who study and work there consider themselves on the left (not sure about links and spam filters for sourcing, but you can Google political affiliations of US professors). I think there's a reasonable debate as to whether these people are mistaken about whether or not they're _actually_ on the left. But it's pretty clear that in this context, Scott is gesturing at some self-identifying leftist culture - which can be pretty far from actual leftist economic systems.
If you don't have the same cultural context as Scott, I can see that this gesturing at quite a nebulous cultural movement is confusing. But also Scott never claimed to be writing for everyone, and it seems fine for him to use words in a way that would be readily understood from within his culture.
Seems like they're the basically the same self-policing rules and guidelines that essentially any workplace, organisation or community could have. I've seen no evidence that there's a "self-identifying leftist culture" at work here.
Scott doesn't claim to be writing for everyone, but if he's going to comment on politics he should be prepared to have his comments analysed by people outside of his bubble.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for "Political Views of American Academics," you will see that a mere 9% of academics identify as conservative. Does this count as evidence of a self identifying leftist culture.
For your second paragraph I'd say something like: No entiendo! Por que eso no está en espanol? Debes estar listo que tus commentarios estan analizado para gente fuera del mundo anglohablante. Todo debe estar disponible a todos.
"Conservative" isn't the only non-left ideology. You seem to be referring to this statistic:
"In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative"
If accurate, that means that 99% of professors are non-left.
That's not evidence that this Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center website of a private university is evidence of the "left eating itself".
To establish this, we need to first find if the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center of Brandeis is "left". Next we need to see if it "eating itself" (rather than, say, making a productive move). Scott establishes neither.
I'm not Scott, but I'll attempt a plausible disambiguation.
The "left" is widely understood to mean two things:
1- The Economic Left : A specific direction in politics and economy that advocates for greater societal control over economic actors (e.g. corporations) and resources, and advocates for greater societal responsibility of the economically-advantaged toward the economically-disadvantaged. (through specific policies, not just through shallow charity.) A widely recognized instance of an Economic Left theoretical apparatus is Marxism.
2- The Identity Left : A memetic mutation of The Economic Left, where the theme of "Society favors certain groups, often at the cost of others" is elevated to Newtonian-Laws Level of fundamentalness, and generalized to apply to any and all groups where some difference of outcome exists. In a large group of the Identity Left adherents, the original economic question is entirely ignored or given lip service only, lets agree to call this subset The Economically-Agnostic Identity Left. A widely recognized instance of an Identity Left theoretical apparatus is Feminism.
The first usage is almost universal in any political environment where private economic actors can hold significant power (so, almost everywhere on earth since the 1960s), but the second is specific to USA, Canada, Australia, Britain and (to a much lesser extent) other specific countries. Although the link between the two can sometimes be strenuous and outright hostile, they are associated with each other.
In the specific case of the USA and Canada, Media and Academia are both dominated by a strong strain of Economically Agnostic (i.e. doesn't really give a fuck about the Economic Left questions) Identity Left. This can be supported by both studies and statistics (a lot of studies about the beliefs of social scientists and how conservative and right wing cultural views are systematically suppressed), and, like, just paying attention to news and social media where academic results are being reported. As a middle easterner, I can name Fox News as a right wing news outlet, but I can name The Atlantic, The New York Times and Vox as Economically-Agnostic Left. Granted, the memory of one foreigner is not a valid measure of a country's cultural bias (and I used to identify with the Identity Left till very recently so it's even more unreliable than that), but there are millions of foreigners and natives that say the same thing, so it's safe to assume the claim has a basis in reality.
The Economically-Agnostic Identity Left often has a nasty tendency to rapidly change hyper-vague norms and lingual practices, often with little to no reasonable debate. The linked site displays a lot of the markers of those kind of discussions, so Scott tagged them with "Left" meaning "Identity Left", as is common in the USA.
The Atlantic, The New York Times and Vox are all center or center-right. That it is common to misidentify media sources as "left" when they're really not is my whole point. If Scott is tagging things as "left" with very little actual debate or discussion as to whether they are actually left or not, then he is making a large mistake.
These kinds of mistakes are common in the USA because media (just like Scott) is mostly very biased against the left.
Re: 17 That explanation doesn't make sense. Data sets are still published material. If someone publishes a derivative of your work using your dataset without crediting you on the paper (IMO is a co-author is a minimum professional courtesy) they are clearly committing academic fraud of some sort.
Re: Media Bias, aka #19, what the heck is that chart? The colors and bubble size is just based on their own pre-assigned metric? How is that the choice you make, when the color and bubble size are the most visually striking parts of the series. The color shade should be how biased they really are in your analysis, and the bubble size should be some sort of viewership/readership metric.
I'm not convinced the reviewer is really fair. While there might be some inaccuracies, he overstates their importance to the point the book makes (and I'm pretty sure he misrepresents what the main argument of the book even is). And he blatantly ignores some points the book makes (and yes, the book does imply that Italians are "less WEIRD"). The sentence "Where Christianity did have an impact was the sense it gave of cultural superiority which led to colonialism and exploitation of other 'lesser' societies" is baffling and a quite insane thing to say for a historian, and the whole review makes me think this guy is just in love with Roman culture and a bit pissed the book author didn't praise Romans enough (in the same way he accuses Henrich of ignoring Roman influence he ignores that much of Europe was never under Roman rule and was only indirectly influenced by Roman culture).
The criticism reminds me of the stuff said agains "Guns, Germs, and Steel", where plenty of historians are pissed, but can't offer a more substancial refutation other than "this theory doesn't fully explain everything I know about some some small group nobody really cares about so that must mean he's wrong!"
I had a loooong conversation online with Freeman (on Amazon's commenting system). Yes you're right, Freeman writes defensively because Henrich's thesis goes against his work. Freeman believes that the Romans had a high degree of civilization and that the Church destroyed that. He can't admit that the Church may (even accidentally, not on purpose) have had a positive impact.
Freeman also hates the fact that Henrich is not a historian, and didn't work with historians to write this book.
Freeman's arguments are mostly of the same type: the Church didn't have full control over marriage in 500 AD and therefore it had no control at all until 1200 AD. (I hardly paraphrase). Or: there is diversity between France and Lithuania, or between Italy and Holland, therefore these countries can't be WEIRD. In other words Freeman can't think in terms of degree or proportionality. He can't grasp the concept of correlation, since that concept precisely requires continuous variation.
Worse, to make his point Freeman uses some distasteful tactics, such as implying racist motivations (mentioning explicitly the superiority of the West; or genetics when Henrich very clearly explains that the transmission mechanism can't be genetic, etc.).
Also, Freeman selectively quotes many authors. The same authors virtually always mention somewhere else that the Church did indeed have an increased influence on marriages and family formation starting in ~500 AD.
Here is an example among many. Freeman says "Smith does mention, p.131, that 'some bishops tried [sic] to impose an additional disqualification' namely enforcing the consanguinity laws but it seems to have been a minority practice"
But the actual quote from Julias Smith is: "Starting at a synod in Rome in 721, ecclesiastical councils gradually added three further elements to Leo the Great’s ideas: an emphasis on the permanence and indissolubility of marriage, a refusal to countenance more than one sexual relationship at a time, and a very much broader definition of incestuous, forbidden marriages. In this context, bishops were emphatic that both the spiritual kinship established through baptism and the relationships created through marriage were impediments to marriage. Godparents, god-siblings, co-parents, and all in-laws thus fell into the vast pool of prohibited marriage partners. In addition, some bishops tried to impose an additional disqualification—consanguinity extending all the way to a common ancestor within seven generations, way beyond the widely acceptable four-generation limit."
So what the bishop tried to do and failed is to extend the prohibition to <b>seven generations</b>, not that they failed to impose any consanguinity laws at all!
Anyway, Freeman and I exchanged about 60 messages on Amazon's comment system, but unfortunately Amazon got rid of the system and the messages are now lost. I have a copy of my own comments but not Freeman's. Still, if someone is interested in more, I can dig up half of that conversation.
Another example, just for fun and because I have it already close by:
Freeman mentions Brundage but Brundage actually says this: "by 1100 the Church had secured virtual supremacy in the adjudication of issues relating to the formation of marriage and the separation, divorce, and remarriage of those whose marriages failed."
"Supremacy", by 1100 AD.
Incidentally, Brundage does a great job describing the intensive kin-based institutions that characterized the early Middle Ages and that progressively disappeared under the influence of the Church. Here are a few quotes from him on this:
Brundage: "[Germanic folklaw pior to Christianity] was based upon two foundations: the collective responsibility of the kindred for the actions of its members and the principle of reciprocal revenge."
Brundage: "Polygyny was also a common feature of Germanic domestic life [...] polygyny was common prior to the conversion of the Germans to Christianity"
Brundage: "Bride purchase involved an agreement between two families. An exchange of property was an essential part of Kaufehe [purchase of a bride] and the Germanic law codes encouraged this type of marriage. "
Brundage: "Early Germanic law treated bastard children by and large not much differently from legitimate offspring. Later, probably under the influence of Church authorities who were anxious to discourage irregular unions, the status of bastard children deteriorated markedly. "
Brundage: "Although as late as the early sixth century some Germanic kings managed to transgress the incest rules with impunity, by the end of that century even royalty could no longer do so. Polygyny likewise became subject to legal restrictions in the aftermath of mass conversions to Christianity among the Germans and by the late sixth century was becoming uncommon."
All these quotes are perfectly in line with Henrich's narrative. Polygyny, wergeld, collective responsibility, bribe as property, "illegitimate" children, "incest" (not necessarily blood-related), etc., are all traits of kin-based clans. The disappearance of these traits is what is noteworthy, and it is impossible not to notice that they disappeared when the Church tried to suppress them (with the help of secular powers, notably the Carolingians).
But somehow Freeman cites this very source but still fail to see how Church policies affected family formation and in general the cohesion of clans.
> "Where Christianity did have an impact was the sense it gave of cultural superiority which led to colonialism and exploitation of other 'lesser' societies"
This is one the dumbest memes in existence. People have been killing, invading and enslaving other groups for as long as different groups have been in contact with each other and none of them needed any elaborate theory to provide moral "justification" for doing this, not did they require some "sense of superiority" to animate themselves towards conquest.
>The criticism reminds me of the stuff said agains "Guns, Germs, and Steel", where plenty of historians are pissed, but can't offer a more substancial refutation other than "this theory doesn't fully explain everything I know about some some small group nobody really cares about so that must mean he's wrong!"
1. There's nothing to actually "refute". He doesn't provide a SINGLE citation for anything he claims in this book, meaning its one big speculative hypothesis and the burden of proof is still on Diamond to validate his claims.
2. Much of what he says is demonstrably false. For example, he claims that native north americans domesticated north american animals as much as they could be domesticated, and that the relative lack of domestication compared with e.g. is due to the biological differences between native species in europe and north america. Modern and ongoing studies have domesticated native north american animals to a much greater extent than the native americans did. There are many such examples.
3. His entire hypothesis is essentially that environmental factors are sufficient to explain why some peoples never progressed beyond rudimentary hunter gatherer society, while others achieved industrial civilization. The enormous, gaping problem that should be obvious to anyone without a preconceived blank-slate worldview is that these environmental factors are supposed to be significant enough to explain enormous societal/civilizational differences, but amazingly they're not significant enough to provide ANY difference in selective pressures between these populations (other than for superficial traits like skin color). Like, seriously, think about that. It's absolutely bonkers. If human populations are so abjectly insensitive to huge, categorical differences in lifestyle and production methods, its a wonder that we ever evolved to become humans at all in the first place, because surely the magnitude of difference in what constitutes fitness for a hunter gatherer society and that for an agricultural society dwarfs the magnitude of pressures that preceded agriculture.
I read Henrich's book, and I am intrigued by the idea, but I'm not convinced yet. I really want to see other experts weigh in and either support or disprove the idea.
However, I didn't think that Amazon review was very satisfying. He just seems like some angry guy going on a rant because an anthropologist stepped into historians' territory. None of the arguments he raised really hit the core.
For example, at one point he seemingly misinterprets Henrich talking about modern day rates of cousin marriage as him talking about rates of cousin marriage in the middle ages, and he goes on an angry rant about how we don't have data for cousin marriages from back then. If you read the book it's pretty clear that Henrich was talking about modern cousin marriage, which we do have data for.
Perhaps someday someone will disprove Henrich's hypothesis, but it's not going to be this Amazon review.
Also this part caught me: "Basic training for historians includes a suspicion of monocausal solutions"
The quote by pseudoerasmus near the end is particularly apt:
"Cultural-social historians are ill-equipped for the age of “Big Data” that Guldi drones on about, but not because they are intellectually incapable. They can get trained in quantitative techniques and actually understand the various interdisciplinary debates that are mostly impenetrable to them right now. But such training would actually change who they are. It’s the historians’ hermeneutical and subjectivist instincts that alienate them from the big empirical debates amongst economists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, etc. So the problem with historians is less any microhistorical preference, than an epistemological bias against positivism."
Freeman is not an idiot or incapable of understanding some basic math. But using statistical tools would change who he is. He (and other "trained" historians) views Henrich's thesis as monocausal, reductionist, deterministic. The problem is indeed "an epistemological bias against positivism."
It has an Urban Dictionary entry from which I gather it's a 4chan-like site that was right-wing-friendly and involved in popularizing Wojak memes. It is oddly hard to find the actual site, or any further explanation, via Google.
I'm wondering if this is a nasty side-effect of the "AIing" of search. It may be Google's algorithm has gotten so good at saying "this is very likely what you meant, because most people mean this, even if you appear to have spelled some words wrong" that you are willy nilly directed to what everyone else is thinking about *whether or not that's what you want*.
I seem to recall that 20 years or so ago, you could find rare results by simply specifying them with sufficient exactitude. You'd put a bunch of words in it that *only* had its on 2 of Google's collection of a billion pages, and out they would pop. It seems now that Google's clever silicon dicks are sayin oh no, you probably didn't mean that, so we'll look for what most people mean when they use the first 3-5 of your search terms, and kind of ignore the others.
There's probably a way using their operators to say no, I really do want *all* of these terms, and probably in the order I typed them, too. But still...one gets the increasing impression that search results are slowly being converged to what most people look for, so serendipity (or the ability to find needles in a haystack) is being slowly strangled.
Quotation marks around words help. It is annoying though when you discover that your specific interest is one letter off of some popular thing from a different country.
Yeah in my experience too it is getting harder to operate search engines in exactly this way. I know 'retreat to the University Library' is not really a scalable solution.
From the Wikipedia link on straw hat riot: "The riot itself began on September 13, 1922, two days before the supposed unspoken date, when a group of youths decided to get an early jump on the tradition." So the description "someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long Straw Hat Riot in New York " doesn't seem quite right.
3. Tlaxcala is fascinating. There was a interesting piece a while back about how Cortes is seen as a villainous figure in most of Mexico - with the exception of Tlaxcala.
It also points to how the typical way we're taught about the Spanish conquest is misleading. Cortes didn't just show up with 500 men and roll over an empire - he allied with the empire's enemies, and led a coalition that toppled said empire. To a lesser extent, something like that happened with Pizarro and the Incas - a lot of his local allies were folks who had been on the losing end of a civil war that happened after the Emperor and his heir died from disease.
15. I wouldn't go that far with Starlink, but SpaceX genuinely is a treasure, and if they can get Starship working at the price-points they're aiming for it could have a revolutionary impact on space industry and utilization. Imagine affordable suborbital tourist flights, much cheaper access to space, and so forth. It's great stuff - I just want them to start making their fuel from green hydrogen and air-captured CO2 sooner so it won't produce so much emissions.
30. I feel like they should go for broke on geothermal, see if increased funding and investment (plus some actual contracts) can get super-hot-rock geothermal to work. Maybe you could sell it to Congress as a way to reuse some of the infrastructure from derelict coal plants, since both of them would need to generate steam to provide electrical power.
One fascinating thing you could do if you had ample geothermal power plus plentiful fresh water (or we got better at desalinating seawater) if use it to produce e-fuels for export. That's not economical yet compared to regular fuels, but if you have to phase out regular fuels and really want to get some more mileage out of your gas and oil power systems you could do it (although I think in practice such will mostly be aimed at ships and airplanes as the market).
This all reminds me of Eli Dourado pointing out that if we really didn't care about Old Faithful or Yellowstone, we could turn the whole Yellowstone area into the Mother of All Geothermal Power Plants and provide electricity for half the country.
> By the way, this is the same Tegmark who in 1998 developed a leading theory for what the universe is and why it exists at all.
Leading with whom? All I can find is people damning it with faint praise. The "reception" section on the linked Wikipedia page is one guy calling it "provocative." The physicist quotes that he uses to advertise his book on Amazon seem lukewarm; every physicist writing a review is carefully mincing their words so as to say something positive while distancing themselves from even the perception they like the theory. "Whether you believe it or not..." "You don't have to necessarily agree...", "You may recoil from his thesis, but..."
I'm interested to hear if it made an actual splash with serious scholars in either physical or philosophical fields. My impression is that it didn't; it made a splash in the science pages of some major outlets during his book tour (for what is definitely an engaging book, even if it's trying to motivate an ill-defined theory!) and then everyone more or less moved on, because there wasn't all that much *there*.
The reason it didn't make more of a splash is that the theory is far been more sensational than substantive. It's not bad physics, because it's not physics at all - it's bad philosophy instead. It adds a modern aesthetic to mathematical monism, but doesn't bring any really new ideas to the table. Every mathematically possible universe exists and we're in one, and they *are* math rather than being *described by* math? "Worse Leibniz" pretty much captures it; the idea was better put, and more completely fleshed out, in the frickin' Monadology.
The most frustrating part, to me, is his signature argument in favor - that Occam's Razor prefers it, since the theory has "no free variables" and no perception can argue against it, since it predicts all of those perceptions. But Occam's Razor cuts the opposite way: a theory is good if it doesn't *have to* propose gigantic numbers of entities, like vast arrays of possible worlds or gremlins behind the scenes, in order to account for observations. The original phrasing is literally (translated directly) "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." I have no idea how the heck Tegmark thought *that principle* could support a view which basically says, "multiply out every permutationally possible mathematical entity, they all exist." (I know several more refined versions of the Razor have been proposed - but even the best one won't support his argument in the way he needs it to. A mathematical ontology is not, at its core, any simpler than any other.)
Occam's Razor is actually of no real value in deciding the probability of hypotheses being true, since by using various perfectly reasonable definitions of "entitities" and "necessity" you can pretty much "prove" any theory at all is preferred.
That's why it's of zero use to the empiricist. You decide the probability of truth of a hypothesis entirely by how many observations fail to falsify it. Considerations of the nature of the hypothesis itself -- whether it is "simple" or "complex" or "beautiful" or "ugly" or "the consensus" or "a rogue idea by a lunatic" and so forth have been demonstrated to be worthless over and over again. Indeed, the major distinction between the Age of Enlightenment and the scholastics of the Middle Ages was the former's rejection of the latter's veneration of the *quality of the argument* as something that had any relationship at all to its probability of being true.
This is actually one of the few really good points made by Sabine Hossenfelder in her quest to become the next Carl Sagan -- that to the extent physics values 'elegance' in any serious sense, it has seriously lost its way.
Well, first of all, it's not the case that no possible experiment can distinguish between the two, because we believe in causality, and that means the blip in 1590 has consequences to this day. They may be tiny, tiny, consequences, but they are by definition not zero and therefore by definition there exists an experiment that could distinguish between them.
But of course you *could* define two theories which are in fact experimentally indistinguishable, even conceivably. And so? Is that supposed to prove something interesting? You might as well have said:
1. F = ma
2. F = mα
Notice the latter uses *two* alphabets instead of one! Clearly the first is to be preferred!
Differences which are philosophical matter as much to actual empirical science as differences which are typographical, and for the same reason. If you can't measure it, it's not science.
I'm not sure I agree with your reduction of dionysus' concern to semantics or "philosophical matters." Or perhaps I agree about *theories*, but only if we're pessimistic about a guarantee that theory will line up with certain kinds of truth. I hope you'll indulge an admittedly fanciful hypothetical to let me illustrate why.
Imagine that when Earth was just coming to be, there was a Dyson sphere around our solar system, created and inhabited by advanced aliens, the Calyptians. After a long period of peace, a group of Calyptian terrorists used an advanced weapon which annihilated the sphere entirely, leaving no physical trace of it. A spherical shell has no gravitational impact on anything inside of it, and suppose the incoming starlight the sphere blocked had such negligible energy that by now, fundamental Heisenberg-style limits on the experiments we can do guarantee that we can't determine that the sphere ever existed.
A theory of the history of our solar system which includes the Calyptians is not just positing a difference of a "philosophical matter". It's not just swapping an alphabet; they were (hypothetically) a vast number of living beings whose inclusion or exclusion from the theory is obviously a more than semantic difference, even if it can't be empirically tested.
I would say that a theory including the Calyptians is a bad theory, *even if they had actually existed.* All this shows is that there can be limits to what we can test and what we can know, such that empiricism can commit us to believing falsehoods, rather than grasping senselessly at unreachable truths. (To be extra clear, this is not me arguing against empiricism, it's still the best thing on offer; instead, I'm arguing against empiricism guaranteeing truth, even modulo semantics.)
The theory of the Calyptians is no different than the hypothesis that every word in Genesis is true, and God created the Universe (complete with fossils and Cosmic Microwave Background radiation) on October 23, 4004 BC, at 9.00 in the morning. That is, it is not testable, and so it is not a scientific hypothesis -- science has nothing to say about it. Whether one chooses to believe it or not is purely a matter of personal taste, there is no objective evidence either way.
Sure, I'm aware one might prefer a "simpler" theory -- the theory that there were no Calyptians. But this is nothing more than a certain taste, and a certain definitgion of "simpler." It's possible someone else might prefer the Calyptian theory for some other, equally persuasive, psychological or aesthetic reason. Who can say? To evaluate competing claims of "simplicity" using the Razor, we would need a complete and final philosophy of aesthetics, to which we all adhere.
I put "simpler" in quotes because the place where I'm most familiar with this kind of argument is in Intelligent Design, where people assert that the theory that God created everything is "simpler" than that there were some wild physics with extremely difficult to follow math, and some unknown implausible bits, that resulted in it all. Without taking a position on the argument per se, I *can* say that the assertion that a supernatural omniscient omnipotent Being exists is in no way "simpler" by *my* lights. I can't even begin to write down a description of such a Being. I think those folks have confused 'simpler' with "more familiar to me" or even just "I'm using words that have familiar meanings, and even if I use them in a novel way, the fact that they are the same old words persuades me the new ideas must be simpler."
There's no way to avoid such psychological weirdness, once you start admitting the value of "simpler" in judging theories. So, I don't. "Simpler" means no more to me than "more beautiful" or any other random aesthetic judgment that depends purely on one's personal outlook. This may be quite interesting from a social point of view, but I find it completely useless as a method for discerning measureable truth.
So if you had to bet $1000 on whether the Calyptians existed, with God resolving the bet, you would take even odds on it? And if you had to bet on whether F=ma or "F=ma except for one second on January 12, 1590 in one cubic centimeter in the core of Mars, when it doesn't apply to manmade objects.", you would also take even odds on each one being true?
I want to highlight what I agree with first, because I think there is a lot there. I agree there is no single objective measure of simplicity over the class of theories; I agree this makes using Occam's Razor an ultimately subjective matter; and I agree that means that it's honestly not a good thing to invoke in the arguments it's most frequently employed in - like arguments about God, or even fundamental metaphysics in general.
I also agree that the Calyptian Hypothesis is untestable, and that this implies a kind of limit on "what science can say about it." In many ways, that was the original point I was trying to get at. I think we might agree that the best version of science ends up being less "whatever takes you to believing what is true" and more "whatever takes you to believing what is *testable and justified*", with things like the Calyptian Hypothesis showing the difference between the two.
But I also think - and I hope you'll agree with me here too - that even if what counts as "simple" is often a matter of taste, and even if tastes differ on how simple God is or how simple a grand metaphysical theory is - there is still a lot that people can agree on, and tastes that are broadly shared. I think most people don't think there is a teapot orbiting beyond Jupiter; I think almost nobody would believe the Calyptians existed. And I think that's because of some shared intuition that these theories are unjustified and add needless complexity.
Even if there's no perfect objective way to formalize "Occam's Razor", even if it can't be turned into a hard and fast rule with a scientific definition, I think it still has value in cases like the Calyptians, where intuitions on simplicity are broadly shared. (And again, I agree that we should probably stop invoking it in the controversial cases.)
>That is, it is not testable, and so it is not a scientific hypothesis -- science has nothing to say about it.
So scientifically, it is just as valid as saying that the universe resulted from a period of very rapid expansion, after which the expansion slowed down, allowing the formation of star systems, &c. &c. &c.?
Also, the fact that you seem to think no one can be wrong about something being simpler is a pretty hot take imo. Why is everyone's judgement equally valid? Why can't the creationists just be wrong?
Not sure I fully understand what you mean, but of course if it's not falsifiable science has nothing to say about whether it is true or not. It's not a scienfic question. Is 2 + 2 = 4? This is not a falsifiable statement. You cannot do a measurement to answer the question, because it rests on human definitions of "2" and "+" and "4" so it is true or false by definition -- it either is or is not logically consistent with whatever axioms underly the formal system. So mathematical conjectures are not scientific hypotheses.
Neither are propositions about philosophy, or the nature of things unmeasureable and inherently undecidable. We may, individually or collectively, be fully convinced that any number of statements in these areas are true, or false, but whether they are or are not is not a question empirical science can answer, so these are not empirical scientific questions.
> Occam's Razor is actually of no real value in deciding the probability of hypotheses being true, since by using various perfectly reasonable definitions of "entitities" and "necessity" you can pretty much "prove" any theory at all is preferred.
That's misleading. Occam's razor was formalized in Solomonoff Induction. Basically, a theory's Kolmogorov complexity is an objective measure of its parsimony. Unfortunately, Kolmogorov complexity is incomputable for all possible inputs, and there is no single "best descriptive language" in which to describe a theory, and the specific order of theories will change slightly given slightly different description languages, ie. theories can be partially ordered but there is no total order.
However, it's not really true that "any theory" will be more parsimonious given the right descriptive language. For instance, "God did it" is incredibly unparsimonious no matter what descriptive language because of the number and complexity of properties of a deity that must be described.
I didn't say anything about Solomonoff's whatzit, so I'm not sure to what you object. I said the Razor is practically of no value at all, that it is merely a way in practice for someone to recast a statement of personal taste in language that appears objective (a narcissistic habit to which our species is highly drawn). It means as much, and as little, as someone saying "this theory is more beautiful the the other," or "this theory is in better accord with the wishes of God." The word "simple" is too poorly defined to have any practical use. It *seems* like it should, because we use the exact same word to describe situations where you *can* make it objectively measureable -- one can readily define a simpler computer program, or a simpler polynomial, or a simpler sundress. But just because we use the same word in a very different context -- trying to describe theories in general -- doesn't mean it retains its potential for objective definition, and in fact, I would say it does not, it loses it entirely.
> I said the Razor is practically of no value at all, that it is merely a way in practice for someone to recast a statement of personal taste in language that appears objective
I know what you said, and I'm saying that's misleading because it turns out that Occam's razor is actually a formal procedure for objectively partially ordering theories by parsimony. This procedure was rigourously formalized in Solomonoff Induction, so you can read up on that if you want further details beyond my summary in the last post. The simple takeaway is that your statement is technically incorrect.
I don't think this demonstrates what you think it demonstrates. Solomonoff Induction depends on a selection of a universal prior... doesn't that prove Carl's point that its application involves an element of arbitrary choice or "personal taste"?
Also, the "mathematical proof" of it relies on a lot of assumptions which probably aren't metaphysically borne out; to pick one critical assumption, the proof depends on the set of all programs being countable, but since the actual universe is continuous (and I believe the basis of a Hilbert space involves uncountable vectors), the space of considered "programs" can't reflect the space of possible hypotheses in the actual universe. In general, whenever anyone claims a mathematical proof has physical implementations, it's good to check that the referents line up.
> Solomonoff Induction depends on a selection of a universal prior... doesn't that prove Carl's point that its application involves an element of arbitrary choice or "personal taste"?
The universal prior is an ordering over theories by their Kolmogorov complexity, which is the compressibility of the theory's information. This is a universal, objective measure of a theory's parsimony; arguably, the only one that makes any sense.
That said, Kolmogorov complexity is incomputable, which means a computable approximation is only a partial order over such theories, and different approximations will yield slightly different orders. I already noted this in my first reply to Carl.
So your statement that "there is an element of arbitrary choice" is correct, but this weaker claim is NOT what Carl said. He made the considerably stronger claim that Occam's razor was of NO practical value at all, and that you can essentially prove ANY theory is preferred. That's a claim that Solomonoff Induction disproves.
Again, as I said in my first reply, no theory whose answers all reduce to "God did it" would ever be preferred under Solomonoff Induction, but Carl's framing of Occam's razor would seemingly permit this as a valid parsimonious theory based on "personal taste".
> to pick one critical assumption, the proof depends on the set of all programs being countable, but since the actual universe is continuous
This is a conjecture at best, and almost certainly false. Physics is computable as best we can tell, despite decades of people trying to find something uncomputable. In fact, the continuum has been at the heart of a number of serious difficulties in physics this past century, and in nearly every case we've solved this by simply removing the continuum entirely. I expect this will only continue.
Occam's Razor offers one type of framework to try to limit discussion when there are too many options to review or not enough evidence to sort between the options otherwise. It's as much a rhetorical device as it is a useful functioning rule, and can be freely used to eliminate correct options that happen to be "more complicated" in the personal viewpoint of the speaker.
It can certainly help eliminate some theories, but in the same way throwing darts at a board could help eliminate some theories. If it's not a generalizable rule, and we aren't sure when it is and isn't useful, then it's not a productive approach.
Playing tennis with Occam's Razor is as common as playing tennis with burden of proof, and probably no more informative. One theory is simpler because it has fewer individual entities, but another is simpler because it has fewer types of entities, and yet another is simpler because it has fewer tunable parameters determining the types and number of entities. I do think that each of these versions of Occam's Razor has some plausibility to it. But that just means that we shouldn't really be appealing to them to settle our philosophical disputes.
But overall, I agree - Tegmark is maybe the boldest version of the claim that All Is Mathematics, but it's not particularly novel, or helpful.
I heard an offhand comment by Hawking during a physics seminar some time ago (when he was far less known popularly) which I found far more compelling as a musing on the ultimate nature of things. He said it may well be the case that the total energy of the universe is zero, in which case the answer to the question of why there is something instead of nothing might be that there isn't -- that what we see is physically and mathematically indistinguishable from "nothing." While we can subtract some portion or other of the universe (in our imagination) and see that this would make things different (the Solar System would be emptier if we subtracted Jupiter, or all the planets), we err logically when we extrapolate this extravagantly to thinking that if we subtracted *everything* the result would be different than what we see now.
That's a cool idea to toy with, thanks for recounting it. I'm more inclined to moot the question by asking- if we were to find a "nonzero value" for the "total energy of the universe" (scare quotes because I have no idea what that would mean or if we could demonstrate it in any meaningful not-purely-semantic way), why would that be something that needs more explaining than zero? Zero energy is as much a contingent fact as "two energy"; if anything, it might seem to some like a greater coincidence.
Well, the point is that the only known physical law that prevents the universe from coming into existence form "nothing" is Conservation of Energy. If the total energy is zero, then there is no measurement of the entire universe we could make that would distinguish it from "nothing." It would just be some random re-arrangement of "nothing."
I'm putting "nothing" in quotes here because it is a surprisingly slippery concept. If you try to say exactly what you mean, I mean physically, or mathematically, it becomes very difficult. Theories of the pure vacuum are very difficult, and I don't think we have any good ones yet. You can't just say something like "oh there is no matter around" because matter makes up a tiny portion of the content of the universe, and is probably the least important characteristic that contribute to its long-term large length scale evolution. The universe "contains" all these fields, which have a tremendous influence, and contain way more energy than is present in the matter. I put "contains" in quotes, because maybe it doesn't "contain" them, maybe it *is* them in some fashion or other, the way spacetime doesn't "contain" gravity, it's that gravity is an interpretation of the way spacetime is curved.
Anyway, once you have fields, you have all kinds of existence and strange things going on, particularly down at the Planck level (we think). So a universe empty of ordinary matter, say, would not be especially different from ours. So *that* is clearly not what we can mean by "nothing." So what could we mean? The absence of fields? But how is that possible? Current theory would let us get rid of the electromagnetic field, for example, because it sits on top of spacetime. But we could not get rid of gravity, because it's just a property of spacetime, meaning as soon as you have space and time coordinates at all, you have gravity, so far as we know. So, again, it's hard to know what we can "subtract" in any meaningful way to discover what we mean by "nothing." And what Hawking's comment suggested to me (I don't knmow if this is what he meant though) is that for all we know it's just not possible, it's not possible to define "nothing" in any way that meaningfully differs from what we see around us.
> that what we see is physically and mathematically indistinguishable from "nothing."
That is obviously incorrect, because what we see is physically very much distinguishable from "nothing". Wow, that hypothesis was quite easy to falsify!
The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. "Nothing" would preclude the existence of any physical laws, including the laws which define the combination of local energy states into a total energy state. Are you sure Hawking said this, and that he wasn't making a joke?
The concept of "nothing" in this context doesn't refer to the context
I'm going to try to summarize the idea in a way that might make sure we're not talking past each other. (Carl, let me know if I go off-base in characterizing Hawking's musing.)
Sometimes, people talk about the potential catastrophe of "false vacuum decay" - the idea being, maybe what we call "vacuum" isn't the "nothingest" thing there could be. Maybe there's an even lower-energy state, "true vacuum". The catastrophe of "false vacuum decay" would be if all of our vacuum (which in fact has some energy associated with it) were to collapse into some such "true vacuum".
But physicists aren't sure whether the vacuum that pervades our universe is at the global minimum of energy, and it's hard to check it against anything else since it's the only one we know. We do know for sure that there's some energy in it; quantum fields and generating and annihilating particle pairs and other stuff I don't understand. But it might well turn out that this vacuum, even though it has energy, is the nothing-est thing that is possible in any coherent physics - which would mean "true vacuum", even though it's philosophically conceivable, has no place in the actual universe.
Hawking might have been musing - what if our entire universe is similarly the "closest possible thing to nothing"? The idea you characterized in your comment, let's call it "true nothing", with no physical laws or energy states whatsoever, is a philosophical one. It's a fine enough philosophical idea, but we can't assume it's possible from the outset, just like we can't assume "true vacuum" is actually possible. Maybe the universe is already in its lowest-energy possible state, so the "true nothing" idea ends up being impossible. (In the philosophical lingo, "true vacuum" and "true nothing" may be *conceivable*, but not *possible*.)
Of course, you can still ask the question - why are the rules for possibility "set up that way"? Why not another physics? That fundamental question is still left open - why this way, and not another? But I take Hawking's point to be something like, even if the "why not another way" question is coherent, the "why something and not nothing" question might, *within* our physics, turn out to be a non-question; this universe could actually be the "nothingest possible thing" in physics.
However, your interpretation of Hawkin's comment would put it in a fundamentally different category than Tegmarks "hypothesis" (a misnomer, since it can't be tested or falsified): physics vs philosophy. It would also mean that Hawking had completely misunderstood the "why is there something instead of nothing" question.
Yeah, to a philosopher, that last part gets at the real question. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is at least in part, "Why are the laws of physics such as they are?" Hawking is answering, "given that the laws of physics are such as they actually are, why do we have this configuration of matter?" But he doesn't address the fundamental question.
I'm not speaking for Hawking, so let us not say what he thinks. We could ask him, except he's dead, so oh well.
The idea is that it is not possible to describe, mathematically or in any other precise way, a "nothing" that is both logically and mathematically consistent, and which differs from the universe we actually see around us. So the question of why is there something instead of nothing is ill-posed, because while "something" can be defined by pointing to everything around us, "nothing" cannot -- it's not possible to point to an example, and there is no way to get there by some logical or mathematically well-defined path from something to which you can point.
I realize that is non-intuitive, but that doesn't really mean squat. Plenty of stuff that is 100% gospel truth is non-intuitive, and plenty of stuff that is intuitive is garbage. Human intuition is worthless in physics, even if epistemologists like to hold onto it for nostalgic reasons I assume.
I think there's something to Hawking's point, especially in that it pushes us to think harder before assuming that what we're seeing isn't "the default", and assuming that it has disadvantages in its "simplicity" compared to a proposed "nothing."
But in the end, I do think it's kind of fanciful; my personal sense of simplicity and my (limited) knowledge of physics makes me think things would almost certainly be simpler and have less energy if, say, the big bang hadn't occurred and the universe were "empty" or "nonexistent" or whatever semantic term you want to use.
The problem is that the false vacuum hypothesis applies to the Higgs field only (with universal consequences, but ultimately it addresses only the dynamics of the Higgs field).
The "generating and annihilating particle pairs" narrative is also a widely dispersed lie rather than anything even remotely similar to the truth. It just doesn't happen.
Huh. I thought the annihilating pairs thing was the leading explanation of how black holes can lose/radiate mass over time. What's the alternative theory? And do you mean we haven't observed radiation we can confirm is Hawking radiation yet, or do you mean that we're sure the theory is false, but it sticks around among the uninformed (like myself)? If you mean the latter, I'd love to take a look at a debunking of it, if you have a preferred source to offer.
What I want to know is how he defined the energy of an expanding spacetime since it's nonstationary, and so has no timelike Killing vector, and so has no definable energy.
I'm not trying to contradict you here, I'm genuinely curious - what does this mean for "conservation of energy"? I was under the impression it has been and remains one of the most important principles across all kinds of domains of physics. But if you can't compare energy between t0 and t1 in an expanding spacetime, that would make it meaningless.
If there is a definable energy metric which is used to characterize conservation of energy, then I would assume Hawking meant that one.
Conservation of energy is a consequence of that symmetry. A good place to start would be Wikipedia's page on Energy in General Relativity.
I am fairly certain (I won't give a number; I haven't tried calibrating my probabilities) that there is no sensible way to define energy in an expanding spacetime, even after accounting for some fairly accomplished scientists saying the total energy of the universe is 0. I honestly have no idea how they would define a gravitational potential energy such that the number holds, besides asserting that it is negative the energy of the stuff in the universe, and if they did do that I would call them sophists instead.
Agreed, Occam's Razor definitely has that sense of disputing the null, and arguments over it tend to quickly devolve into less-than-constructive conversations. If I could edit my earlier comment (and if that part of it weren't a touchstone for the current conversation), I would probably take out my bit about Occam's Razor actually cutting against his position. While I do disagree with his application of it, what really bothers me is his making an epistemic heuristic such a big part of his metaphysical argument in the first place!
> I'm interested to hear if it made an actual splash with serious scholars in either physical or philosophical fields
In physics i have never heard of anyone doing anything with it. I agree with the overall impression that it's not even bad physics but bad philosophy. Related:
>The interesting question is why anyone would possibly take this seriously. Tegmark first came up with this in 1997, putting on the arXiv this preprint. In this interview, Tegmark explains how three journals rejected the paper, but with John Wheeler’s intervention he managed to get it published in a fourth (Annals of Physics, just before the period it published the (in)famous Bogdanov paper). He also explains that he was careful to do this just after he got a new postdoc (at the IAS), figuring that by the time he had to apply for another job, it would not be in prominent position on his CV.
>One answer to the question is Tegmark’s talent as an impresario of physics and devotion to making a splash. Before publishing his first paper, he changed his name from Shapiro to Tegmark (his mother’s name), figuring that there were too many Shapiros in physics for him to get attention with that name, whereas “Tegmark” was much more unusual. In his book he describes his method for posting preprints on the arXiv, before he has finished writing them, with the timing set to get pole position on the day’s listing. Unfortunately there’s very little in the book about his biggest success in this area, getting the Templeton Foundation to give him and Anthony Aguirre nearly $9 million for a “Foundational Questions Institute” (FQXi). Having cash to distribute on this scale has something to do with why Tegmark’s multiverse ideas have gotten so much attention, and why some physicists are respectfully reviewing the book.
This pretty much sums up. I would really like Scott to redact the "leading" part, if you go to a general relativity or cosmology meeting and try to pool the attendees, I would wager more people would give you the christian God as the answer for why the universe exists over variations of Tegmark's theory. Although to be fair I would also bet that more than half of the physicists would argue that "why the universe exists" is not for physics to answer.
#2 Mentions Dune, and adrenochrome harvested from children seems like something Baron Harkonnen would use, but the article actually references "Destination: Void, from a different book series by Frank Herbert.
By the way, it's not adrenochrome (I'm pretty sure), but powerful people harvesting glands from children is a key part of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron.
Re: 19, has anyone here _ever_ had a semantically understandable category fall out of embeddings without feeling like you're trying to force it? I've done a ton of work in that area and whenever I try and understand what the program is doing in real life terms it just seems like nonsesnse.
Can you describe the domain and tools you’re working with a bit more? I’ve done some NLP stuff but am not sure if you’re coming from more of a stats angle.
Interesting. I worked as a taxonomist and in data management for CRM (consumer data), but more on the business side as a liaison between business and tech. I know roughly how the tools work but never had to get “under the hood” myself (I can handle a little SQL but not much else.) I worked with business stakeholders to write rules for automated content management. The technical side fascinates me, though- it is a little like black magic.
I put a lot of work into the netflix prize in 2009 and found topic categories and all other movie metadata to be completely useless. All I needed to predict star ratings 10% better than their status quo was other users' star ratings.
Metadata in general was pretty messy back in 2009. A lot of the people best equipped to generate and maintain it would fight relentlessly to avoid having anything to do with it. It’s a little bit different now, I’m sure, but I haven’t worked in a few years and industries were always wildly different anyway. But last I looked in 2017, it was still surprisingly hard to get management to care about data quality, much less invest in it. It seems like the business reality is that you can make millions without it, so why bother?
It looks like (4) studies the link between knowing Tuskegee and refusing treatment in other diseases before 2020, and also finds there isn’t a difference in actually getting treatment. While there is such difference in Covid vaccines. And in the interviews they note Tuskegee is occasionally mentioned, but not as much as others, but I’m not sure those other reasons apply to COVID vax, as they make more sense in a context of active treatment
On Tuskegee, this article (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/133/1/407/4060075) published in a top econ journal finds disclosure of Tuskegee in 1972 leads to "increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men" by comparing changes in the health of older black men closer or farther away from Macon County (county of Tuskegee). It uses difference-in-differences-in-differences and D-i-D style techniques have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. With that caveat, if there was an effect on black adults in 1972, that would likely persist to today through social norms in the black community on medical distrust and going to the doctor even if black people today do not know about Tuskegee. Though someone should look at re-doing this paper's strategy with vaccine hesitancy as the outcome and better D-i-D methods.
Regarding #25. The paper says, "odds ratio = 4.8, P = 0.034, N = 33, Fisher’s exact test". Don't use it. Fisher's exact test has low power.
Lydersen, S., Fagerland, M. W., & Laake, P. (2009). Recommended tests for association in 2×2 tables. Statistics in Medicine, 28 (7), 1159–1175. http://doi.org/10.1002/sim.3531
(This comment is written by someone who would probably not have seen the gorilla)
On straw hats, doesn’t that link say the riots started two days before straw hat day? That feels very human, ‘No! You can smash up my hat if I was wearing it on the wrong day, but it isn’t the wrong day yet, you bastard, let’s fight!’
@37: My favourite sentence in the Wikipedia article for Alchemy is in the section about its transition into chemistry:
"Boyle would note the place in which the experiment was carried out, the wind characteristics, the position of the Sun and Moon, and the barometer reading, all just in case they proved to be relevant."
Up until now I thought it's both cute and inspiring, a combination of a scientist's discipline and a 17th century intuition about the world. Well, the passage about semiconductor yields made me realize I was unfair to Boyle, and that considering the positions of celestial bodies makes sense even today.
I once attended a scientific meeting where one group had gathered a large amount of brain scan data and urged us to poke around in it and see what we could find. Others at the meeting urged us to not explore the data but only test specific hypotheses on it, because if we looked we would be tainted and would only test hypotheses on the data we already knew the data would support. I was inclined to agree with the first group, but I didn't know whether that's just because that's my style and I'm not a careful enough scientist. Anyway, that's what the gorilla made me think of.
Could we call this DeGroot's Law from his 1956 paper? It needs some kind of memorable tag. Please will anyone say if they know of such a convention in common use in a particular field?
That Brandeis list veers between "okay, I see the point here" and "if ever you hear or see me use this term, shoot me and bury me in a ditch":
"Gender exclusive language:
You guys, Ladies and Gentlemen
Gender inclusive language:
Y'all, folks or folx, friends, loved ones, people, everyone
These examples either lump all people under masculine language or within the gender binary (man or woman), which doesn’t include everyone."
I wonder where the use of "lads" (which we used to refer to each other in the collective sense in my all-girl school) falls on this? And if ever I use "folx", you may be sure and certain that that last remaining dim flicker of reason and sanity has burned itself out and I am now a drooling imbecile.
"And if ever I use "folx", you may be sure and certain that that last remaining dim flicker of reason and sanity has burned itself out and I am now a drooling imbecile."
I think there are also many other signs someone may have become a "drooling imbecile" that are more important than using "folks" or "folx". I just don't think the use of a word or two is really something to prioritize when looking at mental capacity.
Let me know if you ever manage to trip over a sense of humour; I realise that such fripperies are not part of the mental equipment of the austerely high-minded dialectical materialist, but you may be interested in it as a historical curiosity.
I'm not sure what the purpose of the "joke" is, is it simply to call people who use the word "folx" drooling imbeciles? Could you explain it further for me?
I guess that here we get into intrumental-vs-epistemic rationality territory; maybe even elephant-in-the-brain territory. Deiseach's underlying point is presumably that the use of the word 'folx' is strongly correlated with holding wildly improbable beliefs - basically it is a strong marker of being a follower of wokism, broadly defined. And while I gather that there is some some evidence to suggest a correlation between left-wing political orientation and mental illness - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339541044_Mental_illness_and_the_left - presumably not everyone who finds themselves on that side of the aisle actually has a diagnosable psychological condition. My guess is that simply being within the normal range of agreeableness (in the sense of 'not being enough of a non-conformist' and being in a social milieu that promotes, for example, the view that all disparities in outcomes between human groups are the product of discrimination, or the view that biological sex is a meaningless social construct and that trans women are therefore women without any further qualification, will be enough to get a reasonably large number of sane people to internalise those beliefs, even though those beliefs are, colloquially speaking, insane in the sense that there's no way that a mentally healthy person, intelligent enough to fully understand the evidence and acting without any societal pressure, would come to believe them independently.
As it happens, I suspect that Deiseach herself is someone who scores pretty low on trait agreeableness, making her relatively immune to such effects, so for her personally, taking up the language of the woke really would be a good indicator that *something* had broken psychologically, even if that wouldn't be true for the average wokist.
Nothing so high-minded on my part, I'm afraid; it's that the likes of words like "folx" grate horribly upon my inner ear. They are damned neologisms derived from tin-eared, functionally illiterate types who create such cursed terms as "burglarize" when the perfectly functional verb "burglar" already existed, as though one were to describe the work of teachers, writers or doctors as "writerizing, teacherizing and doctorizing".
"Folx" adds to that clunking heaviness a treacly coating of faux-folksiness and tops it off with the same "let's all be Inclusive and Diverse" as creating the term "Latinx" where native speakers of Romance languages, and the persons in question to whom such terms are meant to apply, regard such Anglophone-centric mangling of their own gendered languages with appropriate "what the hell do you think you are doing?"
It's not politics as such, it's that if I ever stoop to such horrible torture of the English language, my brain will undoubtedly have decayed to the extent that I can no longer be held to be in possession of functional reasoning capacity.
Thank you. When I your statement that "burgle" was a noun, I was wondering where. People could say something like "My stuff is gone, there was a burgle", but it's just as well that they don't.
Speaking of, I don't see why "gift" has become a verb when we have the perfectly good "give".
I'll also note that it's weird for you to say things like "faux-folksiness" and "let's all be Inclusive and Diverse" and then attempt to claim that "it's not politics as such". It seems like your own politics has determined that this is a fake folksiness rather than say, an earnest folksiness. As usual, we can see the people who claim to not be talking about politics appear to be the most mired in their own ideology.
It genuinely isn't politics for me. A right-wing politician, organiser, or whomever who didn't come from a background where terms like "folks" were the common parlance, but who tried using it because they wanted to promote an image of being in solidarity with "the common man" would irritate me every bit as much.
In fact, British politicians are replete with instances of this; David Cameron (Conservative Party) being mocked for his "call me Dave" and forgetting which football club he allegedly supported (football, or soccer, is the working-class sport)
They may be at any sort of university and may hold any kind of degree, but if they're native English speakers and can't, in fact, speak standard English then that is functionally illiterate.
"Folx" is the worst kind of fake-down with da yute/appropriating AAVE cringe-worthy behaviour; it's aping the kind of poor orthography that spells by ear (and hence reduces "ks" to "x") which is associated with minorities whom we are now not supposed to mention are poor, originally (as in African-American) rural (and Southern but now increasingly urban and Northern) and non-white.
Adopted by trendies as a sign of solidarity with the masses (and the kind of adoption of Black slang that also gets roasted for using AAVE terms by whities) and by LGBT people because, I dunno, they felt they weren't already distinctive enough?, it has now percolated into the mainstream, or at least those who use it try to make it so percolate.
Imagine someone who is the modern version of an old-school Labour Party shop-steward, who at party conferences would probably have addressed the audience as "Comrades!", but today now they say "Folx, here's the tea" and you get my drift.
A reasonable article on why the letter X has been so abused (though I think the mathematical analogy is weak, I do think it's more to do with fake spelling):
As has been pointed out, "folks" is *already* gender-neutral and doesn't need any special new twist, but there are always those who can't leave well enough alone, and if it ain't broke, their itchy little fingers twitch to 'fix' it.
There's plenty of very literate people who don't speak what I would call a "standard" English. Do you regard "trendies", "dunno", "ain't" to be standard English? Because if you're using such words you seem quite functionally illiterate to me.
Mostly her own self-description over the years. But she's putting up more of an argument in the threads above than someone who was highly keen to get along with people would.
I don't think that's the case. Deisarch is blindly agreeing with Scott Alexander's framing, which is kind of misleading to begin with. A person who was less agreeable would actually look at the evidence posted with a critical eye instead of merely performing the standard right-wing outrage you would usually see over these kinds of stories. Deisarch's complaint is actually very generic as far as I can tell.
Secondly, most people in these comments argue with me. Arguing with me is actually a way to show that you are keen to agree with everyone else on ACX. It's just not very good evidence that someone is disagreeable.
I also think self-description is a pretty poor indicator for these sorts of things, most people who pass around these kinds of meme incidents all like to think of themselves as independent thinkers. Yet they become memes for a reason - most people are approaching them in the exact same way.
@19: If it's any consolation, the media bias study seems to be a small side-project of his main thing right now, which is creating an artificial physicist - a symbolic regression algorithm where experimental data comes in and equations come out.
"Study shows Donald Trump is grumpy when he does not get enough sleep. Being an important enough figure that scientists study you personally sounds exhausting."
I await with breathless anticipation the follow-up studies "When caught out in the rain without an umbrella, Donald Trump gets wet" and "If he has not yet eaten that day, Donald Trump gets hungry".
But how can we be sure this result replicates unless we get data from figures on the other side of the political divide? Has anyone studied whether or not Joe Biden gets more cheerful the less sleep he gets?
Are people really that hard-up enough for something to publish that they need this kind of "grass is green" obviousness, or was it a joke? If it was a sincerely meant paper, I think some "kick them out of the lab into the sunlight and fresh air" is badly needed.
I'm wondering if the dearth of Trump news and the way the media expanded and survived on Trump is being expressed by finding any reason at all to throw "Trump" into the title is what we are seeing.
Not having read the study, my guess is that the real story in that paper is validating either the method they are using to figure out how much sleep Donald Trump had on a given day, or the method they are using to identify grumpiness.
7: Although the thing about "trigger warning" is in the section on "violent language", the actual reasons given for maybe preferring "content note" over "trigger warning" aren't about the implication of violence at all. (I think there's at least one other good reason for usually using something other than "trigger warning": there are reasons why people might want advance notice of potentially-upsetting things besides outright PTSD-like risk of being "triggered".)
>Imagine a future in which Earth’s dominant ISP is constructed, maintained, administered, and governed by Martians, who operate it for free as a public-relations campaign.
Please, can we colonise a saner place like the Moon, the asteroid belt or the Venerean atmosphere? Mars is one of the worse choices because it's got the downsides of a planet (need chemical rockets to take off due to gravity/atmosphere, extra delta-V from gravity well) without the upside (atmosphere thick enough that you don't need a pressure hull or radiation shielding).
Re #16: This chart has been bugging me since it came out. It seems too cute by half. Does the vaccine really reduce mortality by the same amount across age groups?
I haven't looked into their dataset but it's possible to take a quick look at this question from the Delta variant breakdown in UK's Technical Briefing 23, table 5, pages 19 and 20.
Double jabbed over the age of 50: 71 991 cases, 1565 deaths: 2.2 % chance of dying.
Unvaccinated over the age of 50: 8 551 cases, 590 deaths: 6.9 % chance of dying.
So amongst the over fifties, amongst those susceptible to covid, the sickest seven people in a hundred are likely to die if unvaccinated; the sickest two people in a hundred are likely to die even though double jabbed.
We already know there is a high baseline of people not susceptible to covid by various lines of evidence, perhaps as high as 80% according to Nelde et al and Diamond Princess, another source says at least 50 % but this probably will be affected by how we want to define infection: no infection at all, one sneeze, mild symptoms only, and so on.
In the other age segment, under 50 years:
Double jabbed under the age of 50: 85 407 cases, 48 deaths: 0.06 % chance of dying.
Unvaccinated under the age of 50: 248 803 cases, 132 deaths: 0.05 % chance of dying.
So amongst the under fifty age group, amongst those who are susceptible to covid, the sickest person in two thousand is likely to die if unvaccinated, and the sickest person in 1 667 is likely to die even if double jabbed. Although I haven't even taken my statistical manual off the shelf, I think an effect size this small is going to be difficult to work with, you usually want at least 5%, biological systems are noisy.
Semaglutide: "Yet GLP-1 had serious problems. The first was that it was degraded in the blood by an enzyme within a few minutes. This meant that it wasn’t useful as a drug in its native form because it would have to be injected far too often. This problem was solved by using another version of the hormone identified in the saliva of the gila monster lizard..."
I feel as though there is an untold story behind that last sentence.
"How a lizard’s venom inspired the promising weight loss drug Wegovy: Semaglutide is the start of a new chapter in obesity treatments." By Julia Belluz@juliaoftoronto Jul 5, 2021
#17 Could you segment or subset the data. I really think we should stop incentivizing papers based on unpublished data, much of it gathered with public funding. The replication problem is crippling public confidence in much bio-medical and social science research.
#21. hatis problems are historically deep. They can be over explained based on its history. E.g. the French forced the independent country to pay them an indemnity in the 19th Century. The Spanish did nothing like that to the DR.
#16 Not sure of the relevance, since it seems to me that most parents ordinarily want to expose their kids to massively less risk than themselves in general.
Re: War Against The Weak, even academic historians (very anti-eugenics, and very likely to classify things as eugenics) found Edwin Black hyperbolic and sensationalist, especially when it came to drawing Nazi connnections.
Also re: sterilising the blind, separating views on the desirability of someone passing on their genes from views on their capabilities as a parent is difficult, and historians tend to ignore the latter despite all the evidence that it was a strong factor in what is categorised as "eugenics".
My understanding is that much of what we moderns think of as "eugenics" is tainted by a misunderstanding of what the movement was all about, and by tons of recency bias. For one, the idea that the movement was solely focused on creating a 'master race' dismisses their larger concern: that the 'whiteness' they perceived as upholding modern society was being 'polluted' by other races. Since they believed that only 'whiteness' could create and sustain 'civilization', intermarriages that 'polluted' that civilization-sustaining 'whiteness' would (by their logic) lead to complete civilizational collapse.
Understanding that perspective (that eugenics was focused as much on a false-doomsday narrative as on a utopian on) puts the fervent motivations of the actors involved into a frighteningly familiar context. Ms. Plecker from the book can't be dismissed as someone who is pure evil, trying to exclude people who have one drop of non-white blood in them because of simple hatred. In her mind, she's a crusader trying to stop what she sees as the insidious forces attempting to 'contaminate' white society. But for her efforts, she thinks the interbreeding will cause the next generation to 'descend into barbarism' like so many non-white nations around the world. She's stopping the apocalypse! And what can't be justified when all of human civilization is at stake? Certainly SCOTUS bought that argument, as did nearly all respected intellectuals of that era.
“We’re more like them than one might think” is true, but using it exclusively as a “and we should be afraid of that” sort of makes it useless IMO. Eugenics had good parts, like everything (Ancient Greece and Rome had slaves and also saw genociding their neighbors as the highest good, but also created the precursors of much of our science and philosophy, the leftists were whatever insults you want but also did lots of good stuff, etc). To truly understand how “were similar to them” you need to actually understand that, and that is not “well you need to understand them better to know just how evil they are”. It’s the same with Nazis - you hear constantly “the Nazis weren’t totally different from us, we could become like them too!” And it doesn’t mean “oh, actually understand them”, it means “be really scared and frightened of Nazis around every corner!”
(And natural selection literally “culls the weak”. your not having hereditary congenital blindness depended on thousands of your not-ancestors who were such dying! Given that, the seemingly innate moral revulsion to the concept is IMO weird, although I don’t at all support any sort of “eugenics” beyond “not fucking people with deformities” for a variety of reasons - from horses with all sorts of genetic disorders to pugs, human large scale selective breeding has bad parts! in particular your GWAS embryo children are probably going to be not selected on what you thought they were. Please at least wait...)
Probably a bit. And selects against drinking, being male, being 18-24, and aggressiveness.
Bigger is the “selection against not having kids”. Which is unfortunate tbh, as, relatively, most of the people I like tend to not have or have many kids, both today and historically (nietzche :(). Also selection against transgender, which is unfortunate for similar reasons (lots of trans friends). Even the “traditionalists” who are clever and interesting probably won’t make it above two kids each, and half of them probably won’t marry or will go gay/trans. IMO one should have lots of kids just for purely altruistic reasons - I’m conflicted on sperm donating though.
I’m not convinced that parents actually have 0 impact on children, and suspect it’s just that current parenting and schooling existing creates that 0 impact in practice. And it seems somewhat connected to it being bad to sex w/o commitment, and to cheat with someone. Also I had a ... something ... childhood and wouldn’t want to risk that for a kid. It seems just not great to have a kid you don’t raise at least a bit. Don’t know tbh
Technically correct, of course, but from what I understand, there is only relatively modest correlation between *how many* children you have (assuming it's not zero) and how many children your child(ren) will have ... for the time being. There are those who believe that we are starting to see selection pressure for consciously wanting (and succeeding) to have large numbers of children - see Karlin's Age of Industrial Malthusianism series, particularly part 2 - https://www.unz.com/akarlin/breeders-revenge/ - for an interesting exploration of where that could lead us.
Do you have a specific reason or reasons for thinking that "traditionalists who are clever and interesting" will have children that don't marry or be gay/trans at such a high rate? If you're just speaking pessimistically that's fine, you don't need to elaborate on hyperbole. I am just curious if there was something more specific.
Also, if you wouldn't mind I would like to know your definition of "traditionalist" as used here, which you put in quotes and seems to imply is different than the standard definition.
Self identified internet right wingers / traditionalists is what I was referring to. And yeah pessimism + a lot of them claim they will win the future of politics (lol) by having lots of kids when everyone else isn’t, and while having kids does “help” that isn’t gonna do much given all that. I say that a lot of them will go gay or trans instead of having kids because I know a lot of them and they do that a lot, way more than average
Forgive me, but I'm having a hard time following your argument. I'm saying that Nazis and eugenicists were worried about a doomsday scenario that their theory predicted was inevitable. Because of that they justified bending, suspending, and rewriting ethical rules as a necessary step to avoiding a catastrophic predicted outcome. Though an outcome we now realize was BS.
Learning not to adjust your moral principles to satisfy a doomsday prediction is not the same thing as seeing Nazis around every corner. It's attempting to understand how population-level justifications for atrocities arise and realizing it's not a random fluke occurrence.
Your point that many ancient societies did similar things is certainly germane. The Biblical account of Israel attempting to eradicate all of the indigenous Palestinians to prevent religious degeneracy is a very close example of the exact same phenomenon as eugenics.
Plenty of doomsday situations are worth rewriting moral principles for.
Examples: total war of WWI and II caused millions to rewrite their ancient pro glory of war principles to be totally against war.
The entire EA community engages in a lot of “strong moral principle changes around doomsday scenarios”
The problem here is that the issue is that the outcome was BS, not that doomsday scenarios are bad. The “Nazis are the root of all evil” thing is annoying, and leads to everything the Nazis do being called total evil (“not adjusting moral principles around a doomsday scenario”) when that thing as a whole is __fine__. What the Nazis did wasn’t, but ... suspending and rewriting rules is something that happens often and is absolutely often necessary. The enlightenment rewrote most of the rules, and now we’re here. Rome also rewrote most of its rules more than once. Whenever Nazis or eugenics or “moral evil” is involved, people say all sorts of things that are total nonsense
I'm going to disagree about the principle that it's okay to rewrite moral rules to avoid a doomsday scenario. I feel like there's a difference between experiencing WWI & WWII and updating your prior on war as a RESULT of the process, versus saying there's an existential threat on the horizon and the only way to not be destroyed is if we throw out well-established and unrelated ethical rules.
Historically, opposition to the Palestinians/Christians/Reformationists/Axis/Allies/'Degenerates'/Communists/Terrorists/etc. was justification for tossing out unrelated prohibitions against genocide/due process/targeting civilians/total war/oppression/suspension of civil rights/etc. I don't think your examples of updating moral rationale in the face of reasoned experience are equivalent at all. Nor do I think this is just a case of "anything Nazi-related is automatically tainted".
It's fine to update your moral principles, as you point out that's something that has been done to great effect for centuries, and not something we want to roll backward. But those updates should be based on sound moral reasoning, not out of fear that if we don't some unrelated doomsday event is going to destroy all of humanity as we know it. Plenty of historical examples to demonstrate that's not a good idea. Indeed, forcing people to toss out rational principles in response to fear is an established principle of tyranny - in all ages.
wouldn’t it have been great to “update those priors” before hundreds of millions of people died horribly?
“You can’t predict and respond to large scale disasters as a society” seems pretty bad tbh. Yes, “bad thing will happen” is used as an excuse, but it’s because bad things exist and need to be counteracted!
There’s no difference between “sound moral reasoning” and “fear of doomsday” that doesn’t depend on the thing in question. By rejecting it all outright, you condemn us to climate change doom or AI doom or whatever to own the Nazis
Our society empowers the government to seize the children of parents it considers unfit. Some societies have empowered governments to prevent people it considers unfit from having children in the first place. We see a vast moral difference between these things and vast potential for abuse in one and not the other. I'm not sure if that's because they are so different or because we were taught to regard one but not the other as gravely immoral and prone to abuse.
That seems to reflect on the pre-emptive verses reactionary decision. Saying someone can never try to have kids is quite different from saying that they had kids and proved themselves, through their actual actions, as being deficient parents.
Even that line isn't complete though, as there is a lot of meaningful pushback against at least some children being taken away from their parents.
Indeed, there's a strong bias against CPS taking children out of a home. I think there's sometimes an impression that a call to CPS is a strong threat to have your children taken away. In reality, one visit isn't likely to result in the children being removed absent a belligerent parent and very strong evidence of neglect/harm.
Even then, a depressingly small concession to the State's demands will see the children returned to a home that most people would not agree is a good environment. The State's minimum requirement is set very low. That's probably part of how CPS has managed to remain mostly apolitical.
You are being just as simplistic as those you criticise. Eugenicists were concerned with more than just interracial marriage, and some eugenicists did not see anything wrong with interracial marriage, and indeed considered it potentially essential.
I didn't claim those I criticize were being simplistic, nor is it fair to attribute that claim to my comment. Indeed, I think it kind of misses the point. I claimed there is a modern impression that the eugenics movement was primarily focused on creating a positive good in the future, but that much of the effort of the eugenics movement - and particularly the kind of thing being discussed as outlandish in the book being reviewed - was focused on avoiding a predicted negative consequence of allowing what the people at the time perceived as pollution of racial purity. That was hypothesized to sustain civil society, but this idea has been largely forgotten today. The point of the comment was to point this out, fill in some details (not write 10,000 words about the whole movement) to help clarify why people who pushed these ideas did not see themselves as obviously evil, despite how it appears to modern audiences. To be sure, that didn't apply to the smaller group who were on the eugenics side of the debate, but who disagreed with prohibitions on racial mixing. But they had to contend with the counter-argument that their lack of concern was predicted by alarmists to destroy all of modern civilization. That the majority were wrong doesn't factor into the historical analysis of how people of the time perceived the situation.
Two things can be true at the same time: first that there was heterogeneity in a popular international intellectual movement spanning millions of people, and second the consequences of one of the main tenets of that movement (now largely forgotten) have repulsive consequences to a modern audience.
Your argument could be phrased a lot better, and be a lot more accurate, if you didn't keep focusing on interracial marriage. This was a lesser concern of the eugenics movement than things like the "feeble-minded" - hence, for instance, those US states that enacted sterilisation laws without banning interracial marriage.
I think it's also important to understand the status of what we think of as 'genetics' during this era. The concept of heredity before the discovery of the structure of DNA (which did not happen until 1953) was nothing like what we think of today. Darwin's theory was accepted ... and then it ran into some explanatory problems. And for good reason: many of Darwin's original ideas for how heritability was passed on were way off!
The way we tell the story, Mendel discovered genetic inheritance in the 1860's (around the time of Darwin's work) and most of the story was explained until we could tie a nice ribbon on it with DNA. But scientific revolutions rarely run in such a straight line, and just because work in one area has been done doesn't mean that work is universally integrated into the work of another area - even in the 'same' field. Mendel's work was obscure until it was rediscovered half a century later. At that point it provided a new life to Darwin's work with the neo-Darwinian synthesis, but all that theoretical work still took time. Some of the ideas that surrounded the synthesis were around in the 1920's, but many others were still decades away.
Much of Darwin's original evolutionary theory sounds absurd to modern ears. For example, Darwin believed that a person who built up large muscles (e.g. a blacksmith) would pass down that trait to their children. A dancer could develop better coordination and balance and pass that down. Don't look at the sun for too long, because if you go blind you might pass that down to your children as well.
Darwin also missed the idea that traits come in discrete packages (had to wait for Mendel's ideas and the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1940's for that), so he settled on the idea that traits passed on in a more analog fashion. Just as a black and white person who marry do not produce a child with black and white spots like a dairy cow (they have a 'brown' child, obviously), Darwin believed that traits would 'dilute' or concentrate within the population depending on the parents.
(Interestingly, Voltaire had never seen a mixed-race child, so in Candide his mixed-race character did have black and white spots!)
The idea that DNA carried the genetic code was roundly dismissed as late as the 1940's (despite Avery's experiments and 'Chargaff's rule' that nobody cared about until after 1953) as too simplistic. After all, protein was clearly more complex. Complex enough to carry the genetic code that the new-in-the-1940's neo-Darwinian synthesis insisted was important. But where could that genetic code be? DNA was just a structural molecule, and not where the action was. Proteins - which had recently begun to be crystallized to find amazing, complicated structures - were obviously where the genetic code lay.
Knowing all this helps us reset our modern biases so we don't attribute to the people who believed in eugenics a knowledge that was well beyond the science of the time. With context, we can understand why a survey of family history of blindness didn't result in an intuition for people back then that it does for us today. From their perspective they understood the concern that allowing two people who were vision impaired to mate was courting disaster for the next generation.
#31 My daughter was prescribed semiglutide under its Type II diabetes label of Ozempic., but it was primarily for weight loss. She lost 100 lbs. She perceived the mode of action to be causing feelings of repletion to occur upon the consumption of very small amounts of food and for the feeling to last much longer than usual, e.g. 6-8 hrs instead of 4-6 hrs.
Thus encouraged, once the Wegovy formulation was FDA approved, I got my doctor to prescribe it. I have taken the first two 0.25 mg dose. The ramp up to a full therapeutic dose is 16 weeks (02.5, 0.5, 1.0, 1.7, 2.4 mg). No effects or side effects yet.
Medicare Part D will not cover the medicine, or any other weight loss medicine either. It is very expensive. $1325/month. if it works, it is worth it. if not, well weren't going to Italy this year anyway.
I still don’t grasp what situation would call for weight loss drugs, if you are taking them. Can’t you just eat less? If you’re a doctor prescribing them, “patients don’t follow advice on stuff like that, and if we do this they’ll die less” sort of makes sense. But if one is the taker, why can’t you just ... not eat? The effect of taking it seems to be causing you to not eat. And obviously there are all sorts of tricks to not eat, eating physically larger foods that have less calories, avoiding the precision engineered foods designed to make you fat so they can sell you more, etc, but still. That seems much better than $10k/year (which ... wow that is a lot of profit for the pharma companies)
People's background hunger levels vary quite a bit. Revealed choice suggests that "just" eating less causes a significant loss of quality of life for a lot of people.
I believe that adding "just" to a piece of advice means that you're ignoring the difficulty of following it.
I have successfully fasted for long periods of time, despite having unusually intense desire for food and desire in general, I think. And eating less is, I think, within the capabilities of “do hard thing” of almost all people, relative to other difficult things they also do. And as mentioned, one can sort of manipulate the actual choice up the chain away from the eating - whether that be artificial sweeteners, buying lots of lettuce, eating piles of fruit (tasty but low calorie per weight), buying “natural whole” foods (which in my experience helps make desires better anyway), many options. But even without that I don’t see why “eating less Big Macs” is any harder than “going to work every day” or “breaking up with a gf”. And eating less is, I think, the sort of thing one would adjust to after at most six months (extremely overestimated), after which you’d feel fine (unless some nutrition problem), if switching from frozen pizzas to home cooked meat didn’t already make you feel better
The claim that overweight people's diets include too many Big Macs and frozen pizzas perhaps reveals something about your personal dietary preferences, but I do not believe it to be universal.
Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be something like this. I am a generally-healthy 35-year-old female. I have an office job and a modest exercise routine (in particular, I'm a passable rock climber). What stands between me and running a marathon is "just" practice running. If you threatened to shoot me if I didn't finish a marathon in under four hours six months from now, I probably could get there. But in actual real life I won't -- first, because I hate running, and second, because that much practice would require rebuilding my world with running as a first priority, and I'm not willing to do that.
My impression is that for many overweight people, losing weight requires as much (mental) effort as running a marathon would for me. It's not that it's *impossible* per se, but paying $1300/month for an alternative is a remarkably easy sell.
I mean even beyond pure “ear less”, I think you can do well if you fully switch to eating “Whole Foods” or simply less processed - it is genuinely hard to overeat pure meat fat. And this isn’t actually more expensive than processed food - frozen veg and meat as bulk grain is really remarkably cheap. And whatever concerns or difficulties you have, the global market is happy to solve - if you don’t have time, precooked whole cheap frozen whatever you want is available, etc, if you’re willing to simply look at a few thousand product labels for a day or two and choose. I’m just not seeing the difficulty, tbh.
I mean like you said running a marathon would require significant schedule and diet and all sorts of other changes. Eating less (and the Big Mac thing was a joke, frozen pizza as an example of prepared foods is a big contributor tbh) requires eating less. Or buying less at the store. I don’t think it’s as hard. And 12x13 = $15.6k!!!! a year - the median American household income is $60k!!!! Median personal is $35k!
I agree that it is too expensive, but I can afford it.
I have participated in financing pharmaceutical development at a high level. It is an insanely expensive process and the pharmas have to charge a very high price to make it worth while.
Remember that it is not uncommon for drugs to abandoned at the Phase III trial level after $100s of millions have been spent on them. The price of the successful ones must amortize the failures.
Scott posted on the FDA process a few weeks ago and some good ideas and comments. But, even if the FDA process were radically simplified, drug development would be risky and expensive.
For most people, losing weight also requires significant diet and lifestyle changes. You're definitely advocating switching diets, which requires a different shopping routine, meal planning, and meal cooking; those are all nonzero time investments. In addition, most people do not successfully manage to achieve weight loss by only reducing caloric intake, and require additional exercise (not least because, without a deliberate effort on your part, your body is quite good at reducing your caloric expenditure if you start eating less). I would not expect the time investment to be necessarily lower than for marathon running, and I would expect the overall experience to be more miserable.
Evidence suggests that the problem is with your lack of imagination rather than with the people who don't lose weight.
It's a funny thing, but I'm fairly good at not insulting people online, even when I'm very angry. A lot of people can't manage this, and it might be quite difficult for them to stop, rather than something they should just do.
I don’t mind insults at all, and am more than willing to trade a little bit of looking like an idiot to genuinely figure out where I misunderstand something :)
And again the “they genuinely just can’t lose weight”, while theoretically possible, I can’t square with:
Most of the US population is overweight
And a comparison of desire to eat food with other desires that people regularly don’t fall prey to
They generally can lose weight. What they can't do is maintain weight loss-- especially not enough to be socially acceptable-- and quality of life at the same time.
"the “they genuinely just can’t lose weight”, while theoretically possible, I can’t square with:
Most of the US population is overweight"
That seems weird to me - I think the latter is *evidence* for the former, not in any tension with it. If we were just talking about a constant fraction of the population in all societies, at all times, then the idea that it's just up to personal preferences seems plausible. But the fact that it has changed so much in such a brief period (and that it's done so across races, genders, and nations) suggests to me that personal preferences really have very little explanatory value.
I don't want to get into a row over this. It's not going to help anyone. But.
You've said over and over again that you don't understand. And that's true: you don't.
"switching from frozen pizzas to home cooked meat didn’t already make you feel better"
I was fat long before I ever in my life saw such a thing as a frozen pizza. I was raised on home-cooked meals. I walked and cycled everywhere. All that did for me was give me tree-trunk calves from the age of nine onwards but the podge never shifted.
Yes, eat less and exercise more will lose weight. But why do we overeat in the first place? Why can some people burn off calories and others can't? And you see that with the traditional 'middle age spread', as the metabolism slows down and now all the people who were acceptable weight start to put on a bit of padding round the middle, even if they don't eat more.
You keep asking "why don't you why don't you why don't you". Believe me, if I could solve that problem for myself, I wouldn't be the weight I am.
CICO is factually true, but not really useful, unless you can actually fully control calories in and calories out. For some people, like you and me, that's apparently really easy, but for others, it's really hard. (Actually, I'm not convinced it's easy for me - it just so happens that I don't have to work to get CICO to balance at a weight that is considered normal, but I haven't actively tried to control it to some other balance, and I'm not sure that I could!)
CICO is very useful for evaluating proposed hypotheses as to the cause of and/or cure for obesity. If they can't explain where the calories are coming from and where they are going, with at least tentative but plausible numbers, they're just guesses. If you want to know if they are true, try to measure the missing or extra calories wherever your theory says you should find them.
CICO is also useful for evaluating proponents of hypotheses as to the cause of and/or cure for obesity.
yeah, that’s why I’m here. An approach of “I don’t get it but I’m gonna be a wholesome unobtrusive agreeable bro and just say “oh that’s nice dear” and nice on” wouldn’t have provided me with all this wonderful opposition to my ideas, would it have!
Imagine that you have, for some reason, a goal of holding your breath, purely by willpower, until you pass out. Can you do it? I mean, the biochemistry is simple. Lack of oxygen in means you pass out. But can't actually do it (I don't think) because your desire for oxygen will beat your willpower every time.
The analogy with food has holes, but all analogies do. Part of being chronically overweight is having a stronger need for food than is needed to maintain normal weight. (Oh, and losing weight does not cure that.)
I can hold my breath for quite a while, and only stopped out of (probably unjustified) fear of health risk. Other tasks, like fasting, ascetic style intense meditation, and physical exertion past most psychological barriers to the actual point of physical failure (which really sucks lol), I’ve gone way overboard on. And it’s doable! And way way way harder than eating 20% less food. I have a strong love for food! But i can and have simply not eaten. And I genuinely, honestly, do not believe half the US population has a non-overcomeable need for food. Like how does one justify that from any other principle or idea? Everyone in their day to day life does many things they don’t like and think are hard. I honestly think it’s just cope and exaggerations in statements.
As a general thing, I don't think you can understand people who are bad at something you're good at by repeating to yourself "I'm good at it, why can't other people manage something so obvious?".
Find something you're bad at that most other people are good at, and imagine them bewildered at why you just can't do something well when it's so obvious.
It just seems like a case where if one observes the actual attempts to lose weight and things most obese people eat, none of the arguments made really ring true and it really just seems like they don’t want to, and aren’t trying.
I mean, many of them probably aren't trying, or at least not while you're observing. Have you made many principled observations of obese people who are trying to lose weight?
The drive to eat has a billion year evolutionary pedigree. The instinct is very strong and very deep. And there's a difference between "being hungry" and "feeling like you're literally starving". Not eating when hungry is easy; not eating when starving is almost impossible, especially long-term. In severe famine, people eat the bodies of their dead family members. Think about how strong the compulsion to eat has to be in order to motivate people to this extreme.
What would the world look like if obesity is caused by the body thinking it's dangerously underweight, even when it's severely overweight? What would you expect the behavior of obese people to be like in this world?
The health consequences and social stigma of obesity are severe. Those are strong motivators to lose weight. Whatever force it is that keeps obese people from losing weight has to overcome both of these. That's not a trivial thing to do.
The most compelling evidence for this that I've seen is what happens to people who do manage to lose heroic amounts of weight (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html). They just can't stop the weight from coming back. Even with significant behavioral interventions (calorie restriction, exercise), it's not enough. To maintain a consistent weight, someone who used to be obese has to eat a lot less, and/or exercise a lot more, than someone of the same weight who was never obese.
Let me reiterate that. If two people with the same weight eat the same amount of calories and exercise the same amount, the person who used to be obese will gain weight and the person who was never obese will not. This can only be true if the body has other ways to control weight besides appetite. And if the body of an obese person is using these tools to make the person gain weight, then it must think it's starving.
If someone obese loses reduces their weight by 50% (say, 400 lbs -> 200 lbs), their body knows they've lost half their weight. But their body thinks they started off at the correct weight. That's the equivalent of healthy 150 lb person going down to 75 lbs, and staying there. Before you talk about how you "just can't understand" why people don't suck it up and lose weight, spend a year maintaining a weight of 75 lbs. You'll learn fast.
I'm sure it makes you feel good about yourself to think that your not being overweight is do to your "willpower" or whatever, and you like the idea that you're just better than other people. But that should be a huge red flag to you. The more self-flattering the belief, the easier it is to convince yourself of it.
but ... many people can’t work more? If everyone could get an extra 25k a year by just going to work less, then we wouldn’t need welfare, and that’s be significantly easier than applying for and receiving welfare is today. Getting and keeping a job and working at it for another 20-40 hours a week really is a burden in a way “ear 20% less” isn’t.
They should just teach themselves how to become computer programmers so that they can earn higher salaries and get off welfare. It's not that hard. I mean, I taught myself how to program on the side just for fun. Why can't they do it? I don't get it. It seems like they just don't want to, and aren't trying.
I think bored-anon relates to time commitments being a burden that not everyone can afford, but thinks that "being miserable" is something that everyone can just power through, so this might not be a great analogy for them. Honestly, if they can maintain high functioning while feeling miserable, I don't know how to produce an example that they could relate to; willpower of steel presumably happens to some people, and maybe it does make the rest of the race incomprehensible to them.
I mean that actually is true, honestly. It’s a descriptively true statement - everyone *should* try to learn to code. Most don’t and wouldn’t be able to, but the benefits (being relevant in the modern economy as it transforms) are so great that everyone genuinely should try.
But that really does require significant time investment and technical skill and potential etc etc in a way that diet doesn’t
Another thing to note is that “fasts everyone participated in” are extremely common historically? Which makes “most people can’t handle fasts” seem ... weird. And it also seems totally out of proportion with the scale at which these other people undertake difficult tasks
I don't think it was common for everyone to participate in voluntarily-not-eating-enough-to-feel-full. The fasts I'm aware of are either "become a vegetarian for two months" (with no restrictions on quantity) or "don't eat anything for a day". Of course, there were also famines, but those were usually regarded as calamities; also, they weren't voluntary.
The sense I get is that, for whatever reason, you find it relatively easy to ignore hunger (and perhaps other bodily signals?), and are really struggling to imagine what it's like to not find them easy to ignore. I can relate to that somewhat, in that I have a PhD in math, and find it difficult to imagine what it's like being a person who struggles with the Fahrenheit to Celcius conversion. (This was a recent conversation I had; the person said that Celcius to Fahrenheit was ok, but that for some reason they really struggled going back the other way.) My knee-jerk reaction is absolutely "but can't you just think about it for a moment?! you think about harder things all the time!" I *know* that's not how it works, but it's difficult for me to imagine what it's like.
(Note that it wouldn't make me any friends to go around asking "but why can't you just think about it for a moment?!", nor is it terribly likely to produce an enlightening answer.)
The best I've been able to come up with for myself was find a bit of math that I struggled to pack into my head, then take it as an axiom that that's roughly how other people feel about the Fahrenheit / Celcius thing (or whatever math they're struggling with). Perhaps a similar technique can help you relate to the experience of what it's like to experience hunger as suffering? That is, find something that you *do* suffer from, then postulate that hunger works roughly like that for other people?
You say everyone should *try* to learn to code: you seem to accept that many people won't succeed. Shouldn't the equivalent statement be "overweight people should *try* a diet, but many may not succeed at it"? Is that different from what actually happens?
You've already gotten some responses, but to take a different approach:
Suppose that it is physiologically possible for such people to "just" eat less through willpower, but it is highly unpleasant and so they don't. A drug that greatly reduces this unpleasantness such that they'll actually eat less sounds like a huge improvement to quality-of-life.
Compare to pain medication. Pain on its own doesn't physically prevent people from doing very much, but it is highly unpleasant and in practice people will do many fewer things while in pain. They may even say that they "can't" do things because it hurts too much. (Of course, with sufficient willpower they could power through.) And, in fact, doctors prescribe medication for pain *all the time*.
$15k/year does seem exorbitant. (Everything in medicine is - we just only notice when we pay for it ourselves.) But if someone wants to lose weight without feeling terrible, enough that they'd rather pay $15k/year, that sounds like a great option for them. I hope we can make it cost less money so that more people can choose this option.
Yeah there is a ton of evidence about this. Usually efforts to 'lose weight' cause behaviours such as choosing higher calorie foods. restriction of cloric intake usually (85 %) causes the body to adjust the set point for weight higher to compensate for such periods of hunger, and increases the intensity of the drive to consume food. I remember reading about group meeting together over two years to 'lose weight' was on average that they were heavier after those two years than a control group who met together simply for social reasons. A minority of people are able to lose weight long term, presumably those in which biological factors make them less predisposed to the backfiring effects of raising the body's set point for weight. Linda Bacon's book 'Health at every size' would be a ready reference here although studies already convincing when Seligmann published 'What you can change and what you can't' in 1993. The radical dieticians who agree with Linda Bacon's conclusions focus on improving quality of diet and amount of movement and other measurable behaviours and advocate for health improvement without a focus on weight loss. Someone can be healthy or unhealthy at most BMIs: it's important for pretty much everyone to avoid weight cycling and keep active and make sure we are adequately nourished.
>By the way, this is the same Tegmark who in 1998 developed a leading theory for what the universe is and why it exists at all. I feel like going from “discover fundamental nature of the universe” to “attempt to investigate media bias, but it has glaring flaws” is a slightly-too-on-the-nose metaphor for the past 25 years of science as a whole.
This is also the same Tegmark who is President of the Foundational Questions Institue, science director of the Future of Life Institute, and has been a major figure in the advocacy for AI Safety (he wrote Life 3.0).
I'm surprised Scott ommits this. This paper on AI bias seems to be almost a kind of passtime. That's the "metaphor for the past 25 years of science as a whole" - there are many accomplishments from remarkable polymaths we don't even know about - though you could just link his Wikipedia or MIT page.
"Now a Haiti econ blog (appropriately named Vodou Economics) proposes a much better explanation - the data are wrong, and the DR was always ahead of Haiti."
It's not so much that the data are "wrong" so much as they are for the 2011 ICP rather than the 2017 one. The 2017 one shows a much larger gap between the Dominican Republic and Haiti (tenfold as of 2017). The growth statistics are the same, which is arguably what should matter more here. The Maddison people (who, it should be said, are more often than not total morons) discarded some Braithwaite (1968) PPPs for being unreliable -but that shouldn't matter here.
Re: #21 Any one visiting Haiti & the Dominican Republic would have a hard time believing they are on the same island. Despite having similar histories (former colony, revolution, foreign occupation, dictatorship, eventual democracy) the two nations could not be more different.
Having direct considerable time in both I've found that the contrast is the result of what each people see as their heritage.
Dominicans see themselves as “European” with social/political/economic/cultural values and ambitions inherited from Spain.
Haitians see themselves as "African” with social/political/economic/cultural values and ambitions inherited from West Africa.
19: Looking for words or phrases with high predictive power with regards to politics actually merely measures political jargon, not bias, although there is obviously a link to bias, as bias is encoded in some of the jargon (or how it is used).
Of course, it much less of a weird mess. Why do those Spanish greenhouses have these weird shapes? No reallocation of farming land (Dutch farmers traded a lot of land in the past to get nice rectangular plots)?
35: Of course, Germany has states with rather strong cultural differences between them. For example, Prussia was famous for it's military prowess. Prussia was dissolved and many ethnic Germans migrated to other parts of Germany. But it's perfectly plausible for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg and Saxony to have a different culture to the other states.
I disagree with the commenters saying that datasets don’t make good papers in biology. Well-curated, accessible datasets with some analysis make great papers, get published in leading journals, and get cited hundreds of times by people re-analyzing the data. Based on my personal experiences I firmly believe the real reason researchers are bad at data sharing is because they’re afraid that other researchers will re-analyze the data and find their mistakes (or their fraud).
Devon's piece on Prospera is excellent, though every time I see documents by the National Lawyers Guild (a critique of the ZEDEs linked under "Other Resources" as a legitimate recognition of more critical perspectives), I recall their 2003 report on North Korea, which to the best of my knowledge they have not repudiated. This is from a summary by Christopher Black, one of the delegates, still seeing the great revolutionary dream in DPRK in 2003,
"In 2003 I had, along with some American lawyers, members of the National Lawyers Guild, the good fortune to be able to travel to North Korea, that is the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, in order to experience first hand that nation, its socialist system and its people. The joint report issued on our return was titled “The Grand Deception Revealed.” That title was chosen because we discovered that the negative western propaganda myth about North Korea is a grand deception designed to blind the peoples of the world to the accomplishments of the Korean people in the north who have successfully created their own circumstances, their own independent socio-economic system, based on socialist principles, free of the domination of the western powers."
"As in Cuba and other one party socialist societies, North Korea has a system of direct democracy in which elections are held for local peoples committees, district and provincial committees and to the Supreme People’s Assembly. The absence of other parties is not considered a failing, as the entire society is socialist. The question of multiple parties did not even seem understandable to those we spoke to. The delegation questioned whether within that system, there is in fact more participatory democracy than in the American federal system or the parliamentary system in which democracy ceases to operate once the elections are over. It is more circular, with local committees sending up to the next level requests, complaints and so on and so on up to the national level with discussion, at least in theory at these levels and then feedback to the local level until an agreement is reached based on resources available and circumstances.
However, the issue is not whether we agree with DPRK’s system or feel that our democracy is better or more just. . . . Certainly we cannot say that only one political system is successful and generates a participatory and healthy society. We hope that future delegations can learn more about political dialogue within the DPRK system and share the pros and cons of our system without blame or judgment."
Aren't National Lawyers Guild those green hatted people who merrilly stroll among black bloc throwing Molotovs in case they're in need of legal representation with a properly indoctrinated worldview?
Aetna requires prior authorization for Wegovy, the brand name for semaglutide. I tried setting up a Teladoc appointment to get a prescription, and the doctor said she’s not allowed to prescribe “lifestyle medications” and anyway semaglutide is for diabetes.
I don’t interact with the medical industry enough to know if this just typical friction or not, but so far I’m inclined to write this medicine off as vaporware for now.
Teladoc physicians are much more likely to be restricted in what they are allowed to do because there isn't a significant relationship with the patient. Having a good relationship with a primary care provider you see on a regular basis is likely to have a lot more flexibility in what they are able to do for you.
That makes sense, thank you. I was also wondering how much of a roadblock prior authorization is in practice. Like what percentage of people end up getting authorization? Is it just an annoying hoop to jump through or am I basically wasting my time? Is my insurance company fiscally capable of approving a medicine that retails for $1,300 a month, will have to be taken forever, and can help 43% of the population?
37: This doesn't surprise me at all. I used to work for a chemical company that built a plant in South Korea, meant to be a copy of a North American plant. Same blueprints and everything, but for at least 6-8 years the chemists and engineers, from Korea or the US, couldn't get it to produce the same purities as the US plant. So far as I know they never figured it out. Apparently somewhat random outcomes like that are fairly common with large scale chemical production, so apparently there are many strange little influences on the process.
Same deal in my line of work (aerospace engineering, for The Aerospace Corporation). Any time manufacture of a part or component moves to a new facility, or is resumed after more than a few years' interlude at the same plant, we call for a new round of qualification testing. Tacit knowledge is both important and illegible; you can have a part that consistently works because e.g. the guy who makes it just intuitively knows that he's supposed to aim for one side of the tolerance range on a particular operation, and then that guy goes away without training his own replacement, and nobody understands why the part doesn't work any more.
That's a good question. The US plant should be something like 1,125' and the SK plant maybe as low as 50'. I am not 100% sure I am remembering the name of the town in SK correctly, however. It's been quite a few years. Still, it doesn't seem that many places in SK are much above a hundred feet above sea level, and the US plant is up in NE PA coal country.
Are you telling me that the under-age-15 hat-smashing boys were "spanked ignominiously" and just sent home? No criminal record to prevent future employment? No psych eval and prescription medication? No movement to a stricter alternative school?
I don't think they probably learned any lesson if the authorities didn't wreck their subsequent decades.
What a barbaric age it was: we would never do something so cruel in or modern, humanitarian penal system as corporal punishment. It would be down right vengeful! /s
It is interesting to me that they are trying to establish this *new* philosophy of human development on the basis of capitalism. They have patrick collison and peter thiel among others on board as, i guess, "thinkers" and patrons, to define progress in their vision. It's no doubt these people are heavily biased towards start up esque systems and will not want to build a future without them, at least, but it's more than likely they will be building that future on the very basis of them. I wonder if they really believe this will turn out different than the 20th century, if they really believe half the problems of our age were not in fact caused by those very systems. In my view skepticism, bureaucracy, and stagnation, is an inescapable consequence of a mature capitalist system (though a young system doesn't have those problems as much). I don't know why they're trying to build the future in this image but it's not going to work.
Do you know, "Lizard Man"? His post didn't seem to necessarily advocate socialism. It doesn't seem unreasonable to criticize some of the flaws of capitalism and still be fully of the opinion that socialism is not an alternative worth considering.
But bureaucracy and stagnation aren't flaws of capitalism; they are flaws of the human condition. Bureaucracy is found in every country, from North Korea to pre-takeover Hong Kong. Stagnation has been the lot of most people at most times. Ironically, stagnation was broken by people operating in eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalist systems.
(No, I do not know Lizard Man. And if by socialism you mean, government owns everything and can do anything because it rules in the name of the people, then I do not think it is an alternative worth considering.)
I didn't mean it that way. I was trying to say that bureaucracy and stagnation are not unique to capitalism. I would go further and say that it is wrong to think that abolishing capitalism will abolish bureaucracy and stagnation.
See I was thinking "Capitalism" was the system of commerce that most of the free world (rightly IMHO)embraces in one form or another. I've found "Socialism" to be what Right-Wingers scream when anyone posits that the constraints ought to be ever so slightly adjusted.
I have a good friend with a high nostalgia quotient who likes to advocate for pastoral feudalism as a system that was neither capitalist nor socialist. I think what we mean by capitalism only really applies in modern economies where capital can accumulate, be invested, and return more capital.
It's an interesting question whether there is a non-capitalist, non-socialist modern alternative that isn't simply the mix of the two that we mostly use now.
People who are in favor of capitalism, at least libertarians, don't think of it as limited to modern economies or as being linked to capital any more than to other inputs to production. What they mean is a system of private property and exchange. "Capitalism" isn't a very good label, but it's the one commonly used.
Sure, but if you go back it doesn't really apply well, does it? At least, to my understanding. Just to think of the example I can do off the top of my head, if memory serves, William the Conqueror was considered to own all the land in England, and to let it out to his vassals, who let it to theirs, who let it to theirs . . . on down to the peasants working the lords' lands. Those lets weren't in exchange for cash (mostly) but for services of various sorts. And the land wasn't private to the people who worked it. It was all the king's land which you held, ultimately, from him, if you went far enough up the chain of mutual obligation. So it was a system of customary mutual obligation, rather than of private property or free exchange.
Anyway, I didn't think that these sorts of agrarian feudal systems were generally lumped in the same category of capitalism that is typically used to refer to the more advanced later economies. Of course, my first name isn't doctor and I'm not a retired economics professor, so feel free to correct me.
It depends what "bureaucracy" and "stagnation" are taken to mean. Bureaucracy can be just a negative word for "organisation" and stagnation can be just a negative word for sustainability. It also depends what your class outlook is. Stagnation from the point of view of the capitalist class can often seem quite beneficial from the perspective of the workers.
On insulin and weightloss. I have recently been prescribed metformin for whatever "pre-diabetes" is properly called.
What I have noticed is that I feel warmer - I don't notice being cold or being in a draft as much.
Hypothesis that it may be raising either core body temperature, or (more likely) peripheral circulation, which would make my skin, fingers, etc warmer. That warmth would actually mean that I have more heat loss. That would mean that I'm burning more calories to maintain core temperature - which would be an obvious weightloss mechanism, and I know there is some (mixed) evidence for metformin for weightloss, and also explain why it is mixed - if it works through making it easier to tolerate lower temperatures, then you only get the weightloss if you actually experience lower temperatures.
Anyway, proposed approach: monitor room temperatures for people taking possible weightloss drugs, and see if a drop in room temperature correlates with more weightloss.
Cold temperatures, cold showers, swimming in cold water, and even putting an ice pack on your upper back/lower neck area have all been shown to promote weight loss. It's basic thermodynamics.
Sure. My point is that if I can tolerate lower temperatures as a result of taking the drug, then I still only lose weight if I actually experience lower temperatures.
As a single person, I can just turn the thermostat down. But someone living with family or roommates might not be able to do so, and they wouldn't get any weightloss through that mechanism. Which would go a long way to explaining why they work for some people and not others.
Does metformin actually make you warmer, or does it just increase your cold tolerance like (for example) phenylpiracetam?
It takes significant cold exposure to significantly increase weight loss. Staying outside at 30F with no coat for half an hour each day is a good example. Water conducts heat much better than air so a twenty minute cold shower in, say, 60F water will do the same thing. Same for swimming for hours in a 70F pool. It's not something you can normally accomplish just by turning down the thermostat.
Brown fat in order for you to REALLY lose weight this way, and it has to actually feel cold in order to do this. I think there's another mechanism too by which cold makes you lose weight but I can't remember it off the top of my head. Brown fat is so effective that if you lived in an igloo in the arctic circle your pre-diabetes would likely disappear entirely.
Unsure whether it's right to frame East-West migration in Germany before the Berlin wall as "fleeing". I realize the term comes from the abstract of the article (which I have skimmed over and have not yet made up my mind about) so this is not on you.
#36 I agree with much of the criticsim of Henrich's WEIRD argument. I have made similar comments in other fora.
The short version is that Henrich identifies canons of the Medieval Catholic church forbidding cousin marriage as being a key development in the foundation capitalism in Western Europe.
My response is that those rules no longer impacted English society after the Reformation. England is indisputably the home of the industrial revolution. But cousin marriage was common. E.g. Charles Darwin.
It is a key plot point in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, but is no where mentioned as an objection to the marriage of Edmund and Fanny. In Trollope's Can You Forgive Her, Alice Vavasor is infatuated with her cousin George. The objection to George is not that he is her cousin, it is that he is a jack@$$.
- After such a long time, the induced changes can take a life of their own
- How common compared to former model of society? Here in Central Europe you can in general marry or screw your cousin/aunt without legal repercussions and it's not exactly a juicy taboo, but it's still not something prevalent and the rest of the family would at least have lots of jokes and gossip etc. Also lots of people still want a traditional church wedding, even if it's the one time they go inside the church except some sightseeing and Catholic Church keeps its position on 4 times removed. Church wedding here basically means Catholic, unless you cross border into Lutheran part of Germany, but who cares about those condemned-to-hell heretics?
3.) They're somewhat exaggerating the differences in government. Tlaxcala had a monarch and the Aztecs had noble and common political institutions, at least if popular memoriy is to be believed. More interesting is the geopolitical situation. Tlaxcala would be like if an even more brutal version of Rome had risen to power except a state based next door to Rome itself had managed to stay independent and stave off conquest by extreme militarization, long term acceptance of economic deprivation, and alliances with dissident factions in the Aztec empire.
This is a huge context to Cortez's conquest that gets missed. This is why Monctezuma didn't just immediately try and kill Cortez. There was a wider political situation he had to defuse or face a larger revolt/invasion. It's also why driving Cortez out of the city didn't work: Cortez ran back to Tlaxcala and Monctezuma couldn't pursue him without getting past the giant Tlaxcalan-Rebel army. This gave Cortez the time to regroup and engage in more open warfare. (Also, technically Tlaxcala wasn't conquered: they were direct vassals of the Spanish Crown. It was only on independence they were incorporated into Mexico.)
4.) This is overly literal. I have no doubt it's rare. But certain communities have developed intergenerational distrust of the government, often with good reason. This is just a particularly emblematic example that's come to the attention of the chattering classes.
12.) It's worth nothing that the Constitution was a barrier to this kind of thing. Yes, the Supreme Court eventually allowed it. But it took decades to get there, decades that were used in other places to do it even more widely. The most thorough eugenics experiments took place in the territories where the Constitution didn't apply. Likewise, it was often worse in places with less robust conceptions of rights. Rights may forestall good and necessary changes. But they also forestall a lot of evil ones.
15.) It'll probably be the same as how radio and television already work. Lots of little pirate signals in places with significant censorship. They'll be tracked down by the regime in erratic but furious enforcement. In places with freedom of speech the big, legal networks will dominate because they can outspend/out-quality little pirate operations. More importantly, I expect us to get Radio Free Europe: Internet Edition at some point. If we can turn on the uncensored, untraceable internet in North Korea or Manchuria that would undoubtedly be to our advantage.
I'm also curious to see how it affects brands of authoritarianism like Putin. Putin doesn't really do direct censorship: you can go and Google anything you want about him. He even has real elections. He just slants everything as far to his side as he can. Government regulators lean on broadcasters and other organizations. Fraudulent prosecutions go after the wealthy who oppose him. Opposition journalists are attacked. Etc. This might make his form of authoritarianism more durable than the old totalitarian kind. Giving Russians free access to the internet wouldn't change as much as it would in China.
35.) Not to mention the the different regional effects of Nazism. East Berlin/Germany had more Poles, Catholics, and Jews, all of whom didn't fare too well under the regime. Or that being occupied by the Soviets and being occupied by the Americans is a rather different experience. Berlin was conquered by the Soviets wholesale but Americans took their sector over on July 4th 1945. The period from 1945 to 1949 was really turbulent and critical. I think it's very fair to see west vs east Germany as a comparison of two economic systems, especially when comparing specific industries. Food distribution, for example. It's less fair to blindly attribute all differences.
For example, I've long pointed out that the East German female workforce participation rate was higher than the west's in Imperial Germany. So while Communism no doubt did something to get women into the workforce the differential was already somewhat there. Conversely, west Germany has been richer than the east... basically forever. So while it's fair to point out Communism almost certainly did have downward pressure effects simply pointing to raw GDP is too simplistic.
Small correction: East Germany had both more highly Protestant areas and more minority Catholics. So it's complicated. Also, an additional note: I pointed out back when that sex under Communism article came out that there was ample evidence sexual practices were already different between east and west in the 19th century. Different family structures and (it at least seems) sexual norms. Again, this doesn't dilute Communism to nothingness. But it's a complicating factor.
You’re pointing out that East-Elbia and the western parts of the German Imperial Empire had differing distribution of Catholic and Protestant population.
However in the paper they also point out that church attendance had been substantially lower already as of 1910, which I (as a non-historian) think is more important. One reason for this low attendance might have been a higher distrust for institutions (political and clerical). That distrust could have been caused by the unique role the Junkers played in Prussia and into the Weimar Republic, being the major landowners and having substantially improportional political power.
When that influence was broken after WWII during Soviet occupation, those formerly disadvantaged and disenfranchised with democracy retaliated by confiscating the Junkers’ land (pushing them out), and, intentionally or collaterally, they also increased the pressure on all other enterpreneural persons pushing those out as well.
So pressure from the political extremes (reactionaries and communists) crushed the moderates in the middle of the political spectrum with the observed political, social, and economic results.
The cultural influence of Catholicism and Protestantism lasted even among the non-religious. It's like the old joke about Ireland. "He's an atheist!" "A Catholic or a Protestant atheist?" Despite the decline in religiosity the echoes of the kulturkampf meant that Catholics served as a rather distinct force in politics. Adding to the complications is that (again due to kulturkampf) a lot of the Catholics in Prussia were ethnic minorities or from other German principalities.
The former serfs and workers didn't retaliate or have any say in the new government. The Soviet Union, ironically, was far harsher on worker influence in East Germany than the US was. Less tolerant of strikes and all that. This was partly due to its hypocritical totalitarian nature and it was partly because the Soviet Union was more apt to see Germany as a defeated power to be punished. They then installed a victor's government creating one of the more extreme Communist regimes with that extremity backed by Moscow.
Though you're right that government hugely decreased trust. The whole osthilf scandal, for example, was almost perfectly designed to be a right poster issue. "Socialists create program to help poor area, give money away to aristocrats and political allies."
As for a general decline in religiosity being important, it's worth noting that both Communism and Fascism tended to develop in the less religious populations with high distrust in institutions in general. They even had terms analogous to "the blob" or "the deep state" though different factions disagreed on exactly who they were. One of Nazism's advantages memetically was that it gave this energy an easy and culturally acceptable target: Jews. They really were remarkably flexible as a villain. They could be capitalists to the populist, minorities to the racist, satanic to the religious, and so on.
As to whether such distrust was more common in the east: it actually wasn't. The rural east had higher institutional trust in the church and aristocracy. At least measured by votes and membership in radical parties rather than by church attendance. Nazism actually spawned more out of the cities and their surrounding areas. The rural east actually had radical far right monarchists lying around who literally just wanted to set the clock back to 1910. Or in some cases even farther, all the way back to before Prussia had a constitution.
> As to whether such distrust was more common in the east: it actually wasn't. The rural east had higher institutional trust in the church and aristocracy. At least measured by votes and membership in radical parties rather than by church attendance.
Would you please share a source for this statement? Figure A2 indicates that the communist vote share was higher in 1924 in the East than in any other area. Figure A1 also shows that in 1925 on average a higher share of persons were working in manufacturing in the East than in the West, so „rural east had higher institutional trust“ doesn’t seem on point to your argument.
I also was not implying that the rural serfs personally kicked out their former masters on a larger scope, but I think that those feeling oppressed by the former ruling classes had little objections when the new rulers in the Soviet zone (the Soviets and the communists) started the land reform in 1945 (the end of privately owned factories came in 1972, when the SED nationalized the remaining 11000 companies). It seems conclusive from the biographies of some the new rulers and the history of mutual politically motivated murders between 1918 and 1945, that the new rulers considered the old elites their enemies.
Yes. From 1897 to 1927 there was the familiar tempo of political debates and state level laws and court cases back and forth. The pro-sterilization laws also had to be more narrowly tailored because of such concerns until the Supreme Court ruled eugenic sterilization more or less fully constitutional in 1927. In contrast, in Canada sterilization began earlier because the same movement was able to make legal changes more quickly. Likewise, a lot of the "test" cases were done to Native Americans or Puerto Ricans who did not have Constitutional protections specifically for that reason.
However, the courts have continually ruled that sterilization is still Constitutional. So it wasn't all that key to ending sterilization. It's not currently preventing it. What really ended it was a combination of minority rights activists who increasingly saw eugenics as racist and civil libertarians plus the religious right who'd always opposed it.
I do find it a little strange you apparently have a right to bodily autonomy to get an abortion but you don't have a right to bodily autonomy to prevent the state from sterilizing you by force.
The Russian internet is actually pretty similar to Chinese in structure, if not in enforcement (yet). Only domestic providers are allowed to operate, there's a register of banned domains which all of them are legally obliged to enforce, and VPNs which allow to circumvent this are technically banned, but not illegal to use so far.
General criticism of the regime is mostly tolerated (although not on TV for example, the last holdout was recently removed from major broadcasting networks), but always less so as time passes, the crackdown against Navalny-affiliated media being a significant recent development. This mostly concerns Russian-language stuff, because the grasp of foreign languages by the average Russian is terrible.
Elections can be called "real" only in the most technical sense. Actual opposition is banned from participating, and even the "domesticated" one gets vastly less coverage than the ruling party's candidates. Also, the farther you get from the center, the more blatant falsifications get, with regional elites trying to one-up each other in trying to demonstrate their allegiance and reliability by delivering better percentages. Of course, Putin himself is still popular enough (his cronies, less so), but why risk fair elections anyway, when he can afford not to?
It's really not. You seem to have a pretty thorough knowledge of Russia but not of China so you're getting the comparison wrong.
I agree with you Russia's not free in a meaningful sense. But Russia has nothing approaching the totalitarianism of China in either internet enforcement or central state control. Russia functions like a subverted democracy where one party uses semi-free elections and its complete control of the administrative state to slant everything in its favor as much as possible. China is an actual totalitarian state more similar to the old Soviet Union than modern Russia. Elections are not an important political consideration and the state is a tool of the party.
Putins' internet critics do not disappear into camps at any significant rate. Even when he arrests critics they at least get a public if unfair trial. In China they often just disappear. And Russian censorship is largely moral rather than political. The two are intertwined of course. But there's a qualitative difference between banning porn and "gay propaganda" vs having actual mechanisms where the government can ban all discussion of certain words online. Russia also doesn't have an army of government sponsored internet moderators who track down people spreading bad thoughts. Nor does it have the legal/police infrastructure to create one and disappear people.
Also, the literal structure is different. China built its internet, as in the actual infrastructure, with a mind for control. Russia not as much. You can look at the cables and see Russia's got significantly more connective tissue including directly into western nations. This is because the Russia internet wasn't built from a top down mandate to specify government control.
(Also, Russian rules on foreign operators are much less strict than China's. Much less. Which is why you end up with things like LiveJournal living on in Russia rather than China's knock off version of Facebook.)
Yes of course, I don't claim that Russia is anywhere near as repressive as China, be it on the internet or offline, but IMO all of that mostly hinges on Putin's personal goodwill (and the extent to which his close circle can influence him, estimates vary). He likes to maintain the appearance of democracy, plausible deniability, and in general prefers the path of least resistance. But there's no civil society or independent elites, and so no guarantee at all that the next dictator would share this aesthetic.
I wouldn't call Russian elections "real". After all the efforts to wipe out real opposition and media independent of the state, he and his party still boost their results by millions of fake votes.
At this stage it's straight up unscientific to be unwilling to even consider the possibility that biology explains much of the difference between Haiti and DR. The difference in outcomes between these countries is only surprising if you completely ignore the outcome differences between every sub-saharan african country and every other mestizo-majority country, and the socio-economic outcomes of these populations within white majority countries.
"34: It’s generally-believed that IQ is mostly-environmental early on in life, but mostly-genetic after adulthood."
What am I missing? I always thought that IQ was an attempt to measure native intelligence, not functional intelligence -- that is, not acquired abilities or knowledge. So it's hardly surprising that "genetics matter vastly more than environment and environment more-or-less doesn’t matter".
And because IQ is more or less impervious to environmental influences (except for prenatal and childhood malnourishment and diseases), the more interesting question to me is what educational practices are best at equipping the rising generation with knowledge and skills?
The trigger warning note sounded pretty interesting and I was going to share it around - except it turned out to be a reasonable note on the linked site. It says to use ‘content note’ instead which seems more professional frankly, and euphemisms like trigger warning - which seems obviously rooted in gun imagery - sounds pretty crass in a society with (real or apparent) endemic gun-problems.
Isn't it the people who were looking for such warnings who decided they should be called trigger warnings? In which case, this is just more gilding the lily. If it is now considered violent because triggers = guns, then that was a fault at the start but it comes from the side trying to impose such warnings, not the people being told "you now have to include these or else".
I remember years back in fandom, such fights over including or not including trigger/content warnings on fiction. The content warning lot won, so if the imagery is now deemed violent, it's on them. This is yet more "differences that make no difference", as now what does someone who wants content warnings put forward as the reason? Before, it was "please warn for X because that triggers me", now is it going to be "please warn for X because that content notes me"?
The website says stuff like trigger/content warnings can’t be perfect and ultimately could end up triggering someone anyway and those are the breaks - so the content seemed very reasonable to me.
I don’t think we can impute agency to masses and say that some ”people” wanted to say “trigger warming” - but I understand what you’re saying. Everyone seemed happy with using a slang until they weren’t and now the lack of self awareness for pro-trigger warning faction seems a weird. But overall I thing “trigger warning” to “content note” switch could be motivated by vexing reasons or smart reasons - I’m just pointing out that the linked site doesn’t support the claim that the terminology switchover is motivated by vexing reasons, that’s all (even if there is other evidence elsewhere suggesting this trend in switch from “trigger warning” to “content note” is motivated by mostly shallow seeming reasons).
Well, time marches on and progressive shibboleths get more and more precise, but my point was that it wasn't the general mass of people who came up with the original 'violent' imagery in "trigger warnings", it was the people looking for such concessions who did so.
The Brandeis list makes it sound as if we general mass of morons need to be gently tut-tutted into not using such fearful terms. They're the ones who came up with them in the first place, so turn the scolding onto their intellectual forebears who decided to go with trigger warning not content notes.
My problem with this type of thing, apart from the unbearable aggressiveness and smug self-righteousness of their most vocal supporters, is that it's a just-so story; similar to pseudo etymology and popular-science-grade evolutionary psychology.
It gives weird conspiracy-theoretic vibes of consistent patterns, like Scott's ironic reasoning in his novel about the Kabbalah. Very neat derivation chains of words and meaning, very short on inconvenient actual data or any argument for why whatever effect language has is significant or how it impacts the real world. And this thing *will* come to rule over mainstream discourse in 3-5 years, however "it's just voluntary, no policing, peace <3" these guys* pretend or legitimately believe.
* : (oops, did I just commit a hetero-male-normative wrong think?)
>"IQ of biological parents explained about 42% of variance; IQ of adoptive parents explained only 1%. 'Variance explained' is a non-intuitive statistic with a lot of confusing properties - but in this case the obvious conclusion that genetics matter vastly more than environment and environment more-or-less doesn’t matter at all is basically right."
That "obvious conclusion" is the opposite of what the paper said. Look at the far-right column of table 3. Heritability explained 42% of variance in ICAR-16 , but environmental variation explained 50% of the variance in ICAR-16, *higher* than the heritability.
(The middle three columns account for the fact that ancestry and environment are correlated [me and my parents all grew up in Toronto etc], and gene-environment non-additivity [a gene might give me +1 IQ point if I live by a lake but +2 IQ points if I live by the ocean etc].)
This paper isn't at all trying to overturn the fact of environmental effects on IQ variance, which their table 3 confirms; it's just trying to address whether heritability estimates are biased due to any non-randomness of environment of adoption ("placement effects").
Their abstract, clumsily, does say "Together, these findings provide further evidence for the predominance of genetic influences on adult intelligence over any other systematic source of variation." To reconcile this with their environmental-variance components in table 3, I think they're treating "systematic" as the key word there.
"but environmental variation explained 50% of the variance in ICAR-16, *higher* than the heritability."
In fact this is the "non shared environmental variation" which is a misnomer because it is calculated as the variance that remains after genetics and familly are taken into account. So it includes error measurment, random process during brain development, etc... and quite probably very little that is "environmental" in the more common sens of the word.
>"quite probably very little that is 'environmental' in the more common sens..."
What's your basis for saying "probably" and "very little," as opposed to just "lower than 50%"? (Besides that, I want to highlight that this is a separate argument from Scott's claim, which was just a simple misreading of which variance component was which.)
I may obviously be wrong but I do not think that Scott misread which variance component was which, I think that he did not think that "non shared environmental variation" corresponds to environmental effects.
This is also my opinion, which is relatively informed because I teach quantitative genetics but which is only an opinion (common among geneticists I think). This
opinion is based mainly on two arguments:
- when the trait (IQ, personality etc..) is measured more accurately, the heritability of the trait can sometimes very markedly increase (From memory, the heritability of personality traits is for example around 40% when they are measured with a short self-survey, but reach 60 or even 80% when measured with a variety of tests performed by a psychologist).
- Shared-environment consists of all the factors that are common between siblings raised within one familiy. So there is parenting, but also socio-economic factors, precise geographic location, etc. If those do not influence a trait, I think that it is very unlikely that the relatively few remaining environmental factors (friends not in common between the siblings, different teachers if they are not in the same class, etc.) can have a significant role.
These two arguments are not a demonstration by any mean, but I personnaly give à 90 % probability to the fact that "non-shared env" is mostly not environmental, in the most common meaning of the word!
I think #34 significantly understates the problems of variance compression in adoption studies. The most straightforward version of this problem is that adoptive families have low variance in IQ, with few very low-IQ families, as a consequence of the fact that adoption agencies are picky. Meanwhile adoptive families vary a lot, but with a strong skew toward low IQ. This means that you end up with low shares of total IQ variance explained by variance in adoptive parent IQ, but you can adjust for this by reweighting variances to reflect the variation in parental IQ in the full population.
The more serious version of this problem is that for parents who are on the margin of acceptability for adoption agencies, you'll have a negative correlation between IQ and other positive traits (like conscientiousness) even if the correlation between those traits is positive in the general population. If a low IQ parent has been accepted as an adoptive parent, they must have been able to check the boxes of middle-classness, stability, strong references, etc., in spite of their low IQ. The most likely reason for this is being above average for adoptive parents in non-IQ aspects of parent quality. On the other hand, a higher-IQ parent can get accepted as an adoptive parent even with some deficits (relative to most adoptive parents) in other qualities.
The same thing is true of biological parents--high-IQ biological parents who put their kids up for adoption are probably less conscientious, more prone to mental illness, etc, than are either other high-IQ people or even lower IQ biological parents who put their kids up for adoption.
But this is much more likely to bias estimated relationships with adoptive parents. The genetic causal mechanism is likely that high IQ genes lead to high IQ, even if paired with low conscientiousness genes. The environmental causal mechanism is probably that high IQ parents create better childhood environments, which leads to higher child IQ. The connection between conscientious parents and a good childhood environment is plausibly as strong or stronger than the connection between high-IQ parents and good childhood environment. As a result, a negative correlation between IQ and conscientiousness induced by selection into adoption is likely to negatively bias the correlation between adoptive parent IQ and child IQ substantially.
I am not sure that this is an alternative possible explanation of the data because there is a relatively strong effect of adoption on young children, but this effect disappear almost entirely around adolescence.
Background The association of physical activity with the development and progression of coronary artery calcium (CAC) scores has not been studied. This study aimed to evaluate the prospective association between physical activity and CAC scores in apparently healthy adults.
Methods Prospective cohort study of men and women free of overt cardiovascular disease who underwent comprehensive health screening examinations between 1 March 2011 and 31 December 2017. Baseline physical activity was measured using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form (IPAQ-SF) and categorised into three groups (inactive, moderately active and health-enhancing physically active (HEPA)). The primary outcome was the difference in the 5-year change in CAC scores by physical activity category at baseline.
...Conclusion We found a positive, graded association between physical activity and the prevalence and the progression of CAC, regardless of baseline CAC scores
Results
The mean (SD) age of study participants was 42.0 (6.1) years (table 1). The proportions of participants who were inactive, moderately active and HEPA were 46.8%, 38.0% and 15.2%, respectively. Participants with higher physical activity levels were older, less likely to be current smokers, and had lower levels of total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and triglycerides, higher levels of HDL-cholesterol, and higher prevalence of hypertension and presence of CAC than participants with lower physical activity levels.
Participants with CAC >0 at baseline were older, were more likely to be male and current smokers, and had higher levels of traditional cardiovascular risk factors.
The cardiovascular benefits of physical activity are unquestionable. ...Regular physical activity reduces the risk of many adverse health outcomes, including mortality, CVD, diabetes, hypertension, obesity and dyslipidaemia.
...High levels of physical activity, however, may be associated with a higher risk of coronary artery calcification. In a meta-analysis, higher physical activity levels were associated with a higher prevalence of CAC (pooled odds ratio (OR) 1.84; 95% CI 1.41 to 2.93)
...A possible mechanism underlying this association is that physical activity may increase coronary atherosclerosis. Potential pathways include mechanical stress and vessel wall injury of coronary arteries, physiological responses during exercise, such as increased blood pressure, increased parathyroid hormone levels and changes in coronary haemodynamics and inflammation. In addition, other factors, such as diet, vitamins and minerals, may change with physical activity.
The second possibility is that physical activity may increase CAC scores without increasing CVD risk. The standard Agatston CAC scores are calculated as a combination of calcium density and the volume of plaque burden. Higher calcium density, which suggests more stable, calcified plaque, produces a higher CAC score, however, it is associated with lower CVD risk.
...In general, progression of CAC scores is associated with a higher risk of CVD among individuals with CAC=0 and those with CAC >0.28 Moreover, the absence of detectable CAC is a strong negative predictor of CVD, whereas the presence of any CAC, even at very low levels, is associated with an increased risk of CVD. However, considering the undeniable protective effect of physical activity on CVD, the positive relationship between physical activity with CAC progression should be interpreted with caution as the complex interplay between physical activity, CAC progression and subsequent CVD risk remains largely unknown."
Conclusions seem to be "exercise is in general good for you but it could be bad for your heart. Or we could be measuring the wrong kind of plaque. Or we could be totally wrong about hardening of the arteries being a bad thing".
1. Hat Riot wikiepedia - "Many of those taken to court following arrests related to the hat-snatching frenzy opted to be fined rather than serve time in jail. The longest recorded time one of the teens was sent to jail was three days served by an A. Silverman, who was sentenced by Magistrate Peter A. *Hatting* during night court."
I feel like there's a ton of useful truth here, but it would really benefit from re-interpretation and summary of the type Mr.Alexander is uniquely good at.
The AI movie thing was fun, but it's pretty clear there were images of from some of the films or their posters in the training dataset. This is most obvious for die hard with the exploding building, and to a lesser extent space jam and point break.
Bioengineer here with a bit of perspective on the data sharing thing (17).
In a few sub-fields, this has been recognized as a problem and major journals require authors to put their data on big NIH-hosted databases. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/genes-expression/ for examples related to gene expression and genetics.
At the same time, there's an undercurrent of discontent in certain fields of biology (I'm thinking mostly about systems biologists and developmental biologists) over the papers that are *just* datasets. We pretty regularly get papers that are, like, "A high-resolution cell atlas of a developing mouse hindbrain" or "comprehensive time-resolved whole-body single-cell gene expression of growing nematodes". Usually they're very impressive, technically, and produce a metric ton of data that can be accessed using a slick (but still kind of clunky) new custom visualization interface... and nobody knows what to do with it.
There's kind of an "okay, what did we learn?" moment that comes with a lot of those papers that's starting to be too familiar. It turns out that in the modern age, the hard part of learning about biology isn't collecting tons of data -- it's getting any useful conclusions out of that data. Like, imagine you have that high-resolution atlas of a developing mouse hindbrain. What do you *do* with that? It's easy to imagine lots of things you can check with that dataset *in a vague noncommittal way*, but actually concretely coming up with a specific hypothesis to check with that sort of thing is hard. So that's why putting giant datasets online isn't as prestigious as writing a paper that synthesizes something out of that dataset.
(I'm guilty of writing one of those papers, albeit a small one on a small subject. Back in my undergrad days I was on a paper that analyzed gene expression over the course of a bacteriophage infection. Collecting the gene expression data wasn't trivial, but in a way it was ridiculously straightforward. Figuring out what it meant was much, much harder, and I don't think we got all that much out of it.)
Incidentally, I don't have a good citation for this, but a while back I read that "science" (I think chemistry and biochemistry, more specifically) went through a similar crisis back in... I want to say the 50s and 60s? For a stretch, most of the "scientific research" that was going on was basically measuring parameters -- stuff like the rates of reactions -- to finer and finer precision. Eventually some big-name scientists got fed up with all the measurement papers and published some high-profile editorials to the effect of "science isn't about measuring numbers, it's about figuring out how stuff actually works!" and pretty quickly people stopped measuring parameters.
Personally, having written a bunch of models of biocircuits that rely heavily on the field's knowledge of underlying rate parameter values that the field definitely doesn't know, I think we could have done with a *bit* less of a course-correction on this. =P
The thing about the gorilla is totally consistent with cog sci literature on problem solving and the way specific goals constrain attention. For more, you can read my essay on cognitive load theory: https://cognitiveloadtheory.wordpress.com/
Why isn't there money to be made for hedge funds to go around and completely buy up the commercial mortgage securities and modify terms? Or for banks to offer different initial terms?
I feel something else must be going on, eg, maybe there are regulations for which book value matters more than actual expectations?
Since the comment thread where marxbro and I are having a fascinating discussion around cultural mores is becoming the length of the Equator, I'm going to drag this one up here so we can have a fresh starting point.
marxbro1917:
"I'm simply making the point that you are doing performative right-wing outrage. You say that you would dislike any politician doing it, but your own posts show that you don't really have any clear poltical analysis of why you like or dislike certain words. Likely you are just repeating what you heard elsewhere."
I, a parrot, repeating what I heard elsewhere and certainly not having any linguistic tastes of my own:
Squawk! 🦜
From "The Pilgrim's Regress", C.S. Lewis:
(T)he jailor addressed the prisoners and said: ‘You see he is trying to argue. Now tell me, someone, what is argument?’ There was a confused murmur.
‘Come, come,’ said the jailor. ‘You must know your catechisms by now. You, there’ (and he pointed to a prisoner little older than a boy whose name was Master Parrot), ‘what is argument?’
‘Argument,’ said Master Parrot, ‘is the attempted rationalisation of the arguer’s desires.’
...‘Good. Now just one more. What is the answer to an argument turning on the belief that two and two make four?’
‘The answer is, “You say that because you are a mathematician.”’
‘You are a very good boy,’ said the jailor. ‘And when I come back I shall bring you something nice. And now for you,’ he added, giving John a kick and opening the grating.
... ‘This psittacosis is a very obstinate disorder,’ said Reason. And she turned to mount the black horse.
"Likewise, guerrilla units formed from the people may gradually develop into regular units and, when operating as such, employ the tactics of orthodox mobile war. While these units function as guerrillas, they may be compared to innumerable gnats, which, by biting a giant both in front and in rear, ultimately exhaust him. They make themselves as unendurable as a group of cruel and hateful devils, and as they grow and attain gigantic proportions, they will find that their victim is not only exhausted but practically perishing. It is for this very reason that our guerrilla activities are a source of constant mental worry to Imperial Japan."
"In the summing up of the strengths of the contending Irish and British Forces, the factor of morale must rank highest. There was no doubt, whatever, that the morale of the I.R.A. stood far above that of the British. Greater experience, numbers and armaments of the British were indeed an important consideration, but this was far excelled by the willingness of the Volunteers to sacrifice themselves for a cause they knew to be right. Theirs was an aim higher than that of simple political freedom, for perhaps without being fully able to express it, they knew that when they fought and gave their lives for the ending of their long endured subjection, they did so for the dignity of man and all mankind."
"Observers of revolutionary epochs, and particularly those who decry the use of the political weapon in any form as an instrument for successful emancipation, should study well the three periods of the 1916–1921 endeavour. Firstly, the armed Rising and the blood sacrifices of the 1916 patriots to awaken the Nation, although there was no hope of military success ; secondly, the contesting of the 1918 elections and the subsequent setting up of the National Parliament and Government ; and thirdly, the 1920–21 guerilla warfare to prevent the destruction, by armed force and terrorism, of the institutions so set up.
...Many statements have been made by Ministers and Generals in various countries on the necessity for long periods of training before even an infantry soldier is ready for action. This is utter nonsense when applied to volunteers for guerilla warfare. After only one week of collective training, this Flying Column of intelligent and courageous fighters was fit to meet an equal number of soldiers from any regular army in the world, and hold its own in battle, if not in barrackyard ceremonial. Its camp training now completed, the Flying Column was ready to seek out the enemy.
For months preceding September, 1920, many officers of the I.R.A. throughout Ireland must have given thought to the policy and tactics which a Flying Column should adopt to ensure its existence. Strange as it may seem, it was accepted in West Cork that the paramount objective of any Flying Column, in the circumstances then prevailing, should be, not to fight, but to continue to exist. The very existence of such a column of armed men, even if it never struck a blow, was a continuous challenge to the enemy and forced him to maintain large garrisons to meet the threatened onslaught on his military forces, and for the security of his civil administration. Such a Column moving around must seriously affect the morale of garrisons, for one day it would surely strike. It also remained the highest expression of our Nationhood, the Flying Column of the Army of the People."
This exchange of revolutionary fervour has stirred my patriotic feelings, I feel the need for a song representative of the national insurgent spirit coming on!
"Your cultural criticisms seem to be restricted to a vague "this is ugly, this is beautiful" - with zero political investigation as to why you might find certain things "beauty"."
All I know is that I am maddened by the beauty of the moon. It is just past the Autumnal Equinox and China has celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival, which involves mooncakes and moon-viewing amongst other delights.
If we give credence to the people arguing for reincarnation/Hinduism/Buddhism on here, then perhaps I was Chinese in a past life - or I am going to be Chinese in a future one? Then I can indulge in my love for the moon in a supportive cultural context!
There really are people who are up against logistical difficulties, need more information, and/or would like to talk with a human being about the logistics of getting vaccinated.
I was fascinated by your find on arranged marriages. I am really curious if they differ from how Indians do it. If that subject interests you, watch the Netflix show Indian Matchmaking. It is pretty real, I thought. Fascinating show.
I've become skeptical about the WEIRD book's argument ever since I learned that traditional Hinduism was every bit as uncompromising in banning close-kin marriages as medieval Catholicism, and enforced this ban for a lot longer.
Marriages between descendants of the same 7th-generation ancestor on the father's side and between descendants of the same 5th-generation ancestor on the mother's side are banned as far back as the Gautama Dharmasutra (600 BCE-200 BCE). This is reaffirmed in all subsequent ancient and medieval Hindu legal texts (dharmashastras).
(Note that the famous Manusmriti only forbids marriage between third-generation relatives on the maternal side--but the traditional commentaries explain that the 5th-generation standard overrides it.)
The texts explain that this rule applies to all four varnas, unlike the better-known ban on marrying within one's gotra (paternal lineage), which applies only to the twice-born castes.
And, at least according to a random Indian guy I talked to on Twitter, this anti-endogamy rule is actually observed in practice, and makes finding a suitable marriage partner difficult.
On #17 publishing data, I think this is partially true, but doesn't explain why researchers don't publish their code, which does not entail foregone future papers. I think it's because they don't have good code habits, and mainly because this gets you neither citations nor respect (though respect might be trending upwards slowly).
"I link here in penance: Trump’s False Lafayette Square Exoneration. "
One would think you've learned a lesson after the last passage of the Woke ripping your nuts off..... but noooooooo. One. More. Time. Never explain. Never apologize.
Phoney War seems just incomprehensible to me. If this was fiction, holding an idiot ball would be an understatement.
> German military commander Alfred Jodl said that "if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions."
How do you... not attack an enemy when most of its army isn't present?
Also, this:
> Leopold Amery suggested to Kingsley Wood that the Black Forest be bombed with incendiaries to burn its ammunition dumps, Wood—the Secretary of State for Air—amazed the member of parliament by responding that the forest was "private property" and could not be bombed
The criticism of Henrich and WEIRD was valuable, but itself misses many, many tricks. The elements he introduces as disproofs sometimes have easy explanations. Still, it's always good to ask newly fashionable theories that claim to explain everything to explain at least something rigorously.
Re. 17, prominent bioinformatics journals require publishing datasets and code. Unfortunately, bioinformatics may have the biggest and most-restrictive datasets of any discipline. This is a big reason why I never published anything while I was working in bioformatics: my work often used terabytes of data; my employer wouldn't give me more than about 100 megabytes of ftp space; I couldn't afford to host terabytes of data myself; and that data would be gathered or computed from dozens of sources which all had different privacy and redistribution requirements.
On #28 -- The reddit post might be relevant to some smaller landlords, but it doesn't really reflect decision making from large institutional landlords. I'm an asset manager with a 3+ million square foot portfolio. With office space, part of the issue is that a landlord almost always has to give upfront concessions to a tenant and in the middle of a recession those look way too risky on long term leases. If you can only get $26/sf rent with 3% escalations per year on a ten year lease and have to give $80/sf in construction allowance to a tenant plus 10 months free rent upfront plus pay commissions to your broker and the tenant's broker... why not wait a year when rents and concessions go back to normal? Also, demand for office space doesn't just dip in a recession, it goes to almost zero and tenants put their space on the market too, so you compete against super cheap sub-lease space. (e.g. the market clearing rent doesn't go from $30 to $26 per square foot, it falls to like $8 per square foot). If you just wait a little while you could get $30/sf rent again and only give a $60/sf construction allowance for a ten year lease. Decent office buildings in major metros trade for about a 14-20x multiple on annual income so you holding out on rent for a year or more pays off much better than locking in an $8/sf rent for ten years. Regular commercial landlords don't do 1-2 year leases because it takes a lot to build out the space and you amortize that over the lease term. WeWork and Regus will do short term leases and they capture all of that demand, but it's still light so they aren't gobbling up the remaining office inventory either.
Oh my gosh looks like Clarke wrote the playbook for the weaponisation of social media. Good find. Must read to find out what happens next =D
>an uncensorable mix of heterosexual and homosexual pornography (using the Kinsey Report as market research), gore (such as details of bullfights and photographic evidence from the Nuremberg trials), and communist propaganda.
So, basically early /b, which was close to having the most freedom of expression of anywhere ever. Just goes to show that true freedom actually leads to the opposite of what pampered intelligentsia imagines.
A million other early internet sites were equally free but quite different from /b/
Because they were less free. In particular, the technical ease of spam coupled with the tolerance of it were unmatched outside of the chan culture as far as I can tell (for the better, as I'm sure most would agree).
I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. Knowing about specific historical events seems not especially important to that. It's not as if Tuskegee was the only event of this kind. If my parents, friends, family, neighbors all say don't trust X, I probably won't trust X! That's a lot of people! I don't need to know one of the many reasons I shouldn't trust X is because of Y.
That's good and fine, just for some reason there has (for quite a while) been a real mythology about Tuskagee being this really salient cause... and it turns out almost no-one who is vaccine hesistant directly cares about it.
My guess is that it's easier to tell an upper middle class white person "black people are suspicious of the medical establishment because of things like Tuskegee" than it is to go into detail about what "things like Tuskegee" actually means.
What's the thinking (if one can even call it that)? There's a conspiracy to secretly give black people a different vaccine to those safely received by >100 million white americans?
Black vaccine hesitancy is just as nutty as white vaccine hesitancy, and declaring "things *like Tuskgee" is just a way of rationalising the nuttiness of a politically protected group.
Bingo.
What is the explanatory value of it's "nutty?" Even if you choose to just accept that a certain percentage of people are going to have nutty beliefs, then what explains the relative distribution of nuttiness across different groups?
Er...that they're different? Why would it be logical to start out thinking different groups of people think the same about everything?
This was my thinking as well. I can't name other similar experiments off the top of my head, but I have heard of them and they influence my thinking on whether the government might try to experiment on people again. The obvious conclusion is that we cannot rule it out, because it's happened multiple times. If someone asked me on a survey if I've heard of [name of experiment] I might not know that name or the experiment specifically, but the idea of government experimentation is still floating around in my head.
[After looking it up] - Oh goody, there were dozens of experiments on US citizens without their knowledge or consent! This is the kind of stuff that really bolsters confidence in your government, though not all of these were related to government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
“Doctors treat black patients worse on some axis” (usually either “they don’t listen/trust black patients” or “they don’t treat black patient pain effectively”) was a plot point in multiple major network shows I’ve seen in the last year. So there is a definite message being pushed that black patients should find doctors untrustworthy, often in the same media outlets lamenting vaccine hesitancy.
In interviews of vaccine hesitant minorities, I’ve read multiple mentions of concerns about being experimented on (there is a conspiracy theory that the J&J vaccine was being pushed in majority black areas because it was less effective, and the fact that this vaccine was at one point pulled for side effects “proved” that there was an intention to use a riskier or more experimental drug on black people). I think this is a cultural meme at this point that may very well trace to Tuskegee originally, while a lot of people aren’t familiar with the actual origin.
Eh...it's not that much more than they already get, I think. For example, if you listen to media directed at black audiences, one thing that stands out is how much of the advertisement is from hucksters. Shady lawyers, exploitive financial offers, get-rich-quick schemes, payday loans, the whole nine yards. It's kind of horrifying, the vultures that circle around this community. and these are just those that can advertise legally.
So it would not surprise me if it were simultaneously true that (1) blacks trust doctors less than whites, but also (1) blacks trust doctors more than random ordinary people. Basically given their experience I wouldn't find it surprising if blacks trust *almost everybody* less than whites do.
Black Lives Matter isn't training black people to distrust the government - it grows out of that distrust. This gets the direction of the causality wrong.
How many people do you know personally who are part of that movement? I'm guessing zero. It's easy and fun to make people you don't know and disagree with into villains - we used to do the same thing with the Tea Parties - but you're usually going to get them wrong, they way you are here.
Of course, it's also easy and fun to make people you don't know and don't like into evil boogiemen, so feel free. I obviously don't expect to persuade you, but I do feel obligated to at least show up and tell you that you're wrong.
Are we certain that it's racial discrimination as opposed to socioeconomic discrimination? There could be some Simpson's paradox here were poor/stupid people are more likely to be dismissed, and that black people tend to be more poor/stupid than white people. That could result in this data, even if the causal factors are different.
We're definitely not *certain* that it's racial discrimination as *opposed* to socioeconomic discrimination. But it's quite plausible that racial discrimination is a part of it, *as well as* socioeconomic discrimination (and perhaps more relevantly, educational attainment discrimination).
There is more medical distrust among Black Americans. A useful explanation for this that comes up in the literature a lot is that Black Americans persistently face discrimination from medical providers relative to other racial groups.
It is also the case that there is a recent, as within the living memory of, examples of profound mistreatment of Blacks by medical providers symbolized by the most famous example of Tuskegee, that can have an impact simply by creating distrust that spreads through social networks even if individual actors don't understand the particulars of cases that prompted that distrust.
And, of course, distrust in medical providers is one of the on-the-table explanations for vaccine hesitancy in that group. A study showing that Blacks don't know the details of Tuskegee all that well or that such knowledge doesn't correlate with hesitancy doesn't really speak to that hypothesis.
What I'd further add is that knowing the details of Tuskegee is a sign of education and educational status is something that is positively correlated with getting vaccinated.
Except anti-vaxxers are *specifically* pointing to Tuskegee as a cause, and this is absolutely incorrect.
"I'm not sure that the lack of a tuskegee link means much. If authority figures do a lot of bad stuff to a group, that group is going to, pretty quick, learn not to trust authority figures. "
By that standard, Japanese-Americans must be among the most unvaccinated people of all, and Blacks must be voting for *intensely* anti-establishment candidates in Democratic primaries. And yet...
The real answer as to why Black people are less likely to get vaccinated is simply their lower average IQs (the IQ gap is also found within the GOP, judging from heavily Republican heavily college educated counties being much more heavily vaccinated than similarly Republican non-college-educated counties). The real question is why IQ is so important in propensity to get vaccinated in America and not, say, Brazil or Cambodia (or is it... I haven't actually looked at the Brazilian numbers by race, it's just that the % desiring to be vaccinated there seems to be almost universally high).
So far as vaccination is concerned, I think poverty (precarious jobs, lack of access to information, lack of mobility) is enough to explain a lot.
I don't really think my claim does imply that Japanese-Americans would be less trustworthy of the government, or less vaccinated. I don't think that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans than Black Americans. Japanese Americans were briefly confined to concentration camps during a war with the place they came from; later they were released and paid compensation. Black Americans were enslaved for hundreds of years, following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years. And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally. And they never got compensation! I really don't see how you can look at that pattern of facts and say that authority figures have done worse to Japanese Americans.
I also don't really see that it's necessary that distrust of authority figures implies a willingness to vote for anti-establishment candidates. There's no guarantee, after all, that the anti-establishment candidate would be more trustworthy once they were in power. If trust is your primary concern, I would expect you to vote for someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates.
I don't really want to debate the IQ claim.
Slavery ended more than 150 years ago; it has no relevance for the present except where Blacks prefer to live. Meanwhile, there are still Japanese people alive who experienced internment. Also, it was the Federal government which forced desegregation on the South. Major events closer to the present should have more relevance than those of the distant past.
"someone as much like yourself as possible -- which for many Black Americans is most definitely not the anti-establishment candidates."
Hillary Clinton is not someone much more similar to the typical Black American than Bernie Sanders. And yet...
>following which they were violently institutionally and legally oppressed for about a hundred more years
Segregation is not oppression. Is it "oppression" that we have separate countries where people who aren't citizens don't get to freely move around here and have equal rights etc?
And I'm sure you'll bring up "lynchings", which really just refers to 'execution by public hanging at the hands of a mob' and doesn't inherently have anything to do with race. Black people were lynched....and so were white people. And in fact the black/white lynching ratio was LOWER than the black/white incarceration ratio today. So either lynch mobs were less racist than today's criminal justice system, or black people commit less crime during a period where you say they were "oppressed" which contradicts the liberal narrative on the causes of crime disparities.
>And today they are I would say mildly institutionally oppressed, though not legally
Institutionally oppressed? You mean like elite universities engaging in overt and perfectly LEGAL racial discrimination to the benefit of black americans?
>And they never got compensation!
Compensation for what? From whom? Nobody alive is benefitting from slavery, and the eocnomics of american slavery makes it questionable that anybody (other than slave traders) actually did. Plantation owners were often wealthy, but the ROI for slavery has been demonstrated to be not significantly above the general RIO of the economy at the time, but these farmers weren't privy to modern accounting methods. Slavery retarded economic growth (because it diverted funds away from actually productive investments like factories and railroads etc) plus the civil war and its long-term impacts devastated the southern economy.
And what happened to American slaves? Well, they were slaves in America instead of being slaves in Africa or Arabia (where the men would most likely have been castrated and there would be no underclass of resentful slave descendants). I think getting to live in America is more than adequate compensation.
As for segregation, this is nothing to compensate for. Black economic equality was higher and increasing during segregation, there was ah igher employment rate and higher business ownership rate. Plus lower rates of single parenthood etc. These things all got worse after segregation ended, so cannot possibly we attributed to it.
"Black economic equality was higher and increasing during segregation"
This is nonsense BTW.
I think the issue here is more of a tribal framing bias for an anti-vax stance. The red staters are anti-vax because of their own well earned stupidity and their own immoral politicians leading them astray. They deserve their fate. However my tribe's anti-vax stance is due to them being abused by society and they have little agency in their own decisions, which incidentally are in no small part caused by the previous and current systemic racism by red-staters. It's all a little too convenient.
Once you start seeing this framing bias it cannot be unseen. It's very common in the elite media.
Is your preception of black Americans that they are, as a group, more distrustful of authority in general than the mean?
I don't know that I've seen a distrust of authority in general. Of people currently in authority in the United States, I'd say I've seen it. I'm not sure if it's moreso than the mean, because I'm not sure what the mean is. Black distrust of US authority figures definitely seems higher than my social circle but my social circle's mean is probably different from the general population mean.
An alternative hypothesis is that Vaccine hesitancy in the aggregate is driven more by apathy than a firm ideological opposition to being vaccinated.
This is an underrated point. Getting vaxxed twice is a nontrivial inconvenience (and it genuinely puts a lot of people under the weather for a couple days).
There are probably a lot of people who just can’t be bothered, and honestly for the vast majority of otherwise healthy people, it’s quite possibly NOT worth it, on an individual level, to get vaccinated.
For that group, maybe “mumble mumble something about Tuskegee or freedom or whatever” is easier to personally justify than “meh, I’m lazy”. There are some true believer anti-vaxxers out there, but I’m not sure they represent the median unvaxxed person.
I respect Heckman but he is a good example of someone who grabbed hold of an idea early on and held on tenaciously in the face of alternative explanations. He has a paper out earlier this year showing that Denmark has no higher educational mobility than the United States despite vastly great socioeconomic equality and lower poverty. He spends a great deal of time explaining the various ways that family effects might influence educational mobility, without once mentioning genes or heritability - because genetic influence cuts against his narrative of the supremacy of early environmental influence. I always find it a little frustrating.
Why is that frustrating? Despite what a lot of commenters here seem to think, most people accept as common sense that some people are "naturally" smarter than others, ie that intelligence has a strong heritable component.* That kind of "natural" inequality among individuals isn't a problem policymakers could or should fix, any more than we as a society need to fix the fact that some individuals are more beautiful or more athletic than others. Those are cosmic unfairnesses, not injustices. The fact that some large groups of people are significantly less likely to succeed academically than other large groups points to an injustice, one that has to be tackled by addressing environmental variables.
I think it's possible that someone like Heckman is underestimating more neutral cultural influences on educational outcomes - for example, a very intelligent child from a family with a traditional business they're expected to inherit might be less likely to achieve in school than a similarly intelligent child of two professors. But he's right not to focus on genetic influence, because there's really nothing to be done about it.
*You can accept that intelligence is largely heritable and still understand that there is no such thing as inherent racial or socioeconomic differences in intelligence.
I think you should read the paper. When you specifically are asking, in a research paper, why children so resemble their parents in educational outcomes, and you have a whole section devoted to explaining what "family effects" might be, but don't once consider genetic heritage... it's unhelpful. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28543
I read the paper. I agree that Heckman brings up the specter of "family effects" without taking the time to dig into what he really means. But the observations he lays out don't require an investigation into "family effects" to make sense.
It's important to keep in mind that:
1) Not everyone seeks social mobility, since people adapt to and tend to feel most comfortable in the environments they were raised in. This is a practical, emotional reality that has nothing to do with intelligence. Even in a society with perfect equality of opportunity, you would not expect to see people moving freely between neighborhoods and subcultures. (Think of the upper middle class Americans you know - are they all striving as hard as they can to become multimillionaires, or are they content working jobs their parents can tell their friends about? Those same people may moan about how America is so much worse than Canada or Sweden, but do they pack up and move?)
2) An overall increase in educational attainment in Denmark, coupled with the expansion of the welfare state, means that people looking to achieve social mobility through education would see diminishing returns on their efforts after the late 20th century. Heckman's graphs help show that whatever social mobility exists is mostly a middle-class phenomenon - poor people tend to stay poor, and rich people tend to stay rich, because
3) Any class system is designed to prevent mobility - it functions by keeping a small, stable group at the top, with some modest ladder climbing in the middle. Just because Heckman can't clearly see the mechanisms blocking mobility doesn't mean they aren't there. There's a glimpse of this when he points out that schools in wealthier areas mysteriously tend to have better teachers.
I think people get really turned around when they make a series of linked assumptions: that measures like cognitive tests and grades can capture population-wide differences in intelligence, that people who obtain more schooling are more intelligent, and that because people with higher-paying jobs tend to have higher educational attainment, they must also be smarter.
You need to work instead from the realization that while inherited intelligence differences among individuals are real, these differences don’t map on to large populations. And while intelligence tends to be an advantage in basically all contexts, it’s an incredibly weak predictor of any specific life outcome.
Cooper's take on Greenwald is pretty bad. He writes "Greenwald is treating the revelation of new information as proof that people were lying, when in fact these journalists were just reporting what was available to them at the time. He pulled this same childishly dishonest trick with the publication of the D.C. medical examiner's report on Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. 'Watch how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies,' he writes of a CNN segment with Erin Burnett and Don Lemon from the day of the assault."
But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically. The fact that Cooper can't make this distinction reflects very poorly on his writing and critical thinking skills. It is possible to aggressively spread lies through indifference to the truth without concsiously lying.
I'm reminded of Scott's post about whether unintentionally saying something which makes your partner sad is "abusive". I have no idea which definition of the word "lying" would cover the scenario "reporting something which, as best they can tell, is in fact true, although they readily believe it to be true in part because of their own biases". That's not lying, that's just being wrong.
I think the intended point was that "spreading lies" does not require "lying". If A invents a lie, L, and tells it to B, and B believes it and repeats it to C, then B is helping to spread L, which is a lie, even though B is not lying.
Kind of like saying "the Internet helps spread lies". The Internet can't lie; it's just infrastructure. But the Internet helps spread all information, including lies.
Sure, but first: is there an 'A' in this situation? Did some malicious actor make up a lie that the CNN reporters then picked up? I would have thought any inaccuracies would simply be biased assumptions all the way down, I don't think we need to posit a willful liar in this process.
And second: the Greenwald quote given above is "how easily and often and aggressively and readily they just spread lies". That doesn't read like he's just saying the CNN reports passively echoed lies; he's assigning very direct moral blame to the reporters. The "just" in "just spread lies", in particular, is a phrasing that evokes the idea of bald-faced, inexcusable lying; to "readily just spread lies" carries very different connotations from "inadvertently signal-boosting lies" or something of the kind.
Honestly, it feels a bit like a motte-and-bailey to me. Greenwald plays on the ambiguity of "spread lies" so that, if called out, he (or defenders of his) can fall back to the motte that he's just saying the CNN reporters are reporting fraudulent claims in good faith, though they should exercise more diligence in fact-checking; when the bailey is the assumption that they are "often" "aggressively" "just" plain *lying* themselves.
In between deliberately lying and innocently repeating a lie, there is the very common case where someone believes a falsehood on inadequate grounds because it fits what he wants to believe. In the case of a reporter, part of whose job is supposed to be providing information to people, acting that way is irresponsible even if not as bad as a deliberate lie.
To me, the quote sounds consistent with an accusation of "mere" reckless disregard for truth, rather than intentional fabrication.
Note: I know nothing about this debate other than what's in the comments here.
Greenwald is making the very reasonable point that reporters should check sources, confirm information, and fact check prior to publicizing information. He's harped on reporters acting as pass throughs for information instead of journalists many times, and it's a regular point on his Substack.
What value does a CNN reporter mindlessly sharing an MSNBC reporter's unsourced story provide to society? Sharing by a reporter implies the story is true, despite the second reporter having no better knowledge of it than a random person.
Of course, in defiance of his own, "reasonable point," Greenwald completely neglects to do his own due diligence.
You are questioning whether it is a reasonable point that journalists should do journalism? Is fact-checking a passé relic of the past? Greenwald is reporting a comprehensive report that interviewed a ton of people. It's not the same as just parroting some assertion some CIA stooge or even some other journalist made.
Also, if B doesn't even bother to figure out whether L is true or false but just accepts it at face value because it's convenient in their argument with C, while not technically lying they are still bullshitting, in Harry Frankfurt's sense.
If you say "X is certainly true", without knowing it, that is lying; it doesn't even matter if X turns out to be true, you were lying still.
> "reporting something which, as best they can tell, is in fact true, although they readily believe it to be true in part because of their own biases"
1. Were they "reporting", or were they propagandizing a favoured narrative to get views?
2. Was it really "as best they could tell"?
3. Isn't it their job to uncover lies, and so be more cautious before "reporting"? At the time, they were making a big deal out of "fact checking".
I think we all know the answers, and the case for calling this "spreading lies" isn't so flimsy.
This is a good point.
And the valid criticism of CNN et al is surely that they accept and repeat things that are too flattering to their view of the world far too easily and far too often without interrogating them, not that they are willfully lying (sure there is some of that too). Like think Nick Sandmann, or Jussie Smollett, or how the shooter in Colorado a few months back was a white male until he was an Arab, and so forth. When everything is about "the narrative" you end up spreading a lot of "too good to check" stories (also c.f. Alleged-Covid-Medicine-That-Should-Not-Be-Named and horses - I'm actually blanking on the name of the medicine right now and I think it's funnier that way so shan't look it up to correct).
I think if you say someone is "aggressively and readily spread[ing] lies" it's reasonable to assume that you're intentionally leading your readers to assume they were deliberately lying, unless you specify that you don't think it was deliberate. Greenwald's "not technically lying" here isn't really any better than CNN's "not technically lying;" either way they're either deliberately or recklessly leading their audience to a false conclusion.
I would describe much of the coverage of Nick Sandman et al. as "aggressively and readily spreading lies", and would defend such a description of it. If you say something as if it is true beyond doubt, and you could easily verify/investigate it but choose not to (instead, leaving the actual journalistic work to Robby Soave), and instead just trust your "primary/original witness" (who is presumptively the one lying), then yeah, I think you are "spreading lies". I don't want to debate pedantry but I think there is a real difference between "willfully lie" and "spread lies" and the distinction exists to cover stuff like useful idiots repeated stuff that is false.
Yes, this. Greenwald’s argument is that these outlets are spreading falsehoods, maybe not necessarily knowingly, but with a reckless disregard for their actually veracity. A recklessness (or laziness?) that they would not apply for stories that didn’t flatter their preferred narrative. Publishing something that is “too good to verify” is, maybe not exactly “willfully lie”, but it’s a lot closer to “lying” than “responsible journalism”.
Greenwald is actually very clear about this so I don't think this is an issue. He consistently hammers the same point about spreading lies by accepting assertions without fact-checking.
Greenwald is really aggressive about this stuff but I think his general points only make sense if you have the background the media is claiming they're trustworthy truth tellers who you can offload some verification work onto. Outside of that context Cooper's argument makes sense. The issue is I do think that context is there.
"But it is perfectly clear from this quote that Greenwald accused them of aggressively and readily spreading lies, not of "consciously lying." In other words, running with an convenient narrative that they couldn't be bothered to interrogate critically."
Funnily enough I think this is exactly what Greenwald did. His 'convenient narrative' is that the media lies to hurt trump, and so applied it here when (as Cooper shows) it isn't true.
Meanwhile Bill Barr said at the time, with a bit of lawyerly language, that he ordered it.
So was Greenwald lying when he spread misinformation about a potential lie that turned out to be true. It's lie-ception. Lies all the way down...
How dangerous is Semaglutide? Is it a good candidate for use as a nootropic?
I'd first worry about how you're going to pay for it. It's $700/injection in the US.
A sufficiently good nootropic can pay for itself. But it's probably not that good.
don’t see at all why it would be better than nicotine or addys or w/e, and presumably a lot worse
I guess it doesn't matter so much where the rain in Spain falls if you've got sprinklers.
PSA: Michaël Trazzi created a version of the "rationalist dating/friending" site reciprocity.io for Twitter. It's called "Twinder".
- pick mutuals to chat with
- they DM you if there's a match
http://twinder.me/
https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi/status/1438533888540766210
That's great, thanks for letting me know.
(is "a version of Reciprocity for Twitter" his wording or yours?)
Oh, it's my own wording, I guess I should have been clear about that. I don't know if he even knows about reciprocity.io.
So many variants of the swiping model. Somebody needs to teach a neural net how to matchmake. There must be somebdy around who has the technical ability and also the trustworthiness to be handling corpora of sensitive data.
Then write a paper once it surpasses the benchmark of neo-trad adj twitter.
Maybe the ability of human beings to read the nonverbals in other humans' actual presence is still way beyond what computers can tell from the marks we make in their world. See the way humans can gravitate in a crowded room towards others that they have something in common with. Hendrix's models for romantic attraction in 'Getting the love you want' might also be relevant. Almost all those nonverbals are out of range for computer models.
4. The write up doesn't convince me. I think intergenerational transmission of general medical hesitancy is possible, even if the original source is forgotten.
That said, I do think Tuskegee is a convenient way to rationalize different reactions to the same behavior by blacks and by deplorables.
Spike Lee once said on Bill Maher's show, not long after Katrina, that he thought the federal government had intentionally blown up New Orleans's dykes. When he was asked why he thought that, he said "the Tuskegee experiment."
It's also quite possible that "Tuskegee" is really being used as shorthand for a general feeling of disrespect from doctors, and experience with them lying to you, whether or not you're aware of a very famous institutionalized case of doctors disrespecting and lying to black people.
Perhaps. I think that our tendency to over apply racial explanations often leads us astray. My speculative theory is that blacks share similar levels of mistrust of authority as poor whites, though for different reasons. This leads to similar hesitancy to trust government mandated or promoted vaccines.
The black jeopardy SNL skit w/ Tom Hanks gets at this shared mistrust of authority: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7VaXlMvAvk
Maybe not even that different reasons - doctors disrespect and lie to lots of people.
Underrated point. Like when we talk about mistrust of authority, obviously it's bad (on some object level) that the authorities aren't perfectly trustworthy and perfectly trusted. But is it remotely clear that given the authorities we have, that they are trusted too little? (Maybe, idk).
Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden (or pick your favorite boogeyman from the opposite tribe) almost everyone has plenty of reason not to trust government leaders. Really good reasons, in fact.
Definitely underrated point. I hear tons of people of all races complain that their doctors don’t listen to them, are too quick to ascribe their complicated issues to simple causes (you’re fat / you’re old / you’re menopausal), don’t give them the meds or treatment they want, are generally dismissive or disrespectful, etc. etc. Sometimes I think they have a good point, sometimes they are probably overreacting. Of course, when white people do this, they often just get called “Karens”.
anyone with a hot take on why African Americans have low vax rates need to account for the fact that the one ethnic group with even less reason to trust the American government, Native Americans, have one of the highest vax rates: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/native-americans-highest-covid-vaccination-rate-us/
the boring cold take is to simply point at health care access as probably being the most important difference
In May 2020 the Navajo Nation had the highest Covid infection rate among US states (even though it is not a state it is comparably sized.) Lack of infrastructure such as running water in some places made pandemic hygiene really difficult. Covid hit Native communities very hard for reasons that are downstream of racism/colonization, but are physical and practical - lack of water, shared housing makes isolation difficult, etc. I think there was very little emotional place to say “we can beat this with what we have, we don’t need a vaccine.”
Health care access may be different as well - but IHS is famously overburdened. Also, cultural attitudes to the elderly may be different. Some people who were of the few remaining living links to old ways of life died from Covid and that represents profound loss for numerically small cultural groups which have undergone tremendous change. I think the context is different for many African American individuals and communities.
Health care access may also play a role.
Native Americans, apart from their history of awful treatment by the US government, also have a history of being annihilated on an apocalyptic level by infectious disease. Historical memory cuts both ways in their case.
Early in the pandemic, I saw an exchange between two tribal members on social media. One claimed that traditional medicine was all you needed to ward off disease, but a second rebutted that traditional medicine wasn't enough to save their great-great grandparents from smallpox, closing with "...unless you think you know our traditions better than they did?"
So you might have a piece of it here.
Access? You are perhaps not aware that vaccines were preferentially distributed to neighborhoods with higher percentages of minorities? There were many reports of whites only getting appointments in minority neighborhoods, then showing up to the local equivalent of CVS and finding mostly white people in line. That is a little hard to ascribe to access when people are not willing to get vaccines right in their neighborhood.
Part of the problem was people not being able to schedule time off work for appointments and/or afraid of losing their jobs if they were knocked out for a day by side effects of the vaccine.
I can believe that, although I don't know how much of an impact it has. It seems that employers were/are more keen to require vaccines than the other way around.
The side effects I could see being a driving force too. I have known some people who had really bad side effects, basically a moderate case of COVID, from getting vaxxed, so I wouldn't be surprised if people who already had the disease would be disinclined to get vaxxed, on top of distrusting various authorities.
I think it very much depends on the employer whether they're going to push to have their employees vaxxed.
That's why I got the vaccine on Saturday morning. I'm skeptical that this could be a huge problem for many people.
There are people whose jobs require them to be on call. They may not know their schedule a week in advance.
You're skeptical that "many people" work jobs where they often don't get 2 days off in a row? Are you not in the US? Here it's very common for low wage workers to only get days off one at a time. And that's not even considering the fact that many of those people work more than 1 job, or have to be able to cover child care on their days off so their partners can work.
Maybe he's skeptical that there are many people who haven't gotten 2 days off in a row any time in the last 6 months.
One out of ten people are unbanked, but when we talked about that here a couple of months ago, people had trouble believing that someone could operate in the modern world without a bank account. This board skews white and affluent, and it's hard for us to imagine the lives of people who aren't like us.
My own parents got their vaccinations on a reservation, so that's not a difference in favor of African Americans... and there are no IHS clinics in the ghetto, last time I checked
Is the ghetto you are referring to any specific ghetto, or just ghettos in general? It is a bit hard to check up on your claim when you are so vague. IHS clinics are also not the only place to get vaccines, depending on where you are; that sort of thing varies a lot by state and county.
I don't really think you understand what I'm saying here and I don't feel like walking you through it. Peace!
I think I understand your point: it's easier to get the vaccine on a reservation than a ghetto. Is that right?
If so, I don't think you've made a good argument for that position.
In the Tuskegee study, the scientists did not give the black men safe and effective treatment, thereby prolonging their suffering. Why would knowing about that cause someone to be more in favor of the scientific establishment preventing access to a claimed treatment?
You're assuming that people know what actually happened. Lots of people think the men were deliberately infected.
Yeah Tuskagee mythology is strange. The most common form of the story (using it to blame govt for vaccine hesistancy among Black people) appears to get a bunch of facts wrong!
I think the real winner from the Violent Language list is "picnic". Apparently some terrible people used to picnic during horrible acts of racial violence, so now we should all say "outdoor eating". I guess we're lucky the rule isn't that decent people should no longer eat outdoors, which would be an equally valid conclusion to draw from the example.
Yeah that one stood out so much that, I went to check that one on Wikipedia, and it does get a mention in the etymology section:
> Black American communities have long believed there to be a link between the word picnic and lynching parties. This false etymology claims that the term picnic referred to the N-word and the "picking" of a target to lynch. Scholars argue that this myth persists due to a hint of truth; white Americans frequently ate and picnicked at lynchings. Some white Americans referred to lynchings as "barbecues.
So this is definitely A Thing, rather than just being some 'woke-era one-upmanship'. But I imagine most here would rather people focused on correcting the false etymology rather than eternally propagating it by banning the word.
I'm surprise to see this, given that Freaknik was named after picnicking.
Let's not get into habit of proclaiming "A Thing" based on unsourced wiki reference.
When some different horrible people shall "outdoor eat" during some racial violence, we shall retire "outdoor eating" too.
re: 34
(I'm not trying to make a point or an argument, I'm genuinely curious here)
Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier.
Also, if this data is meaningful, in what mechanism can the Flynn effect be impacting IQ if its not measurable as environmental?
For your second question, it is always important to remember that Flynn himself did not doubt the findings of the kinship studies and believed firmly that IQ was strongly heritable. His book Does Your Family Make You Smarter? is an attempt to find as much variance explainable by family effects as possible, but it's always framed in the shadow of the kinship studies - the conclusion starts by explicitly accepting their conclusions.
For the first question, think of someone with a particular genetic potential, then think of various environmental factors that limit that potential. Any given person's poor performance in a nutritionally deprived and intellectually unstimulating environment might be the produce of environment in that context, but this does not mean that there is no underlying cognitive tendency to be intelligent or unintelligent. It simply means that environmental confounds might be swamping the potential. The question is to what degree modern humans are living in environments that move most of us towards our genetic potential. If the people who claim the Flynn effect is slowing or stopped are correct, then perhaps we're nearing the limits of what an enriched environment can provide. But who knows?
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2020/03/intelligence-and-pisa-timss-etc-at-the-individual-level/
Is it possible to try to make the logical jumps.
PISA strongly correlates with IQ.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/28450521-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/28450521-en
The PISA differences between countries are implausibly large to be explained by genetics. "In Kosovo, Morocco and the Philippines, even the highest-performing students scored only around the OECD average. In these countries/economies, the 95th percentile of the reading distribution was close to the average score across OECD countries".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5754247/
The "genetic" effects are nearly completely gene-environment?
If true I believe the framing of the % claimed genetic is misleading.
The framing of "percent variance explained by genes" is always within a given nation, basically always a developed one, and often only studies middle class and up for practical reasons - poor families usually aren't eligible to adopt children.
That does still provide a lot of useful information about the effect of different parenting styles and different schooling experiences, but you're right that when looking at countries where malnutrition or heavy metal poisoning are relatively common then environmental effects can be expected to be much than they are in the West
This would seem to imply that the environmental factor that caused the Flynn effect varied over time but does not vary in this sample. One scenario in which this would happen is if some infectious disease was making people stupid pre-Flynn but that disease has now been eradicated; another is if some lack of nutrients was causing stupidity but now everyone has enough nutrients; a third is if schools have uniformly become better at training for IQ tests or just that kids have started to be uniformly forced into going to school.
Perhaps I mis-remember, but I thought the Flynn effect was primarily observed in the abstract/pattern-based reasoning sections of the test, not so much in the natural language parts (the Raven's Matrices). This led to the theory that the effect was created by the rapidly increasing number of tasks in modern life that require abstract symbolic reasoning, i.e. machines with hidden internal state that must be manipulated by poking icons of various kinds in different orders. If you practice something you get better at it and the average farmer in 1920 would not need to identify patterns in sequences of symbols very often, but someone who has to work with computers or even a modern electric oven does.
I'm not sure if you're saying the Flynn Effect has been primarily observed in Raven's, or that progressive matrices fall under "natural language" — but either way that's wrong, AFAIK.
The former. My editing was bad, that's all.
Talking about PISA, Ireland tends to do better on reading than on maths, and girls do better/reading while boys do better/maths. And a lot of the difference between our highest and lowest scoring students is down to socio-economic status?
https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?primaryCountry=IRL&treshold=10&topic=PI
"Ireland
Student performance (PISA 2018)
In reading literacy, the main topic of PISA 2018, 15-year-olds in Ireland score 518 points compared to an average of 487 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a statistically significant difference of 23 points (OECD average: 30 points higher for girls).
On average, 15-year-olds score 500 points in mathematics compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Boys perform better than girls with a non statistically significant difference of 6 points (OECD average: 5 points higher for boys).
In Ireland, the average performance in science of 15-year-olds is 496 points, compared to an average of 489 points in OECD countries. Girls perform better than boys with a non statistically significant difference of 1 points (OECD average: 2 points higher for girls).
Socio-economic status explains 11% of the variance in reading performance in Ireland (OECD average: 12%).
The average difference between advantaged and disadvantaged students in reading is 75 points, compared to an average of 89 in OECD countries. However, 13% of disadvantaged students are academically resilient (OECD average: 11%)."
I agree with the point about Raven's Matrices, I think we are generally weaker on mathematical ability so if you're scoring Irish intelligence on that, we will score lower. But what the heck do I know?
So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
If you are only testing kids in the US, then they do not have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the same house, but they do have a 'shared environment' of being raised in the US. There will be less variance in environment if you use a US-only sample than if you used an 'everywhere in the world' sample.
Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
Think about it this way: if two children have very similar upbringings: same school system, same culture, similarly loving and supportive parenting, etc., then environment will account for little of their variance in IQ, and you will decide that IQ is almost entirely heritable.
Now, compare those two children to one child who grew up in a poor third world country and was heavily malnourished throughout during infancy and early childhood and exposed to lots of lead and other pollutants, and another child with abusive parents who never sent them to school and locked them in a basement without books or toys most of their life and punished them whenever they asked questions or disobeyed orders. Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
So, to your question: the high-heritability results come from studies with homogenous environments. Before-and-after-wealth Ireland and Greece are much more different from each other than what we see in these studies, so we'd expect less heritability and more environmental impact there.
> Therefore, you will get a higher heritability rating if you use a US-only sample, than if you use a whole-world sample.
No, you'll get a different heritability rating. There is no theoretical reason to assume it will be higher.
(You can argue that the US environment is characterized by homogeneity in all relevant dimensions compared to the world, which would necessarily drive heritability up. But that's a very fact-specific claim; many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average. We used to do fashionable lobotomies.)
The US might have higher variance than other places, but it would be pretty nuts if the whole world had less variance than US alone. We know that there are places in the world with radical differences in nutrition, schooling, culture, etc.
>many places are characterized by a higher environmental variance than the world average.
Many places may have higher within-region variance than other places, but what we're talking about here is between-region variance, ie US vs Afghanistan vs Switzerland vs South Africa vs etc. Hard to imagine that within-region variance of the US is greater than between-region variance across the board. Sure, it's a hypothesis you could make, but it so flies in the face of common sense that I think the burden of proof is heavily on the person making it, not the person eliding it.
Malnourishment is a really important thing to bring up. Shift to another trait that is basically entirely heritable: height. Have you ever heard the phrase "head and shoulders above the rest?" That dates back to pre-independence America, where your typical colonist was several inches taller than your typical native of England. It's generally thought to be due to Americans having far superior childhood nutrition. The principle is that you're never going to grow taller than your genes will allow. But a childhood filled with disease and hunger can keep you closer to Earth.
The same principle applied to intelligence explains pretty well most of the observations you bring up. Though nourishment might include the normal sort of teaching/stimulation of learning that good parents practice with their children.
Sure....but so what? Nobody denies the impact of malnourishment. It's just that malnourishment explains virtually NONE of the variance in these traits within the US because so very few people are malnourished. Heritability isn't impacted by every single environmental factor that could exist and impact a trait, it's impacted only by factors that actually exist and actually have an impact for a given population.
People who point to rural African IQ scores as evidence of 'biodiversity of IQ' absolutely elide the impact of malnourishment and other factors to make their argument, whether or not they directly reject it when challenged.
I' love to live in the world you do with regards to this topic, where everyone who discusses it is knowledgeable and honest. But I encounter lot of bad actors and bad pop-science out there on this one.
>So the big unaddressed caveat in every measure of heritability is that the number you get only applies to the population you tested, and populations sufficiently similar. This is because the notion of 'shared environment' is multi-layered, and directly affects the calculation.
It's not unaddressed at all. Most heritability studies specifically state 'heritability of X in the US' or wherever they're looking at. Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware that heritability estimates are BY DEFINITION specific to the time and place the participants are from.
Like, seriously, I cannot overstate this: This is absolutely, 100% known, appreciated and acknowledged by intelligence researchers.
> Suddenly, you're probably going to find that environment accounts for most of the variance in your sample, with heredity playing a distant second.
This is news only to those who are patently oblivious to the intelligence research literature. Nobody disputes this.
All that matters is the scope of applying the findings. So if we're interested in IQ differences within the US, focusing on increasing the availability of food or providing free parenting classes is not going to do very much at all because the heritability of IQ in the US is very high.
It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
>Everybody who is half-way knowledgeable about heritability studies is fully aware
Yes, which I'd estimate makes up about .01% of the people who *talk* about heritability studies.
Listen, I've talked to lots of people, including IN THIS COMMENT SECTION, who are very happy to point out a very-limited-US-only sample of IQ research showing high heritability of IQ, then say that proves that the IQ differences between whites and blacks in the US must be genetic, or the differences in IQ between white Americans and people in poor African villages must be genetic. This is not an aberration, this is the bailey where most of the non-expert discussion of this topic takes place.
That's why I said this is 'unaddressed' not 'unknown'. You'll notice Scott didn't address it here (nor did he need to, it's not central to this post). It's not addressed in most comment sections discussing these things. It's not addressed in most articles written about these things.
Yes, a journal article tells you what sample they used, and a savvy reader knows that you can only make limited generalizations beyond that sample. But that's not the level that the popular-media discussion of this topic is at, at all.
>It is vastly more accurate to use US heritability estimates for directing US policy. It's what we SHOULD be using. Having a representative 'whole world' IQ heritability study is only really useful for looking at IQ inequality on a global scale. It is totally useless for trying to reduce IQ inequality in the US, or any other trait we're interested in.
Cool beans.
I was answering a question about Ireland and Greece over long time periods of great social change.
I think 100% of your comment is you imagining that I said things I didn't? I didn't say researchers don't know this, I didn't say US samples shouldn't be used to direct US policy.
I think you might be in an 'arguments as soldiers' thing where you think I'm on a different 'side' from you and making the types of arguments that 'side' would make.
I'm only making the arguments I actually made.
It’s variance explained in current environment. Free public schooling combined with extensive programs to find gifted kids, libraries, the internet, and cities with all sorts of jobs and groups of people means smarter people can get trained and knowledge find their spots easily. Ireland in the 1800s did not have any of that, and had a lot of malnutrition, so that doesn’t apply.
Reckon it's the difference between moving a hungry person, deprived of essential nutrients, riddled with untreated diseases and worked close to death to a nice environment, and moving someone from a less nice to a nice environment.
The study and the Flynn effect are not in fact contradictory. Environment has a large influence on adult IQ, as demonstrated by the Flynn effect, but in which (non abusive) familly you were raised does not : what seems to count is the environment at the society level (food access, disease burden, schooling available) and not the type of parenting.
"Can someone explain to me how this can be reconciled with the huge disparities in IQ over time in countries like Ireland and Greece as they became wealthier."
The oft-quoted "Irish IQ is 90" result comes from Richard Lynn, who I have frequently criticised. He fudged together three tests, one done on adults and two done on school children in the 70s and took an average, then went off to tell the world that the rebellious Paddies were only rebels against the benevolent maternal British Empire because they were literally stupider than the loyal Unionists who in turn were less smart than the staunch mainlanders in Great Britain (er, I may be intruding some political commentary of my own here).
The important thing is that Lynn, in his books, didn't do any tests himself, he just scrabbled together results from all over the place. More recent national testing has not, so far as I know, been done but we do participate in PISA and have reasonably good scores there.
Luckily, somebody *has* done the work on those Irish schoolchildren IQ tests back in the 70s. Will you be astounded to hear that some of the children were from disadvantaged areas? Oh, and there's this little gem which I didn't know before:
https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/bitstream/10197/6437/1/%29._Chapter_3._Twenty_years_a_growing-_gains_in_the_intelligence_test_scores_of_Irish_children_over_two_decades.pdf
"In considering the results of the comparisons reported here, it is important to keep
in mind that the standardization sample included children from schools for the
mentally handicapped, while the two surveys did not. Mentally handicapped
children with IQ's below 70 account for approximately 2.7% of the population
(Gelder et al., 1983, p. 688). Some of these, particularly the mildly mentally
handicapped with IQs between 50 and 70 are educated in ordinary primary
schools. Less than 0.5% of the population have IQs below 60. Altogether,
therefore it may be assumed that about 1% of children in the population attend
special schools for the mentally handicapped or that, what Jack Tizard called, the
administrative prevalence of mental handicap is 1% (Tizard, 1964). Thus the
omission of children from special schools from the recent surveys may have
inflated the median gain in IQ points on the RSPM by the equivalent of about 1
percentile point or less than 1 IQ point. Conservatively we may therefore state
that the mean gain in IQ points on the RSPM has been approximately 9 IQ points
over the past 15-17 years: that is, the periods 1972-1987 and 1972-1989."
So some of the kids involved in the Great IQ Tests were mildly mentally handicapped. Do you think this maybe, possibly, could have contributed to "Irish IQ score is 90" and that conversely, giving IQ tests to kids which exclude the mildly mentally handicapped in recent times could see the increase to "Irish have normal 100 IQ" changes? This is only my own view, but I imagine it could be a contributory factor.
"Precisely what the national and international gains on the RSPM means is
open to a variety of interpretations. If the RSPM is measuring intelligence (g),
then clearly Irish children are making the gains that their international
contemporaries are. If the RSPM is measuring the development of new test
taking strategies, then these new strategies are being developed by Irish children
at the same rate as their international counterparts. Both of these conclusions are
particularly important in view of previous claims that Irish children were
intellectually inferior to children from other countries a position discussed and
criticized by Benson (1987). "
Exactly. The idea Irish had Uruguayan IQ levels in the 1970s is questionable to the extreme.
Two of my hot takes on the Flynn effect:
It's well established in psychology that IQ tests are not accurate outside of the community for whom the test was normed against. So when you give 10 year old Greeks an IQ test that is normed against 10 year old Greeks from 30 years ago and they tend to get more answers correct, does this mean they're smarter or does it mean that the questions have lost power to assess intelligence? This is not a question that we can really answer. All IQ tests do is rank you. There's no objective unit of intelligence, no milieinstein or whatever. What we need to know is if you got a time machine and brought the Greek kids from 30 years ago into the future, then normed an IQ test for the new batch of all 10 year olds, would the current 10 year olds still score higher? Your new test would not contain the same questions as the old one. So there's not really a way to know.
Second hot take. IQ tests include a lot of subtests for different strands of intelligence. Generally Verbal Comprehension, Visual Spatial, Fluid Reasoning, Working Memory, and Processing Speed. Four out of the five show basically no change between generations. Almost the entire Flynn effect is in Visual Spatial intelligence. That is conspicuous to me as the kind of intelligence you need to successfully drive a car. It's also the sort of intelligence that would be trained as kids ride around in cars and learn to make sense of the world zooming around them. And to a somewhat darker place, it's also the rare sort of thing that Darwinian selection would actually apply to, sometimes an entire family at a time.
I doubt there’s no way to do it, although probably there are pitfalls, but I think scores increasing is pretty proven by now
And is that really true? Ravens matrices tests don’t have sub tests. Have a hard time believing that the first three didn’t increase
Ok this is just wrong. There is a way to validate that you're measuring the same thing between two separate groups and that's measure invariance. There is internal structure to the patterns of answers on IQ tests, and that structure can be compared between cohorts to validate that the same construct is being measured. For example, if both groups demonstrate the same g-loadings on the same questions (i.e. they both agree on which questions are hard) and factor analysis shows that both groups have the same subfactor distributions, then you have a good argument that your test is measuring the same thing in both cohorts.
The Flynn effect is *not* measure invariant, which implies that it doesn't represent an increase in intelligence. There is some skill which is being learned, though I don't think anyone knows what it is - your idea about driving cars is a good candidate.
Heritability is a measure of the extent to which an observed variance is the result of genetic factors. That is to say, when you look at a group of people, what explains the differences between them? When you shift what groups of people you are looking at the answer can shift as well. People sometimes mistakenly read studies publishing on this question as stating to what extent X is genetic, but that's not what they're doing. Nutrition (for example) might explain differences in average height between two countries while explaining very little of the difference between height in one city in America.
I believe it should be "Sitzkrieg" and not "Sitzkreig". Except if there a second-level pun going on (with "Sitzkreis"), which seems unlikely to me.
*is
Sorry, my mistake.
On the AI media classification - it almost looks like the left-right political axis got mapped into a lower left-upper right axis in that graph. WSJ is still misplaced, but everything else looks more plausible.
On the IQ thing - do adoption agencies do a really good job of screening out adoptive families that live in places with high soil lead, or remnants of lead paint in the walls?
LOL no
I imagine those factors would correlate with income, and income would correlate with adoption rates.
I mean a negative correlation between lead and income.
Unless you live in one of those trendy redeveloped industrial areas.
Lead is really, really unlikely to be a factor here.
That's why I'm so surprised! Lead seems to me like it would be an environmental factor that is uncontrolled, and is said to explain some significant amount of variance in IQ in many other contexts. If it doesn't do so in the context of adoption, then this study must be measuring some conception of variance that is somewhat different from what I expect!
Adoption agencies do a good job of screening out certain bad family environments (criminals, people who couldn't provide basic necessities for the child(ren), active abusers). They do a fair job of following a basic checklist of things a house should and shouldn't have, for instance enough beds for the prospective adoptees, obvious hazards, etc. They definitely wouldn't pick up on soil lead, but they would usually pick up on problems with the drinking water. I don't think they would catch anything related to lead paint unless it was specifically disclosed.
I'm curious where you think one might find high concentrations of metallic lead in the soil. How would it have gotten there?
I believe it's mainly tetraethyl lead, not reduced metallic lead. It got there from decades of burning leaded gasoline, so it is highest concentration in places that were urban neighborhoods in the period from 1930-1975 or so, though places that have had major redevelopment in recent years have often had extensive soil remediation to remove it.
However, as I dig into this, I'm learning that there's actually very little documentation of which locations do or don't have substantial lead contamination. I can find some detailed maps of lead concentration in properties in a small square mile region, or I can find national maps of estimated risk of high lead concentration based on proxies like building age.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=d45c8610b7364b8f931fdbb748d607c1
https://www.vox.com/a/lead-exposure-risk-map
Ah I see. So by "high" soil concentrations of lead you mean 400 parts per million. Oookay. It's a point of view, I guess.
I don’t understand why you are being so scornful of the idea that a toxic metal could be toxic at concentrations that would be low for some other substances.
Where I grew up, in the Lead Belt of Missouri, there were chat dumps. Big hills from the spoil of the lead mines. They sat in the area for decades. Bored locals would sled down them (not being particularly adventuresome, I never did). A few years ago, they were finally removed. Probably all through my region we had a few generations with low level lead poisoning.
What's funny, is that when I first visited home as they were coming down, I was shocked, and regretted never having climbed one. I know better, but I couldn't help it. Even now, thinking on it makes me sad.
https://dailyjournalonline.com/news/local/special-projects/sixty-images/sept-19-chat-piles/article_72ce9be6-55f4-5cd0-8a73-8d4c81581162.html
Er...you do realize that the spoil from a lead mine necessarily contains much less lead than the surrounding rock, right? That's *why* they throw it away. For that matter, it's lead *ore* you mine, not metallic lead, galena would be typical, and the chemical properties of lead ore are as different from those of metallic lead as, say, the properties of rust are from iron, or carbon dioxide from charcoal.
No. I don't know much about the topic. Mining isn't really a thing there anymore, and hasn't been in a long time. I guess it stands to reason that if they were *highly* dangerous they wouldn't have stayed up for so long. This is a better article that I found after I posted. It says kids from the area had elevated lead levels, so the EPA ordered them down. If it's not true it's too bad, the article captures how much a part of the regions landscape they were.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8132449
2. There was something of the sort in Spinrad's _Bug Jack Baron_-- I think the conspiracy was killing black children for (the rejuvenating effects of?) their glands.
4. I believe without evidence that greater medical neglect and incompetence would be enough to explain black people tending not to trust the vaccines without needing to bring in older history. I'm not sure if there's been research.
For that matter, I don't know whether white people who've had bad experiences with the medical system are less likely to trust the vaccines.
Anecdotally, my cousin who was a victim of some bad medical malpractice is not vaccinated and is not a Trumpster.
It seems overly US focused. There are large variances between countries in the EU in vaccine uptake rates. UK very high without much coercion for example. In Italy they're forcing people out of the economy to make them take it: one step removed from just having the police tie them down and forcibly inject them. All white people though, more or less.
I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government. The vaccination programme is at this point a Rorschach test. If you're already pre-disposed to view government agencies as unfair, power-crazed, uninterested in your life and kinda irrational ... and I'd say black Americans are more likely to hold this view than whites with PhDs ... then you'll look at this situation and see an unfair power-grab by irrational people who don't care about your life. Conclusion: stay the hell away. If you're pre-disposed to see government agencies as an alliance of technocratic rationalists who deeply care about your life, make the best decisions uninfluenced by profit, then you'll see some triumph of government planning and the need for social cohesion, etc.
"I suspect it's far more related to general cultural attitudes about government."
Maybe, but comparing countries as opposed to comparing various groups inside a single country introduces massive political confounders.
Both Spain and the UK, which I believe rate lowest in the EU with regard to vaccine hesitancy, report low general trust in government. ( https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm ) But their health care agencies specifically are extremely well-regarded institutions.
France actually ranks slightly higher on the trust-in-government scale but it also had a big vaccine controversy in 2018 (number of mandatory vaccines for newborns went from 3 to 11) which may have primed the population for the Covid debate. It also has a media which tends to treat anti-vax views more leniently than in some other places. And its vaccine hesitancy is through the roof.
In Italy, the Five Star movement, a major political coalition, had been using vaccines as a proxy for civil liberties long before Covid. So, somewhat as above.
If we're going to look for the Tuskegee effect, perhaps it would be more useful to gauge the attitudes of racialised minorities relative to the general population in various other countries and then compare the results with the US.
I recall Luigi Zingales telling a very amusing anecdote on EconTalk regarding his amazement that Americans actually take what their government recommends seriously. The last line was to the effect of "In Italy if you do the opposite of what the government says, you are probably on the right track."
Re: 33. My brother keeps talking to me about that greenhouse plain. It looks quite uncanny on google maps. Does anyone know what is being grown there?
Mainly vegetables (especially tomatoes) for the EU market.
Where does the rain fall in a region like that?
The rain just falls on the greenhouse and gets directed away. In Holland, there are quite a few water basins next to greenhouses to store the water, to be used in watering. Like so: https://www.jokri.com/thumbs/600x600/uploads/bassin_dscn0314_1394698505.jpg
I'm sorry, the correct answer is that the rain falls mainly on the plain, this being Spain.
👏👏👏
@Aapje, in case you're not aware, "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" is a well known rhyme among native English speakers.
Ok, I thought it was a question about where the rain goes, given how much land is covered by glass.
Known but false. The rain in Spain falls mostly on the mountains.
As to why there is no Journal of Datasets, well, dataset papers exist and do get published in fields like machine learning and computer vision. In biology and medicine it seems less common.
BUT, the main reason is not a technicality of whether a journal exists or whether you get a line for your CV. The publishability is a red herring and not the ultimate reason.
The issue is that scientists genuinely give you more "informal reputation" for coming up with interesting results, hypotheses and solutions to problems. Collecting data is boring grunt work that isn't really all that impressive from a subjective point of view. There are exceptions like the ImageNet dataset with did help Fei-Fei Li become really famous and successful, but that's computer vision again.
It's similar with all the complaints about publication bias, the file drawer effect etc. and the idea that a Journal of Negative Results will improve upon this state of affairs. However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow. Just because there's a journal for negative results won't mean that it actually gets you true recognition. And in academia informal connections are everything.
There is a journal for datasets though, it's called Scientific Data and it's quite popular:
https://www.nature.com/sdata/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Data_(journal)
There's actually quite a lot of Data Journals, GigaScience (http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/) launched in 2012, and Nature (Scientific Data) and Elsevier (Data in Brief) followed with the same concept in 2014. Citations are a superficial metric, but at least provide a form of credit and they show people are using these datasets. Actually having something based on reusable data and software means you can place visualization tools on top of the underlying digital information and finally make papers more interactive. This is what GigaScience's new sister journal GigaByte is trying to do now https://youtu.be/ltlZ4HdJ1qY
This issue can also vary a lot by field. In astrophysics, and in some other physics fields, journals are starting to publish datasets as machine-readable tables. And when the data are too big to incorporate as a MRT, many groups are posting data for access online via dedicated servers, github, or through partnerships with government archives.
In materials science, dataset papers can be immensely popular. The Materials Project paper detailing the creation of a dataset of results from high throughput density functional theory calculations is the most cited paper of most of its authors. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4812323
Right, and taking it a step further, the problem at the root cause of many bad scientific papers is that academia is a reputation economy, not a market economy.
When I first heard about Whuffie and similar concepts I remember thinking, how novel, how cool. A world without money, who wouldn't find that appealing? Well ... I learned. Nowadays "reputation economy" as a term is falling out of use, and "social credit" is replacing it. The latter has far more dystopian overtones.
>However, the issue is not with whether there is a journal or not. The issue is that experts and scientists will learn your name and help your career if you find some interesting result that makes them go wow.
This kind attitude, of course, is a silly attitude. Coming up with a really good research design and collecting data correctly are the parts of the research process that test the skill of the scientists involved. It doesn't take much to download a data set (whether provided by a collaborator or online publication) and turn the crank, the scientist is the one who realizes what is needed to give an adequate answer and what questions can be asked from a given data set (if any).
The other issue is that a dataset publication still takes a lot of work beyond what it took to collect the data: the writeup itself is likely to be of a similar effort level to a typical publication and getting the data clean for all potential uses is often another paper's worth of effort. So you are using two paper's worth of effort to get a single paper that then allows competitors to pre-empt your other potential ideas.
Even if you are ideologically committed to open science, fast public data releases are competing with all your other time priorities, so it's likely to fall fairly far down the priority list even if you're not actively trying to hide it from other researchers.
The incentives are really bad around this. But there are two simple solutions: data releases with an agreed schedule as conditions of grant funding and data releases as condition of publication. Scientists really want grants and publications and will go through the effort of public data release if it's required to get them.
I work on a large research project and we consistently release our data within 3 months of collection because that's what we promised in our grant proposal. If those conditions weren't in there we would definitely release the data publicly, but I doubt we would be anywhere near as timely (a similar project in another country typically release their data 5 years after data collection).
Grant requirements are not a bad thing, but still feel an inadequate solution, like a stick that the wielder unsuccessfully insists is really a carrot (because one is tied to one end of it) while hitting the mule with it.
I think visionguy identified a correct problem in prevalent attitudes: while journals for data and open data publication requirements exist, they are going to be viewed as a hurdles to be passed (or gamed) with minimal effort as long as the underlying attitude itself doesn't change. And it won't, if inventing and running good data generating procedures (think of experiments, observational setups, identifying questions they can answer, any kind of such thing) is viewed less prestigious than / something that can be compensated by milking enough interesting results after one obtained one good source of data. I've been involved in a projects where I have felt a replaceable cog in an engine, and realized it is the design of the engine, which is quite difficult (and in those projects done by others), which should matter more as a scientific contribution.
I see those two solutions as complementary. You can signal and influence scientific values through the policies of institutions such as major funding agencies and journals.
To give contrasting examples. Political science has made major moves towards open science in its journal policies in the last decade (replication data is required for publication) and I've seen colleagues become much more open to these practices after being required to follow them. This contrasts with sociology where the journal editors explicitly state that they see no need for open science practices and most sociologists still see bothering to post data or replication files as a strange affectation.
Culture can be changed by convincing everyone that your preferred practices are the only legitimate way to do something and institutional rules are very effective at doing that.
Under point 15, the following is a poor conclusion.
"Plausibly SpaceX will still have to follow the rules of its host country, the US, so the big loser here will be China "
China will not be a loser. Tesla has significant assets within China, with the CCCP not distinguishing corporate fictions of Tesla and SpaceX. Additionally, China demonstrated anti-satellite capabilities in 2007, which lends itself to slightly more force more than a simply fist shake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
Starlink as anti-censorship technology will only work in peripheral nations.
Perhaps that's overly harsh on the internet though. We're posting here on Substack, after all.
Censorship was traditionally used by people in power to suppress speech by the citizens. Nowadays censorship is used by the citizens to suppress speech of the people in power (cf. Trump vs the amorphous mobs who hated him).
The internet did not magically eliminate all information control: after all the phrase "the internet" is overloaded to mean both a technical substrate of protocols and equipment, plus the general US libertarian culture that took hold in the early days and built the upper layers. China has the first but not the second. But it pretty massively moved the dial.
There is nothing even close to truly subversive on substack* (that has any serious amount of eyes on it!).
Re. Trump speech: Was it ever actually suppressed? I'd say it wasn't until he became threatening to the status quo re. Businesses Doin' Business, at which point he was exiled to the outer darkness n'er to return.
Substack is an company that exists to make money by catering to a clientele that likes the perception of being rebellions or counter culture; of being autre in some way even while not being anything but firmly establishment.
The REAL shit is either a ethnonationalist militia that is 50% FBI, or socialist militia that is 50% CIA.
>n'er to return
Citation needed.
source:<my hopes and dreams>
The internet absolutely was a pro-information-idea-sharing technology though, like you can just download any significant piece of information for free whether it be movies and tv or books or porn or science studies or leaked documents, so that’s a weird take. You can say anything you want on mainstream platforms and it takes years for the moderation team to figure out how to censor it quickly.
Also, China could fine or arrest its citizens for using Starlink (as Russia is planing to do). The equipment is fairly large and conspicuous during use even if you manage to smuggle it in (assuming China would ban sales of terminals if SpaceX refused to cave in), so there would be no real benefit to the Chinese would-be-users, just like Google's not caving in would give no real benefit to the Chinese users of Google search.
also more conspicuously Chinese citizens already have VPNs
Is that still true? My understanding is that the GFW got pretty good at stopping VPN usage in recent years, and the government ramped up arrests of people caught using them as a consequence.
They have cracked down some but plenty of them still work and they’re very important for for instance business use so they can’t totally nuke them. That said I’m not Chinese nor do I have any friends who live there so I could be wrong, but I’m pre sure it’s still widely available
I think the question is whether "widely available" in practice means that a million Chinese people use VPNs, or ten million, or a hundred million, or five hundred million. There's a lot of things that are in theory widely available, but not actually used by more than a small fraction of people.
I live in China and am posting this through a VPN, bought from a Chinese dealer, who I contact through Chinese social media (WeChat). I would rate VPN availability in China at about the same level as the availability of illegal drugs in the UK when I was growing up. Obviously not there on the supermarket shelves, but if you ask around, you can generally find some.
Someone above suggested that 15+% of the Chinese population might be using them - that's definitely not right. I'd be very surprised if it's as high as 1%. The vast majority of people here do not see any need to obtain uncensored internet. (The possible exception to this is porn, but there are lots of workarounds for that inside the GFW.) I've never heard of anyone being arrested just for using a VPN. I don't think that's worth anyone's trouble.
Hm. If you google china vpn use you get 15-30% from various websites (and uhh illega drug use is way above 1%, somewhere around 11-7% of brits smoked the leaf last year per survey and probably 13-14% USA)
Hard to smuggle, although in a place like China I could imagine underground replication of the hardware as the antennae are complex but not unique -- pretty easy to hide though, you just need an EM-transparent structure about the size of an average trashcan. (a plastic trashcan would probably work, actually)
Likely it will be in some countries not large enough to affect SpaceX.
It will become harder for government to cut off internet in random African countries and Foobaristans. But China/USA/EU will be able to censor whatever the want.
> said the same thing about the Internet
It is less anti censorship than some expected, but still has serious power here.
SpaceX *could* go into the business of providing rogue internet, but those countries can seek remediation through bodies like the UN for violation of their sovereignty.
Does SpaceX really want to go to war?
Ha ha yep. But among his other talents, Musk is a gifted salesman, and he knows exactly the community to which he's selling (stock if not Teslas and sat links). These are people who are *so* wired up to the complex world of technology that they are unusually dependent on the good-will of the big companies and big government that control its base and lifeblood. If the Internet tech companies to which they are so interconnected go titzup or get compromised in big ways or small -- e.g. because of some bobble in the financial markets, or a regulatory hissy-fit by a state actor -- they are uniquely vulnerable. Far more so than Joe Sixpack turning a wrench in a Caterpillar plant in Peoria, shopping weekly for staples in the local Piggly Wiggly, picking up a few eggs from a neighbor with hens, and whose connection to all the people he knows tends to revolve around a popular bar in town and conversations after church.
So along comes Musk to soothe their existential worries: not to worry! I have a technical solution to the inherent vulnerability of your situation. Vietnam will *not* be able to cut off your Internet, should you choose to visit or even live there. Plus we are building such bulletproof security that no conceivable hacking attempt that isn't based around quantum computing with a million qubits could succeed* -- here are some math-dense white papers proving that. And I will *only* comply with surveillance orders in your own jurisdiction if they're signed by an actual live sworn-in judge, or if I feel like it because it would not be a good idea to annoy the people who control my access to the bond market. Don't you feel much better? And they do.
------------
* Oblig xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/
Also re concerns about Kessler syndrome, the Starlink satellites are relatively low earth orbit at 550 kilometers, where atmospheric drag will naturally decay their orbits in several years. IDK how much time debris would persist if you blew them up, but it's much less of a concern than say a GPS satellite (20,200 km altitude)
At 550 kilometers, I think it would only be a couple years.
I feel like I should also add that Kessler Syndrome doesn't block you off from space, either. It just makes it harder to have stuff stay in orbit, since it will get damaged faster from impacts and deorbit sooner. You can still fly stuff through a cloud of such debris if you're launching missions to elsewhere.
Yeah, Kessler means LEO is not a viable place to keep satellites (and everything there is a write-off) and that's basically it. You can send stuff through it just fine.
Forgive the domain-ignorant question, but would a satellite takedown necessarily require blowing up a satellite in orbit? I know Astroscale is proposing to clean up low-orbit debris by way of magnetic capture and I've also read somewhere that the Russian military has been experimenting with lasers intended to disable rather than destroy.
Capturing satellites and deorbiting sounds like it would be expensive (if you want to gently catch a satellite, you have to match orbits, so you need a rocket as big as the one that put it in orbit in the first place). Disabling them in one piece seems fairly plausible to me, but I'm not an expert.
But no matter how you choose to do it, destroying its coverage in China would destroy it for everyone (since satellites move), and that would probably get some complaints from other countries.
A powerful laser shot at a satellite should still fuck it up.
china shooting down starlink sats would certainly be quirky. not sure how plausible that is tbh
I don't think they'd be willing short of an outright "we can win WWIII" hawk. Thousands of ASAT launches against LEO is basically guaranteed Kessler and "military action blowing up large amounts of other nations' infrastructure in international territory" is literally casus belli.
Also, there are much cheaper and effective ways of solving that. For example kidnapping Elon Musk/friends/family/employees etc.
Quite extreme but less extreme and cheaper and more effective than thousands of anti-satellite rockets. I am not sure is China even capable of shooting down all (or large part of) Starlink satellites.
This is particularly true because LEO is not geosynchronous.
I mean, none of the other bands are really susceptible to it at this point (hence why I specified LEO). MEO and HEO are far too sparsely populated, and GEO is immune because while there are a ton of satellites there, they're all on the same exact path (geostationary i.e. eccentricity = inclination = 0) and thus the hypervelocity collisions needed for Kessler propagation can't happen.
There are journals for datasets (e.g. Journal of Open Psychology Data), but they are not used much in most fields for two reasons: 1) Scientific culture of valuing exciting (often nonreplicable) discoveries over high-quality data; 2) New-ish journals are almost never popular because it takes a long time to get an impact factor and overturn the inertial prestige held by the older journals, thus almost no one submits to them.
The article linked about the Tuskegee issue was frustrating to read, because it never seemed to attempt to explain why, if not Tuskegee, would Black Americans be more *hesitant* to get a COVID vaccine. There was a lot of stuff in there about unequal access and the problems that Black Americans who *want* to be vaccinated face in achieving that goal, but that's a different issue. I suppose what the article could be implying is that if you've been dealing your whole life with a system that refuses or hesitates to treat you when you want to be treated, when it starts beating down your door begging you to let them treat you for something else, you get suspicious. But I would have liked to have seen some quotes or data that actually indicated that.
It could also be true that the article wasn't ever really trying to answer the question "why don't Black people trust the COVID vaccine", but instead was saying "if you're looking at overall vaccination rates by race and noticing that Black people have lower rates than Whites, don't conclude that it's because they don't want to be vaccinated because Tuskegee", but again, it never said that explicitly. Also, I got a chuckle when it described "religious reasons" as a "modern" objection to vaccines, and once again I think that certain White people are continually confused when Black people have conservative opinions/values even though they are the most reliable Democrat voting block.
RE:Geothermal - I can say that there isn’t any real fear of wind and solar within the oil and gas industry. But geothermal elicits a “yea that’s a thing that could actually work”. Part of that might be that building geothermal capacity looks mechanically similar to E&P (exploration and production) because they both involve sticking things into the earth.
Ultimately, geothermal will run into the same problem fasting does - there’s not really a product anyone can get rich making so the proponents aren’t all that financially incentivized.
It seems decentralisation will play a factor as well, making the new industries incomprehensible to the already wealthy and powerful oil elite. Luckily their understanding or support is not necessary.
A distributed solar network combined with a more advanced grid operator with battery or other energy storage. technology need not fixate on expanding the trust funds for the children of oil executives to function.
Geothermal is just another red herring of nonsense the press like to focus on that will have incredibly niche applications. Just like with hydrogen cars that never appeared or with just about whatever the MSM points at...the finger of the media is directed by the hand of big oil in terms of what they focus on.
As with the never ever ever ending coverage of 'breakthrough technology' as though we don't already have everything we need right now to end the use of oil and coal for transport and electricity in nearly all applications.
We do indeed have everything we need. The article sets aside small scale geothermal for homes and small buildings but I've had my geothermal heating and cooling system for 8 years now and it is super efficient and seems to be super reliable with minimal maintenance. The temp range here is -10F to 100F and it's never failed to keep my home comfortable. If my hydro-supplied electric (via village co-op) weren't so damn cheap, I'd have panels too to power my geothermal. Yet most new home installations here are natural gas and traditional a/c compressors because...well, because people can't do the math to determine the cost over time of their NG/LP system.
Huh. I didn't know home geothermal was a thing. Have links to more information? I might be in the market in the next few years.
WayUpstate is almost certainly talking about geothermal heat pumps (https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/geothermal-heat-pumps).
You're exactly right. Of these, I have a horizontal closed-loop system that heats and cools my house in a cold northern clime with a perhaps a few weeks in the summer in the 90s. I had a few acres so the space was not an issue. Others with smaller lots close by have the vertical 'well-type' closed loop systems that also seem satisfactory. These prices seem about right though mine was more expensive as I had to retrofit an existing house with ductwork. If ductwork already exists, cost is dependent upon whether you need 1 or 2 heat pumps. At the time, I received 30% of the cost back in the form of a tax credit so the system was actually the same price as a conventional (nat gas heat and a/c compressor) system after the credit. When mine was installed, there were fewer installers so I would hope(?) that prices have fallen somewhat with more installers and competition. I'd absolutely do it again as none of my neighbors believe me when I tell them what my electric bill is in January/February (they know I don't have a gas connection).
Geothemal heat pumps are completely unrelated to geothermal energy being discussed in the original article and the posts again. I am jealous of your geothermal heat pumps. However, they do not fully power your house.
Twitter center left “””neolibs”” keep selling the idea that solar and wind are beating oil and gas and this’ll solve climate change. never taken a position on that but how wrong is it...
I am not sure what qualifies as beating, but solar and wind are forcing the price of non-renewables down and making questionable the profitability establishing of new non-renewable plants. Presumably solar and wind will continue to become more economical. (BTW, I am not on Twitter and not a neoliberal)
From the fiscally conservative Forbes Magazine:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/renewable-energy-is-now-the-cheapest-option-even-without-subsidies/
Forbes runs blogs, so, true or not, that article is not written by "fiscally conservatives" Forbes magazine. You can even tell by the URL.
It is a sign that they know very little physics or geology. In terms of concentrated energy sources, there is no swap for oil. Renewables can provide maybe 10 % of our current energy use so that is probably the budget for the next hundred year time frame going forward.
We're all in the predicament together as users of the one-shot concentrated energy store we call fossil fuels. It's like a lorry of grain having been spilt in a meadow biome. The mice and bird populations explode, and then thousands of mouse/bird generations later some of the mice or birds start looking at the small pile of grain left and thinking 'perhaps people in prehistory used to eat something other than the grain mountain'.
All of the industrial infrastructure, including that for renewables is built by fossil fuels. The best applications of renewable energy are a way to displace that embodied fossil fuel energy forward in time over a time period of decades. Unless people can grasp those basics they are just hand-waving. There's a lot of it about. I think the last two years have shown how few people in the political classes remember anything much of their high-school science classes or have the inclination to build on that foundation.
What are you on about? Fossil fuels currently provide 60% of energy generation in the US with 20% coming from Nuclear and 20% from renewables.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
It's to do with true cost accounting. The energy coming from renewable outputs doesn't capture the investment of fossil fuel energy involved in mining rare earths, transporting components and so on. Net energy is more important than gross output to see the energy landscape. Back in the early days of oil the return on energy invested for fossil fuels was very high because you could just bash a pipe in and get a gusher. What's left is more costly to access in energy terms.
This just is not the case.
Carbon payback time for a wind turbine is 8-9 months including extraction and manufacturing of raw materials, production of the turbines, their transport, erection, operation, maintenance, dismantling and disposal, and the same for their foundation and the transmission grid.
https://www.vestas.com/.../pdfs/lca_v90_june_2006.ashx
Solar takes longer and is estimated around 1.6 years.
https://www.renewableenergyhub.co.uk/.../solar-panels.../
Both of those are 404 ing?
Percentages are useless for unreliable and undispatchable power source. Grid needs to match supply to demand in real time or Bad Things start to happen. Realistic scenarios are only cases of Costa Rica kind - lots of hydropower, which is the ideal peak/backup source, so when they add a lots of solar, they stretch the accumulated water for longer time and can immediately switch to it when PV production falls.
Did they solve the problem of geothermal fracking creating earthquakes? That's what killed it off in Switzerland.
This is addressed in the link: the claim is that the fissures needed are much smaller than what is used for natural gas and therefore there is less seismic risk. Can you share more info about the Switzerland situation you refer to?
> there’s not really a product anyone can get rich making so the proponents aren’t all that financially incentivized.
If you're saying it's expensive and can't work, okay.
If you're saying it's "too good" and would create energy too cheap to meter, so no one bothers, it's going to take more work to explain.
"Semiconductor manufacturers have 'about as much built-in voodoo and superstition as a major-league baseball team'"
I will observe that this book was written in 1985. About the semiconductor industry of the early 1980s. Fab process control has gotten a lot better since then.
And baseball teams have gotten a lot more scientific.
"And baseball teams have gotten a lot more scientific."
Well ... this is true (folks pay more attention to on-base percentage and there is less stealing as two examples), but ...
the lucky underwear sort of thing still holds in baseball, however. Because YOU don't want to be the one to jinx your current success (jinx is a technical term ...).
The fab guys ... not so much.
I dunno about you, but I see plenty of cargo cult thinking, superstition, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", whatever you want to call it, in the fab and outside. It certainly wears fancier clothes these days than the textbook examples, but it's present nonetheless. People get locked into certain recipes or maintenance schedules or whatever, unable to change, because they don't understand the consequences of change.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's because the flows are so complicated for these modern devices. It's the complement of what you mentioned... Yes process control is way better, but the processes themselves are WAY more complicated. What should be a mathematical and physical exercise becomes an issue of statistical comparison, without reference to the object level.
Not to mention, the responsibilities of the engineers are so finely subdivided that many of them don't have a clue what a transistor is or how it works!! Which you would think is a base-level requirement.
The Tsimane' aren't hunter-gatherers. They are mostly horticulturalists.
28. HMC and marriage.
I can't see the full article, but a key component of this idea relates to the female's use of chemical contraception pills which skew female preference.
The idea being that she'll choose overly similar males as company when she's on the pill with the idea of female spending more time around brothers and fathers and uncles when they are already pregnant. While females who are not on the pill will be more attracted to men who are different to them.
There are many such stories linking this to divorce rates and many stories of women who go off the pill to get pregnant with their partners, only to suddenly become repulsed by their smell and unwilling to have sex with their partner.
Nearly every woman I've talked to about this will know women in their social circle to whom this has happened. Making it clear to me it is not a rare event.
The contraception pill works to make the woman's body act as though it were pregnant. Leading to 'incorrect' selection of males who are similar to them as mates.
So I'd postulate what we may well be seeing as 'random' is in fact a mix of women not taking the pill selecting men with different immune system and women taking the pill selecting men with similar immune systems...leading to no 'overall trend'.
I'm not claiming this is necessarily impossible, but consider that the MHC on chr6 is a peculiar, befuddling place due to its high variability. In this so-called 'hypervariable' region, allele patterns are easily confounded by other geographically-distributed characteristics, and I would take any published association between MHC variants and most human phenotypes with a grain of salt -- doubly so when it comes to things like mating preferences, which pose additional (somewhat analogous) challenges.
With that said, I'm not terribly familiar with this particular research and could be pleasantly surprised; however, my prior regarding this kind of funky MHC-related finding has got to range between very skeptical ("a *lot* of things could have gone wrong, here") and downright cynical ("oh great, another group firing off flawed results to grab easy headlines").
Given your comment, I don't think you understand MHC well, or why there is a hypervariable region. (To be fair, it's kind of esoteric to immunology and the details of clonal selection theory.)
That said, my prior when I read about the hypothesis was that it would go the other direction, since it's maladaptive to marry closely to your MHC profile. Given a choice of two potential mates where the only differentiating factor is MHC compatibility, you'd want to pick the one who matches you less closely, not more. (Assuming organ transplants aren't a thing, which is true at evolutionary development timescales.)
Appreciate the correction!
They say in the abstract that pre-marriage contraception use has no impact
That apparently did not replicate, or at least attraction didn’t vary with ovulation, which is the proposed mechanism of BC influencing attraction. https://t.co/N1FMK25y3c?amp=1 (h/t rolfdegen)
I haven’t read any of these studies and as such have no opinion on their usefulness or correctness, but neither thing is adequately proven IMO
#2: Aldous Huxley mentions Adrenochrome in the fourth paragraph of The Doors of Perception, which was very popular (It's still the #1 search result for books about psychedelics). That's probably where most of those post-1954 fiction writers heard about it.
Adrenochrome is not an imaginary drug, although most of its uses are. The headline of the Daily Beast article is incorrect, and so is the implication that Hunter S Thomson made it up 20 years after Huxley.
Here is a link to the full pdf of The Doors of Perception, where adrenochrome is mentioned at the top of page 3: https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf
Huxley implies adrenochrome is a powerful endogenous psychedelic and explains the then-current but now-disproven theory that adrenochrome contributes to schizophrenia.
See also this paper on adrenochrome inhibiting ATP production and probably not being very safe:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3635424/
"Perfusion of the heart with 50 mg/L adrenochrome induced a marked decline in contractile force within 5 min and this was associated with a rapid decline in the myocardial ATP/AMP ratio...Adrenochrome at concentrations of 20 mg/L or higher was found to inhibit the oxidative phosphorylation activities of heart mitochondria under in vitro conditions. "
3 is complete bullshit. It should read: "While the Aztecs were sacrificing prisoners to the gods, their neighbors in Tlaxcala were a confederation of four despotic kingdoms that also sacrificed prisoners to the gods, because Aztec culture and Tlaxcalan culture were almost identical."
For what it's worth, Wikipedia agrees that Tlaxcala was a "republic" with both nobility and commoners on the ruling council, though I get the impression that the council was self-selected rather than democratically elected. It further says that the Tlaxcalans came to have four hereditary rulers 26 years after the Spanish Conquest.
That doesn't mean they weren't a similar culture to the Aztecs, and it certainly doesn't mean they were peaceful.
Is there any info on the numbers and nature of the Tlaxcala sacrifices? My understanding is the Aztecs stood out among the Central and South American cultures for the sheer volume and painful styles of their human sacrifice. I found this for the Aztec approach, which backs up stuff I've read elsewhere, but I didn't find anything on the Tlaxcala approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
“While the Canadians bowed to a god-appointed monarch on a distant island, their neighbours in the USA were a Federal Republic.”
Maybe constitutions aren’t the definitive foundation of all civilisation.
Come to think of it, I’m now curious how US civics classes on the importance of checks & balances, the separation of powers, separation of church and state etc. deal with the fact that the UK has none of these things but is barely different?
From what I remember from decades ago, U.S. civics classes just don't address that point. There's some discussion of British ideas from centuries ago that were the basis of our Constitution, but not really anything comparing the two countries today.
As Bullseye said, those classes largely aren't interested in comparing the US to other modern governments. The most you might get is "UK and some other countries have a parliamentary system, so basically everything goes through the legislative branch, eh, seems to work for them but we like doing it our way."
A more complete answer might gesture at:
- what separation of powers owed to the British system of the time (two houses of Parliament with lots of executive power still with the king) via Montesquieu
- the influence of Magna Carta, English Bill of Rights, etc. on the concept of freedom via binding limitations on government
- the crucial improvement of a written constitution (inspired by colonial charters); yes, the British "unwritten" one works okay given the weight of tradition, but the US was setting up a government from scratch and couldn't afford 300+ years of often violent wrangling over it
- federalism as an innovation made necessary by the size and number of colonies, with no real analogue in Britain (unfortunately for Scotland and Ireland maybe?)
- the not very representative structure of the British parliament at the time (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832; arguably this and later reforms represent Britain emulating the US!)
- the much greater diversity of background, lifestyle, and opinion in the US even today
NZ has an unwritten constitution that's worked out pretty well. IMO it's much preferrable.
The US constitution became a way for judges to make laws without approval by the legislative branch, so instead of increasing the barrier to institute certain laws, it made them smaller.
So better to not have a constitution that is interpreted by judges, IMO.
Burkean evolution to de facto secession > revolutionary secession
There’s absolutely a sense that the UK is a bit more absurd than the US with its ur-licensing, arbitrary bans on speech, and police going around confiscating knives. UK’s small c constitution also does have some checks and balances. (I.e. UK still has many rules and procedures and customs they follow even though they aren’t in a written document)
A fair bit of that relates back to the government taking over large sections of everything during World War 2, and (of course) not letting go.
It's not clear how much of that is due to separation of powers, checks and balances, etc. and how much is just due to two very specific amendments written into the US constitution. If we hadn't passed the first and second amendments as written when we did, would the structure of US government make them easier to pass now?
UK basically does have those things, it just doesn't have a written constitution that says it does. Queen is head of the Church, in theory, but in reality isn't. Queen is head of the State, in theory, but in reality isn't. There's a separate judicial branch and the civil service sees itself as an independent provider of services to the government.
If anything the UK has too much separation of powers. British government is overrun with supposedly "independent" organizations of various kinds called quangos, that think of themselves as unaccountable to anyone, even though they're taxpayer funded and legislatively empowered. Even the 1984-esque word "quango" reflects this platypus like approach: quasi-non-governmental-organization. Separation of powers usually means in practice a separation of accountability, where one side remains accountable and the other doesn't.
The US doesn't have this issue because the first thing a new President does is replace the heads of all the different government organizations. It's expected that they turn up with a team who will directly take over the running of government. In some way this is less power-separatey than the UK's approach, but it's hard to argue against it. Americans talk about the Deep State all the time, but most non-black parts of the state are at least controlled by political appointees. In the UK the Deep State is so pervasive people don't even have a name for it, they just shrug and sort of accept that half the time they think they're dealing with government it turns out to be some sort of strange company-like body that nonetheless has the power to fine them.
The Queen really is the Head of State, she's just not the Head of Government.
The UK might not clean house every election, but the government definitely has fairly strong control over quangos.
I haven't really seen that myself. See the exasperation evinced by ministers over the past 5 years about the antics of the Electoral Commission. The EC has failed in almost every way it's possible for it to fail and all ministers could do was moan in public and make occasional noises about reviewing its role. When the new head of the EC came in he apologised for the past "mistakes" and then immediately stated that, however, the EC was "not just a body of Parliament". In other words you have quango heads openly asserting in public that they are accountable to nobody, not even Parliament itself, despite being theoretically government agencies.
If you can't see why the Electoral Commission would want to emphasise its independence from the government for non-sinister reasons you are either an idiot or a conspiracist.
In any case if Parliament really wanted to they could just abolish it.
It is my contention that the American belief that a sensible constitution automatically spawns a rational and effective government is the reason that so many of its nation building schemes fail.
27 (real estate) seems like further evidence for my "contracts make us dumb" hypothesis. The more long-term contracts people sign, the more that locks us into doing things that no longer make sense if you're looking at objective reality, but seemed like a good idea at the time the contract was signed.
on the other hand the entire developed world runs on contracts!
Isn’t locking people into doing things that might not seem to be their immediate preference literally the whole point of a contract? To provide a degree of predictability in spite of expected uncertainty?
That doesn’t mean they won’t result in some situations that seem dumb if certain scenarios come to pass - but the alternative world without contracts is lots of people stupidly passing up beneficial arrangements due to lack of trust and/or certainty.
Sure, you can't do without them, but perhaps they could be improved. In this case, maybe a something less like a loan and more like an equity investment that gets marked to market based on rental rates.
I look at contracts as an agreement to not change your mind later. Presumably both sides agree on the terms, and their immediate preference would be to follow the contract. Expected uncertainty comes into it, but only later. It would be odd if one or both participants would want to immediately change the deal. (Of course, both sides might prefer a deal where the exchange still happens but is more favorable to them. I wouldn't consider that the same reason we have contracts, because the end result of that is disagreement and no exchange). If both sides know that the other is prohibited from backing out or modifying if the situation changes, then they can be much more comfortable entering the agreement in the first place.
"doing things that no longer make sense "
You mean like making your monthly mortgage payment even though the bank already gave you the money? Come on, contracts enforce an endless variety of non-instantaneous transactions that would be impossible without them. "Contracts are dumb" is a nonsensical position.
Although I was exaggerating a bit, I didn’t quite say “Contracts are dumb.” Sometimes the results are dumb, if they can’t be renegotiated easily.
Mortgages are a case in point. When the something bad happens, it’s sometimes in everyone’s interest to give the homeowner a break, reducing their current payments but not leaving the bank with a house they have to sell. There are horror stories where the mortgage has been resold so it’s difficult to find someone to renegotiate with, even if the it’s very much in the interest of the people who now own the securitized income streams to redo the deal so they will end up with more money versus a default.
The point is that even a well-drafted contract *is not intelligent.* It’s a bunch of dumb rules that can’t understand and adapt to circumstances unless there are people to override the rules. Ideally the contract itself allows for overrides.
Have you looked at Scots law at all? Their legal system is heavily based on contracts and might provide examples to compare. In some ways I think their legal system has advantages in comparison to the English/Welsh one based if I understand correctly on precendent.
30. There are some interesting ideas in this article, but the Voxsplainer massively oversells its promise - and it is not internally consistent.
The total energy flow out of the earth is about 30 TW. Total human energy use today is 15 TW.
Geothermal energy is not uniformly distributed, but you can use that assumption for some rough estimates. About 2/3 - 3/4 of this heat comes up in the oceans (the Earth's surface is 71% ocean). Land-based geothermal cannot cover total human energy use. The US covers about 1/50th of Earth's surface, so even if we are able to harvest all of the geothermal energy, it would be about 0.6 TW. The US uses about 3 TW.
That doesn't stop Vox from claiming "5,157 gigawatts of electric capacity" (i.e. 5.2 TW) from geothermal in the US is possible. For this to even be physically possible, the US would have to be 10 times more volcanic than usual - which it's not.
Current total geothermal energy production globally is about 15 GW, so 0.1% of global energy use. [I wonder if Vox assumes that people don't keep track of TW vs GW vs MW.] This is concentrated around 'hot spots' - unusually volcanically active areas. New technologies could increase this significantly.
The technology Vox describes is basically using fracking technology (pumping pressurized water through rock) to access more geothermal energy.
This would start as a way to expand the area around a hot spot where geothermal is viable. After the technology is perfected there, the promise is that it could be used "almost anywhere". This is not quite right - it should say "almost everywhere". If we want geothermal to compete at close to the scale of fossil fuels, we need to tap a significant fraction of all the heat flowing up through Earth's crust.
Vox promises that this is not fracking and will not cause any seismic problems, as long as it stays away from seismically active areas. This is inconsistent - I'm not sure where they're planning on finding volcanically active, but not seismically active areas.
There is an even bigger problem for "almost everywhere" geothermal. Rock conducts heat really poorly, unless it contains fluids - either water of magma. There is magma near hot spots, and water in aquifers close to the surface. Small amounts of water can be pumped down, but not enough to saturate all the way down to the mantle. You will extract heat from the rock that is in contact with the pumped water, but that rock will reheat from lower rocks extremely slowly. This should be thought of as mining the heat of the crust. It is not renewable on the timescales it can be extracted.
Using technology developed for fracking to help geothermal is a good idea. I think it's plausible that it could increase geothermal energy production by a factor of 2-10. But claiming that it could compete at the scale of fossil fuels or that it "solves energy" is completely ridiculous.
I'm not sure that 30 TW budget is all that much of an upper limit. We obviously can't pull more than 30 TW forever, but for at least some amount of time we can. I did it quickly so my math might have an error, but I get that just 100 vertical meters of 100 C rock across the US can supply 5 TW for 2000 years. Not permanent, but it'll go for a while.
30 TW by mining the entire surface of the US is about 0.1 Watts per square meter. Sunlight on average is about 200 W/m^2 (averaged over day and night), so with 20% efficient panels gives about 40 Watts per square meter. Wind is a few Watts per square meter. Geothermal potential is miniscule except in tiny, fortunate areas; there's no way it's a sizeable contribution to energy issues.
The point of my response is that 30 TW isn't an actual upper limit. You can (temporarily, but for a while on human timescales) pull out substantially more than that.
It might still be less energy sense than I dunno, but with very real advantages of not needing to worry about clouds and time of day. Which wins that in detail is way behind me though, I just wanted to disagree with the specific suggestion of 30 TW as an upper limit.
Less energy dense*
You're right. If this is the strategy, then it should not be described as a renewable energy source. I prefer to call it 'mining the heat of the crust'.
Let's hope that fusion is less than 2000 years away!
Further context on #37: "phase of the moon" is a classic idiom in tech for inputs to a process that are fundamentally mysterious or random-seeming. (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/phase-of-the-moon.html) Naturally the link includes two more examples of issues that were actually linked to the phase of the moon.
Re #17. In medicine, data are often collected under very a strict protocol to preserve privacy (see HIPPA). This makes it challenging to post datasets publicly. However, there are at least a few higher tier journals, such as PLoSOne, which insist that data be made public unless authors can provide good reason not to. The journals typically suggest one of several repositories. I've posted numerous datasets to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) repository for papers I've published in PLoSOne, JAMA, JAMA Open, and BMJ Open.
"under a very strict"
"HIPAA"
Typo on #35: difference -> different
"Students trying to prove the hypothesis were less than half as likely to notice the gorilla than those investigating aimlessly. I’m agnostic as to whether this proves something important about science or is just funny."
They're students doing homework. They tested what they were asked to test and then went on with their lives. Doesn't tell you anything about real scientists.
Also, if your brief is “investigate randomly” then you’re going to draw a scatter plot.
Under what circumstances would “real scientists” behave like “students doing homework”? I don’t think the answer is “never” (it might be “often”).
> In 1922, someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long Straw Hat Riot in New York and several hospitalizations.
After which the culprits were punished by magistrate Peter Hatting. Very appropriate.
Well, I just filled out the form for the arranged marriage. It asked me for my age, income, a recent picture, and gave a miniature Big 5 personality quiz. Wish me luck, I guess.
Good luck, I guess!
On the subject of high-context memetics: https://twitter.com/lukechampine/status/1367547150494752770
"Not sure if this counts as “the left is eating itself”, but the (unofficial) Brandeis Suggested Language List now recommends students not use the term “trigger warning” because it is “violent language”."
Well, you're linking to the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center website of a private university, so I don't really see how that would count as "left" politics. Can you explain to me your reasoning here, Scott Alexander?
If Scott had written "wokeism is eating itself" would you have any objections? In context it seems clear that's what he meant to convey.
Yes, I would still have an objection towards that. Scott would still need to explain what "woke" is (and I would argue that this category is even more unclear than "left") and then he would have to explain how this example has anything to do with "eating itself".
There was no need for that, most people understand implications. This is list of interesting links - not a mathematical proof.
I don't see what is "interesting" about the link.
Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say I linked the exact same link and said:
"Not sure if this counts as “THE RIGHT is eating itself”, but the (unofficial) Brandeis Suggested Language List now recommends students not use the term “trigger warning” because it is “violent language”."
Would you still find this "interesting"? Would you still be as willing to think about the "implications" without any real proof?
It would suggest that you believe that universities are controlled by THE RIGHT. That would be "interesting".
Universities in a capitalist society tend to be liberal which I think can be argued to be centre-right. Not all universities are like this, for example I would expect Universities in Cuba to be significantly more left-wing.
> I don't see what is "interesting" about the link.
It is mildly amusing case of turboleft attacking left - minor case of revolution eating itself.
Again, I don't see any evidence that this is the "turboleft" (what do you even consider the "turboleft"?)
Universities, “violent language” hunters, labguage policing (especially in this form) are left-type stuff. Especially in USA.
That seems like bad, circular argument. The unsupported assumption is that language policing is "left-type" stuff (really? is it?), therefore any "language policing" that we see on an organisation's website must be "left".
Let's use an real-life example. I've previously had my language policed on this blog and even been banned from it for a while. Is this evidence towards the "left eating itself"?
I get where you're coming from, I really do, private universities in a mixed economy don't look especially leftist.
But a lot of people who study and work there consider themselves on the left (not sure about links and spam filters for sourcing, but you can Google political affiliations of US professors). I think there's a reasonable debate as to whether these people are mistaken about whether or not they're _actually_ on the left. But it's pretty clear that in this context, Scott is gesturing at some self-identifying leftist culture - which can be pretty far from actual leftist economic systems.
If you don't have the same cultural context as Scott, I can see that this gesturing at quite a nebulous cultural movement is confusing. But also Scott never claimed to be writing for everyone, and it seems fine for him to use words in a way that would be readily understood from within his culture.
Seems like they're the basically the same self-policing rules and guidelines that essentially any workplace, organisation or community could have. I've seen no evidence that there's a "self-identifying leftist culture" at work here.
Scott doesn't claim to be writing for everyone, but if he's going to comment on politics he should be prepared to have his comments analysed by people outside of his bubble.
If you look at the Wikipedia page for "Political Views of American Academics," you will see that a mere 9% of academics identify as conservative. Does this count as evidence of a self identifying leftist culture.
For your second paragraph I'd say something like: No entiendo! Por que eso no está en espanol? Debes estar listo que tus commentarios estan analizado para gente fuera del mundo anglohablante. Todo debe estar disponible a todos.
"Conservative" isn't the only non-left ideology. You seem to be referring to this statistic:
"In 2007, Gross and Simmons concluded in The Social and Political Views of American Professors that the professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderates, and 9% conservative"
If accurate, that means that 99% of professors are non-left.
> I've seen no evidence that there's a "self-identifying leftist culture" at work here.
There is a bunch of research showing a high willingness by academics in certain fields to discriminate based on political viewpoint.
That's not evidence that this Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center website of a private university is evidence of the "left eating itself".
To establish this, we need to first find if the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center of Brandeis is "left". Next we need to see if it "eating itself" (rather than, say, making a productive move). Scott establishes neither.
I'm not Scott, but I'll attempt a plausible disambiguation.
The "left" is widely understood to mean two things:
1- The Economic Left : A specific direction in politics and economy that advocates for greater societal control over economic actors (e.g. corporations) and resources, and advocates for greater societal responsibility of the economically-advantaged toward the economically-disadvantaged. (through specific policies, not just through shallow charity.) A widely recognized instance of an Economic Left theoretical apparatus is Marxism.
2- The Identity Left : A memetic mutation of The Economic Left, where the theme of "Society favors certain groups, often at the cost of others" is elevated to Newtonian-Laws Level of fundamentalness, and generalized to apply to any and all groups where some difference of outcome exists. In a large group of the Identity Left adherents, the original economic question is entirely ignored or given lip service only, lets agree to call this subset The Economically-Agnostic Identity Left. A widely recognized instance of an Identity Left theoretical apparatus is Feminism.
The first usage is almost universal in any political environment where private economic actors can hold significant power (so, almost everywhere on earth since the 1960s), but the second is specific to USA, Canada, Australia, Britain and (to a much lesser extent) other specific countries. Although the link between the two can sometimes be strenuous and outright hostile, they are associated with each other.
In the specific case of the USA and Canada, Media and Academia are both dominated by a strong strain of Economically Agnostic (i.e. doesn't really give a fuck about the Economic Left questions) Identity Left. This can be supported by both studies and statistics (a lot of studies about the beliefs of social scientists and how conservative and right wing cultural views are systematically suppressed), and, like, just paying attention to news and social media where academic results are being reported. As a middle easterner, I can name Fox News as a right wing news outlet, but I can name The Atlantic, The New York Times and Vox as Economically-Agnostic Left. Granted, the memory of one foreigner is not a valid measure of a country's cultural bias (and I used to identify with the Identity Left till very recently so it's even more unreliable than that), but there are millions of foreigners and natives that say the same thing, so it's safe to assume the claim has a basis in reality.
The Economically-Agnostic Identity Left often has a nasty tendency to rapidly change hyper-vague norms and lingual practices, often with little to no reasonable debate. The linked site displays a lot of the markers of those kind of discussions, so Scott tagged them with "Left" meaning "Identity Left", as is common in the USA.
The Atlantic, The New York Times and Vox are all center or center-right. That it is common to misidentify media sources as "left" when they're really not is my whole point. If Scott is tagging things as "left" with very little actual debate or discussion as to whether they are actually left or not, then he is making a large mistake.
These kinds of mistakes are common in the USA because media (just like Scott) is mostly very biased against the left.
Re: 17 That explanation doesn't make sense. Data sets are still published material. If someone publishes a derivative of your work using your dataset without crediting you on the paper (IMO is a co-author is a minimum professional courtesy) they are clearly committing academic fraud of some sort.
Re: Media Bias, aka #19, what the heck is that chart? The colors and bubble size is just based on their own pre-assigned metric? How is that the choice you make, when the color and bubble size are the most visually striking parts of the series. The color shade should be how biased they really are in your analysis, and the bubble size should be some sort of viewership/readership metric.
Then you can position them just like you would on a language relationships chart. Such as: https://matadornetwork.com/abroad/mapped-crazy-relationships-among-european-languauges/
To me, the most visually striking thing is their physical position, especially since most of the colors are dull and/or purplish.
TBH, if that was your choice, you shouldn't include the bubble size/color at the same time.
Jeez, that's a pretty devastating evisceration of the WEIRD book.
I'm not convinced the reviewer is really fair. While there might be some inaccuracies, he overstates their importance to the point the book makes (and I'm pretty sure he misrepresents what the main argument of the book even is). And he blatantly ignores some points the book makes (and yes, the book does imply that Italians are "less WEIRD"). The sentence "Where Christianity did have an impact was the sense it gave of cultural superiority which led to colonialism and exploitation of other 'lesser' societies" is baffling and a quite insane thing to say for a historian, and the whole review makes me think this guy is just in love with Roman culture and a bit pissed the book author didn't praise Romans enough (in the same way he accuses Henrich of ignoring Roman influence he ignores that much of Europe was never under Roman rule and was only indirectly influenced by Roman culture).
The criticism reminds me of the stuff said agains "Guns, Germs, and Steel", where plenty of historians are pissed, but can't offer a more substancial refutation other than "this theory doesn't fully explain everything I know about some some small group nobody really cares about so that must mean he's wrong!"
I had a loooong conversation online with Freeman (on Amazon's commenting system). Yes you're right, Freeman writes defensively because Henrich's thesis goes against his work. Freeman believes that the Romans had a high degree of civilization and that the Church destroyed that. He can't admit that the Church may (even accidentally, not on purpose) have had a positive impact.
Freeman also hates the fact that Henrich is not a historian, and didn't work with historians to write this book.
Freeman's arguments are mostly of the same type: the Church didn't have full control over marriage in 500 AD and therefore it had no control at all until 1200 AD. (I hardly paraphrase). Or: there is diversity between France and Lithuania, or between Italy and Holland, therefore these countries can't be WEIRD. In other words Freeman can't think in terms of degree or proportionality. He can't grasp the concept of correlation, since that concept precisely requires continuous variation.
Worse, to make his point Freeman uses some distasteful tactics, such as implying racist motivations (mentioning explicitly the superiority of the West; or genetics when Henrich very clearly explains that the transmission mechanism can't be genetic, etc.).
Also, Freeman selectively quotes many authors. The same authors virtually always mention somewhere else that the Church did indeed have an increased influence on marriages and family formation starting in ~500 AD.
Here is an example among many. Freeman says "Smith does mention, p.131, that 'some bishops tried [sic] to impose an additional disqualification' namely enforcing the consanguinity laws but it seems to have been a minority practice"
But the actual quote from Julias Smith is: "Starting at a synod in Rome in 721, ecclesiastical councils gradually added three further elements to Leo the Great’s ideas: an emphasis on the permanence and indissolubility of marriage, a refusal to countenance more than one sexual relationship at a time, and a very much broader definition of incestuous, forbidden marriages. In this context, bishops were emphatic that both the spiritual kinship established through baptism and the relationships created through marriage were impediments to marriage. Godparents, god-siblings, co-parents, and all in-laws thus fell into the vast pool of prohibited marriage partners. In addition, some bishops tried to impose an additional disqualification—consanguinity extending all the way to a common ancestor within seven generations, way beyond the widely acceptable four-generation limit."
So what the bishop tried to do and failed is to extend the prohibition to <b>seven generations</b>, not that they failed to impose any consanguinity laws at all!
Anyway, Freeman and I exchanged about 60 messages on Amazon's comment system, but unfortunately Amazon got rid of the system and the messages are now lost. I have a copy of my own comments but not Freeman's. Still, if someone is interested in more, I can dig up half of that conversation.
Another example, just for fun and because I have it already close by:
Freeman mentions Brundage but Brundage actually says this: "by 1100 the Church had secured virtual supremacy in the adjudication of issues relating to the formation of marriage and the separation, divorce, and remarriage of those whose marriages failed."
"Supremacy", by 1100 AD.
Incidentally, Brundage does a great job describing the intensive kin-based institutions that characterized the early Middle Ages and that progressively disappeared under the influence of the Church. Here are a few quotes from him on this:
Brundage: "[Germanic folklaw pior to Christianity] was based upon two foundations: the collective responsibility of the kindred for the actions of its members and the principle of reciprocal revenge."
Brundage: "Polygyny was also a common feature of Germanic domestic life [...] polygyny was common prior to the conversion of the Germans to Christianity"
Brundage: "Bride purchase involved an agreement between two families. An exchange of property was an essential part of Kaufehe [purchase of a bride] and the Germanic law codes encouraged this type of marriage. "
Brundage: "Early Germanic law treated bastard children by and large not much differently from legitimate offspring. Later, probably under the influence of Church authorities who were anxious to discourage irregular unions, the status of bastard children deteriorated markedly. "
Brundage: "Although as late as the early sixth century some Germanic kings managed to transgress the incest rules with impunity, by the end of that century even royalty could no longer do so. Polygyny likewise became subject to legal restrictions in the aftermath of mass conversions to Christianity among the Germans and by the late sixth century was becoming uncommon."
All these quotes are perfectly in line with Henrich's narrative. Polygyny, wergeld, collective responsibility, bribe as property, "illegitimate" children, "incest" (not necessarily blood-related), etc., are all traits of kin-based clans. The disappearance of these traits is what is noteworthy, and it is impossible not to notice that they disappeared when the Church tried to suppress them (with the help of secular powers, notably the Carolingians).
But somehow Freeman cites this very source but still fail to see how Church policies affected family formation and in general the cohesion of clans.
> "Where Christianity did have an impact was the sense it gave of cultural superiority which led to colonialism and exploitation of other 'lesser' societies"
This is one the dumbest memes in existence. People have been killing, invading and enslaving other groups for as long as different groups have been in contact with each other and none of them needed any elaborate theory to provide moral "justification" for doing this, not did they require some "sense of superiority" to animate themselves towards conquest.
>The criticism reminds me of the stuff said agains "Guns, Germs, and Steel", where plenty of historians are pissed, but can't offer a more substancial refutation other than "this theory doesn't fully explain everything I know about some some small group nobody really cares about so that must mean he's wrong!"
1. There's nothing to actually "refute". He doesn't provide a SINGLE citation for anything he claims in this book, meaning its one big speculative hypothesis and the burden of proof is still on Diamond to validate his claims.
2. Much of what he says is demonstrably false. For example, he claims that native north americans domesticated north american animals as much as they could be domesticated, and that the relative lack of domestication compared with e.g. is due to the biological differences between native species in europe and north america. Modern and ongoing studies have domesticated native north american animals to a much greater extent than the native americans did. There are many such examples.
3. His entire hypothesis is essentially that environmental factors are sufficient to explain why some peoples never progressed beyond rudimentary hunter gatherer society, while others achieved industrial civilization. The enormous, gaping problem that should be obvious to anyone without a preconceived blank-slate worldview is that these environmental factors are supposed to be significant enough to explain enormous societal/civilizational differences, but amazingly they're not significant enough to provide ANY difference in selective pressures between these populations (other than for superficial traits like skin color). Like, seriously, think about that. It's absolutely bonkers. If human populations are so abjectly insensitive to huge, categorical differences in lifestyle and production methods, its a wonder that we ever evolved to become humans at all in the first place, because surely the magnitude of difference in what constitutes fitness for a hunter gatherer society and that for an agricultural society dwarfs the magnitude of pressures that preceded agriculture.
I read Henrich's book, and I am intrigued by the idea, but I'm not convinced yet. I really want to see other experts weigh in and either support or disprove the idea.
However, I didn't think that Amazon review was very satisfying. He just seems like some angry guy going on a rant because an anthropologist stepped into historians' territory. None of the arguments he raised really hit the core.
For example, at one point he seemingly misinterprets Henrich talking about modern day rates of cousin marriage as him talking about rates of cousin marriage in the middle ages, and he goes on an angry rant about how we don't have data for cousin marriages from back then. If you read the book it's pretty clear that Henrich was talking about modern cousin marriage, which we do have data for.
Perhaps someday someone will disprove Henrich's hypothesis, but it's not going to be this Amazon review.
Also this part caught me: "Basic training for historians includes a suspicion of monocausal solutions"
Shouldn't we prefer monocausal solutions as being more likely? This Scott article explains it pretty well: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/14/how-likely-are-multifactorial-trends/
Although, I hate to imagine what angry rant we would be subjected to if we showed that guy this article.
Agreed. Also very relevant is this blog post by Tanner Greer:
https://scholars-stage.org/historians-fear-not-the-psychologists/
The quote by pseudoerasmus near the end is particularly apt:
"Cultural-social historians are ill-equipped for the age of “Big Data” that Guldi drones on about, but not because they are intellectually incapable. They can get trained in quantitative techniques and actually understand the various interdisciplinary debates that are mostly impenetrable to them right now. But such training would actually change who they are. It’s the historians’ hermeneutical and subjectivist instincts that alienate them from the big empirical debates amongst economists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, geneticists, etc. So the problem with historians is less any microhistorical preference, than an epistemological bias against positivism."
Freeman is not an idiot or incapable of understanding some basic math. But using statistical tools would change who he is. He (and other "trained" historians) views Henrich's thesis as monocausal, reductionist, deterministic. The problem is indeed "an epistemological bias against positivism."
I started reading it, but it seemed more like a rant and less like substantial criticism, so I couldn't finish it.
What is PCM?
It has an Urban Dictionary entry from which I gather it's a 4chan-like site that was right-wing-friendly and involved in popularizing Wojak memes. It is oddly hard to find the actual site, or any further explanation, via Google.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/
TIL (and also IL that high-context acronyms are hard to Google)
I'm wondering if this is a nasty side-effect of the "AIing" of search. It may be Google's algorithm has gotten so good at saying "this is very likely what you meant, because most people mean this, even if you appear to have spelled some words wrong" that you are willy nilly directed to what everyone else is thinking about *whether or not that's what you want*.
I seem to recall that 20 years or so ago, you could find rare results by simply specifying them with sufficient exactitude. You'd put a bunch of words in it that *only* had its on 2 of Google's collection of a billion pages, and out they would pop. It seems now that Google's clever silicon dicks are sayin oh no, you probably didn't mean that, so we'll look for what most people mean when they use the first 3-5 of your search terms, and kind of ignore the others.
There's probably a way using their operators to say no, I really do want *all* of these terms, and probably in the order I typed them, too. But still...one gets the increasing impression that search results are slowly being converged to what most people look for, so serendipity (or the ability to find needles in a haystack) is being slowly strangled.
Quotation marks around words help. It is annoying though when you discover that your specific interest is one letter off of some popular thing from a different country.
Oh it could be worse. Consider Rule 34.
Yeah in my experience too it is getting harder to operate search engines in exactly this way. I know 'retreat to the University Library' is not really a scalable solution.
A meme subreddit based around the political compass. It has around 500k subscribers.
Based
From the Wikipedia link on straw hat riot: "The riot itself began on September 13, 1922, two days before the supposed unspoken date, when a group of youths decided to get an early jump on the tradition." So the description "someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long Straw Hat Riot in New York " doesn't seem quite right.
3. Tlaxcala is fascinating. There was a interesting piece a while back about how Cortes is seen as a villainous figure in most of Mexico - with the exception of Tlaxcala.
It also points to how the typical way we're taught about the Spanish conquest is misleading. Cortes didn't just show up with 500 men and roll over an empire - he allied with the empire's enemies, and led a coalition that toppled said empire. To a lesser extent, something like that happened with Pizarro and the Incas - a lot of his local allies were folks who had been on the losing end of a civil war that happened after the Emperor and his heir died from disease.
15. I wouldn't go that far with Starlink, but SpaceX genuinely is a treasure, and if they can get Starship working at the price-points they're aiming for it could have a revolutionary impact on space industry and utilization. Imagine affordable suborbital tourist flights, much cheaper access to space, and so forth. It's great stuff - I just want them to start making their fuel from green hydrogen and air-captured CO2 sooner so it won't produce so much emissions.
30. I feel like they should go for broke on geothermal, see if increased funding and investment (plus some actual contracts) can get super-hot-rock geothermal to work. Maybe you could sell it to Congress as a way to reuse some of the infrastructure from derelict coal plants, since both of them would need to generate steam to provide electrical power.
One fascinating thing you could do if you had ample geothermal power plus plentiful fresh water (or we got better at desalinating seawater) if use it to produce e-fuels for export. That's not economical yet compared to regular fuels, but if you have to phase out regular fuels and really want to get some more mileage out of your gas and oil power systems you could do it (although I think in practice such will mostly be aimed at ships and airplanes as the market).
This all reminds me of Eli Dourado pointing out that if we really didn't care about Old Faithful or Yellowstone, we could turn the whole Yellowstone area into the Mother of All Geothermal Power Plants and provide electricity for half the country.
> By the way, this is the same Tegmark who in 1998 developed a leading theory for what the universe is and why it exists at all.
Leading with whom? All I can find is people damning it with faint praise. The "reception" section on the linked Wikipedia page is one guy calling it "provocative." The physicist quotes that he uses to advertise his book on Amazon seem lukewarm; every physicist writing a review is carefully mincing their words so as to say something positive while distancing themselves from even the perception they like the theory. "Whether you believe it or not..." "You don't have to necessarily agree...", "You may recoil from his thesis, but..."
I'm interested to hear if it made an actual splash with serious scholars in either physical or philosophical fields. My impression is that it didn't; it made a splash in the science pages of some major outlets during his book tour (for what is definitely an engaging book, even if it's trying to motivate an ill-defined theory!) and then everyone more or less moved on, because there wasn't all that much *there*.
The reason it didn't make more of a splash is that the theory is far been more sensational than substantive. It's not bad physics, because it's not physics at all - it's bad philosophy instead. It adds a modern aesthetic to mathematical monism, but doesn't bring any really new ideas to the table. Every mathematically possible universe exists and we're in one, and they *are* math rather than being *described by* math? "Worse Leibniz" pretty much captures it; the idea was better put, and more completely fleshed out, in the frickin' Monadology.
The most frustrating part, to me, is his signature argument in favor - that Occam's Razor prefers it, since the theory has "no free variables" and no perception can argue against it, since it predicts all of those perceptions. But Occam's Razor cuts the opposite way: a theory is good if it doesn't *have to* propose gigantic numbers of entities, like vast arrays of possible worlds or gremlins behind the scenes, in order to account for observations. The original phrasing is literally (translated directly) "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." I have no idea how the heck Tegmark thought *that principle* could support a view which basically says, "multiply out every permutationally possible mathematical entity, they all exist." (I know several more refined versions of the Razor have been proposed - but even the best one won't support his argument in the way he needs it to. A mathematical ontology is not, at its core, any simpler than any other.)
Occam's Razor is actually of no real value in deciding the probability of hypotheses being true, since by using various perfectly reasonable definitions of "entitities" and "necessity" you can pretty much "prove" any theory at all is preferred.
That's why it's of zero use to the empiricist. You decide the probability of truth of a hypothesis entirely by how many observations fail to falsify it. Considerations of the nature of the hypothesis itself -- whether it is "simple" or "complex" or "beautiful" or "ugly" or "the consensus" or "a rogue idea by a lunatic" and so forth have been demonstrated to be worthless over and over again. Indeed, the major distinction between the Age of Enlightenment and the scholastics of the Middle Ages was the former's rejection of the latter's veneration of the *quality of the argument* as something that had any relationship at all to its probability of being true.
This is actually one of the few really good points made by Sabine Hossenfelder in her quest to become the next Carl Sagan -- that to the extent physics values 'elegance' in any serious sense, it has seriously lost its way.
I don't think so. Consider these two hypotheses:
1. F=ma
2. F=ma except for one second on January 12, 1590 in one cubic centimeter in the core of Mars, when it doesn't apply to manmade objects.
Which hypothesis is true? No possible experiment can distinguish between the two, since there's no way you can go back to 1590.
Well, first of all, it's not the case that no possible experiment can distinguish between the two, because we believe in causality, and that means the blip in 1590 has consequences to this day. They may be tiny, tiny, consequences, but they are by definition not zero and therefore by definition there exists an experiment that could distinguish between them.
But of course you *could* define two theories which are in fact experimentally indistinguishable, even conceivably. And so? Is that supposed to prove something interesting? You might as well have said:
1. F = ma
2. F = mα
Notice the latter uses *two* alphabets instead of one! Clearly the first is to be preferred!
Differences which are philosophical matter as much to actual empirical science as differences which are typographical, and for the same reason. If you can't measure it, it's not science.
I'm not sure I agree with your reduction of dionysus' concern to semantics or "philosophical matters." Or perhaps I agree about *theories*, but only if we're pessimistic about a guarantee that theory will line up with certain kinds of truth. I hope you'll indulge an admittedly fanciful hypothetical to let me illustrate why.
Imagine that when Earth was just coming to be, there was a Dyson sphere around our solar system, created and inhabited by advanced aliens, the Calyptians. After a long period of peace, a group of Calyptian terrorists used an advanced weapon which annihilated the sphere entirely, leaving no physical trace of it. A spherical shell has no gravitational impact on anything inside of it, and suppose the incoming starlight the sphere blocked had such negligible energy that by now, fundamental Heisenberg-style limits on the experiments we can do guarantee that we can't determine that the sphere ever existed.
A theory of the history of our solar system which includes the Calyptians is not just positing a difference of a "philosophical matter". It's not just swapping an alphabet; they were (hypothetically) a vast number of living beings whose inclusion or exclusion from the theory is obviously a more than semantic difference, even if it can't be empirically tested.
I would say that a theory including the Calyptians is a bad theory, *even if they had actually existed.* All this shows is that there can be limits to what we can test and what we can know, such that empiricism can commit us to believing falsehoods, rather than grasping senselessly at unreachable truths. (To be extra clear, this is not me arguing against empiricism, it's still the best thing on offer; instead, I'm arguing against empiricism guaranteeing truth, even modulo semantics.)
The theory of the Calyptians is no different than the hypothesis that every word in Genesis is true, and God created the Universe (complete with fossils and Cosmic Microwave Background radiation) on October 23, 4004 BC, at 9.00 in the morning. That is, it is not testable, and so it is not a scientific hypothesis -- science has nothing to say about it. Whether one chooses to believe it or not is purely a matter of personal taste, there is no objective evidence either way.
Sure, I'm aware one might prefer a "simpler" theory -- the theory that there were no Calyptians. But this is nothing more than a certain taste, and a certain definitgion of "simpler." It's possible someone else might prefer the Calyptian theory for some other, equally persuasive, psychological or aesthetic reason. Who can say? To evaluate competing claims of "simplicity" using the Razor, we would need a complete and final philosophy of aesthetics, to which we all adhere.
I put "simpler" in quotes because the place where I'm most familiar with this kind of argument is in Intelligent Design, where people assert that the theory that God created everything is "simpler" than that there were some wild physics with extremely difficult to follow math, and some unknown implausible bits, that resulted in it all. Without taking a position on the argument per se, I *can* say that the assertion that a supernatural omniscient omnipotent Being exists is in no way "simpler" by *my* lights. I can't even begin to write down a description of such a Being. I think those folks have confused 'simpler' with "more familiar to me" or even just "I'm using words that have familiar meanings, and even if I use them in a novel way, the fact that they are the same old words persuades me the new ideas must be simpler."
There's no way to avoid such psychological weirdness, once you start admitting the value of "simpler" in judging theories. So, I don't. "Simpler" means no more to me than "more beautiful" or any other random aesthetic judgment that depends purely on one's personal outlook. This may be quite interesting from a social point of view, but I find it completely useless as a method for discerning measureable truth.
So if you had to bet $1000 on whether the Calyptians existed, with God resolving the bet, you would take even odds on it? And if you had to bet on whether F=ma or "F=ma except for one second on January 12, 1590 in one cubic centimeter in the core of Mars, when it doesn't apply to manmade objects.", you would also take even odds on each one being true?
I want to highlight what I agree with first, because I think there is a lot there. I agree there is no single objective measure of simplicity over the class of theories; I agree this makes using Occam's Razor an ultimately subjective matter; and I agree that means that it's honestly not a good thing to invoke in the arguments it's most frequently employed in - like arguments about God, or even fundamental metaphysics in general.
I also agree that the Calyptian Hypothesis is untestable, and that this implies a kind of limit on "what science can say about it." In many ways, that was the original point I was trying to get at. I think we might agree that the best version of science ends up being less "whatever takes you to believing what is true" and more "whatever takes you to believing what is *testable and justified*", with things like the Calyptian Hypothesis showing the difference between the two.
But I also think - and I hope you'll agree with me here too - that even if what counts as "simple" is often a matter of taste, and even if tastes differ on how simple God is or how simple a grand metaphysical theory is - there is still a lot that people can agree on, and tastes that are broadly shared. I think most people don't think there is a teapot orbiting beyond Jupiter; I think almost nobody would believe the Calyptians existed. And I think that's because of some shared intuition that these theories are unjustified and add needless complexity.
Even if there's no perfect objective way to formalize "Occam's Razor", even if it can't be turned into a hard and fast rule with a scientific definition, I think it still has value in cases like the Calyptians, where intuitions on simplicity are broadly shared. (And again, I agree that we should probably stop invoking it in the controversial cases.)
>That is, it is not testable, and so it is not a scientific hypothesis -- science has nothing to say about it.
So scientifically, it is just as valid as saying that the universe resulted from a period of very rapid expansion, after which the expansion slowed down, allowing the formation of star systems, &c. &c. &c.?
Also, the fact that you seem to think no one can be wrong about something being simpler is a pretty hot take imo. Why is everyone's judgement equally valid? Why can't the creationists just be wrong?
In that framework, you also have to consider the opportunity of observations falsifying it. If it's not falsifiable, it's not automatically true.
Not sure I fully understand what you mean, but of course if it's not falsifiable science has nothing to say about whether it is true or not. It's not a scienfic question. Is 2 + 2 = 4? This is not a falsifiable statement. You cannot do a measurement to answer the question, because it rests on human definitions of "2" and "+" and "4" so it is true or false by definition -- it either is or is not logically consistent with whatever axioms underly the formal system. So mathematical conjectures are not scientific hypotheses.
Neither are propositions about philosophy, or the nature of things unmeasureable and inherently undecidable. We may, individually or collectively, be fully convinced that any number of statements in these areas are true, or false, but whether they are or are not is not a question empirical science can answer, so these are not empirical scientific questions.
> Occam's Razor is actually of no real value in deciding the probability of hypotheses being true, since by using various perfectly reasonable definitions of "entitities" and "necessity" you can pretty much "prove" any theory at all is preferred.
That's misleading. Occam's razor was formalized in Solomonoff Induction. Basically, a theory's Kolmogorov complexity is an objective measure of its parsimony. Unfortunately, Kolmogorov complexity is incomputable for all possible inputs, and there is no single "best descriptive language" in which to describe a theory, and the specific order of theories will change slightly given slightly different description languages, ie. theories can be partially ordered but there is no total order.
However, it's not really true that "any theory" will be more parsimonious given the right descriptive language. For instance, "God did it" is incredibly unparsimonious no matter what descriptive language because of the number and complexity of properties of a deity that must be described.
I didn't say anything about Solomonoff's whatzit, so I'm not sure to what you object. I said the Razor is practically of no value at all, that it is merely a way in practice for someone to recast a statement of personal taste in language that appears objective (a narcissistic habit to which our species is highly drawn). It means as much, and as little, as someone saying "this theory is more beautiful the the other," or "this theory is in better accord with the wishes of God." The word "simple" is too poorly defined to have any practical use. It *seems* like it should, because we use the exact same word to describe situations where you *can* make it objectively measureable -- one can readily define a simpler computer program, or a simpler polynomial, or a simpler sundress. But just because we use the same word in a very different context -- trying to describe theories in general -- doesn't mean it retains its potential for objective definition, and in fact, I would say it does not, it loses it entirely.
> I said the Razor is practically of no value at all, that it is merely a way in practice for someone to recast a statement of personal taste in language that appears objective
I know what you said, and I'm saying that's misleading because it turns out that Occam's razor is actually a formal procedure for objectively partially ordering theories by parsimony. This procedure was rigourously formalized in Solomonoff Induction, so you can read up on that if you want further details beyond my summary in the last post. The simple takeaway is that your statement is technically incorrect.
I don't think this demonstrates what you think it demonstrates. Solomonoff Induction depends on a selection of a universal prior... doesn't that prove Carl's point that its application involves an element of arbitrary choice or "personal taste"?
Also, the "mathematical proof" of it relies on a lot of assumptions which probably aren't metaphysically borne out; to pick one critical assumption, the proof depends on the set of all programs being countable, but since the actual universe is continuous (and I believe the basis of a Hilbert space involves uncountable vectors), the space of considered "programs" can't reflect the space of possible hypotheses in the actual universe. In general, whenever anyone claims a mathematical proof has physical implementations, it's good to check that the referents line up.
> Solomonoff Induction depends on a selection of a universal prior... doesn't that prove Carl's point that its application involves an element of arbitrary choice or "personal taste"?
The universal prior is an ordering over theories by their Kolmogorov complexity, which is the compressibility of the theory's information. This is a universal, objective measure of a theory's parsimony; arguably, the only one that makes any sense.
That said, Kolmogorov complexity is incomputable, which means a computable approximation is only a partial order over such theories, and different approximations will yield slightly different orders. I already noted this in my first reply to Carl.
So your statement that "there is an element of arbitrary choice" is correct, but this weaker claim is NOT what Carl said. He made the considerably stronger claim that Occam's razor was of NO practical value at all, and that you can essentially prove ANY theory is preferred. That's a claim that Solomonoff Induction disproves.
Again, as I said in my first reply, no theory whose answers all reduce to "God did it" would ever be preferred under Solomonoff Induction, but Carl's framing of Occam's razor would seemingly permit this as a valid parsimonious theory based on "personal taste".
> to pick one critical assumption, the proof depends on the set of all programs being countable, but since the actual universe is continuous
This is a conjecture at best, and almost certainly false. Physics is computable as best we can tell, despite decades of people trying to find something uncomputable. In fact, the continuum has been at the heart of a number of serious difficulties in physics this past century, and in nearly every case we've solved this by simply removing the continuum entirely. I expect this will only continue.
See Baez's Struggles with the Continuum for more information: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.01421
Is it plausible that Occam's Razor eliminates some theories, but doesn't offer a good general approach for choosing theories?
Occam's Razor offers one type of framework to try to limit discussion when there are too many options to review or not enough evidence to sort between the options otherwise. It's as much a rhetorical device as it is a useful functioning rule, and can be freely used to eliminate correct options that happen to be "more complicated" in the personal viewpoint of the speaker.
It can certainly help eliminate some theories, but in the same way throwing darts at a board could help eliminate some theories. If it's not a generalizable rule, and we aren't sure when it is and isn't useful, then it's not a productive approach.
Playing tennis with Occam's Razor is as common as playing tennis with burden of proof, and probably no more informative. One theory is simpler because it has fewer individual entities, but another is simpler because it has fewer types of entities, and yet another is simpler because it has fewer tunable parameters determining the types and number of entities. I do think that each of these versions of Occam's Razor has some plausibility to it. But that just means that we shouldn't really be appealing to them to settle our philosophical disputes.
But overall, I agree - Tegmark is maybe the boldest version of the claim that All Is Mathematics, but it's not particularly novel, or helpful.
I heard an offhand comment by Hawking during a physics seminar some time ago (when he was far less known popularly) which I found far more compelling as a musing on the ultimate nature of things. He said it may well be the case that the total energy of the universe is zero, in which case the answer to the question of why there is something instead of nothing might be that there isn't -- that what we see is physically and mathematically indistinguishable from "nothing." While we can subtract some portion or other of the universe (in our imagination) and see that this would make things different (the Solar System would be emptier if we subtracted Jupiter, or all the planets), we err logically when we extrapolate this extravagantly to thinking that if we subtracted *everything* the result would be different than what we see now.
That's a cool idea to toy with, thanks for recounting it. I'm more inclined to moot the question by asking- if we were to find a "nonzero value" for the "total energy of the universe" (scare quotes because I have no idea what that would mean or if we could demonstrate it in any meaningful not-purely-semantic way), why would that be something that needs more explaining than zero? Zero energy is as much a contingent fact as "two energy"; if anything, it might seem to some like a greater coincidence.
Well, the point is that the only known physical law that prevents the universe from coming into existence form "nothing" is Conservation of Energy. If the total energy is zero, then there is no measurement of the entire universe we could make that would distinguish it from "nothing." It would just be some random re-arrangement of "nothing."
I'm putting "nothing" in quotes here because it is a surprisingly slippery concept. If you try to say exactly what you mean, I mean physically, or mathematically, it becomes very difficult. Theories of the pure vacuum are very difficult, and I don't think we have any good ones yet. You can't just say something like "oh there is no matter around" because matter makes up a tiny portion of the content of the universe, and is probably the least important characteristic that contribute to its long-term large length scale evolution. The universe "contains" all these fields, which have a tremendous influence, and contain way more energy than is present in the matter. I put "contains" in quotes, because maybe it doesn't "contain" them, maybe it *is* them in some fashion or other, the way spacetime doesn't "contain" gravity, it's that gravity is an interpretation of the way spacetime is curved.
Anyway, once you have fields, you have all kinds of existence and strange things going on, particularly down at the Planck level (we think). So a universe empty of ordinary matter, say, would not be especially different from ours. So *that* is clearly not what we can mean by "nothing." So what could we mean? The absence of fields? But how is that possible? Current theory would let us get rid of the electromagnetic field, for example, because it sits on top of spacetime. But we could not get rid of gravity, because it's just a property of spacetime, meaning as soon as you have space and time coordinates at all, you have gravity, so far as we know. So, again, it's hard to know what we can "subtract" in any meaningful way to discover what we mean by "nothing." And what Hawking's comment suggested to me (I don't knmow if this is what he meant though) is that for all we know it's just not possible, it's not possible to define "nothing" in any way that meaningfully differs from what we see around us.
Conservation of energy only applies to systems with time translation invariance. The universe as a whole is not such a system.
> that what we see is physically and mathematically indistinguishable from "nothing."
That is obviously incorrect, because what we see is physically very much distinguishable from "nothing". Wow, that hypothesis was quite easy to falsify!
The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. "Nothing" would preclude the existence of any physical laws, including the laws which define the combination of local energy states into a total energy state. Are you sure Hawking said this, and that he wasn't making a joke?
The concept of "nothing" in this context doesn't refer to the context
[please disregard the last half-finished sentence; also, why isn't there an edit function?]
I'm going to try to summarize the idea in a way that might make sure we're not talking past each other. (Carl, let me know if I go off-base in characterizing Hawking's musing.)
Sometimes, people talk about the potential catastrophe of "false vacuum decay" - the idea being, maybe what we call "vacuum" isn't the "nothingest" thing there could be. Maybe there's an even lower-energy state, "true vacuum". The catastrophe of "false vacuum decay" would be if all of our vacuum (which in fact has some energy associated with it) were to collapse into some such "true vacuum".
But physicists aren't sure whether the vacuum that pervades our universe is at the global minimum of energy, and it's hard to check it against anything else since it's the only one we know. We do know for sure that there's some energy in it; quantum fields and generating and annihilating particle pairs and other stuff I don't understand. But it might well turn out that this vacuum, even though it has energy, is the nothing-est thing that is possible in any coherent physics - which would mean "true vacuum", even though it's philosophically conceivable, has no place in the actual universe.
Hawking might have been musing - what if our entire universe is similarly the "closest possible thing to nothing"? The idea you characterized in your comment, let's call it "true nothing", with no physical laws or energy states whatsoever, is a philosophical one. It's a fine enough philosophical idea, but we can't assume it's possible from the outset, just like we can't assume "true vacuum" is actually possible. Maybe the universe is already in its lowest-energy possible state, so the "true nothing" idea ends up being impossible. (In the philosophical lingo, "true vacuum" and "true nothing" may be *conceivable*, but not *possible*.)
Of course, you can still ask the question - why are the rules for possibility "set up that way"? Why not another physics? That fundamental question is still left open - why this way, and not another? But I take Hawking's point to be something like, even if the "why not another way" question is coherent, the "why something and not nothing" question might, *within* our physics, turn out to be a non-question; this universe could actually be the "nothingest possible thing" in physics.
Thank you, that makes more sense.
However, your interpretation of Hawkin's comment would put it in a fundamentally different category than Tegmarks "hypothesis" (a misnomer, since it can't be tested or falsified): physics vs philosophy. It would also mean that Hawking had completely misunderstood the "why is there something instead of nothing" question.
Yeah, to a philosopher, that last part gets at the real question. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is at least in part, "Why are the laws of physics such as they are?" Hawking is answering, "given that the laws of physics are such as they actually are, why do we have this configuration of matter?" But he doesn't address the fundamental question.
I'm not speaking for Hawking, so let us not say what he thinks. We could ask him, except he's dead, so oh well.
The idea is that it is not possible to describe, mathematically or in any other precise way, a "nothing" that is both logically and mathematically consistent, and which differs from the universe we actually see around us. So the question of why is there something instead of nothing is ill-posed, because while "something" can be defined by pointing to everything around us, "nothing" cannot -- it's not possible to point to an example, and there is no way to get there by some logical or mathematically well-defined path from something to which you can point.
I realize that is non-intuitive, but that doesn't really mean squat. Plenty of stuff that is 100% gospel truth is non-intuitive, and plenty of stuff that is intuitive is garbage. Human intuition is worthless in physics, even if epistemologists like to hold onto it for nostalgic reasons I assume.
I think there's something to Hawking's point, especially in that it pushes us to think harder before assuming that what we're seeing isn't "the default", and assuming that it has disadvantages in its "simplicity" compared to a proposed "nothing."
But in the end, I do think it's kind of fanciful; my personal sense of simplicity and my (limited) knowledge of physics makes me think things would almost certainly be simpler and have less energy if, say, the big bang hadn't occurred and the universe were "empty" or "nonexistent" or whatever semantic term you want to use.
The problem is that the false vacuum hypothesis applies to the Higgs field only (with universal consequences, but ultimately it addresses only the dynamics of the Higgs field).
The "generating and annihilating particle pairs" narrative is also a widely dispersed lie rather than anything even remotely similar to the truth. It just doesn't happen.
Huh. I thought the annihilating pairs thing was the leading explanation of how black holes can lose/radiate mass over time. What's the alternative theory? And do you mean we haven't observed radiation we can confirm is Hawking radiation yet, or do you mean that we're sure the theory is false, but it sticks around among the uninformed (like myself)? If you mean the latter, I'd love to take a look at a debunking of it, if you have a preferred source to offer.
What I want to know is how he defined the energy of an expanding spacetime since it's nonstationary, and so has no timelike Killing vector, and so has no definable energy.
I'm not trying to contradict you here, I'm genuinely curious - what does this mean for "conservation of energy"? I was under the impression it has been and remains one of the most important principles across all kinds of domains of physics. But if you can't compare energy between t0 and t1 in an expanding spacetime, that would make it meaningless.
If there is a definable energy metric which is used to characterize conservation of energy, then I would assume Hawking meant that one.
Conservation of energy is a consequence of that symmetry. A good place to start would be Wikipedia's page on Energy in General Relativity.
I am fairly certain (I won't give a number; I haven't tried calibrating my probabilities) that there is no sensible way to define energy in an expanding spacetime, even after accounting for some fairly accomplished scientists saying the total energy of the universe is 0. I honestly have no idea how they would define a gravitational potential energy such that the number holds, besides asserting that it is negative the energy of the stuff in the universe, and if they did do that I would call them sophists instead.
By "that symmetry" I mean time translation invariance. I thought you were replying to another comment of mine and didn't check.
Agreed, Occam's Razor definitely has that sense of disputing the null, and arguments over it tend to quickly devolve into less-than-constructive conversations. If I could edit my earlier comment (and if that part of it weren't a touchstone for the current conversation), I would probably take out my bit about Occam's Razor actually cutting against his position. While I do disagree with his application of it, what really bothers me is his making an epistemic heuristic such a big part of his metaphysical argument in the first place!
Good point. That bugs me also.
> I'm interested to hear if it made an actual splash with serious scholars in either physical or philosophical fields
In physics i have never heard of anyone doing anything with it. I agree with the overall impression that it's not even bad physics but bad philosophy. Related:
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551
>The interesting question is why anyone would possibly take this seriously. Tegmark first came up with this in 1997, putting on the arXiv this preprint. In this interview, Tegmark explains how three journals rejected the paper, but with John Wheeler’s intervention he managed to get it published in a fourth (Annals of Physics, just before the period it published the (in)famous Bogdanov paper). He also explains that he was careful to do this just after he got a new postdoc (at the IAS), figuring that by the time he had to apply for another job, it would not be in prominent position on his CV.
>One answer to the question is Tegmark’s talent as an impresario of physics and devotion to making a splash. Before publishing his first paper, he changed his name from Shapiro to Tegmark (his mother’s name), figuring that there were too many Shapiros in physics for him to get attention with that name, whereas “Tegmark” was much more unusual. In his book he describes his method for posting preprints on the arXiv, before he has finished writing them, with the timing set to get pole position on the day’s listing. Unfortunately there’s very little in the book about his biggest success in this area, getting the Templeton Foundation to give him and Anthony Aguirre nearly $9 million for a “Foundational Questions Institute” (FQXi). Having cash to distribute on this scale has something to do with why Tegmark’s multiverse ideas have gotten so much attention, and why some physicists are respectfully reviewing the book.
Thanks, this is really illuminating!
This pretty much sums up. I would really like Scott to redact the "leading" part, if you go to a general relativity or cosmology meeting and try to pool the attendees, I would wager more people would give you the christian God as the answer for why the universe exists over variations of Tegmark's theory. Although to be fair I would also bet that more than half of the physicists would argue that "why the universe exists" is not for physics to answer.
#2 Mentions Dune, and adrenochrome harvested from children seems like something Baron Harkonnen would use, but the article actually references "Destination: Void, from a different book series by Frank Herbert.
+1; came to say the same thing
By the way, it's not adrenochrome (I'm pretty sure), but powerful people harvesting glands from children is a key part of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron.
Re: 19, has anyone here _ever_ had a semantically understandable category fall out of embeddings without feeling like you're trying to force it? I've done a ton of work in that area and whenever I try and understand what the program is doing in real life terms it just seems like nonsesnse.
Can you describe the domain and tools you’re working with a bit more? I’ve done some NLP stuff but am not sure if you’re coming from more of a stats angle.
Usually recommendation engines, various tools, like principle components and some deep learning methods.
Interesting. I worked as a taxonomist and in data management for CRM (consumer data), but more on the business side as a liaison between business and tech. I know roughly how the tools work but never had to get “under the hood” myself (I can handle a little SQL but not much else.) I worked with business stakeholders to write rules for automated content management. The technical side fascinates me, though- it is a little like black magic.
I put a lot of work into the netflix prize in 2009 and found topic categories and all other movie metadata to be completely useless. All I needed to predict star ratings 10% better than their status quo was other users' star ratings.
Metadata in general was pretty messy back in 2009. A lot of the people best equipped to generate and maintain it would fight relentlessly to avoid having anything to do with it. It’s a little bit different now, I’m sure, but I haven’t worked in a few years and industries were always wildly different anyway. But last I looked in 2017, it was still surprisingly hard to get management to care about data quality, much less invest in it. It seems like the business reality is that you can make millions without it, so why bother?
It looks like (4) studies the link between knowing Tuskegee and refusing treatment in other diseases before 2020, and also finds there isn’t a difference in actually getting treatment. While there is such difference in Covid vaccines. And in the interviews they note Tuskegee is occasionally mentioned, but not as much as others, but I’m not sure those other reasons apply to COVID vax, as they make more sense in a context of active treatment
James Hawes's The Shortest History of Germany is a (biased) book about how "East Elbia" was always a different thing than the Rhine zone.
On Tuskegee, this article (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/133/1/407/4060075) published in a top econ journal finds disclosure of Tuskegee in 1972 leads to "increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men" by comparing changes in the health of older black men closer or farther away from Macon County (county of Tuskegee). It uses difference-in-differences-in-differences and D-i-D style techniques have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. With that caveat, if there was an effect on black adults in 1972, that would likely persist to today through social norms in the black community on medical distrust and going to the doctor even if black people today do not know about Tuskegee. Though someone should look at re-doing this paper's strategy with vaccine hesitancy as the outcome and better D-i-D methods.
Worth noting that the vaccination rate in Macon county is about average for the state and considerably higher than neighboring Russell county.
That part of east Alabama has a vaccination rate higher than the regions north and south of it, as well.
> I can’t tell whether “two components” naturally fell out of the data, or they decided it by fiat
with PCA it gives you a list of component basis vectors sorted by contribution / importance, I imagine they just took top 2 like you usually do
Regarding #25. The paper says, "odds ratio = 4.8, P = 0.034, N = 33, Fisher’s exact test". Don't use it. Fisher's exact test has low power.
Lydersen, S., Fagerland, M. W., & Laake, P. (2009). Recommended tests for association in 2×2 tables. Statistics in Medicine, 28 (7), 1159–1175. http://doi.org/10.1002/sim.3531
(This comment is written by someone who would probably not have seen the gorilla)
On straw hats, doesn’t that link say the riots started two days before straw hat day? That feels very human, ‘No! You can smash up my hat if I was wearing it on the wrong day, but it isn’t the wrong day yet, you bastard, let’s fight!’
Leading theory my ass. (Metaphysical speculation) != (physics). We have guild rules about that.
@37: My favourite sentence in the Wikipedia article for Alchemy is in the section about its transition into chemistry:
"Boyle would note the place in which the experiment was carried out, the wind characteristics, the position of the Sun and Moon, and the barometer reading, all just in case they proved to be relevant."
Up until now I thought it's both cute and inspiring, a combination of a scientist's discipline and a 17th century intuition about the world. Well, the passage about semiconductor yields made me realize I was unfair to Boyle, and that considering the positions of celestial bodies makes sense even today.
I once attended a scientific meeting where one group had gathered a large amount of brain scan data and urged us to poke around in it and see what we could find. Others at the meeting urged us to not explore the data but only test specific hypotheses on it, because if we looked we would be tainted and would only test hypotheses on the data we already knew the data would support. I was inclined to agree with the first group, but I didn't know whether that's just because that's my style and I'm not a careful enough scientist. Anyway, that's what the gorilla made me think of.
Repeat after the data scientist: "First, halve your data."
You can explore with up to half your data set and then use the other half to see whether you have anything. https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is-it-reasonable-to-use-half-your-dataset-to-carry-out-exploratory-analysis-leading-to-specific-hypotheses-and-then-test-these-using-the-other-half
Could we call this DeGroot's Law from his 1956 paper? It needs some kind of memorable tag. Please will anyone say if they know of such a convention in common use in a particular field?
That Brandeis list veers between "okay, I see the point here" and "if ever you hear or see me use this term, shoot me and bury me in a ditch":
"Gender exclusive language:
You guys, Ladies and Gentlemen
Gender inclusive language:
Y'all, folks or folx, friends, loved ones, people, everyone
These examples either lump all people under masculine language or within the gender binary (man or woman), which doesn’t include everyone."
I wonder where the use of "lads" (which we used to refer to each other in the collective sense in my all-girl school) falls on this? And if ever I use "folx", you may be sure and certain that that last remaining dim flicker of reason and sanity has burned itself out and I am now a drooling imbecile.
Oh, I'm sorry - is "imbecile" an ableist term?
"And if ever I use "folx", you may be sure and certain that that last remaining dim flicker of reason and sanity has burned itself out and I am now a drooling imbecile."
I think there are also many other signs someone may have become a "drooling imbecile" that are more important than using "folks" or "folx". I just don't think the use of a word or two is really something to prioritize when looking at mental capacity.
Let me know if you ever manage to trip over a sense of humour; I realise that such fripperies are not part of the mental equipment of the austerely high-minded dialectical materialist, but you may be interested in it as a historical curiosity.
I'm not sure what the purpose of the "joke" is, is it simply to call people who use the word "folx" drooling imbeciles? Could you explain it further for me?
I admit that I am curious - is it some overly complex attempt to present Marxist as clueless idiots?
Why would you say that? I'm asking very fair questions.
I guess that here we get into intrumental-vs-epistemic rationality territory; maybe even elephant-in-the-brain territory. Deiseach's underlying point is presumably that the use of the word 'folx' is strongly correlated with holding wildly improbable beliefs - basically it is a strong marker of being a follower of wokism, broadly defined. And while I gather that there is some some evidence to suggest a correlation between left-wing political orientation and mental illness - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339541044_Mental_illness_and_the_left - presumably not everyone who finds themselves on that side of the aisle actually has a diagnosable psychological condition. My guess is that simply being within the normal range of agreeableness (in the sense of 'not being enough of a non-conformist' and being in a social milieu that promotes, for example, the view that all disparities in outcomes between human groups are the product of discrimination, or the view that biological sex is a meaningless social construct and that trans women are therefore women without any further qualification, will be enough to get a reasonably large number of sane people to internalise those beliefs, even though those beliefs are, colloquially speaking, insane in the sense that there's no way that a mentally healthy person, intelligent enough to fully understand the evidence and acting without any societal pressure, would come to believe them independently.
As it happens, I suspect that Deiseach herself is someone who scores pretty low on trait agreeableness, making her relatively immune to such effects, so for her personally, taking up the language of the woke really would be a good indicator that *something* had broken psychologically, even if that wouldn't be true for the average wokist.
Nothing so high-minded on my part, I'm afraid; it's that the likes of words like "folx" grate horribly upon my inner ear. They are damned neologisms derived from tin-eared, functionally illiterate types who create such cursed terms as "burglarize" when the perfectly functional verb "burglar" already existed, as though one were to describe the work of teachers, writers or doctors as "writerizing, teacherizing and doctorizing".
"Folx" adds to that clunking heaviness a treacly coating of faux-folksiness and tops it off with the same "let's all be Inclusive and Diverse" as creating the term "Latinx" where native speakers of Romance languages, and the persons in question to whom such terms are meant to apply, regard such Anglophone-centric mangling of their own gendered languages with appropriate "what the hell do you think you are doing?"
It's not politics as such, it's that if I ever stoop to such horrible torture of the English language, my brain will undoubtedly have decayed to the extent that I can no longer be held to be in possession of functional reasoning capacity.
"Burglar" is of course a noun, "burgle" is the verb.
There's been a burglarization. We must arrest the burglarizationist.
Tell the police to begin policizating! They must investigatorize the premises in order to identityize the burglarizationist!
Thank you. When I your statement that "burgle" was a noun, I was wondering where. People could say something like "My stuff is gone, there was a burgle", but it's just as well that they don't.
Speaking of, I don't see why "gift" has become a verb when we have the perfectly good "give".
Ok, but doctors don't doct, at least not in English.
One doctor would doceo, and if there were more than one doctor they would docemus.
That is so, doctors... doctor. But they don't -ize while they're doing it!
I certainly would worry if my doctor doctored my chart or prescription ...
"functionally illiterate"
Wait, I thought we were talking about a highly educated students group at a university? Surely they're just as literate as you are?
I'll also note that it's weird for you to say things like "faux-folksiness" and "let's all be Inclusive and Diverse" and then attempt to claim that "it's not politics as such". It seems like your own politics has determined that this is a fake folksiness rather than say, an earnest folksiness. As usual, we can see the people who claim to not be talking about politics appear to be the most mired in their own ideology.
It genuinely isn't politics for me. A right-wing politician, organiser, or whomever who didn't come from a background where terms like "folks" were the common parlance, but who tried using it because they wanted to promote an image of being in solidarity with "the common man" would irritate me every bit as much.
In fact, British politicians are replete with instances of this; David Cameron (Conservative Party) being mocked for his "call me Dave" and forgetting which football club he allegedly supported (football, or soccer, is the working-class sport)
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/25/david-cameron-blames-brain-fade-for-getting-his-football-team-wrong
Ed Miliband (Labour) with his two kitchens:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/12/kitchen-miliband-photo-backfires-bbc-labour
But I have to go now as I have the oven on and it's time to take the cooking out of it or else it'll burn!
They may be at any sort of university and may hold any kind of degree, but if they're native English speakers and can't, in fact, speak standard English then that is functionally illiterate.
"Folx" is the worst kind of fake-down with da yute/appropriating AAVE cringe-worthy behaviour; it's aping the kind of poor orthography that spells by ear (and hence reduces "ks" to "x") which is associated with minorities whom we are now not supposed to mention are poor, originally (as in African-American) rural (and Southern but now increasingly urban and Northern) and non-white.
Adopted by trendies as a sign of solidarity with the masses (and the kind of adoption of Black slang that also gets roasted for using AAVE terms by whities) and by LGBT people because, I dunno, they felt they weren't already distinctive enough?, it has now percolated into the mainstream, or at least those who use it try to make it so percolate.
Imagine someone who is the modern version of an old-school Labour Party shop-steward, who at party conferences would probably have addressed the audience as "Comrades!", but today now they say "Folx, here's the tea" and you get my drift.
A reasonable article on why the letter X has been so abused (though I think the mathematical analogy is weak, I do think it's more to do with fake spelling):
https://www.wellandgood.com/folx-meaning/
As has been pointed out, "folks" is *already* gender-neutral and doesn't need any special new twist, but there are always those who can't leave well enough alone, and if it ain't broke, their itchy little fingers twitch to 'fix' it.
There's plenty of very literate people who don't speak what I would call a "standard" English. Do you regard "trendies", "dunno", "ain't" to be standard English? Because if you're using such words you seem quite functionally illiterate to me.
"As it happens, I suspect that Deiseach herself is someone who scores pretty low on trait"
Is there any evidence for this? Whenever I see Deisarch comments they seem pretty stock-standard and agreeable.
Mostly her own self-description over the years. But she's putting up more of an argument in the threads above than someone who was highly keen to get along with people would.
I don't think that's the case. Deisarch is blindly agreeing with Scott Alexander's framing, which is kind of misleading to begin with. A person who was less agreeable would actually look at the evidence posted with a critical eye instead of merely performing the standard right-wing outrage you would usually see over these kinds of stories. Deisarch's complaint is actually very generic as far as I can tell.
Secondly, most people in these comments argue with me. Arguing with me is actually a way to show that you are keen to agree with everyone else on ACX. It's just not very good evidence that someone is disagreeable.
I also think self-description is a pretty poor indicator for these sorts of things, most people who pass around these kinds of meme incidents all like to think of themselves as independent thinkers. Yet they become memes for a reason - most people are approaching them in the exact same way.
I'm fairly sure there is no-one in my entire life would ever have described as "highly keen to get along with people" 😁
I was reminded of this conversation when I saw this tweet - https://twitter.com/elegationvain/status/1440787340058783745 - if this had been in a Zero HP Lovecraft story I'd have found it a bit too obvious.
@19: If it's any consolation, the media bias study seems to be a small side-project of his main thing right now, which is creating an artificial physicist - a symbolic regression algorithm where experimental data comes in and equations come out.
"Study shows Donald Trump is grumpy when he does not get enough sleep. Being an important enough figure that scientists study you personally sounds exhausting."
I await with breathless anticipation the follow-up studies "When caught out in the rain without an umbrella, Donald Trump gets wet" and "If he has not yet eaten that day, Donald Trump gets hungry".
But how can we be sure this result replicates unless we get data from figures on the other side of the political divide? Has anyone studied whether or not Joe Biden gets more cheerful the less sleep he gets?
Are people really that hard-up enough for something to publish that they need this kind of "grass is green" obviousness, or was it a joke? If it was a sincerely meant paper, I think some "kick them out of the lab into the sunlight and fresh air" is badly needed.
I'm wondering if the dearth of Trump news and the way the media expanded and survived on Trump is being expressed by finding any reason at all to throw "Trump" into the title is what we are seeing.
Not having read the study, my guess is that the real story in that paper is validating either the method they are using to figure out how much sleep Donald Trump had on a given day, or the method they are using to identify grumpiness.
7: Although the thing about "trigger warning" is in the section on "violent language", the actual reasons given for maybe preferring "content note" over "trigger warning" aren't about the implication of violence at all. (I think there's at least one other good reason for usually using something other than "trigger warning": there are reasons why people might want advance notice of potentially-upsetting things besides outright PTSD-like risk of being "triggered".)
>Imagine a future in which Earth’s dominant ISP is constructed, maintained, administered, and governed by Martians, who operate it for free as a public-relations campaign.
Please, can we colonise a saner place like the Moon, the asteroid belt or the Venerean atmosphere? Mars is one of the worse choices because it's got the downsides of a planet (need chemical rockets to take off due to gravity/atmosphere, extra delta-V from gravity well) without the upside (atmosphere thick enough that you don't need a pressure hull or radiation shielding).
Re #16: This chart has been bugging me since it came out. It seems too cute by half. Does the vaccine really reduce mortality by the same amount across age groups?
I haven't looked into their dataset but it's possible to take a quick look at this question from the Delta variant breakdown in UK's Technical Briefing 23, table 5, pages 19 and 20.
Double jabbed over the age of 50: 71 991 cases, 1565 deaths: 2.2 % chance of dying.
Unvaccinated over the age of 50: 8 551 cases, 590 deaths: 6.9 % chance of dying.
So amongst the over fifties, amongst those susceptible to covid, the sickest seven people in a hundred are likely to die if unvaccinated; the sickest two people in a hundred are likely to die even though double jabbed.
We already know there is a high baseline of people not susceptible to covid by various lines of evidence, perhaps as high as 80% according to Nelde et al and Diamond Princess, another source says at least 50 % but this probably will be affected by how we want to define infection: no infection at all, one sneeze, mild symptoms only, and so on.
In the other age segment, under 50 years:
Double jabbed under the age of 50: 85 407 cases, 48 deaths: 0.06 % chance of dying.
Unvaccinated under the age of 50: 248 803 cases, 132 deaths: 0.05 % chance of dying.
So amongst the under fifty age group, amongst those who are susceptible to covid, the sickest person in two thousand is likely to die if unvaccinated, and the sickest person in 1 667 is likely to die even if double jabbed. Although I haven't even taken my statistical manual off the shelf, I think an effect size this small is going to be difficult to work with, you usually want at least 5%, biological systems are noisy.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1018547/Technical_Briefing_23_21_09_16.pdf
Semaglutide: "Yet GLP-1 had serious problems. The first was that it was degraded in the blood by an enzyme within a few minutes. This meant that it wasn’t useful as a drug in its native form because it would have to be injected far too often. This problem was solved by using another version of the hormone identified in the saliva of the gila monster lizard..."
I feel as though there is an untold story behind that last sentence.
"How a lizard’s venom inspired the promising weight loss drug Wegovy: Semaglutide is the start of a new chapter in obesity treatments." By Julia Belluz@juliaoftoronto Jul 5, 2021
https://www.vox.com/22553793/gila-monster-lizard-venom-inspired-obesity-drug-semaglutide
I guess it's not actually an interesting story, then, because that article doesn't really tell it.
I guess there is an opening for you to do some investigative journalism.
Wouldn't be the first time someone had to clean up a mess left by a Voxsplainer.
#17 Could you segment or subset the data. I really think we should stop incentivizing papers based on unpublished data, much of it gathered with public funding. The replication problem is crippling public confidence in much bio-medical and social science research.
#21. hatis problems are historically deep. They can be over explained based on its history. E.g. the French forced the independent country to pay them an indemnity in the 19th Century. The Spanish did nothing like that to the DR.
#16 Not sure of the relevance, since it seems to me that most parents ordinarily want to expose their kids to massively less risk than themselves in general.
Also, totally ignores parents under 35.
Re: War Against The Weak, even academic historians (very anti-eugenics, and very likely to classify things as eugenics) found Edwin Black hyperbolic and sensationalist, especially when it came to drawing Nazi connnections.
Also re: sterilising the blind, separating views on the desirability of someone passing on their genes from views on their capabilities as a parent is difficult, and historians tend to ignore the latter despite all the evidence that it was a strong factor in what is categorised as "eugenics".
My understanding is that much of what we moderns think of as "eugenics" is tainted by a misunderstanding of what the movement was all about, and by tons of recency bias. For one, the idea that the movement was solely focused on creating a 'master race' dismisses their larger concern: that the 'whiteness' they perceived as upholding modern society was being 'polluted' by other races. Since they believed that only 'whiteness' could create and sustain 'civilization', intermarriages that 'polluted' that civilization-sustaining 'whiteness' would (by their logic) lead to complete civilizational collapse.
Understanding that perspective (that eugenics was focused as much on a false-doomsday narrative as on a utopian on) puts the fervent motivations of the actors involved into a frighteningly familiar context. Ms. Plecker from the book can't be dismissed as someone who is pure evil, trying to exclude people who have one drop of non-white blood in them because of simple hatred. In her mind, she's a crusader trying to stop what she sees as the insidious forces attempting to 'contaminate' white society. But for her efforts, she thinks the interbreeding will cause the next generation to 'descend into barbarism' like so many non-white nations around the world. She's stopping the apocalypse! And what can't be justified when all of human civilization is at stake? Certainly SCOTUS bought that argument, as did nearly all respected intellectuals of that era.
“We’re more like them than one might think” is true, but using it exclusively as a “and we should be afraid of that” sort of makes it useless IMO. Eugenics had good parts, like everything (Ancient Greece and Rome had slaves and also saw genociding their neighbors as the highest good, but also created the precursors of much of our science and philosophy, the leftists were whatever insults you want but also did lots of good stuff, etc). To truly understand how “were similar to them” you need to actually understand that, and that is not “well you need to understand them better to know just how evil they are”. It’s the same with Nazis - you hear constantly “the Nazis weren’t totally different from us, we could become like them too!” And it doesn’t mean “oh, actually understand them”, it means “be really scared and frightened of Nazis around every corner!”
(And natural selection literally “culls the weak”. your not having hereditary congenital blindness depended on thousands of your not-ancestors who were such dying! Given that, the seemingly innate moral revulsion to the concept is IMO weird, although I don’t at all support any sort of “eugenics” beyond “not fucking people with deformities” for a variety of reasons - from horses with all sorts of genetic disorders to pugs, human large scale selective breeding has bad parts! in particular your GWAS embryo children are probably going to be not selected on what you thought they were. Please at least wait...)
I've wondered whether car accidents select for people with prudence and/or fast reflexes.
Probably a bit. And selects against drinking, being male, being 18-24, and aggressiveness.
Bigger is the “selection against not having kids”. Which is unfortunate tbh, as, relatively, most of the people I like tend to not have or have many kids, both today and historically (nietzche :(). Also selection against transgender, which is unfortunate for similar reasons (lots of trans friends). Even the “traditionalists” who are clever and interesting probably won’t make it above two kids each, and half of them probably won’t marry or will go gay/trans. IMO one should have lots of kids just for purely altruistic reasons - I’m conflicted on sperm donating though.
Why are you conflicted about sperm donation?
I’m not convinced that parents actually have 0 impact on children, and suspect it’s just that current parenting and schooling existing creates that 0 impact in practice. And it seems somewhat connected to it being bad to sex w/o commitment, and to cheat with someone. Also I had a ... something ... childhood and wouldn’t want to risk that for a kid. It seems just not great to have a kid you don’t raise at least a bit. Don’t know tbh
Turns out having children IS genetic. If your parents didn't have children, there's little chance you will have them.
New GWAS finds a shocking 100% heritability for heritability!
Technically correct, of course, but from what I understand, there is only relatively modest correlation between *how many* children you have (assuming it's not zero) and how many children your child(ren) will have ... for the time being. There are those who believe that we are starting to see selection pressure for consciously wanting (and succeeding) to have large numbers of children - see Karlin's Age of Industrial Malthusianism series, particularly part 2 - https://www.unz.com/akarlin/breeders-revenge/ - for an interesting exploration of where that could lead us.
I humanity keeps having car accidents for a really long time, eventually 18-24 year olds will die out.
Do you have a specific reason or reasons for thinking that "traditionalists who are clever and interesting" will have children that don't marry or be gay/trans at such a high rate? If you're just speaking pessimistically that's fine, you don't need to elaborate on hyperbole. I am just curious if there was something more specific.
Also, if you wouldn't mind I would like to know your definition of "traditionalist" as used here, which you put in quotes and seems to imply is different than the standard definition.
Self identified internet right wingers / traditionalists is what I was referring to. And yeah pessimism + a lot of them claim they will win the future of politics (lol) by having lots of kids when everyone else isn’t, and while having kids does “help” that isn’t gonna do much given all that. I say that a lot of them will go gay or trans instead of having kids because I know a lot of them and they do that a lot, way more than average
Forgive me, but I'm having a hard time following your argument. I'm saying that Nazis and eugenicists were worried about a doomsday scenario that their theory predicted was inevitable. Because of that they justified bending, suspending, and rewriting ethical rules as a necessary step to avoiding a catastrophic predicted outcome. Though an outcome we now realize was BS.
Learning not to adjust your moral principles to satisfy a doomsday prediction is not the same thing as seeing Nazis around every corner. It's attempting to understand how population-level justifications for atrocities arise and realizing it's not a random fluke occurrence.
Your point that many ancient societies did similar things is certainly germane. The Biblical account of Israel attempting to eradicate all of the indigenous Palestinians to prevent religious degeneracy is a very close example of the exact same phenomenon as eugenics.
Plenty of doomsday situations are worth rewriting moral principles for.
Examples: total war of WWI and II caused millions to rewrite their ancient pro glory of war principles to be totally against war.
The entire EA community engages in a lot of “strong moral principle changes around doomsday scenarios”
The problem here is that the issue is that the outcome was BS, not that doomsday scenarios are bad. The “Nazis are the root of all evil” thing is annoying, and leads to everything the Nazis do being called total evil (“not adjusting moral principles around a doomsday scenario”) when that thing as a whole is __fine__. What the Nazis did wasn’t, but ... suspending and rewriting rules is something that happens often and is absolutely often necessary. The enlightenment rewrote most of the rules, and now we’re here. Rome also rewrote most of its rules more than once. Whenever Nazis or eugenics or “moral evil” is involved, people say all sorts of things that are total nonsense
I'm going to disagree about the principle that it's okay to rewrite moral rules to avoid a doomsday scenario. I feel like there's a difference between experiencing WWI & WWII and updating your prior on war as a RESULT of the process, versus saying there's an existential threat on the horizon and the only way to not be destroyed is if we throw out well-established and unrelated ethical rules.
Historically, opposition to the Palestinians/Christians/Reformationists/Axis/Allies/'Degenerates'/Communists/Terrorists/etc. was justification for tossing out unrelated prohibitions against genocide/due process/targeting civilians/total war/oppression/suspension of civil rights/etc. I don't think your examples of updating moral rationale in the face of reasoned experience are equivalent at all. Nor do I think this is just a case of "anything Nazi-related is automatically tainted".
It's fine to update your moral principles, as you point out that's something that has been done to great effect for centuries, and not something we want to roll backward. But those updates should be based on sound moral reasoning, not out of fear that if we don't some unrelated doomsday event is going to destroy all of humanity as we know it. Plenty of historical examples to demonstrate that's not a good idea. Indeed, forcing people to toss out rational principles in response to fear is an established principle of tyranny - in all ages.
wouldn’t it have been great to “update those priors” before hundreds of millions of people died horribly?
“You can’t predict and respond to large scale disasters as a society” seems pretty bad tbh. Yes, “bad thing will happen” is used as an excuse, but it’s because bad things exist and need to be counteracted!
There’s no difference between “sound moral reasoning” and “fear of doomsday” that doesn’t depend on the thing in question. By rejecting it all outright, you condemn us to climate change doom or AI doom or whatever to own the Nazis
Our society empowers the government to seize the children of parents it considers unfit. Some societies have empowered governments to prevent people it considers unfit from having children in the first place. We see a vast moral difference between these things and vast potential for abuse in one and not the other. I'm not sure if that's because they are so different or because we were taught to regard one but not the other as gravely immoral and prone to abuse.
That seems to reflect on the pre-emptive verses reactionary decision. Saying someone can never try to have kids is quite different from saying that they had kids and proved themselves, through their actual actions, as being deficient parents.
Even that line isn't complete though, as there is a lot of meaningful pushback against at least some children being taken away from their parents.
Indeed, there's a strong bias against CPS taking children out of a home. I think there's sometimes an impression that a call to CPS is a strong threat to have your children taken away. In reality, one visit isn't likely to result in the children being removed absent a belligerent parent and very strong evidence of neglect/harm.
Even then, a depressingly small concession to the State's demands will see the children returned to a home that most people would not agree is a good environment. The State's minimum requirement is set very low. That's probably part of how CPS has managed to remain mostly apolitical.
You are being just as simplistic as those you criticise. Eugenicists were concerned with more than just interracial marriage, and some eugenicists did not see anything wrong with interracial marriage, and indeed considered it potentially essential.
I didn't claim those I criticize were being simplistic, nor is it fair to attribute that claim to my comment. Indeed, I think it kind of misses the point. I claimed there is a modern impression that the eugenics movement was primarily focused on creating a positive good in the future, but that much of the effort of the eugenics movement - and particularly the kind of thing being discussed as outlandish in the book being reviewed - was focused on avoiding a predicted negative consequence of allowing what the people at the time perceived as pollution of racial purity. That was hypothesized to sustain civil society, but this idea has been largely forgotten today. The point of the comment was to point this out, fill in some details (not write 10,000 words about the whole movement) to help clarify why people who pushed these ideas did not see themselves as obviously evil, despite how it appears to modern audiences. To be sure, that didn't apply to the smaller group who were on the eugenics side of the debate, but who disagreed with prohibitions on racial mixing. But they had to contend with the counter-argument that their lack of concern was predicted by alarmists to destroy all of modern civilization. That the majority were wrong doesn't factor into the historical analysis of how people of the time perceived the situation.
Two things can be true at the same time: first that there was heterogeneity in a popular international intellectual movement spanning millions of people, and second the consequences of one of the main tenets of that movement (now largely forgotten) have repulsive consequences to a modern audience.
Your argument could be phrased a lot better, and be a lot more accurate, if you didn't keep focusing on interracial marriage. This was a lesser concern of the eugenics movement than things like the "feeble-minded" - hence, for instance, those US states that enacted sterilisation laws without banning interracial marriage.
I think it's also important to understand the status of what we think of as 'genetics' during this era. The concept of heredity before the discovery of the structure of DNA (which did not happen until 1953) was nothing like what we think of today. Darwin's theory was accepted ... and then it ran into some explanatory problems. And for good reason: many of Darwin's original ideas for how heritability was passed on were way off!
The way we tell the story, Mendel discovered genetic inheritance in the 1860's (around the time of Darwin's work) and most of the story was explained until we could tie a nice ribbon on it with DNA. But scientific revolutions rarely run in such a straight line, and just because work in one area has been done doesn't mean that work is universally integrated into the work of another area - even in the 'same' field. Mendel's work was obscure until it was rediscovered half a century later. At that point it provided a new life to Darwin's work with the neo-Darwinian synthesis, but all that theoretical work still took time. Some of the ideas that surrounded the synthesis were around in the 1920's, but many others were still decades away.
Much of Darwin's original evolutionary theory sounds absurd to modern ears. For example, Darwin believed that a person who built up large muscles (e.g. a blacksmith) would pass down that trait to their children. A dancer could develop better coordination and balance and pass that down. Don't look at the sun for too long, because if you go blind you might pass that down to your children as well.
Darwin also missed the idea that traits come in discrete packages (had to wait for Mendel's ideas and the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1940's for that), so he settled on the idea that traits passed on in a more analog fashion. Just as a black and white person who marry do not produce a child with black and white spots like a dairy cow (they have a 'brown' child, obviously), Darwin believed that traits would 'dilute' or concentrate within the population depending on the parents.
(Interestingly, Voltaire had never seen a mixed-race child, so in Candide his mixed-race character did have black and white spots!)
The idea that DNA carried the genetic code was roundly dismissed as late as the 1940's (despite Avery's experiments and 'Chargaff's rule' that nobody cared about until after 1953) as too simplistic. After all, protein was clearly more complex. Complex enough to carry the genetic code that the new-in-the-1940's neo-Darwinian synthesis insisted was important. But where could that genetic code be? DNA was just a structural molecule, and not where the action was. Proteins - which had recently begun to be crystallized to find amazing, complicated structures - were obviously where the genetic code lay.
Knowing all this helps us reset our modern biases so we don't attribute to the people who believed in eugenics a knowledge that was well beyond the science of the time. With context, we can understand why a survey of family history of blindness didn't result in an intuition for people back then that it does for us today. From their perspective they understood the concern that allowing two people who were vision impaired to mate was courting disaster for the next generation.
#31 My daughter was prescribed semiglutide under its Type II diabetes label of Ozempic., but it was primarily for weight loss. She lost 100 lbs. She perceived the mode of action to be causing feelings of repletion to occur upon the consumption of very small amounts of food and for the feeling to last much longer than usual, e.g. 6-8 hrs instead of 4-6 hrs.
Thus encouraged, once the Wegovy formulation was FDA approved, I got my doctor to prescribe it. I have taken the first two 0.25 mg dose. The ramp up to a full therapeutic dose is 16 weeks (02.5, 0.5, 1.0, 1.7, 2.4 mg). No effects or side effects yet.
Medicare Part D will not cover the medicine, or any other weight loss medicine either. It is very expensive. $1325/month. if it works, it is worth it. if not, well weren't going to Italy this year anyway.
I should add that the medicine is administered by injection once a week. It is sold in prefilled single use injectors. the $1325 is for 4 injectors.
I still don’t grasp what situation would call for weight loss drugs, if you are taking them. Can’t you just eat less? If you’re a doctor prescribing them, “patients don’t follow advice on stuff like that, and if we do this they’ll die less” sort of makes sense. But if one is the taker, why can’t you just ... not eat? The effect of taking it seems to be causing you to not eat. And obviously there are all sorts of tricks to not eat, eating physically larger foods that have less calories, avoiding the precision engineered foods designed to make you fat so they can sell you more, etc, but still. That seems much better than $10k/year (which ... wow that is a lot of profit for the pharma companies)
People's background hunger levels vary quite a bit. Revealed choice suggests that "just" eating less causes a significant loss of quality of life for a lot of people.
I believe that adding "just" to a piece of advice means that you're ignoring the difficulty of following it.
I have successfully fasted for long periods of time, despite having unusually intense desire for food and desire in general, I think. And eating less is, I think, within the capabilities of “do hard thing” of almost all people, relative to other difficult things they also do. And as mentioned, one can sort of manipulate the actual choice up the chain away from the eating - whether that be artificial sweeteners, buying lots of lettuce, eating piles of fruit (tasty but low calorie per weight), buying “natural whole” foods (which in my experience helps make desires better anyway), many options. But even without that I don’t see why “eating less Big Macs” is any harder than “going to work every day” or “breaking up with a gf”. And eating less is, I think, the sort of thing one would adjust to after at most six months (extremely overestimated), after which you’d feel fine (unless some nutrition problem), if switching from frozen pizzas to home cooked meat didn’t already make you feel better
The claim that overweight people's diets include too many Big Macs and frozen pizzas perhaps reveals something about your personal dietary preferences, but I do not believe it to be universal.
Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be something like this. I am a generally-healthy 35-year-old female. I have an office job and a modest exercise routine (in particular, I'm a passable rock climber). What stands between me and running a marathon is "just" practice running. If you threatened to shoot me if I didn't finish a marathon in under four hours six months from now, I probably could get there. But in actual real life I won't -- first, because I hate running, and second, because that much practice would require rebuilding my world with running as a first priority, and I'm not willing to do that.
My impression is that for many overweight people, losing weight requires as much (mental) effort as running a marathon would for me. It's not that it's *impossible* per se, but paying $1300/month for an alternative is a remarkably easy sell.
A lot of people describe maintaining weight loss as equivalent to a second job.
I mean even beyond pure “ear less”, I think you can do well if you fully switch to eating “Whole Foods” or simply less processed - it is genuinely hard to overeat pure meat fat. And this isn’t actually more expensive than processed food - frozen veg and meat as bulk grain is really remarkably cheap. And whatever concerns or difficulties you have, the global market is happy to solve - if you don’t have time, precooked whole cheap frozen whatever you want is available, etc, if you’re willing to simply look at a few thousand product labels for a day or two and choose. I’m just not seeing the difficulty, tbh.
Genuinely cannot see the “second job” thing. Hm.
I mean like you said running a marathon would require significant schedule and diet and all sorts of other changes. Eating less (and the Big Mac thing was a joke, frozen pizza as an example of prepared foods is a big contributor tbh) requires eating less. Or buying less at the store. I don’t think it’s as hard. And 12x13 = $15.6k!!!! a year - the median American household income is $60k!!!! Median personal is $35k!
I agree that it is too expensive, but I can afford it.
I have participated in financing pharmaceutical development at a high level. It is an insanely expensive process and the pharmas have to charge a very high price to make it worth while.
Remember that it is not uncommon for drugs to abandoned at the Phase III trial level after $100s of millions have been spent on them. The price of the successful ones must amortize the failures.
Scott posted on the FDA process a few weeks ago and some good ideas and comments. But, even if the FDA process were radically simplified, drug development would be risky and expensive.
For most people, losing weight also requires significant diet and lifestyle changes. You're definitely advocating switching diets, which requires a different shopping routine, meal planning, and meal cooking; those are all nonzero time investments. In addition, most people do not successfully manage to achieve weight loss by only reducing caloric intake, and require additional exercise (not least because, without a deliberate effort on your part, your body is quite good at reducing your caloric expenditure if you start eating less). I would not expect the time investment to be necessarily lower than for marathon running, and I would expect the overall experience to be more miserable.
Evidence suggests that the problem is with your lack of imagination rather than with the people who don't lose weight.
It's a funny thing, but I'm fairly good at not insulting people online, even when I'm very angry. A lot of people can't manage this, and it might be quite difficult for them to stop, rather than something they should just do.
I don’t mind insults at all, and am more than willing to trade a little bit of looking like an idiot to genuinely figure out where I misunderstand something :)
And again the “they genuinely just can’t lose weight”, while theoretically possible, I can’t square with:
Most of the US population is overweight
And a comparison of desire to eat food with other desires that people regularly don’t fall prey to
They generally can lose weight. What they can't do is maintain weight loss-- especially not enough to be socially acceptable-- and quality of life at the same time.
"the “they genuinely just can’t lose weight”, while theoretically possible, I can’t square with:
Most of the US population is overweight"
That seems weird to me - I think the latter is *evidence* for the former, not in any tension with it. If we were just talking about a constant fraction of the population in all societies, at all times, then the idea that it's just up to personal preferences seems plausible. But the fact that it has changed so much in such a brief period (and that it's done so across races, genders, and nations) suggests to me that personal preferences really have very little explanatory value.
I don't want to get into a row over this. It's not going to help anyone. But.
You've said over and over again that you don't understand. And that's true: you don't.
"switching from frozen pizzas to home cooked meat didn’t already make you feel better"
I was fat long before I ever in my life saw such a thing as a frozen pizza. I was raised on home-cooked meals. I walked and cycled everywhere. All that did for me was give me tree-trunk calves from the age of nine onwards but the podge never shifted.
Yes, eat less and exercise more will lose weight. But why do we overeat in the first place? Why can some people burn off calories and others can't? And you see that with the traditional 'middle age spread', as the metabolism slows down and now all the people who were acceptable weight start to put on a bit of padding round the middle, even if they don't eat more.
You keep asking "why don't you why don't you why don't you". Believe me, if I could solve that problem for myself, I wouldn't be the weight I am.
Whatever. Lots of good advice from people like you for many, many years.
BTW, the only "engineered food I eat is Johnny Walker Black. Everything else is home prepared from raw ingredients.
I just don’t get it tbh. CICO is factually true, and there are dozens of levers to pull to regulate calorie input.
CICO is factually true, but not really useful, unless you can actually fully control calories in and calories out. For some people, like you and me, that's apparently really easy, but for others, it's really hard. (Actually, I'm not convinced it's easy for me - it just so happens that I don't have to work to get CICO to balance at a weight that is considered normal, but I haven't actively tried to control it to some other balance, and I'm not sure that I could!)
CICO is very useful for evaluating proposed hypotheses as to the cause of and/or cure for obesity. If they can't explain where the calories are coming from and where they are going, with at least tentative but plausible numbers, they're just guesses. If you want to know if they are true, try to measure the missing or extra calories wherever your theory says you should find them.
CICO is also useful for evaluating proponents of hypotheses as to the cause of and/or cure for obesity.
No, you don't. That much you have made amply clear.
yeah, that’s why I’m here. An approach of “I don’t get it but I’m gonna be a wholesome unobtrusive agreeable bro and just say “oh that’s nice dear” and nice on” wouldn’t have provided me with all this wonderful opposition to my ideas, would it have!
Has any of the opposition affected your opinion?
Imagine that you have, for some reason, a goal of holding your breath, purely by willpower, until you pass out. Can you do it? I mean, the biochemistry is simple. Lack of oxygen in means you pass out. But can't actually do it (I don't think) because your desire for oxygen will beat your willpower every time.
The analogy with food has holes, but all analogies do. Part of being chronically overweight is having a stronger need for food than is needed to maintain normal weight. (Oh, and losing weight does not cure that.)
I can hold my breath for quite a while, and only stopped out of (probably unjustified) fear of health risk. Other tasks, like fasting, ascetic style intense meditation, and physical exertion past most psychological barriers to the actual point of physical failure (which really sucks lol), I’ve gone way overboard on. And it’s doable! And way way way harder than eating 20% less food. I have a strong love for food! But i can and have simply not eaten. And I genuinely, honestly, do not believe half the US population has a non-overcomeable need for food. Like how does one justify that from any other principle or idea? Everyone in their day to day life does many things they don’t like and think are hard. I honestly think it’s just cope and exaggerations in statements.
As a general thing, I don't think you can understand people who are bad at something you're good at by repeating to yourself "I'm good at it, why can't other people manage something so obvious?".
Find something you're bad at that most other people are good at, and imagine them bewildered at why you just can't do something well when it's so obvious.
It just seems like a case where if one observes the actual attempts to lose weight and things most obese people eat, none of the arguments made really ring true and it really just seems like they don’t want to, and aren’t trying.
I mean, many of them probably aren't trying, or at least not while you're observing. Have you made many principled observations of obese people who are trying to lose weight?
The drive to eat has a billion year evolutionary pedigree. The instinct is very strong and very deep. And there's a difference between "being hungry" and "feeling like you're literally starving". Not eating when hungry is easy; not eating when starving is almost impossible, especially long-term. In severe famine, people eat the bodies of their dead family members. Think about how strong the compulsion to eat has to be in order to motivate people to this extreme.
What would the world look like if obesity is caused by the body thinking it's dangerously underweight, even when it's severely overweight? What would you expect the behavior of obese people to be like in this world?
The health consequences and social stigma of obesity are severe. Those are strong motivators to lose weight. Whatever force it is that keeps obese people from losing weight has to overcome both of these. That's not a trivial thing to do.
The most compelling evidence for this that I've seen is what happens to people who do manage to lose heroic amounts of weight (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html). They just can't stop the weight from coming back. Even with significant behavioral interventions (calorie restriction, exercise), it's not enough. To maintain a consistent weight, someone who used to be obese has to eat a lot less, and/or exercise a lot more, than someone of the same weight who was never obese.
Let me reiterate that. If two people with the same weight eat the same amount of calories and exercise the same amount, the person who used to be obese will gain weight and the person who was never obese will not. This can only be true if the body has other ways to control weight besides appetite. And if the body of an obese person is using these tools to make the person gain weight, then it must think it's starving.
If someone obese loses reduces their weight by 50% (say, 400 lbs -> 200 lbs), their body knows they've lost half their weight. But their body thinks they started off at the correct weight. That's the equivalent of healthy 150 lb person going down to 75 lbs, and staying there. Before you talk about how you "just can't understand" why people don't suck it up and lose weight, spend a year maintaining a weight of 75 lbs. You'll learn fast.
I'm sure it makes you feel good about yourself to think that your not being overweight is do to your "willpower" or whatever, and you like the idea that you're just better than other people. But that should be a huge red flag to you. The more self-flattering the belief, the easier it is to convince yourself of it.
Counterpoint: we don't need welfare because you can just work more.
but ... many people can’t work more? If everyone could get an extra 25k a year by just going to work less, then we wouldn’t need welfare, and that’s be significantly easier than applying for and receiving welfare is today. Getting and keeping a job and working at it for another 20-40 hours a week really is a burden in a way “ear 20% less” isn’t.
They should just teach themselves how to become computer programmers so that they can earn higher salaries and get off welfare. It's not that hard. I mean, I taught myself how to program on the side just for fun. Why can't they do it? I don't get it. It seems like they just don't want to, and aren't trying.
I think bored-anon relates to time commitments being a burden that not everyone can afford, but thinks that "being miserable" is something that everyone can just power through, so this might not be a great analogy for them. Honestly, if they can maintain high functioning while feeling miserable, I don't know how to produce an example that they could relate to; willpower of steel presumably happens to some people, and maybe it does make the rest of the race incomprehensible to them.
I mean that actually is true, honestly. It’s a descriptively true statement - everyone *should* try to learn to code. Most don’t and wouldn’t be able to, but the benefits (being relevant in the modern economy as it transforms) are so great that everyone genuinely should try.
But that really does require significant time investment and technical skill and potential etc etc in a way that diet doesn’t
Another thing to note is that “fasts everyone participated in” are extremely common historically? Which makes “most people can’t handle fasts” seem ... weird. And it also seems totally out of proportion with the scale at which these other people undertake difficult tasks
I don't think it was common for everyone to participate in voluntarily-not-eating-enough-to-feel-full. The fasts I'm aware of are either "become a vegetarian for two months" (with no restrictions on quantity) or "don't eat anything for a day". Of course, there were also famines, but those were usually regarded as calamities; also, they weren't voluntary.
The sense I get is that, for whatever reason, you find it relatively easy to ignore hunger (and perhaps other bodily signals?), and are really struggling to imagine what it's like to not find them easy to ignore. I can relate to that somewhat, in that I have a PhD in math, and find it difficult to imagine what it's like being a person who struggles with the Fahrenheit to Celcius conversion. (This was a recent conversation I had; the person said that Celcius to Fahrenheit was ok, but that for some reason they really struggled going back the other way.) My knee-jerk reaction is absolutely "but can't you just think about it for a moment?! you think about harder things all the time!" I *know* that's not how it works, but it's difficult for me to imagine what it's like.
(Note that it wouldn't make me any friends to go around asking "but why can't you just think about it for a moment?!", nor is it terribly likely to produce an enlightening answer.)
The best I've been able to come up with for myself was find a bit of math that I struggled to pack into my head, then take it as an axiom that that's roughly how other people feel about the Fahrenheit / Celcius thing (or whatever math they're struggling with). Perhaps a similar technique can help you relate to the experience of what it's like to experience hunger as suffering? That is, find something that you *do* suffer from, then postulate that hunger works roughly like that for other people?
You say everyone should *try* to learn to code: you seem to accept that many people won't succeed. Shouldn't the equivalent statement be "overweight people should *try* a diet, but many may not succeed at it"? Is that different from what actually happens?
You've already gotten some responses, but to take a different approach:
Suppose that it is physiologically possible for such people to "just" eat less through willpower, but it is highly unpleasant and so they don't. A drug that greatly reduces this unpleasantness such that they'll actually eat less sounds like a huge improvement to quality-of-life.
Compare to pain medication. Pain on its own doesn't physically prevent people from doing very much, but it is highly unpleasant and in practice people will do many fewer things while in pain. They may even say that they "can't" do things because it hurts too much. (Of course, with sufficient willpower they could power through.) And, in fact, doctors prescribe medication for pain *all the time*.
$15k/year does seem exorbitant. (Everything in medicine is - we just only notice when we pay for it ourselves.) But if someone wants to lose weight without feeling terrible, enough that they'd rather pay $15k/year, that sounds like a great option for them. I hope we can make it cost less money so that more people can choose this option.
Yeah there is a ton of evidence about this. Usually efforts to 'lose weight' cause behaviours such as choosing higher calorie foods. restriction of cloric intake usually (85 %) causes the body to adjust the set point for weight higher to compensate for such periods of hunger, and increases the intensity of the drive to consume food. I remember reading about group meeting together over two years to 'lose weight' was on average that they were heavier after those two years than a control group who met together simply for social reasons. A minority of people are able to lose weight long term, presumably those in which biological factors make them less predisposed to the backfiring effects of raising the body's set point for weight. Linda Bacon's book 'Health at every size' would be a ready reference here although studies already convincing when Seligmann published 'What you can change and what you can't' in 1993. The radical dieticians who agree with Linda Bacon's conclusions focus on improving quality of diet and amount of movement and other measurable behaviours and advocate for health improvement without a focus on weight loss. Someone can be healthy or unhealthy at most BMIs: it's important for pretty much everyone to avoid weight cycling and keep active and make sure we are adequately nourished.
>By the way, this is the same Tegmark who in 1998 developed a leading theory for what the universe is and why it exists at all. I feel like going from “discover fundamental nature of the universe” to “attempt to investigate media bias, but it has glaring flaws” is a slightly-too-on-the-nose metaphor for the past 25 years of science as a whole.
This is also the same Tegmark who is President of the Foundational Questions Institue, science director of the Future of Life Institute, and has been a major figure in the advocacy for AI Safety (he wrote Life 3.0).
I'm surprised Scott ommits this. This paper on AI bias seems to be almost a kind of passtime. That's the "metaphor for the past 25 years of science as a whole" - there are many accomplishments from remarkable polymaths we don't even know about - though you could just link his Wikipedia or MIT page.
"Now a Haiti econ blog (appropriately named Vodou Economics) proposes a much better explanation - the data are wrong, and the DR was always ahead of Haiti."
It's not so much that the data are "wrong" so much as they are for the 2011 ICP rather than the 2017 one. The 2017 one shows a much larger gap between the Dominican Republic and Haiti (tenfold as of 2017). The growth statistics are the same, which is arguably what should matter more here. The Maddison people (who, it should be said, are more often than not total morons) discarded some Braithwaite (1968) PPPs for being unreliable -but that shouldn't matter here.
Re: #21 Any one visiting Haiti & the Dominican Republic would have a hard time believing they are on the same island. Despite having similar histories (former colony, revolution, foreign occupation, dictatorship, eventual democracy) the two nations could not be more different.
Having direct considerable time in both I've found that the contrast is the result of what each people see as their heritage.
Dominicans see themselves as “European” with social/political/economic/cultural values and ambitions inherited from Spain.
Haitians see themselves as "African” with social/political/economic/cultural values and ambitions inherited from West Africa.
19: Looking for words or phrases with high predictive power with regards to politics actually merely measures political jargon, not bias, although there is obviously a link to bias, as bias is encoded in some of the jargon (or how it is used).
33: You can take somewhat similar pictures in the Westland region of Holland: http://i.imgur.com/8PNGO.jpg
Of course, it much less of a weird mess. Why do those Spanish greenhouses have these weird shapes? No reallocation of farming land (Dutch farmers traded a lot of land in the past to get nice rectangular plots)?
35: Of course, Germany has states with rather strong cultural differences between them. For example, Prussia was famous for it's military prowess. Prussia was dissolved and many ethnic Germans migrated to other parts of Germany. But it's perfectly plausible for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg and Saxony to have a different culture to the other states.
I disagree with the commenters saying that datasets don’t make good papers in biology. Well-curated, accessible datasets with some analysis make great papers, get published in leading journals, and get cited hundreds of times by people re-analyzing the data. Based on my personal experiences I firmly believe the real reason researchers are bad at data sharing is because they’re afraid that other researchers will re-analyze the data and find their mistakes (or their fraud).
or maybe afraid that they’ll scoop them either on that dataset or future work I’d guess
Devon's piece on Prospera is excellent, though every time I see documents by the National Lawyers Guild (a critique of the ZEDEs linked under "Other Resources" as a legitimate recognition of more critical perspectives), I recall their 2003 report on North Korea, which to the best of my knowledge they have not repudiated. This is from a summary by Christopher Black, one of the delegates, still seeing the great revolutionary dream in DPRK in 2003,
"In 2003 I had, along with some American lawyers, members of the National Lawyers Guild, the good fortune to be able to travel to North Korea, that is the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, in order to experience first hand that nation, its socialist system and its people. The joint report issued on our return was titled “The Grand Deception Revealed.” That title was chosen because we discovered that the negative western propaganda myth about North Korea is a grand deception designed to blind the peoples of the world to the accomplishments of the Korean people in the north who have successfully created their own circumstances, their own independent socio-economic system, based on socialist principles, free of the domination of the western powers."
https://journal-neo.org/2017/03/13/north-korea-the-grand-deception-revealed/
A sample from the report itself,
"As in Cuba and other one party socialist societies, North Korea has a system of direct democracy in which elections are held for local peoples committees, district and provincial committees and to the Supreme People’s Assembly. The absence of other parties is not considered a failing, as the entire society is socialist. The question of multiple parties did not even seem understandable to those we spoke to. The delegation questioned whether within that system, there is in fact more participatory democracy than in the American federal system or the parliamentary system in which democracy ceases to operate once the elections are over. It is more circular, with local committees sending up to the next level requests, complaints and so on and so on up to the national level with discussion, at least in theory at these levels and then feedback to the local level until an agreement is reached based on resources available and circumstances.
However, the issue is not whether we agree with DPRK’s system or feel that our democracy is better or more just. . . . Certainly we cannot say that only one political system is successful and generates a participatory and healthy society. We hope that future delegations can learn more about political dialogue within the DPRK system and share the pros and cons of our system without blame or judgment."
http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php?t=43901
So ZEDEs are suspiciously undemocratic from the National Lawyers Guild perspective but the "direct democracy" of the DPRK is just fine?
Aren't National Lawyers Guild those green hatted people who merrilly stroll among black bloc throwing Molotovs in case they're in need of legal representation with a properly indoctrinated worldview?
Aetna requires prior authorization for Wegovy, the brand name for semaglutide. I tried setting up a Teladoc appointment to get a prescription, and the doctor said she’s not allowed to prescribe “lifestyle medications” and anyway semaglutide is for diabetes.
I don’t interact with the medical industry enough to know if this just typical friction or not, but so far I’m inclined to write this medicine off as vaporware for now.
Teladoc physicians are much more likely to be restricted in what they are allowed to do because there isn't a significant relationship with the patient. Having a good relationship with a primary care provider you see on a regular basis is likely to have a lot more flexibility in what they are able to do for you.
That makes sense, thank you. I was also wondering how much of a roadblock prior authorization is in practice. Like what percentage of people end up getting authorization? Is it just an annoying hoop to jump through or am I basically wasting my time? Is my insurance company fiscally capable of approving a medicine that retails for $1,300 a month, will have to be taken forever, and can help 43% of the population?
37: This doesn't surprise me at all. I used to work for a chemical company that built a plant in South Korea, meant to be a copy of a North American plant. Same blueprints and everything, but for at least 6-8 years the chemists and engineers, from Korea or the US, couldn't get it to produce the same purities as the US plant. So far as I know they never figured it out. Apparently somewhat random outcomes like that are fairly common with large scale chemical production, so apparently there are many strange little influences on the process.
Same deal in my line of work (aerospace engineering, for The Aerospace Corporation). Any time manufacture of a part or component moves to a new facility, or is resumed after more than a few years' interlude at the same plant, we call for a new round of qualification testing. Tacit knowledge is both important and illegible; you can have a part that consistently works because e.g. the guy who makes it just intuitively knows that he's supposed to aim for one side of the tolerance range on a particular operation, and then that guy goes away without training his own replacement, and nobody understands why the part doesn't work any more.
This is why the vaccine patent waivers don't mean much.
How different were the altitudes of the two facilities?
That's a good question. The US plant should be something like 1,125' and the SK plant maybe as low as 50'. I am not 100% sure I am remembering the name of the town in SK correctly, however. It's been quite a few years. Still, it doesn't seem that many places in SK are much above a hundred feet above sea level, and the US plant is up in NE PA coal country.
Are you telling me that the under-age-15 hat-smashing boys were "spanked ignominiously" and just sent home? No criminal record to prevent future employment? No psych eval and prescription medication? No movement to a stricter alternative school?
I don't think they probably learned any lesson if the authorities didn't wreck their subsequent decades.
What a barbaric age it was: we would never do something so cruel in or modern, humanitarian penal system as corporal punishment. It would be down right vengeful! /s
As funny as the straw hat story is, the summary is inaccurate :)
re 14, the roots of progress:
It is interesting to me that they are trying to establish this *new* philosophy of human development on the basis of capitalism. They have patrick collison and peter thiel among others on board as, i guess, "thinkers" and patrons, to define progress in their vision. It's no doubt these people are heavily biased towards start up esque systems and will not want to build a future without them, at least, but it's more than likely they will be building that future on the very basis of them. I wonder if they really believe this will turn out different than the 20th century, if they really believe half the problems of our age were not in fact caused by those very systems. In my view skepticism, bureaucracy, and stagnation, is an inescapable consequence of a mature capitalist system (though a young system doesn't have those problems as much). I don't know why they're trying to build the future in this image but it's not going to work.
Fortunately, bureaucracy and stagnation are never found in socialist systems.
Do you know, "Lizard Man"? His post didn't seem to necessarily advocate socialism. It doesn't seem unreasonable to criticize some of the flaws of capitalism and still be fully of the opinion that socialism is not an alternative worth considering.
But bureaucracy and stagnation aren't flaws of capitalism; they are flaws of the human condition. Bureaucracy is found in every country, from North Korea to pre-takeover Hong Kong. Stagnation has been the lot of most people at most times. Ironically, stagnation was broken by people operating in eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalist systems.
(No, I do not know Lizard Man. And if by socialism you mean, government owns everything and can do anything because it rules in the name of the people, then I do not think it is an alternative worth considering.)
So the original socialism comment was just partisan whinging then...
I didn't mean it that way. I was trying to say that bureaucracy and stagnation are not unique to capitalism. I would go further and say that it is wrong to think that abolishing capitalism will abolish bureaucracy and stagnation.
Fair enough.
Doesn't "Socialism" = "Not Capitalism"? Or is there a Not Capitalism that is also Not Socialism?
I'm talking about two poles. Obviously, the common in between point of these two poles is what we call a Mixed Economy.
See I was thinking "Capitalism" was the system of commerce that most of the free world (rightly IMHO)embraces in one form or another. I've found "Socialism" to be what Right-Wingers scream when anyone posits that the constraints ought to be ever so slightly adjusted.
I have a good friend with a high nostalgia quotient who likes to advocate for pastoral feudalism as a system that was neither capitalist nor socialist. I think what we mean by capitalism only really applies in modern economies where capital can accumulate, be invested, and return more capital.
It's an interesting question whether there is a non-capitalist, non-socialist modern alternative that isn't simply the mix of the two that we mostly use now.
People who are in favor of capitalism, at least libertarians, don't think of it as limited to modern economies or as being linked to capital any more than to other inputs to production. What they mean is a system of private property and exchange. "Capitalism" isn't a very good label, but it's the one commonly used.
Sure, but if you go back it doesn't really apply well, does it? At least, to my understanding. Just to think of the example I can do off the top of my head, if memory serves, William the Conqueror was considered to own all the land in England, and to let it out to his vassals, who let it to theirs, who let it to theirs . . . on down to the peasants working the lords' lands. Those lets weren't in exchange for cash (mostly) but for services of various sorts. And the land wasn't private to the people who worked it. It was all the king's land which you held, ultimately, from him, if you went far enough up the chain of mutual obligation. So it was a system of customary mutual obligation, rather than of private property or free exchange.
Anyway, I didn't think that these sorts of agrarian feudal systems were generally lumped in the same category of capitalism that is typically used to refer to the more advanced later economies. Of course, my first name isn't doctor and I'm not a retired economics professor, so feel free to correct me.
It depends what "bureaucracy" and "stagnation" are taken to mean. Bureaucracy can be just a negative word for "organisation" and stagnation can be just a negative word for sustainability. It also depends what your class outlook is. Stagnation from the point of view of the capitalist class can often seem quite beneficial from the perspective of the workers.
Sometimes you make it very hard to agree with you.
Thiel is a maggot. He can only feast on the dying flesh of decaying systems. There's no way he can help create anything other than death and decay.
On insulin and weightloss. I have recently been prescribed metformin for whatever "pre-diabetes" is properly called.
What I have noticed is that I feel warmer - I don't notice being cold or being in a draft as much.
Hypothesis that it may be raising either core body temperature, or (more likely) peripheral circulation, which would make my skin, fingers, etc warmer. That warmth would actually mean that I have more heat loss. That would mean that I'm burning more calories to maintain core temperature - which would be an obvious weightloss mechanism, and I know there is some (mixed) evidence for metformin for weightloss, and also explain why it is mixed - if it works through making it easier to tolerate lower temperatures, then you only get the weightloss if you actually experience lower temperatures.
Anyway, proposed approach: monitor room temperatures for people taking possible weightloss drugs, and see if a drop in room temperature correlates with more weightloss.
Wikipedia says the mechanism of action may be mitochondrial uncoupling, which would generate heat. Probably not though.
Cold temperatures, cold showers, swimming in cold water, and even putting an ice pack on your upper back/lower neck area have all been shown to promote weight loss. It's basic thermodynamics.
Sure. My point is that if I can tolerate lower temperatures as a result of taking the drug, then I still only lose weight if I actually experience lower temperatures.
As a single person, I can just turn the thermostat down. But someone living with family or roommates might not be able to do so, and they wouldn't get any weightloss through that mechanism. Which would go a long way to explaining why they work for some people and not others.
Does metformin actually make you warmer, or does it just increase your cold tolerance like (for example) phenylpiracetam?
It takes significant cold exposure to significantly increase weight loss. Staying outside at 30F with no coat for half an hour each day is a good example. Water conducts heat much better than air so a twenty minute cold shower in, say, 60F water will do the same thing. Same for swimming for hours in a 70F pool. It's not something you can normally accomplish just by turning down the thermostat.
Your body has to make
Brown fat in order for you to REALLY lose weight this way, and it has to actually feel cold in order to do this. I think there's another mechanism too by which cold makes you lose weight but I can't remember it off the top of my head. Brown fat is so effective that if you lived in an igloo in the arctic circle your pre-diabetes would likely disappear entirely.
Unsure whether it's right to frame East-West migration in Germany before the Berlin wall as "fleeing". I realize the term comes from the abstract of the article (which I have skimmed over and have not yet made up my mind about) so this is not on you.
Why? It seems that both sides in the Cold War would've agreed to this as a fair characterization, albeit with the opposite moral import naturally.
#36 I agree with much of the criticsim of Henrich's WEIRD argument. I have made similar comments in other fora.
The short version is that Henrich identifies canons of the Medieval Catholic church forbidding cousin marriage as being a key development in the foundation capitalism in Western Europe.
My response is that those rules no longer impacted English society after the Reformation. England is indisputably the home of the industrial revolution. But cousin marriage was common. E.g. Charles Darwin.
It is a key plot point in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, but is no where mentioned as an objection to the marriage of Edmund and Fanny. In Trollope's Can You Forgive Her, Alice Vavasor is infatuated with her cousin George. The objection to George is not that he is her cousin, it is that he is a jack@$$.
To play the devil's advocate:
- After such a long time, the induced changes can take a life of their own
- How common compared to former model of society? Here in Central Europe you can in general marry or screw your cousin/aunt without legal repercussions and it's not exactly a juicy taboo, but it's still not something prevalent and the rest of the family would at least have lots of jokes and gossip etc. Also lots of people still want a traditional church wedding, even if it's the one time they go inside the church except some sightseeing and Catholic Church keeps its position on 4 times removed. Church wedding here basically means Catholic, unless you cross border into Lutheran part of Germany, but who cares about those condemned-to-hell heretics?
3.) They're somewhat exaggerating the differences in government. Tlaxcala had a monarch and the Aztecs had noble and common political institutions, at least if popular memoriy is to be believed. More interesting is the geopolitical situation. Tlaxcala would be like if an even more brutal version of Rome had risen to power except a state based next door to Rome itself had managed to stay independent and stave off conquest by extreme militarization, long term acceptance of economic deprivation, and alliances with dissident factions in the Aztec empire.
This is a huge context to Cortez's conquest that gets missed. This is why Monctezuma didn't just immediately try and kill Cortez. There was a wider political situation he had to defuse or face a larger revolt/invasion. It's also why driving Cortez out of the city didn't work: Cortez ran back to Tlaxcala and Monctezuma couldn't pursue him without getting past the giant Tlaxcalan-Rebel army. This gave Cortez the time to regroup and engage in more open warfare. (Also, technically Tlaxcala wasn't conquered: they were direct vassals of the Spanish Crown. It was only on independence they were incorporated into Mexico.)
4.) This is overly literal. I have no doubt it's rare. But certain communities have developed intergenerational distrust of the government, often with good reason. This is just a particularly emblematic example that's come to the attention of the chattering classes.
12.) It's worth nothing that the Constitution was a barrier to this kind of thing. Yes, the Supreme Court eventually allowed it. But it took decades to get there, decades that were used in other places to do it even more widely. The most thorough eugenics experiments took place in the territories where the Constitution didn't apply. Likewise, it was often worse in places with less robust conceptions of rights. Rights may forestall good and necessary changes. But they also forestall a lot of evil ones.
15.) It'll probably be the same as how radio and television already work. Lots of little pirate signals in places with significant censorship. They'll be tracked down by the regime in erratic but furious enforcement. In places with freedom of speech the big, legal networks will dominate because they can outspend/out-quality little pirate operations. More importantly, I expect us to get Radio Free Europe: Internet Edition at some point. If we can turn on the uncensored, untraceable internet in North Korea or Manchuria that would undoubtedly be to our advantage.
I'm also curious to see how it affects brands of authoritarianism like Putin. Putin doesn't really do direct censorship: you can go and Google anything you want about him. He even has real elections. He just slants everything as far to his side as he can. Government regulators lean on broadcasters and other organizations. Fraudulent prosecutions go after the wealthy who oppose him. Opposition journalists are attacked. Etc. This might make his form of authoritarianism more durable than the old totalitarian kind. Giving Russians free access to the internet wouldn't change as much as it would in China.
35.) Not to mention the the different regional effects of Nazism. East Berlin/Germany had more Poles, Catholics, and Jews, all of whom didn't fare too well under the regime. Or that being occupied by the Soviets and being occupied by the Americans is a rather different experience. Berlin was conquered by the Soviets wholesale but Americans took their sector over on July 4th 1945. The period from 1945 to 1949 was really turbulent and critical. I think it's very fair to see west vs east Germany as a comparison of two economic systems, especially when comparing specific industries. Food distribution, for example. It's less fair to blindly attribute all differences.
For example, I've long pointed out that the East German female workforce participation rate was higher than the west's in Imperial Germany. So while Communism no doubt did something to get women into the workforce the differential was already somewhat there. Conversely, west Germany has been richer than the east... basically forever. So while it's fair to point out Communism almost certainly did have downward pressure effects simply pointing to raw GDP is too simplistic.
Small correction: East Germany had both more highly Protestant areas and more minority Catholics. So it's complicated. Also, an additional note: I pointed out back when that sex under Communism article came out that there was ample evidence sexual practices were already different between east and west in the 19th century. Different family structures and (it at least seems) sexual norms. Again, this doesn't dilute Communism to nothingness. But it's a complicating factor.
You’re pointing out that East-Elbia and the western parts of the German Imperial Empire had differing distribution of Catholic and Protestant population.
However in the paper they also point out that church attendance had been substantially lower already as of 1910, which I (as a non-historian) think is more important. One reason for this low attendance might have been a higher distrust for institutions (political and clerical). That distrust could have been caused by the unique role the Junkers played in Prussia and into the Weimar Republic, being the major landowners and having substantially improportional political power.
When that influence was broken after WWII during Soviet occupation, those formerly disadvantaged and disenfranchised with democracy retaliated by confiscating the Junkers’ land (pushing them out), and, intentionally or collaterally, they also increased the pressure on all other enterpreneural persons pushing those out as well.
So pressure from the political extremes (reactionaries and communists) crushed the moderates in the middle of the political spectrum with the observed political, social, and economic results.
not ... caused by ..., better ... enforced / intensified by ...
The cultural influence of Catholicism and Protestantism lasted even among the non-religious. It's like the old joke about Ireland. "He's an atheist!" "A Catholic or a Protestant atheist?" Despite the decline in religiosity the echoes of the kulturkampf meant that Catholics served as a rather distinct force in politics. Adding to the complications is that (again due to kulturkampf) a lot of the Catholics in Prussia were ethnic minorities or from other German principalities.
The former serfs and workers didn't retaliate or have any say in the new government. The Soviet Union, ironically, was far harsher on worker influence in East Germany than the US was. Less tolerant of strikes and all that. This was partly due to its hypocritical totalitarian nature and it was partly because the Soviet Union was more apt to see Germany as a defeated power to be punished. They then installed a victor's government creating one of the more extreme Communist regimes with that extremity backed by Moscow.
Though you're right that government hugely decreased trust. The whole osthilf scandal, for example, was almost perfectly designed to be a right poster issue. "Socialists create program to help poor area, give money away to aristocrats and political allies."
As for a general decline in religiosity being important, it's worth noting that both Communism and Fascism tended to develop in the less religious populations with high distrust in institutions in general. They even had terms analogous to "the blob" or "the deep state" though different factions disagreed on exactly who they were. One of Nazism's advantages memetically was that it gave this energy an easy and culturally acceptable target: Jews. They really were remarkably flexible as a villain. They could be capitalists to the populist, minorities to the racist, satanic to the religious, and so on.
As to whether such distrust was more common in the east: it actually wasn't. The rural east had higher institutional trust in the church and aristocracy. At least measured by votes and membership in radical parties rather than by church attendance. Nazism actually spawned more out of the cities and their surrounding areas. The rural east actually had radical far right monarchists lying around who literally just wanted to set the clock back to 1910. Or in some cases even farther, all the way back to before Prussia had a constitution.
> As to whether such distrust was more common in the east: it actually wasn't. The rural east had higher institutional trust in the church and aristocracy. At least measured by votes and membership in radical parties rather than by church attendance.
Would you please share a source for this statement? Figure A2 indicates that the communist vote share was higher in 1924 in the East than in any other area. Figure A1 also shows that in 1925 on average a higher share of persons were working in manufacturing in the East than in the West, so „rural east had higher institutional trust“ doesn’t seem on point to your argument.
I also was not implying that the rural serfs personally kicked out their former masters on a larger scope, but I think that those feeling oppressed by the former ruling classes had little objections when the new rulers in the Soviet zone (the Soviets and the communists) started the land reform in 1945 (the end of privately owned factories came in 1972, when the SED nationalized the remaining 11000 companies). It seems conclusive from the biographies of some the new rulers and the history of mutual politically motivated murders between 1918 and 1945, that the new rulers considered the old elites their enemies.
Did constitutional concerns prevent any sterilization laws from being passed?
Yes. From 1897 to 1927 there was the familiar tempo of political debates and state level laws and court cases back and forth. The pro-sterilization laws also had to be more narrowly tailored because of such concerns until the Supreme Court ruled eugenic sterilization more or less fully constitutional in 1927. In contrast, in Canada sterilization began earlier because the same movement was able to make legal changes more quickly. Likewise, a lot of the "test" cases were done to Native Americans or Puerto Ricans who did not have Constitutional protections specifically for that reason.
However, the courts have continually ruled that sterilization is still Constitutional. So it wasn't all that key to ending sterilization. It's not currently preventing it. What really ended it was a combination of minority rights activists who increasingly saw eugenics as racist and civil libertarians plus the religious right who'd always opposed it.
I do find it a little strange you apparently have a right to bodily autonomy to get an abortion but you don't have a right to bodily autonomy to prevent the state from sterilizing you by force.
The Russian internet is actually pretty similar to Chinese in structure, if not in enforcement (yet). Only domestic providers are allowed to operate, there's a register of banned domains which all of them are legally obliged to enforce, and VPNs which allow to circumvent this are technically banned, but not illegal to use so far.
General criticism of the regime is mostly tolerated (although not on TV for example, the last holdout was recently removed from major broadcasting networks), but always less so as time passes, the crackdown against Navalny-affiliated media being a significant recent development. This mostly concerns Russian-language stuff, because the grasp of foreign languages by the average Russian is terrible.
Elections can be called "real" only in the most technical sense. Actual opposition is banned from participating, and even the "domesticated" one gets vastly less coverage than the ruling party's candidates. Also, the farther you get from the center, the more blatant falsifications get, with regional elites trying to one-up each other in trying to demonstrate their allegiance and reliability by delivering better percentages. Of course, Putin himself is still popular enough (his cronies, less so), but why risk fair elections anyway, when he can afford not to?
It's really not. You seem to have a pretty thorough knowledge of Russia but not of China so you're getting the comparison wrong.
I agree with you Russia's not free in a meaningful sense. But Russia has nothing approaching the totalitarianism of China in either internet enforcement or central state control. Russia functions like a subverted democracy where one party uses semi-free elections and its complete control of the administrative state to slant everything in its favor as much as possible. China is an actual totalitarian state more similar to the old Soviet Union than modern Russia. Elections are not an important political consideration and the state is a tool of the party.
Putins' internet critics do not disappear into camps at any significant rate. Even when he arrests critics they at least get a public if unfair trial. In China they often just disappear. And Russian censorship is largely moral rather than political. The two are intertwined of course. But there's a qualitative difference between banning porn and "gay propaganda" vs having actual mechanisms where the government can ban all discussion of certain words online. Russia also doesn't have an army of government sponsored internet moderators who track down people spreading bad thoughts. Nor does it have the legal/police infrastructure to create one and disappear people.
Also, the literal structure is different. China built its internet, as in the actual infrastructure, with a mind for control. Russia not as much. You can look at the cables and see Russia's got significantly more connective tissue including directly into western nations. This is because the Russia internet wasn't built from a top down mandate to specify government control.
(Also, Russian rules on foreign operators are much less strict than China's. Much less. Which is why you end up with things like LiveJournal living on in Russia rather than China's knock off version of Facebook.)
Yes of course, I don't claim that Russia is anywhere near as repressive as China, be it on the internet or offline, but IMO all of that mostly hinges on Putin's personal goodwill (and the extent to which his close circle can influence him, estimates vary). He likes to maintain the appearance of democracy, plausible deniability, and in general prefers the path of least resistance. But there's no civil society or independent elites, and so no guarantee at all that the next dictator would share this aesthetic.
I wouldn't call Russian elections "real". After all the efforts to wipe out real opposition and media independent of the state, he and his party still boost their results by millions of fake votes.
7. If only it were satire.
36. I see three hyperlinks to the one Amazon review. Wondering if you meant to link others?
Fwiw, this PolicyTensor critique is also worth the read.
https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-churchs-crusade-against-cousin
Me: Astrology is dumb and annoying.
Also me: Fuck yeah my compass coordinate is on Apollo! Apollo gang!
At this stage it's straight up unscientific to be unwilling to even consider the possibility that biology explains much of the difference between Haiti and DR. The difference in outcomes between these countries is only surprising if you completely ignore the outcome differences between every sub-saharan african country and every other mestizo-majority country, and the socio-economic outcomes of these populations within white majority countries.
Haiti is also much poorer than most other black Caribbean countries. So biology can't be all of it.
The question is why it is much poorer.
I've seen a suggestion that the Duvaliers did a lot of damage. Would the timing be right for that to be an explanation?
Re 20: "Once you remove elderly Hispanic self-identified Attack Helicopters the effect largely disappears" is one of the better sentences.
I once listed my gender identity as "Cisleithanian."
This is erasure of elderly Hispanic self-identified Attack Helicopters as well as being ageist and racist!
"34: It’s generally-believed that IQ is mostly-environmental early on in life, but mostly-genetic after adulthood."
What am I missing? I always thought that IQ was an attempt to measure native intelligence, not functional intelligence -- that is, not acquired abilities or knowledge. So it's hardly surprising that "genetics matter vastly more than environment and environment more-or-less doesn’t matter".
And because IQ is more or less impervious to environmental influences (except for prenatal and childhood malnourishment and diseases), the more interesting question to me is what educational practices are best at equipping the rising generation with knowledge and skills?
The trigger warning note sounded pretty interesting and I was going to share it around - except it turned out to be a reasonable note on the linked site. It says to use ‘content note’ instead which seems more professional frankly, and euphemisms like trigger warning - which seems obviously rooted in gun imagery - sounds pretty crass in a society with (real or apparent) endemic gun-problems.
Isn't it the people who were looking for such warnings who decided they should be called trigger warnings? In which case, this is just more gilding the lily. If it is now considered violent because triggers = guns, then that was a fault at the start but it comes from the side trying to impose such warnings, not the people being told "you now have to include these or else".
I remember years back in fandom, such fights over including or not including trigger/content warnings on fiction. The content warning lot won, so if the imagery is now deemed violent, it's on them. This is yet more "differences that make no difference", as now what does someone who wants content warnings put forward as the reason? Before, it was "please warn for X because that triggers me", now is it going to be "please warn for X because that content notes me"?
The website says stuff like trigger/content warnings can’t be perfect and ultimately could end up triggering someone anyway and those are the breaks - so the content seemed very reasonable to me.
I don’t think we can impute agency to masses and say that some ”people” wanted to say “trigger warming” - but I understand what you’re saying. Everyone seemed happy with using a slang until they weren’t and now the lack of self awareness for pro-trigger warning faction seems a weird. But overall I thing “trigger warning” to “content note” switch could be motivated by vexing reasons or smart reasons - I’m just pointing out that the linked site doesn’t support the claim that the terminology switchover is motivated by vexing reasons, that’s all (even if there is other evidence elsewhere suggesting this trend in switch from “trigger warning” to “content note” is motivated by mostly shallow seeming reasons).
Sigh - typos :-) I think it’s obvious what they are and what I meant to type.
Well, time marches on and progressive shibboleths get more and more precise, but my point was that it wasn't the general mass of people who came up with the original 'violent' imagery in "trigger warnings", it was the people looking for such concessions who did so.
The Brandeis list makes it sound as if we general mass of morons need to be gently tut-tutted into not using such fearful terms. They're the ones who came up with them in the first place, so turn the scolding onto their intellectual forebears who decided to go with trigger warning not content notes.
My problem with this type of thing, apart from the unbearable aggressiveness and smug self-righteousness of their most vocal supporters, is that it's a just-so story; similar to pseudo etymology and popular-science-grade evolutionary psychology.
It gives weird conspiracy-theoretic vibes of consistent patterns, like Scott's ironic reasoning in his novel about the Kabbalah. Very neat derivation chains of words and meaning, very short on inconvenient actual data or any argument for why whatever effect language has is significant or how it impacts the real world. And this thing *will* come to rule over mainstream discourse in 3-5 years, however "it's just voluntary, no policing, peace <3" these guys* pretend or legitimately believe.
* : (oops, did I just commit a hetero-male-normative wrong think?)
>"IQ of biological parents explained about 42% of variance; IQ of adoptive parents explained only 1%. 'Variance explained' is a non-intuitive statistic with a lot of confusing properties - but in this case the obvious conclusion that genetics matter vastly more than environment and environment more-or-less doesn’t matter at all is basically right."
That "obvious conclusion" is the opposite of what the paper said. Look at the far-right column of table 3. Heritability explained 42% of variance in ICAR-16 , but environmental variation explained 50% of the variance in ICAR-16, *higher* than the heritability.
(The middle three columns account for the fact that ancestry and environment are correlated [me and my parents all grew up in Toronto etc], and gene-environment non-additivity [a gene might give me +1 IQ point if I live by a lake but +2 IQ points if I live by the ocean etc].)
This paper isn't at all trying to overturn the fact of environmental effects on IQ variance, which their table 3 confirms; it's just trying to address whether heritability estimates are biased due to any non-randomness of environment of adoption ("placement effects").
Their abstract, clumsily, does say "Together, these findings provide further evidence for the predominance of genetic influences on adult intelligence over any other systematic source of variation." To reconcile this with their environmental-variance components in table 3, I think they're treating "systematic" as the key word there.
"but environmental variation explained 50% of the variance in ICAR-16, *higher* than the heritability."
In fact this is the "non shared environmental variation" which is a misnomer because it is calculated as the variance that remains after genetics and familly are taken into account. So it includes error measurment, random process during brain development, etc... and quite probably very little that is "environmental" in the more common sens of the word.
>"includes error measurment, random process..."
Okay, but
>"quite probably very little that is 'environmental' in the more common sens..."
What's your basis for saying "probably" and "very little," as opposed to just "lower than 50%"? (Besides that, I want to highlight that this is a separate argument from Scott's claim, which was just a simple misreading of which variance component was which.)
I may obviously be wrong but I do not think that Scott misread which variance component was which, I think that he did not think that "non shared environmental variation" corresponds to environmental effects.
This is also my opinion, which is relatively informed because I teach quantitative genetics but which is only an opinion (common among geneticists I think). This
opinion is based mainly on two arguments:
- when the trait (IQ, personality etc..) is measured more accurately, the heritability of the trait can sometimes very markedly increase (From memory, the heritability of personality traits is for example around 40% when they are measured with a short self-survey, but reach 60 or even 80% when measured with a variety of tests performed by a psychologist).
- Shared-environment consists of all the factors that are common between siblings raised within one familiy. So there is parenting, but also socio-economic factors, precise geographic location, etc. If those do not influence a trait, I think that it is very unlikely that the relatively few remaining environmental factors (friends not in common between the siblings, different teachers if they are not in the same class, etc.) can have a significant role.
These two arguments are not a demonstration by any mean, but I personnaly give à 90 % probability to the fact that "non-shared env" is mostly not environmental, in the most common meaning of the word!
I think #34 significantly understates the problems of variance compression in adoption studies. The most straightforward version of this problem is that adoptive families have low variance in IQ, with few very low-IQ families, as a consequence of the fact that adoption agencies are picky. Meanwhile adoptive families vary a lot, but with a strong skew toward low IQ. This means that you end up with low shares of total IQ variance explained by variance in adoptive parent IQ, but you can adjust for this by reweighting variances to reflect the variation in parental IQ in the full population.
The more serious version of this problem is that for parents who are on the margin of acceptability for adoption agencies, you'll have a negative correlation between IQ and other positive traits (like conscientiousness) even if the correlation between those traits is positive in the general population. If a low IQ parent has been accepted as an adoptive parent, they must have been able to check the boxes of middle-classness, stability, strong references, etc., in spite of their low IQ. The most likely reason for this is being above average for adoptive parents in non-IQ aspects of parent quality. On the other hand, a higher-IQ parent can get accepted as an adoptive parent even with some deficits (relative to most adoptive parents) in other qualities.
The same thing is true of biological parents--high-IQ biological parents who put their kids up for adoption are probably less conscientious, more prone to mental illness, etc, than are either other high-IQ people or even lower IQ biological parents who put their kids up for adoption.
But this is much more likely to bias estimated relationships with adoptive parents. The genetic causal mechanism is likely that high IQ genes lead to high IQ, even if paired with low conscientiousness genes. The environmental causal mechanism is probably that high IQ parents create better childhood environments, which leads to higher child IQ. The connection between conscientious parents and a good childhood environment is plausibly as strong or stronger than the connection between high-IQ parents and good childhood environment. As a result, a negative correlation between IQ and conscientiousness induced by selection into adoption is likely to negatively bias the correlation between adoptive parent IQ and child IQ substantially.
I am not sure that this is an alternative possible explanation of the data because there is a relatively strong effect of adoption on young children, but this effect disappear almost entirely around adolescence.
In today's "what the hell, medical science, make up your minds!" news, a new study says that exercise may cause heart attacks.
Or not. Conversely, it may demonstrate that the thing they've been measuring to indicate likelihood of heart attack was the wrong thing all along.
So all those stories about early promoters of jogging dropping dead could be explained by this, or not.
https://heart.bmj.com/content/early/2021/08/27/heartjnl-2021-319346
"Abstract
Background The association of physical activity with the development and progression of coronary artery calcium (CAC) scores has not been studied. This study aimed to evaluate the prospective association between physical activity and CAC scores in apparently healthy adults.
Methods Prospective cohort study of men and women free of overt cardiovascular disease who underwent comprehensive health screening examinations between 1 March 2011 and 31 December 2017. Baseline physical activity was measured using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form (IPAQ-SF) and categorised into three groups (inactive, moderately active and health-enhancing physically active (HEPA)). The primary outcome was the difference in the 5-year change in CAC scores by physical activity category at baseline.
...Conclusion We found a positive, graded association between physical activity and the prevalence and the progression of CAC, regardless of baseline CAC scores
Results
The mean (SD) age of study participants was 42.0 (6.1) years (table 1). The proportions of participants who were inactive, moderately active and HEPA were 46.8%, 38.0% and 15.2%, respectively. Participants with higher physical activity levels were older, less likely to be current smokers, and had lower levels of total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol and triglycerides, higher levels of HDL-cholesterol, and higher prevalence of hypertension and presence of CAC than participants with lower physical activity levels.
Participants with CAC >0 at baseline were older, were more likely to be male and current smokers, and had higher levels of traditional cardiovascular risk factors.
The cardiovascular benefits of physical activity are unquestionable. ...Regular physical activity reduces the risk of many adverse health outcomes, including mortality, CVD, diabetes, hypertension, obesity and dyslipidaemia.
...High levels of physical activity, however, may be associated with a higher risk of coronary artery calcification. In a meta-analysis, higher physical activity levels were associated with a higher prevalence of CAC (pooled odds ratio (OR) 1.84; 95% CI 1.41 to 2.93)
...A possible mechanism underlying this association is that physical activity may increase coronary atherosclerosis. Potential pathways include mechanical stress and vessel wall injury of coronary arteries, physiological responses during exercise, such as increased blood pressure, increased parathyroid hormone levels and changes in coronary haemodynamics and inflammation. In addition, other factors, such as diet, vitamins and minerals, may change with physical activity.
The second possibility is that physical activity may increase CAC scores without increasing CVD risk. The standard Agatston CAC scores are calculated as a combination of calcium density and the volume of plaque burden. Higher calcium density, which suggests more stable, calcified plaque, produces a higher CAC score, however, it is associated with lower CVD risk.
...In general, progression of CAC scores is associated with a higher risk of CVD among individuals with CAC=0 and those with CAC >0.28 Moreover, the absence of detectable CAC is a strong negative predictor of CVD, whereas the presence of any CAC, even at very low levels, is associated with an increased risk of CVD. However, considering the undeniable protective effect of physical activity on CVD, the positive relationship between physical activity with CAC progression should be interpreted with caution as the complex interplay between physical activity, CAC progression and subsequent CVD risk remains largely unknown."
Conclusions seem to be "exercise is in general good for you but it could be bad for your heart. Or we could be measuring the wrong kind of plaque. Or we could be totally wrong about hardening of the arteries being a bad thing".
1. Hat Riot wikiepedia - "Many of those taken to court following arrests related to the hat-snatching frenzy opted to be fined rather than serve time in jail. The longest recorded time one of the teens was sent to jail was three days served by an A. Silverman, who was sentenced by Magistrate Peter A. *Hatting* during night court."
20. typo "the populations were already pretty *difference*"
I feel like there's a ton of useful truth here, but it would really benefit from re-interpretation and summary of the type Mr.Alexander is uniquely good at.
https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r1/index.html
The AI movie thing was fun, but it's pretty clear there were images of from some of the films or their posters in the training dataset. This is most obvious for die hard with the exploding building, and to a lesser extent space jam and point break.
Bioengineer here with a bit of perspective on the data sharing thing (17).
In a few sub-fields, this has been recognized as a problem and major journals require authors to put their data on big NIH-hosted databases. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/genes-expression/ for examples related to gene expression and genetics.
At the same time, there's an undercurrent of discontent in certain fields of biology (I'm thinking mostly about systems biologists and developmental biologists) over the papers that are *just* datasets. We pretty regularly get papers that are, like, "A high-resolution cell atlas of a developing mouse hindbrain" or "comprehensive time-resolved whole-body single-cell gene expression of growing nematodes". Usually they're very impressive, technically, and produce a metric ton of data that can be accessed using a slick (but still kind of clunky) new custom visualization interface... and nobody knows what to do with it.
There's kind of an "okay, what did we learn?" moment that comes with a lot of those papers that's starting to be too familiar. It turns out that in the modern age, the hard part of learning about biology isn't collecting tons of data -- it's getting any useful conclusions out of that data. Like, imagine you have that high-resolution atlas of a developing mouse hindbrain. What do you *do* with that? It's easy to imagine lots of things you can check with that dataset *in a vague noncommittal way*, but actually concretely coming up with a specific hypothesis to check with that sort of thing is hard. So that's why putting giant datasets online isn't as prestigious as writing a paper that synthesizes something out of that dataset.
(I'm guilty of writing one of those papers, albeit a small one on a small subject. Back in my undergrad days I was on a paper that analyzed gene expression over the course of a bacteriophage infection. Collecting the gene expression data wasn't trivial, but in a way it was ridiculously straightforward. Figuring out what it meant was much, much harder, and I don't think we got all that much out of it.)
Incidentally, I don't have a good citation for this, but a while back I read that "science" (I think chemistry and biochemistry, more specifically) went through a similar crisis back in... I want to say the 50s and 60s? For a stretch, most of the "scientific research" that was going on was basically measuring parameters -- stuff like the rates of reactions -- to finer and finer precision. Eventually some big-name scientists got fed up with all the measurement papers and published some high-profile editorials to the effect of "science isn't about measuring numbers, it's about figuring out how stuff actually works!" and pretty quickly people stopped measuring parameters.
Personally, having written a bunch of models of biocircuits that rely heavily on the field's knowledge of underlying rate parameter values that the field definitely doesn't know, I think we could have done with a *bit* less of a course-correction on this. =P
The thing about the gorilla is totally consistent with cog sci literature on problem solving and the way specific goals constrain attention. For more, you can read my essay on cognitive load theory: https://cognitiveloadtheory.wordpress.com/
Why isn't there money to be made for hedge funds to go around and completely buy up the commercial mortgage securities and modify terms? Or for banks to offer different initial terms?
I feel something else must be going on, eg, maybe there are regulations for which book value matters more than actual expectations?
Since the comment thread where marxbro and I are having a fascinating discussion around cultural mores is becoming the length of the Equator, I'm going to drag this one up here so we can have a fresh starting point.
marxbro1917:
"I'm simply making the point that you are doing performative right-wing outrage. You say that you would dislike any politician doing it, but your own posts show that you don't really have any clear poltical analysis of why you like or dislike certain words. Likely you are just repeating what you heard elsewhere."
I, a parrot, repeating what I heard elsewhere and certainly not having any linguistic tastes of my own:
Squawk! 🦜
From "The Pilgrim's Regress", C.S. Lewis:
(T)he jailor addressed the prisoners and said: ‘You see he is trying to argue. Now tell me, someone, what is argument?’ There was a confused murmur.
‘Come, come,’ said the jailor. ‘You must know your catechisms by now. You, there’ (and he pointed to a prisoner little older than a boy whose name was Master Parrot), ‘what is argument?’
‘Argument,’ said Master Parrot, ‘is the attempted rationalisation of the arguer’s desires.’
...‘Good. Now just one more. What is the answer to an argument turning on the belief that two and two make four?’
‘The answer is, “You say that because you are a mathematician.”’
‘You are a very good boy,’ said the jailor. ‘And when I come back I shall bring you something nice. And now for you,’ he added, giving John a kick and opening the grating.
... ‘This psittacosis is a very obstinate disorder,’ said Reason. And she turned to mount the black horse.
From "On Guerilla Warfare" by Mao:
"Likewise, guerrilla units formed from the people may gradually develop into regular units and, when operating as such, employ the tactics of orthodox mobile war. While these units function as guerrillas, they may be compared to innumerable gnats, which, by biting a giant both in front and in rear, ultimately exhaust him. They make themselves as unendurable as a group of cruel and hateful devils, and as they grow and attain gigantic proportions, they will find that their victim is not only exhausted but practically perishing. It is for this very reason that our guerrilla activities are a source of constant mental worry to Imperial Japan."
From "Guerilla Days in Ireland" by Tom Barry:
"In the summing up of the strengths of the contending Irish and British Forces, the factor of morale must rank highest. There was no doubt, whatever, that the morale of the I.R.A. stood far above that of the British. Greater experience, numbers and armaments of the British were indeed an important consideration, but this was far excelled by the willingness of the Volunteers to sacrifice themselves for a cause they knew to be right. Theirs was an aim higher than that of simple political freedom, for perhaps without being fully able to express it, they knew that when they fought and gave their lives for the ending of their long endured subjection, they did so for the dignity of man and all mankind."
(cont.)
"Observers of revolutionary epochs, and particularly those who decry the use of the political weapon in any form as an instrument for successful emancipation, should study well the three periods of the 1916–1921 endeavour. Firstly, the armed Rising and the blood sacrifices of the 1916 patriots to awaken the Nation, although there was no hope of military success ; secondly, the contesting of the 1918 elections and the subsequent setting up of the National Parliament and Government ; and thirdly, the 1920–21 guerilla warfare to prevent the destruction, by armed force and terrorism, of the institutions so set up.
...Many statements have been made by Ministers and Generals in various countries on the necessity for long periods of training before even an infantry soldier is ready for action. This is utter nonsense when applied to volunteers for guerilla warfare. After only one week of collective training, this Flying Column of intelligent and courageous fighters was fit to meet an equal number of soldiers from any regular army in the world, and hold its own in battle, if not in barrackyard ceremonial. Its camp training now completed, the Flying Column was ready to seek out the enemy.
For months preceding September, 1920, many officers of the I.R.A. throughout Ireland must have given thought to the policy and tactics which a Flying Column should adopt to ensure its existence. Strange as it may seem, it was accepted in West Cork that the paramount objective of any Flying Column, in the circumstances then prevailing, should be, not to fight, but to continue to exist. The very existence of such a column of armed men, even if it never struck a blow, was a continuous challenge to the enemy and forced him to maintain large garrisons to meet the threatened onslaught on his military forces, and for the security of his civil administration. Such a Column moving around must seriously affect the morale of garrisons, for one day it would surely strike. It also remained the highest expression of our Nationhood, the Flying Column of the Army of the People."
This exchange of revolutionary fervour has stirred my patriotic feelings, I feel the need for a song representative of the national insurgent spirit coming on!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si7DsPsFmiE
You also ask me:
"Your cultural criticisms seem to be restricted to a vague "this is ugly, this is beautiful" - with zero political investigation as to why you might find certain things "beauty"."
All I know is that I am maddened by the beauty of the moon. It is just past the Autumnal Equinox and China has celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival, which involves mooncakes and moon-viewing amongst other delights.
If we give credence to the people arguing for reincarnation/Hinduism/Buddhism on here, then perhaps I was Chinese in a past life - or I am going to be Chinese in a future one? Then I can indulge in my love for the moon in a supportive cultural context!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZrm9h3JRGs
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/23/covid-unvaccinated-but-willing/
There really are people who are up against logistical difficulties, need more information, and/or would like to talk with a human being about the logistics of getting vaccinated.
I was fascinated by your find on arranged marriages. I am really curious if they differ from how Indians do it. If that subject interests you, watch the Netflix show Indian Matchmaking. It is pretty real, I thought. Fascinating show.
https://youtu.be/zZ_dXjsyP5E
I've become skeptical about the WEIRD book's argument ever since I learned that traditional Hinduism was every bit as uncompromising in banning close-kin marriages as medieval Catholicism, and enforced this ban for a lot longer.
Marriages between descendants of the same 7th-generation ancestor on the father's side and between descendants of the same 5th-generation ancestor on the mother's side are banned as far back as the Gautama Dharmasutra (600 BCE-200 BCE). This is reaffirmed in all subsequent ancient and medieval Hindu legal texts (dharmashastras).
(Note that the famous Manusmriti only forbids marriage between third-generation relatives on the maternal side--but the traditional commentaries explain that the 5th-generation standard overrides it.)
The texts explain that this rule applies to all four varnas, unlike the better-known ban on marrying within one's gotra (paternal lineage), which applies only to the twice-born castes.
And, at least according to a random Indian guy I talked to on Twitter, this anti-endogamy rule is actually observed in practice, and makes finding a suitable marriage partner difficult.
On #17 publishing data, I think this is partially true, but doesn't explain why researchers don't publish their code, which does not entail foregone future papers. I think it's because they don't have good code habits, and mainly because this gets you neither citations nor respect (though respect might be trending upwards slowly).
"I link here in penance: Trump’s False Lafayette Square Exoneration. "
One would think you've learned a lesson after the last passage of the Woke ripping your nuts off..... but noooooooo. One. More. Time. Never explain. Never apologize.
Phoney War seems just incomprehensible to me. If this was fiction, holding an idiot ball would be an understatement.
> German military commander Alfred Jodl said that "if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions."
How do you... not attack an enemy when most of its army isn't present?
Also, this:
> Leopold Amery suggested to Kingsley Wood that the Black Forest be bombed with incendiaries to burn its ammunition dumps, Wood—the Secretary of State for Air—amazed the member of parliament by responding that the forest was "private property" and could not be bombed
WTF.
> now recommends students not use the term “trigger warning” because it is “violent language”.
Hopefully someone will soon decide the word "violent" constitutes "violent language".
The criticism of Henrich and WEIRD was valuable, but itself misses many, many tricks. The elements he introduces as disproofs sometimes have easy explanations. Still, it's always good to ask newly fashionable theories that claim to explain everything to explain at least something rigorously.
Re. 17, prominent bioinformatics journals require publishing datasets and code. Unfortunately, bioinformatics may have the biggest and most-restrictive datasets of any discipline. This is a big reason why I never published anything while I was working in bioformatics: my work often used terabytes of data; my employer wouldn't give me more than about 100 megabytes of ftp space; I couldn't afford to host terabytes of data myself; and that data would be gathered or computed from dozens of sources which all had different privacy and redistribution requirements.
On #28 -- The reddit post might be relevant to some smaller landlords, but it doesn't really reflect decision making from large institutional landlords. I'm an asset manager with a 3+ million square foot portfolio. With office space, part of the issue is that a landlord almost always has to give upfront concessions to a tenant and in the middle of a recession those look way too risky on long term leases. If you can only get $26/sf rent with 3% escalations per year on a ten year lease and have to give $80/sf in construction allowance to a tenant plus 10 months free rent upfront plus pay commissions to your broker and the tenant's broker... why not wait a year when rents and concessions go back to normal? Also, demand for office space doesn't just dip in a recession, it goes to almost zero and tenants put their space on the market too, so you compete against super cheap sub-lease space. (e.g. the market clearing rent doesn't go from $30 to $26 per square foot, it falls to like $8 per square foot). If you just wait a little while you could get $30/sf rent again and only give a $60/sf construction allowance for a ten year lease. Decent office buildings in major metros trade for about a 14-20x multiple on annual income so you holding out on rent for a year or more pays off much better than locking in an $8/sf rent for ten years. Regular commercial landlords don't do 1-2 year leases because it takes a lot to build out the space and you amortize that over the lease term. WeWork and Regus will do short term leases and they capture all of that demand, but it's still light so they aren't gobbling up the remaining office inventory either.